Dora glanced at the bartender, whose hair looked like one of the dust balls accumulating under her bed.
“Yes, it looks very—”
“Amazing!” Marta finished her sentence. “Oh, look at him. He’s like the Hungarian version of John Lennon.”
“If he was just struck by lightning.”
“You’re right, he’s electric!” Marta grabbed Dora’s hand and ushered them toward the bar. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” blared from the speakers as Marta danced within view of the bartender, her scraggly curls bouncing into Dora’s eyes.
“Dora, you dance like a drunken elephant!”
“There’s more where that came from.” Dora exaggerated her jerky dance moves even more, sending Marta into spasms of laughter.
Of course, Dora knew Marta had planned all of this. Knowing her goofiness attracted conversation, Marta projected a carefree attitude, and men fell for it every time. At first, they would look at Marta sideways, as if second-guessing their initial feelings of attraction, but then, once Marta quit her show, they would come over and say something like, “Oh, that was very funny,” or, “Where did you learn those moves?”
But when the bartender neglected to even look at Marta, she sped toward him, temporarily abandoning Dora. Dora began meandering back toward their table when she realized a group of men now surrounded her, thanks to Marta.
“I wanna hold your haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand,” someone shouted in Dora’s ear. They butchered The Beatles’ lyrics with their heavy Hungarian accent and drunken drawl.
Turning toward the commotion, Dora faced a man, about her age, clad in maroon corduroy pants and a thick woolen sweater, his sweat tumbling from his forehead to the ground. Listing, yet obviously determined to make himself appear sober, he fixated his gaze upon Dora and displayed a grin that seemed to lay siege to his entire face. Momentarily disgusted by his obvious show, Dora shunned him. She brushed her hair slightly over her face to conceal her eyes. Countless similarly sweaty men had confronted Dora before, daring to conquer her imperturbable façade.
Studying his face momentarily through the wisps of her hair, Dora noticed an alluring softness in his eyes. And before she could stop it, the slightest of smiles slipped from her lips.
“And what could possibly be your name?” the man shouted.
“It’s Anika,” Dora replied as she lifted her drink off the table next to her.
Taking precautions to conceal herself, in every way possible, Dora stared at her straw as she picked at it and moved it through her fingers. She stopped when she realized the man, now leaning into Dora, was hungrily staring at her fingers.
As if suddenly remembering his manners, he stepped away from Dora and exclaimed, “I’m Ferenc,” which elicited no response in Dora.
“Would you like to hold my haaaaaaaaand?” he sang and smiled sheepishly.
He refused to wait for a reply. He grabbed Dora’s hand and ignored her subsequent flinching. Resisting Dora’s subtle attempts to push herself in the opposite direction, Ferenc spun Dora around in circles.
“Anika, Anika, Anika. What a lovely name!” he sang, “I wanna hold your haaaand, Anika!”
On her third cycle around Ferenc, Dora caught a glimpse of Marta angling her chest over the bar so her cleavage spilled—no, overflowed—onto the mahogany. How Marta managed to produce cleavage while wearing a sweater would always mystify Dora.
"Anika,” Ferenc continued to sing, “Oh, please, say to me, you’ll let me be your man. Anika, please, say to me, that you’ll talk to me!”
Beginning to relent to Ferenc’s charm, Dora laughed, but only at a barely audible level. By allowing someone to fawn over her, if only for a second, Dora experienced a sense of importance she hadn’t felt in years. Ivan’s pains to make Dora feel loved only did the opposite. As he failed multiple and successive times, Dora felt more like a waste of his energy, an exhausting task that challenged him every day.
Dora moved a step closer to Ferenc and placed just a few of the obtrusive strands of hair behind her ear.
“Your eyes pierced me from across the room,” Ferenc said. Reaching toward her cheek and petting it gently with his thumb, he continued, “They compelled me to ask you to hold my haaaaaaaaaaaaaand. Did you know that your eyes have a power over men?”
Dora laughed, her face growing hot.
“It’s true. They are beautiful!”
“Thank you.”
“But they are sad.”
“What?”
“They are sad,” Ferenc yelled back. “I can tell.”
“Oh,” Dora said, dumbfounded. If she was drunk, perhaps this conversation would have been easier. Dora began moving in the direction of Marta, prepared to take leave of the potentially-emotional conversation, when Ferenc touched her shoulder.
“I want to know!” he shouted.
“What?” Dora tried to raise her voice above the music, but she was not used to yelling, or loud bars, for that matter.
“I want to know what makes you sad.” Despite the watery, drunken glaze now coating Ferenc’s eyes, he looked at Dora with a sincerity she recognized. It was the same kind Boldiszar had shown her. It made her feel like it didn’t matter what she said—she, and all her thoughts, would be accepted.
“My family split in half when I was seventeen,” Dora informed Ferenc.
Dora now felt a slight wetness underneath her arms. Her heart began beating at irregular intervals.
“Must have been so hard.” Ferenc started to step away from Dora.
She wondered what she said wrong. Resolved that this was a bad idea in the first place, she said. “Anyway, there you have it. I have to go now.”
“Wait!” He scrambled after her. “My family also split in half. But this isn’t about me, tell me what happened to yours.”
“I lost my mom,” Dora admitted.
“What happened to her?”
Dora waited nine years to be asked this question, or rather to be asked this question and reply with the truth, for once. Now that the opportunity loomed before her, she cowered, unable to speak.
“And how is it with her gone?” Ferenc nearly fell into Dora, who realized that he hadn’t been backing away earlier, he was just struggling to find his footing. So obviously drunk, Ferenc handed Dora the silent microphone she had been waiting for. He wouldn’t remember a thing she told him.
“I am frustrated,” she began affectedly. Noticing Ferenc’s eyes trying, but failing, to focus on her, she grew confident.
“No, I’m mad that she could not be the mom that I needed. I wanted someone to tell me good job, without me even asking for it. I just wanted her to say it.”
A momentary desire to feel her anger overtook Dora. This conversation proved to her she still had a chance at being whole, that she could experience the full range of emotions she worked to conceal her entire adulthood. She wouldn’t let them go so easily.
“When she left, she said nothing. But I fantasized that she said, ‘Dora, please don’t forget me. Remember that I will always love you.’” A tear fell down Dora’s face, and for the first time, she didn’t care.
“Dora?” Ferenc frowned.
Did she just say her real name? She must have let it slip. If Ferenc noticed it, he probably wasn’t that drunk. She needed to walk away.
“Dora who?” She tried to cover her tracks before she said goodbye.
“I thought you called yourself something else,” Ferenc said. “I’m so drunk.”
“I should go.”
“Oh, Anika, wait. How could you leave me now? How could anyone ever leave you?”
“It happens. You’ll forget about me soon enough.”
“I want to hear more about your mom.”
Dora knew she should go. Her gut told her this was a bad idea, but her mouth opened and her voice sent words out through it anyway, because a part of her needed this more than she even knew.