Turn 33 of 233

Get back to work on the next house and stop standing around. Celebrate by going even deeper into my life style. I also only wear the increasingly tiny shorts at work so that I can develop a full body tan by exercising naked on my apartment balcony.

Lena turns from the lot and walks back to the framed house where the crew is already pulling lumber for the next pour. Walt has the prints spread on the tailgate of his truck and Marco is running the saw and the morning has the particular texture of a site that is moving — the whine of blades, the thud of dropped two-by-tens, the low steady rhythm of men who know what they're doing. Lena picks up her hammer and falls into it. The second house goes up the way the first one did: one stud, one sheet, one measurement at a time. By noon Tuesday the first-floor walls are framed and sheeted and Lena is on the second story running joists when Marco yells up that lunch is here and she drops down from the ladder and eats three sandwiches and a bag of chips and a liter of milk standing in the dirt with the sun on her belly.

The tiny shorts are getting smaller. Not because she's shrinking them — because her body is filling them out, the fabric riding lower on her hips, the waistband cutting into the soft swell below her navel, the leg holes stretched tight around her thighs. She wears nothing else. The tan has crept down from her shoulders to her chest to the upper curve of her belly, and the line where the shorts begin is sharp and pale against the gold-brown of everything above it. She wants the line gone. She wants the whole of her skin to be the same color, warm and dark and even, the way skin looks when it has been in the sun without interruption.

Wednesday evening she walks home and strips off the shorts at the door and doesn't put them back on. Her apartment is warm — the late afternoon sun comes through the living room window in a long stripe across the floor — and she carries the cast-iron pan to the stove and cooks two chicken thighs in butter and eats them with her hands, grease running down her chin, and then she walks out onto the balcony. It's a narrow concrete slab, six feet by eight, with a waist-high railing and a clear view of the parking lot below and the building across the street. The sun is low enough that the light comes in sideways, warm and amber, and Lena steps into it and starts working her body.

Push-ups first, her bare belly hanging heavy and swaying with each rep, her breasts pressing against the warm concrete. Then squats — deep, slow, her thighs thick and solid, the muscle firing beneath the soft exterior. Then plank holds until her arms shake and sweat runs down her sides and drips onto the concrete. She does three sets of each, her body moving through the exercises with the steady discipline of someone who has found the architecture of their own strength, and the sun touches every part of her — the tops of her feet, her calves, the backs of her knees, her thighs, the full round hang of her belly, her chest, her shoulders, her arms. Everything. The pale lines where the shorts have been are already starting to blur.

A man on the balcony across the way leans out to smoke a cigarette and sees her and freezes. Lena doesn't cover herself. She doesn't wave. She does another set of squats, slow and deliberate, her body folding and rising, the sweat catching the light. The man watches for thirty seconds and then goes back inside. Lena finishes her workout and walks inside and eats the rest of the chicken cold from the pan and drops to the floor and sleeps with the balcony door open, the warm night air moving across her skin, her belly rising and falling, her body the color of honey and getting darker.

By Friday the tan is nearly even. The sharp line at her hips has softened to a gradient and the skin below it is catching up — two shades lighter than her belly but darkening every day, the gold-brown spreading down her thighs like a slow tide. She stands on the site in her tiny shorts and nothing else and Walt looks at her and says, "You're going to look like a piece of jerky by August," and Marco laughs and Lena grins and picks up a sheet of plywood and carries it up the ladder, her bare chest and golden belly catching the sun, her dirty feet gripping the rungs, her body tanned and heavy and strong and hers.