And now here they were: two soft little knobs pushing against the beige fabric. They were my very real breasts. They were beautiful. The girl who blinked at me from the bookcase’s surface was beautiful. She was not just pretty or cute, as people mistakenly called her. She was strikingly, undeniably beautiful. Apparently, the beauty had always been there, but buried under the wrong clothes.
I had to show the world.
I dialed Vera’s number and asked her to meet me by the playground.
I threw on a new miniskirt and new tights and ran to the door, past my parents, who were getting drunk on foreign liquor and Aunt Marusya’s stories of foreign life.
Clomping down the steps of the littered staircase, I suddenly thought of my newfound beauty as a burden. Being beautiful couldn’t be easy. It could be troublesome and even embarrassing. People would stare at me now; I would produce some reaction in the outside world, make some change. And I would have to react. But how? How exactly did a beautiful person behave? What was I supposed to do when boys stared at me and at my breasts, which I was certain they would? I had a surge of titillating panic as I opened the entrance door and stopped, blinded by the orange rays of the setting sun.
I’d just keep my eyes down, I decided. I’d let them stare, but I’d keep my eyes down.
Vera presented a bigger problem. Would it be possible to stay friends? Vera, with her flat square face and thick waist, wasn’t even pretty, let alone beautiful, and about eighty percent of our conversations had consisted of berating the stupid and boy-crazy pretty girls. Yet she’d been my best friend for years, and I didn’t want to lose her.
She loped toward me now, swinging a canvas bag in one hand and waving a wad of money with the other. Was she ungraceful! I slouched and messed up my hair, trying to make my beauty a little less obvious.
But when Vera drew near, I saw that my worries were in vain. Her forehead was covered with sweat and her eyes bulged with excitement; she clearly was oblivious to everything in the world, including the sudden beauty of her friend.
“Puffed…puffed…puffed rice,” she panted. “They are selling puffed rice in the Littlestore.” She clutched my sleeve and tried to catch a breath. “American puffed rice in crunchy bags! A friend of my mother’s hairdresser told us. We have to run because the line is getting bigger every second.”
“But I don’t have any money!”
“I’ll lend you some.”
And we loped in the store’s direction together.
We were two hundred fifty-sixth and two hundred fifty-seventh in the line. The reason we knew was that they scribbled the numbers in blue ink right on our palms. I had to keep my marked hand apart, so the number wouldn’t rub off accidentally, as happened to a woman who stood ahead of us. She kept showing her sweaty palm to everybody and asking if they could still read her number, when there wasn’t anything but a faded blue stain. I was sure they would turn her away from the counter. The subjects of clothes, boys, and beauty lost their importance somehow, or maybe it was just hard to think of such nonsense while guarding your marked hand.
The line moved slowly. Everybody shifted from one foot to the other, waiting to take a step forward. They were admitting people in batches of ten or twelve — as many as could fit into the narrow aisle of the store.
I chewed on my ponytail. Vera rolled and unrolled the ruble bills in her hand. We were too tired to talk, as were other people. All eyes focused on the exit door, where the happy ones squeezed by with armfuls of crunchy silver-and-yellow bags. The people looked shabby and crumpled, but the bags shone winningly in the orange rays of the sun.
“Let’s buy two each,” Vera suggested, when the line advanced to the one hundreds. I nodded. She smoothed the crumpled ruble bills in her hand. There were five of them: enough to buy ten bags of puffed rice or two bags and a round can of instant coffee in the Bigstore next door, as Vera’s mother had suggested. I thought what a good friend Vera was. Another person would’ve just spent all the money, without sharing it with me. I asked myself if I would’ve done the same thing for Vera. I wasn’t sure.
“Let’s buy six,” Vera said, when we advanced to the store doors. I nodded.
She reached with her hand and touched a bag of puffed rice in somebody’s arms. It crunched just as I’d expected.
“You know what? Let’s buy ten,” Vera decided.
I nodded.
My feet hurt and my lips were parched. But instead of craving a drink, I craved dry and salty puffed rice.
We stood just a few people away from the doors now. They’d let us in with the next batch! Only a little while longer before I could feel the crunchy surface of a bag in my hands, before I could rip it open, before I could let the golden avalanche pour into my hand. I licked a trickle of saliva off the corner of my mouth.
Then a saleswoman appeared in the doorway.
“Seven o’clock. The store is closed,” she said.
For a few moments, nobody moved. Nobody made a sound. People just stood gazing at the woman intently, as if she spoke a foreign language and they were struggling to interpret her words. Then the crowd erupted. The feeble, polite pleas grew into demands, then into curses, then into an angry, unintelligible murmur.
The woman listened with a tired and annoyed expression. She shook her head and pulled on the door. She wore a white apron and a white hat above thin dark hair gathered in a loose bun. She had a smooth, round birthmark on the right side of her chin. I’d never hated anybody as much as I hated her. My hands clenched into fists. I prepared to punch her in the face. Even though I had never done it before, I knew exactly what it would be like. I heard the swishing sound of my striking arm and her scream. I saw the thin skin of her cheeks breaking under my knuckles. I saw her blood. I saw her sink to the floor. Then I realized it was somebody else who had punched her.
Almost immediately I felt a strong shove in the back and found myself swimming inside the store. I was squeezed between other bodies and I was going in. I was going in! In! We were storming the store. Just like the crowd that was storming the Czar’s Palace in all of the revolution movies. Only now I was more than the audience. I was a part of the crowd.
There was a drunken determination on people’s faces. We crashed through the entrance and the last thing I saw on the outside was Vera, who had been pushed away.
“Vera!” I yelled halfheartedly, because in my toxic excitement I didn’t really care whether she’d make it or not.
Soon I found myself pushed to the very back of the store, next to the cracked plywood door that led to the storage area. I was squeezed in among twenty or thirty people filling the tiny space between the entrance and the back door. There wasn’t any puffed rice around, but I was sure they had more in storage.
“Bring it out, you bitch! We won’t leave,” piercing voices screamed behind me. I wiggled to turn away from the door and see what was happening.
The saleswoman had scrambled onto her knees and stood by the entrance holding her cheek. Her face flinched with a cold hatred.
“Ivan, Vasyok!” she called in a tired voice. “Where the hell are you? Call the police!”
People kept pushing. An old man to my left shoved me between my ribs with his elbow, somebody hit me in the stomach, somebody stepped on my foot, the light hair of a woman in front of me stuck to my sweaty forehead.
The excitement had faded. All I wanted was to get out. I looked for the slightest opening between people’s bodies, where I could sneak through. There wasn’t any.
Then a man appeared, either Vasyok or Ivan. He pushed through the plywood door and stopped right behind me. I managed to turn my head sideways to look at him. He wasn’t tall, rather broad and heavy like my grandmother’s commode. He smiled.