Permission

by Saskia Vogel

  She let me go.

  I breathed in sips until I seemed not to be breathing at all. I stood still. She dragged her thumbnail down my chest, where the drops were falling. Leaving marks. White from the pressure, then red. Lines that faded slowly. She commented on how they shifted and changed. Paying close attention. She studied the effect of her actions, refining them until I was no longer cold. From jaw to shoulder. From collarbone to hip. Dip of the neck to navel. Hip to thigh. She noted every shift in my breath, every hair raised, how and when the goosebumps spread. She dragged her nail across my breasts and my body rolled toward her. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I tried not to blink.

  Her brutal hands. The pain glowing, the heat rising. Trying to keep still. The awareness again of blood rushing, breath quickening. Pulsing, expanding, contracting, wet. Everything she conjured in me, rushing to appear. There was nothing else I could do. I surrendered myself to her.

  She brushed her hand across my torso, as if wiping a window clean. The deepest breath, a sigh.

  ‘Show me more,’ she said.

  The lines she had traced caught fire, and I followed the path of the hottest flame. Raised like a scar. I pressed my finger against it, trying to discern an edge, finding it with my fingernails. I pressed, and with a sensation like stumbling in your sleep, my finger slipped under the skin. There was an opening. I felt queasy, then curious. What would I be without this skin? It didn’t matter. I wanted her to have what she was asking for. I wanted more.

  Slowly, I pushed my finger further in. Splitting warp and weft, a tear. Offering little resistance. I tore open the seam from elbow to shoulder. Our eyes met, giddy.

  She wanted more.

  I slipped my arm out of its sleeve. Light flooded the room. Sun on sea, a glister.

  ‘Keep going,’ she said.

  I pushed my whole hand under the skin of my breasts and peeled my torso clean. It didn’t hurt; it was a relief. There was enough room for me. I worked faster and faster, tearing off long, wide strips, tossing them to the floor. The other arm, my legs, face and hair. The spaces between my toes were tricky, as were the backs of my ears, but every inch came off.

  I showed myself to her. Sparkling.

  But it didn’t feel like enough. I wanted to give her more, but no touch no breath no kiss no closeness would be close enough. That insufficient wish: ‘I want to be inside you.’ I wanted to merge.

  I searched my body, my hands playing in the light and waves. Sun on the horizon, stars rising. There was movement inside. A tide. I sunk my hands down into me and raised them up in offering. Drink of me, salt and sweet. Her lips parted in my palms. The way her throat moved. She drank and drank and it wasn’t just water she was drinking. She was swallowing my heart.

  THE NIGHT SEEMED TO never end. Dressed in dreams, tongues and talk until the sun rose. She held me from behind. We pressed ourselves into each other.

  My heart in her chest, beating against my back. Her every breath a vibration. I listened. I felt it racing. Impossible, I thought, that we were sharing space and emotion.

  I slept and woke and she was still beside me. The tug of my heart, the thread between us taut and winding. Cocooned in the covers. Was this what it felt like to be safe? I resented the world for its intrusions. I didn’t want anything to lay itself over the night. No palm trees or street sounds. No airplanes flying low along the cliffs. No new impressions. I wanted the process of memory-making to stop.

  Only her.

  Only this.

  Only now.

  ORLY’S HOUSEMATE WAS ALREADY in the kitchen by the time we got up. He was hand-grinding the coffee when we came in. A carton of eggs and bread were on the counter. Lonnie wasn’t quite as old as my dad had been, but the sight of a man with graying hair busy in a kitchen reminded me of the Sundays my dad woke up with a hankering for pancakes and made us tall stacks with a side of fruit and yogurt.

  ‘Hungry?’ he asked, and before I could answer, Orly said: ‘Don’t you have to get to work?’ Their eyes locked, and he stepped away from her, wrapped up the bread and put the eggs in the fridge.

  ‘I’ve got a late shift today,’ he replied in a breezy tone that seemed forced. ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, impatiently.

  I didn’t know how to read Orly: if she hadn’t had enough sleep or if she didn’t want Lonnie to fix us breakfast because she didn’t want me hanging around. I was about to say goodbye and go home, but then she turned to me and asked: ‘How do you take yours?’ She sounded formal, and resigned.

  Lonnie seemed easily overwhelmed, so I said: ‘Black.’ Orly pulled out my chair and when I sat, she ran her hand over my hair and I pressed my head into her palm. When she took her hand away, she seemed different, our connection dropped.

  Orly took a seat across from me at the small table, which was set for breakfast. The presentation was flawless. The cutlery was parallel and polished. The glaze of the white ceramic plates was uneven and gave the material a sort of glow. As the coffee percolated, Orly’s housemate cleared what was not needed from the table. He poured me a cup of coffee, and then began to fix Orly’s. The milk, hot from the stove, was poured into a clear tall glass resting on a saucer, about a quarter of an inch. He held the glass low and the coffee pot high and poured, a dark stream. Not a drop was wasted. The milk bubbled and a pale froth formed at the surface. He set the coffee on the table in front of her. She did not drink, nor did she say a word.

  ‘Neat trick,’ I said.

  ‘I learned it when I was working at a Mexican restaurant a while back. The owners were from Veracruz.’

  I remember the feeling that something didn’t fit, a man in my neighbourhood talking about shift work. I wondered what had gone wrong for him, to be so far along in life and still renting, and not even renting but subletting. What good was a man like him, I thought. I was stunned by my harsh assessment. It seemed independent of me. Did I envy him for being at home here? There was more to it. I was looking at Lonnie with my parents’ eyes. I remembered Vee, my mother’s cat, old and infirm, dragging its body around our backyard. Someone walking along the cliffs didn’t have their dog on a leash and it slipped through the fence. I remember the dog, its fervour, its drive. How meek the cat, not vital enough and so it must die. The fur on the lawn. I couldn’t run down the stairs and out the door fast enough to stop it.

  He kept talking. It put me ill at ease. Orly regarded him coolly, but she didn’t interrupt. ‘I’ve had the honour of bringing Orly her coffee every day for almost a decade now. Every morning before nine,’ he said.

  I resented the tenderness in his voice, and that this was how I was finding out what kind of fixture he was in her life. I wished she would have said something before the three of us met.

  ‘Piggy was my first client,’ she said. Her correction would have made me feel better, but I was thrown by the new name.

  Orly looked at me and then through me. He never took his eyes off her. She explained: ‘Piggy spends some of his time as my houseboy. Bringing me coffee, running my errands. And for now, he’s subletting from me.’

  Whatever swagger he’d had dissipated when she said ‘for now.’ I thought about the dog.

  Matter of fact and still looking in the distance, she said: ‘My coffee’s getting cold,’ and Piggy leapt into action, fortified by the task.

  From one of the wooden drawers, Piggy took a strip of colour swatches in milky coffee colours: cappuccino, latte, mocha. Orly received them and made a show of comparing the numbered colours to the liquid in her cup.

  ‘An improvement,’ she said, and set the swatches on the table. He picked them up and put them away.

  ‘I switched to whole milk,’ he said. ‘It gives a better colour.’

  She said: ‘Thank you, Piggy.’ Then: ‘No more today.’

  His face fell, and his voice broke when he said: ‘Yes, mistress.’ He looked like he knew he would be scolded, and I liked that Orly had the decency not
to do it in front of me.

  Orly took her coffee to the living room and turned on the TV with the news. Clear skies, seventy-five degrees by the beaches. The TV anchors chattered. Meth house raided. Hikers lost in the desert. Amber alert for a nine-year-old boy. A tiger cub smuggled into the state finds a permanent home.

  Piggy finished cleaning the kitchen. The milk pan, the coffee machine. As he cleaned, he talked about coffee. How coffee was their first agreement. No matter what, he’d bring her one, even when she was on the road. He’d prepare coffee at home or pick one up to-go and send her a picture. Sometimes he’d leave a voicemail or send a gift card. How roasts and milk fat percentages impact the colour, how he balances colour with taste. He spoke in clear, fully formed sentences. He seemed practiced in explaining himself. But it didn’t feel like a conversation. The answers he gave to my questions were ready-made. He kept glancing at Orly in the living room, distant and removed. I felt an obligation to be polite. It would have been impossible to join her on the sofa and sit with her as though he weren’t there. The tension between them made me feel like a child, and I wanted to go home.

  MY PARENTS’ HOUSE was silent. The windows were open. I watched the ocean heave, all it contained hidden. An ashtray was on the coffee table, but the house didn’t smell of cigarettes. I wondered if, in spite of the smoking, my mother was out of her haze. I wished she’d run me a bath again. I smoked some of the pot Orly had given me, and then it didn’t hurt so much to look out the window. I thought of Orly on the sofa, I thought of us together. What she did with her clients shouldn’t matter to me, she’d made it sound like a clean deal, but Piggy made it messy, like the musician made it messy, and I was left wanting. I checked my phone. No messages. The door to the garage opened.

  ‘Mom?’ I called.

  It was Blanca. She was carrying in cleaning supplies.

  I walked over to her and she hugged me. She squeezed my arms and said: ‘Ya come algo.’

  ‘I eat.’

  ‘Eat more,’ she said. ‘Where’s your phone?’

  I patted the back pocket of my jeans.

  She shook her head. ‘Does it ring?’

  I looked away.

  ‘You have people who love you, and when you don’t pick up, they worry. I worry, mijita.’

  She’d always known how to talk to me.

  ‘Querida,’ she continued. She wouldn’t have had to say anything more. I recognized her tone. I knew what was coming. ‘Tu mamá no se encuentra bien.’

  The last time my mother was ‘not feeling well,’ my father wasn’t here either. After the unrest that came with statements such as ‘This isn’t what I signed up for,’ and ‘Pull yourself together,’ he moved out for a trial separation. He was gone for months, a forever amount of time for a child.

  One day he’d had enough. I wasn’t sure what made Dad hit his limit. I’d heard them scream at each other, seen things break, worse, and that had turned out fine. Within days we’d be back to normal, home-cooked dinners, tennis lessons, and weekend trips where we stopped off to eat pea soup on our way home from touring a castle built by a newspaper man up the coast. But this: this great sadness seeping from my mother – a sadness that made the sky flat and turned the palm trees black – was different. In sickness, in health, in rage, but not in sadness. It was too much for him. That’s what he said.

  When my dad was loading his suitcase into the car, I took the suitcase I kept packed in case of a fire and sat in the passenger seat of his convertible, refusing to be left behind. Angry, then in tears, then angry again. Maybe this was why he wouldn’t let me come with him: I was too much, too. I was still small enough then for him to be able to pick me up and carry me to the living room when his words failed to move me. Blanca arrived the next day with her own bag. She stayed a while, telling me as often as I needed to hear it: ‘It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.’

  Blanca sat by my bed at night, because I was afraid that if I fell asleep, I would wake up changed, like my mother. Who knew if she’d ever go back to normal. By the time Mom finally started appearing in the hours I was awake too, when she started waking up early enough to take me to school, a lifetime had passed. It was a time I recalled only in fragments, over Blanca’s shoulder, my ear pressed to her waist, everything muffled by the rustle of her clothing, her pulse. Her insistence that I eat something. I ate.

  My mother wasn’t feeling well.

  My father was gone.

  Blanca had a family of her own.

  This is what I knew of love.

  My mother wasn’t feeling well, and in her barbed way she had asked me to come home. As I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door, I thought of Orly’s stern silence and how Lonnie had become Piggy, a man in her service. The intimacy in that constant, steady act of bringing Orly coffee every morning, even when she refused to return what looked like love. His actions weren’t necessarily a sign of weakness, I thought; perhaps they were a kind of armour.

  ‘I told you: No hoy,’ I heard my mother say from her bed.

  ‘Mom, it’s me.’

  Her shutters were closed and the lights were off, but there it was. Salt and sour. I didn’t need light to see it: the thickness of her tears. Lips wet, eyes leaking, sniffing the snot back in when she didn’t have a tissue. Giving up on having tissues and using whatever was within reach – sleeve, arm, pages of a magazine.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and patted the mounds of blankets and pillows, searching for the woman they contained. I found her back, her dainty bones, and felt her body expand and contract. The blankets shifted, and her face appeared. I noticed I was holding my breath, afraid of what would come next: teeth or tenderness. She draped her arm over her eyes as though even the darkness were too bright, and said, ‘You’re home.’

  ‘Mhm. I got your message.’

  ‘And so you came.’ She sounded daft and happy, didactic. ‘Sometimes, schatz…’ From under her arm, she gave me that look of hers, one of deep concern, as though I might already be too far gone, but only maybe. With her wisdom I could be saved.

  ‘You need to be reminded of how to be there for people, don’t you?’

  When she was down, all she had – and all she ever seemed to want – was me. It was too much to bear. Each word she spoke was a stone in my pocket. Each sentence a step toward the sea. I wanted to let her drown. I wanted to drown. I wanted to show her how to float, if only I knew how. I wanted none of it.

  She stroked my arm, as though she felt sorry for me, for my failings. With each second I grew colder, and then she gave my arm her ‘that’s enough now’ pat, as though I had asked for this.

  She wasn’t oblivious, my mother. No. Maybe she couldn’t pinpoint where things were going wrong, but I knew she could feel the distance between us, too wide to see across. She did what she could to close the gap. But I knew better than to trust it to hold.

  ‘Do you remember our trips up the coast? Do you remember what I was like then?’ she said, shutting her eyes. She sounded small. I didn’t reply. She seemed to fall back asleep, letting out a gentle snore, which roused her. She opened her eyes, shut them. The bottles of pills on her bedside table.

  I watched her for a while. Her breathing was light and even, and sometimes she stuttered. When my mother’s breathing became heavy, I tiptoed around the room as quietly as I could, picking up glasses that smelled of alcohol, and plates, used tissues, nudging the piles of clothing and file folders strewn across the floor – it looked as though she were in the middle of a project, but it was impossible to imagine her being in the middle of anything but this. I thought about what Orly had said about wanting to help people avoid unnecessary pain, but what happened when the pain became an essential part of you? What did it mean to end it? I was helpless when faced with my mother. I could do nothing about her wounds.

  My mother might not have been feeling well, as Blanca had said, but I thought: This is how it’s always been. When Mom asked if I remembered what she used to be like, this is what I th
ought of – a dark room, walls with no doors. I didn’t know what was worse: that she used to be someone else or that this is what had become of her.

  I went upstairs and opened the pantry. Those cluttered shelves. Bags and boxes of crackers and chips made for dip. All bought when Dad was still around, bought for us, so we’d have it around. Jam not yet mouldy. Peanut butter. Ya come algo. I mashed a fistful of corn chips between my teeth, comforted by crunch and carbohydrate. The rubber band from around the bag was still intact. I grabbed another fistful. This is how I ate when I was younger. I spit the mush out in the trash. If I was going to eat, I should eat properly. Get a grip. Have a meal. I took a casserole from the freezer. I heated it up. I had it as a late lunch. A reasonable portion doubled. I smoked, I napped, I had more casserole straight from the baking dish and cleaned up after myself. I felt sick.

  I went to my room and stayed there, listening to the vacuum cleaner stutter across the floor overhead. I had a new message. Van wanted to talk. His last text read: ‘I was trying to impress you. Did I come on too strong?’ Bullshit, I thought. I shoved the phone under my pillow.

  My phone buzzed and buzzed again. I took it out to turn it off, and saw it wasn’t Van pestering, but Orly, checking in.

  ‘That got weird,’ she wrote.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You OK?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the screen, my thumbs on the keys. I typed: ‘Are all your clients in love with you?’ But I didn’t press send. I didn’t want to ruin it.

  Then my phone rang.

  ‘If I was outside,’ Orly asked, ‘would you come and meet me?’

  I DON’T KNOW what possessed me. There were so many places we could have gone. There was the mansion that had been converted into a church, with lush gardens and terraced steps leading down to the sea. You only had to jump one fence and there weren’t any security lights. We could have lain on the concrete that once had led to a private pier, now in ruins. We could have lain in the dark under the stars and looked at the ‘queen’s necklace,’ the glittering lights of the beach cities set along the bay. We could have named our own constellations like Dad and I used to do. But no.