Eva : Part 2

Choose Me
by Xenia Ruiz

(Page 2 of 6)

"My friend and I are collecting data for our class on human sexuality," Simone lied matter-of-factly, clutching her legal pad and pen. "We were wondering if you could answer a few questions." I couldn't believe her. We were getting too old for this stuff.

The man looked curiously at us - first at Simone, who at just under six feet with heels stood several inches taller than he, then down at me, trying to hide my humiliated face in the thick paperback book.

"What are you, grad students?" he finally asked.

"Undergrad."

"You don't look like undergrads."

"We go to night school, okay?" Simone retorted. The one thing Simone disliked was when people assumed she was older than she was. With her svelte figure and chin-length hair in a curly natural, she looked at least fifteen years younger. No one could wear an Afro like Simone. She was the kind of woman who could make a potato sack look good, the kind of girl others had hated because boys were drawn to her; the kind of woman other women envied but for all the wrong, petty reasons, because she stole the spotlight the minute she entered a room.

"Now, do you want to participate or not?" she chided him in that teasing, reprimanding way she used on men when flirting.

"Sure, why not?"

"Shall we?" She pointed toward an unoccupied table with four chairs. They sat down, but I remained standing.

"Eva, come on, this is your project, too," Simone insisted so innocently I almost believed her myself. I debated whether to ignore her and just walk out, pretend I didn't know her, leave her hanging. But knowing Simone, she could always embarrass me worse than I ever could her and she wouldn't even care about the unwanted attention. There was no shame in her game.

"Okay, um . . . What's your name?" she started.

"Don. Hey, you're not going to use my name?"

"No, we're using numbers. But you don't want me to call you by a number, do you?" Simone looked up at me. "Eva. Are you going to sit down or what?" she said in her most impatient tone, the one she would use on her child - if she had one.

"Yeah, come on, Eva," Don said, smiling, taking me in from head to toe in one sweep. My attraction to him was slowly fading.

I smiled feebly and sat in the chair nearest to me, but at the other end of the table, browsing through my book like I was seriously interested. I realized that The Latina's Bible was not a bible at all but a resource book of love, spirituality, and family.

"I'm Simone," she introduced herself, pronouncing her name "See-mo-NAY," the stage name she had created for her new modeling/acting career. I rolled my eyes and held back from saying, Your name is "Seh-MOAN" from the northwest side of Chicago. Ever since she had turned forty a couple of months ago, she had undergone a midlife crisis of sorts, getting a leopard tattoo on the small of her back and a navel ring, in addition to legally changing the spelling of her name to "S'Monée," including puncutation marks. I told her I didn't care if she had court papers, she would always be "Simone" to me.

"This is Eva," she added.

"So I heard."

I glanced up from my book and saw him leering at her chest, recently purchased with her last few modeling jobs.

"Okay, Don, pay attention, sweetie. I'm up here. Question number one . . . What do you think of celibacy?" Simone asked, reading from a fictitious list of questions.

"I . . . I don't know."

"Do you think it's natural, normal?"

"For some people, I guess it's natural, like priests, or nuns."

"But what about normal, everyday people? Like, say, a woman who hasn't had sex in five years."

I knew that if I made any movement, any facial expression, any noise, he would know she was talking about me. Giving her dirty looks was almost routine for me so it was hard to keep a straight face, but I kept my cool and kept my head down as I slowly turned the pages.

"I guess if she's happy not having sex, well, I say go for it. But I mean, I can't see how, for five years . . . unless she was like, unattractive, you know, or really fat."

I could keep quiet no longer. "That's a really nasty thing to say," I said, looking straight into his mocha-colored eyes for the first time.

Copyright © 2005 by Xenia Ruiz

About the Author

A graduate of Northwestern University, Xenia Ruiz received First Prize in the university's Iota Sigma Epsilon Fiction Contest for her short story, "Pops." She currently lives in Chicago with her son and daughter.