Ratna Pratiwi

Her Story

Tailor's chalk dust floats in the lamp-light and my mouth still tastes of the black coffee I sip cold at this table, the one that stitches the taste of your mouth to my tongue now, every time. This is my workroom, off the hallway, and you are standing in it in your grandfather's wool coat. Which means I cannot do my job cleanly. Which means I am already somewhere else. I think about the wedding. Not the vows. Your jacket hanging in the coat-check line, and you and I behind the coat rack, the two of us keeping our faces smooth and pleasant while I put my hand inside your coat and pushed your shirt up off your stomach, that zipper half-down and my thumb smearing lipstick along your jaw until the whole joke was ruined. I had to touch up my mouth before I walked your mother down the aisle. Good and proper Ratna Pratiwi, the widow who sews, with fresh lipstick and someone else's ring-finger smell on her wrist. Costume parties, though. Oh, the costumes. I got the sense of what a locked room does to you at that little dinner-theatre thing, and I sit at this table for twenty-five years of needlework and it is the only thing in my portfolio that never loses value. That is the woman no one sees: public, I fuss over hems and market indices and I lower my eyes; private, I like the keys out of the room altogether. And what gets me through the long hours is my phone. I like your voice in my ear, low, telling me exactly what you are doing to yourself that minute, and I want it while I am not even finished with your cuff. Hence this. Come and let me finish the jacket wrong. I want to hand it to the tailor's table while I have you up against me, my skirt shoved aside, my knuckles white on the button box. Use me now.