The next week our words dry up. We’ve emptied our childhood stories, unpacked all our secret wishes, run out of biographical data to pass along. Sometimes we find a new stream of ideas, and the talk flows like clear water. Mostly, though, I sense a thick, white mass between us—I think it’s paste of chaste. Or pastity of chastity—a consciousness of curdling time. While it makes me sodden and slow, it also makes me more sure of what I want.
When conversation eludes us, Lonnie and I sing. She favors the grim, cynical musicals—Threepenny Opera and Cabaret, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. Me, I’m a sucker for Bye Bye Birdie and The Sound of Music. Luckily, we both love Peter, Paul and Mary; The Mamas and The Papas; the Weavers. With their help, we spackle the holes in our conversations for a week. Then she invites me to her house.
I think, What does it mean? What if I’m misinterpreting everything? Is it possible?
And I say, “No, come to my house.” Because we both know: my parents are in Montreal.
Lonnie hugs me hello and my nose pokes through the stream of her hair.
“Someday I want to see your parents,” she says.
“Me too. I barely remember what they look like.”
She holds up her guitar. “As promised,” she says. “I brought music, too, so we can sing.”
“I want to hear something you wrote.”
She shrugs. “Later, maybe.”
What came next? I can hardly remember. We sat on the floor and sang from the Weavers’ songbook: “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “Darling Corey,” “Wimoweh.” Lonnie’s voice was strong. Our harmonies were indestructible: pure geometry. Our voices were becoming grainy when Lonnie said, “I want to play one that’s not in the book. I learned it from their reunion album.”
I sat by her side and she began to play. The song had a purple-red quality, like a slow, heavy rainstorm. I couldn’t really follow the words. Lonnie’s eyes were closed. Then the song changed, and the words became:
There’s something about the women
Something about the women
Something about the women in my life.
It circled endlessly, becoming stronger and stronger. Light poured from Lonnie’s face. My body seemed to become seamless, listening to the song with recognition. It was like the first time I’d ever heard a song. A precious secret and marching band in one.
In my life, there are women,
In my life there are women, in my life.
The song closed like a heavy book, and Lonnie’s eyes stayed shut. There were no words in my head. No thoughts. Just the expansiveness of a galaxy. Lonnie’s eyes opened. I coasted to her lips. Touched them with my own.
It wasn’t even a kiss, just a touch, but it made my insides avalanche. I felt rocks falling from my shoulders, jagged granite I hadn’t even known was there. The unbelievable softness of her lips.
The guitar struck a note when it hit the floor. Lonnie didn’t seem to notice. Her arms encircled me, her lips kissed me. No thoughts anywhere, only softness. Nothing dangling, wondering, worrying. Only the lightness, the absolute completeness.
Lonnie twisted away, crying in silent little beads. Frightened, I asked, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that I’m so….relieved,” she said, pulling me back to her.
I felt the last boulder topple from my shoulder, and I was crying too, because I had never been myself before that moment. I had been Tammy, waiting. Now I was Tammy. All my questions, insecurities, maybes were evaporating into ghosts. In their place was fiber and feeling.
“Tammy,” she named, and I was me. Our faces together, tears puddling our shirts. Everything salt. And joy. As we kissed, our crying ebbed, salt crystallized, and we became serious. My fingers wove through her hair, just as I had imagined a thousand times. Her hands on my neck, my shoulders, my back. My teeth at her ears. Her mouth on my throat. I ripped myself away.
“We gotta stop.” My voice sounded like I’d just jogged a mile.
“Why?”
“Because…” I realized I had no good reason. “Because what if we get pregnant?”
Lonnie cupped my jaw in her hand. “Honey, that isn’t going to happen.”
“But I feel like it could.”
“I’ll call the Pope,” Lonnie said, squeezing my hand.
The completeness I’d felt was gone, replaced by more wanting. Lonnie understood. She took my hands and drew me off the floor and onto the bed.
I swept all the dolls off my quilt in one superhuman gesture. Lonnie positioned herself in the bed, and I jumped in after her. Our arms pretzeled, we clung and kissed.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
Our whole bodies pressed together: breasts, stomachs, the tops of our thighs, even our feet. I squeezed her bony shoulders and kissed her neck. Lonnie’s feet grabbed one of mine, lifting. A regular gymnast, she simultaneously parted my thighs and sprang on top of me.
I had never imagined. All my hours of pretending, of picturing—nothing came close to the fundamental rumbling I felt when Lonnie first surfed like that, her thigh a rudder between my legs. My hands stuck like starfish to her back, but soon they loosened and slid. I stroked her from shoulders to waist, feeling her ribs like ripples in a sandy riverbed.
With each stroke, I dipped my hands a little more to the side. Her hand was scrunching in my stomach, scrabbling upward like a bear cub climbing a tree. She crept up, I crept down, until each of us was at the perimeter of the other’s breast, our fingers brushing around again and again.
I couldn’t believe I was doing this, that I had the right, that she was letting me. That she wanted it, too. That her hand was—oh—full on my breast.
I hastened to do the same, my heart crashing.
“God,” she said, and I felt her nipple ripple beneath her shirt. Then she sat up suddenly, her eyes never leaving mine. She crossed her arms, grasped the base of her shirt, and pulled up.
“My God,” I said. No bra. Breasts shaped like teardrops. Her body, shoulder to waist, uninterrupted by a bra, by a bathing suit. I had the right to look. I was allowed to look. I ripped my shirt off as fast as I could. Lonnie tried to unfasten my bra, which messed up the rhythm, but eventually we got me untangled.
“Pillows,” she said, caressing me with both hands. Touching her and being touched at the same time—it was like reading and eating and taking a bath all at once. Which is, of course, my favorite activity. Well, was my favorite activity.
“You’re so soft,” she said, her voice full of wonder. She knelt and kissed me from throat to belly and back again.
“Let me!” I pulled her down and tasted every naked part. It was a strange, slow ritual of faces, shoulders, hands. Her body full of shadows like the moon.
I don’t know how long we rocked like that, tasting, testing. Sometimes I was half an inch tall, exploring the folds of her belly button. Other times I was fabulously large, cramped in my room like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house. I never expected the fine hairs on her neck, never imagined her licking my palms. Everything I never had even wished for: it was all coming true.
I bet you’re wondering if we ever took our pants off. For a while, I thought we shouldn’t. It seemed frightening, messy, complicated, better left to another day. But my hands loved her hips, her hips loved my thighs, and soon the word yes was trumpeting through me like the sound of the shofar.
We stood, giggling, trying to make sense of each other’s buckles and zippers. First my pants came off, then hers. Underwear and socks peeled away, and we stood, looking.
All her lines ran vertically: legs straight and white as junior slim tampons, hips hardly thicker than waist, waist barely smaller than shoulders. Her hipbones stuck out like the wings on an Edsel. “You’re gorgeous,” she said.
I looked down at my body, full of crazy S-curves and cellulite. Rumpled and messy. When I looked back up, Lonnie was inches away, drawing me to her.
We kissed, standing, our full bod
ies together. I felt—I swear, I felt myself turning into a woman. Felt my body expand, heavy and flowing as magma. Magma—that’s molten rock. What an impossible idea, that rocks can melt. What a completely impossible idea.
To Celebrate the Ordinary
Elaine Starkman
Today, the first day of autumn, we become lovers, our wetness the wetness of droplets, our noise their noise as they gently fall to the ground and into the dry soil of our neglected backyard. A day I’ve awaited for over twenty years, when I was the Libby who let you make our decisions, the one who agreed to stay home with three children and remained too frightened to go back to work until they were nearly teenagers. The Libby who now demands that you move under my body, that you stay here in the warmth of the covers a while longer. No, don’t leave. The children are gone. The house and chores, they can wait.
From what place do such demands reach my lips? From my overworked mind? From this quiet after all these years? From doing work that pays, that gives me a sense of worth? Here we lie, you and I mirroring all those couples we read about in crass books, view in slick films, an outmoded statistic, still married among our newly unmarried friends.
Rain sinks into the soil. You sink into me. There’s no dichotomy of mind and body; one no longer cancels the other. “Yes,” I say, “oh yes,” like Molly Bloom; the long years of denial and our ineptness are gone. I hope the sun doesn’t come out; let it remain gray, quiet, soft, a late September morning with nothing to run toward or from.
Yes. The fault mine for not admitting it sooner. Yes. The early years of dependency when I didn’t know what to ask, how to ask. The baby-making. Long, dreary years, my young self without a sense of my body other than the function of my growing womb. We barely touched. I was too placid, you, too staid, too married and responsible to be my lover. I lay on the delivery table murmuring, “I love you.” After our third came that dark, unsettling feeling that lasted for months. Not yet thirty, I had to imagine lovers. I couldn’t say “I love you.” Even now, those words fill me with caution; I know their transience.
Images in my head: that time at Mann Ranch in Ukiah when the therapist told me, “I was fifty before I knew passion, knew how a woman’s body worked.” I am not yet fifty.
“Slow down; we’ve time today. Let’s brush our teeth. Don’t look at the clock. We’re not going anywhere. My hair, stroke my hair, that’s it. Good. Now bring a towel.”
Is this chatter a fear that we could separate like Julia and Howard, our longtime friends who had everything?
My woman’s body. The shock of watching this body age while my mind remains a child’s mind. Flower of the mountain. If I will it, if I allow it.
“You use sex as a weapon, you use it to change me,” you’d say. And now you’re overwhelmed with my change, with my wanting to hum like a cello.
The years of child-rearing. Who knew how exhausting they’d become, how they’d tear us apart?
“Beth’s dropping French.”
“It’s Beth’s life.”
Undermining me with your acceptance, making me Witch Mother to your Prince Father; Bad Mom made life easier for you.
When the children grew older, the rush, the frenzied schedule. Never any time alone. We read the sex manuals and threw them into the garbarge. Their effects lasted less than a week, then we’d be back to our old patterns while our offspring burst forth with their shocking sexuality. Let them learn to love their bodies the way we never have. Let them not mask their senses.
Our own recalcitrant years, years of ideological moves across the country, out of the country, of being caught up in separate worlds. I became less than those parts, blaming you. How I lost my wedding band in the garden, in the garbage disposal, down the toilet. A miracle flushed it back up. I wanted to rid myself of you, but wherever I’d run, I’d find pieces of you in me. Now I lose nothing, no longer run, no longer blame. I’m back where you wait for me, predictable and unchanging, while both of us unlearn how alien we are even to ourselves.
Where to place this arm, eyelid against armpit, toes interlocking.
“Do you think Julia and Howard are happier now?” I finally ask.
“Never mind them.”
Your teeth grind into mine, each beginning as awkward as the first, each ending as if we’ve been strung together since our births. How I know your intelligent scent, your fair skin covered with too much hair, your dry hands with the broken finger that never healed right, your nails clipped too short, the parts you hide from me.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.”
Your rabbinical eyes close with the dread of my insistence that you talk.
You stir. Open your eyes. Your fingers are still unsure of who they might find. Look at my new belly, these droopy little breasts that never grew. At last my body forgets my mind; it arches to its animal purpose. To celebrate the ordinary. Make my ordinariness unordinary, open my fullest, most vulnerable self to you. But don’t overtake me. For this moment, I, not you, must remain the wild one, the free one in my imagination.
And now quietly you sleep again, vein pulsing in your neck. Rest. I must not need you too much. Knee inside knee, keep me safe. The old dependency rises, makes me want to separate. Will you become the sweet old man to my cranky old woman, the eye of our mutual respect rearing its head so differently from that of our children and their lovers?
I go to wash. I go into my separateness. The sun rises; the phone rings; the drip of rain on the roof has stopped.
The Locusts
Cara Bruce
… and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt. Very grievous were they; previously there had been no such locusts as they, nor shall there be such after them.
Exodus 10: 14-15
Every seventeen years they come out of the ground to feed. There are so many of them it is impossible to walk anywhere without killing them. I watch from the kitchen window as they eat all the leaves off my trees, leaving nothing but their discarded brown shells. They fly in a group to the next leaf, momentarily darkening the sky. The worst part is the noise, an incessant buzzing. The buzzing that has replaced all other sounds of life. The buzzing that I hear when I wake up, when I fall asleep, and even through the barrier of my dreams.
I turn on the faucet to get a glass of water, watching as it runs red from rust in the pipes. I imagine the metallic taste, like blood, and I look toward the locusts as if this too could be their fault. My husband is walking up the front sidewalk, his big feet crushing whirring locust bodies into the cement. His lips are drawn tightly together and I look at the clock. It is only one. I told him not to go in at all, that he wasn’t ready. He merely looked at me, unsure of what else there was to do.
We buried my eldest son within a day of his death, according to Jewish law. I imagine his gravesite invisible except for brown shells. I believe their crunchy covering is keeping him warm, but I also worry that their buzzing keeps him awake.
Daniel opens the front door brushing the bugs off his shoulders and hair. “Rachel,” he says quietly. I come to greet him, opening my arms, allowing him to collapse inside me. I hold him tight, and when he pulls away I see tears in his eyes. He brings me upstairs, his hand resting heavy on my arm, weighted with grief.
We go into the bedroom and he lays me down on the bed, nuzzling his nose into my neck, planting his mouth hard upon the soft hollow of my throat. His kisses are rougher than usual and I can feel his desperation. I wrap my arms around him, scaring away the flies that have landed on his already sweaty back. His hot tears drop on my breast as he opens my denim work shirt and moves his mouth down over my bra. He kisses me through the black lace before reaching behind and unclasping it, pulling it up but not all the way off so it rests upon my chest. He lightly bites my hard nipple, massaging my tit with his hand.
His head is moving down toward the soft pillow of my belly. He rests for a minute, inhaling my warmth; then he
unbuttons my pants, pulling them down, breathing over the pubic hair that presses right up against the worn-out silk of my panties. He rips them down.
He is moving quickly; I can feel his need to taste and feel all of me. I raise my hips to him as he pushes fingers into me, up into the place where his son came from. He kisses me there, he is whispering something but I cannot hear him. I hear only the beating wings of the locusts. He pulls my clit with his mouth, licking it, sucking it. I close my eyes and reach above me, pressing back on the headboard. I push into him, attempting to match his intensity. Feeling good through my pain.
He unbuttons his dress pants and I see his cock spring out. Thirty-four years ago that cock made me pregnant, in a time before AIDS, before being careless meant only a new life, not the threat of deadly disease. He pushes into me, stretching my walls and filling me up with his throbbing prick. He goes in deeper, and again I push back. He is fucking me as if we were young: hard and fast. I open up until my entire body is cunt and I am swallowing his pulsating grief. It runs through my veins and I absorb. He thrusts again and I feel him in my stomach. He is moving and I go with him, feeling all the women before me, the pain of persecution, of epidemic, of plagues, feeling it for myself, for my husband and for my son. The locusts have covered the sun, and in the room I can see only the outline of my husband moving above me, soaking me with himself and his sorrow, allowing me to feel again, to make sure life has not stopped and that we will somehow go on. I cling to him, digging my nails into his back, closing my eyes and mixing the buzzing with my orgasm, bringing me all at once into and out of this life. I come, tightening my legs and holding on with all my might, finally allowing myself to sob.
Linguistic
Stacy Reed
Meyercurve is by definition a ghetto—its majority is the city’s minority—but it’s hardly a slum. It is home to many fantastically educated and affluent Jews. The Hebrew Community Center, as well as Beth Yushiddah (the largest synagogue in the state) and its academy, cast shadows on the ebbing Protestant congregations and schools, the Christian day-care centers. Meyercurve is a suburb to which Jews congregate.
The Oy of Sex Page 13