Scissors, Paper, Stone

by Martha K. Davis

  I took it, dabbing my face. I saw Jill glance at me worriedly. I smiled at her, folding the handkerchief.

  “We were just talking about Acapulco,” she said to Morris and me. Unwillingly, I let myself be pulled into this stream of conversation. I had no appetite, but I kept drinking.

  As the sun went down, bathing the tall palm trees in an orange-pink glow, floodlights came on and the catering staff went from table to table lighting candles in clear glass lanterns. The ocean breeze felt good against my clammy skin. It seemed as if the approaching night made the salt air more pungent, and I breathed it in deeply, relaxing in spite of myself. I liked the luxury of this setting. I might never be in a place this nice again. I wondered how much the evening had cost and who had paid for it. When the bandleader made an announcement, we all turned to watch my father dance with his new bride. It was a slow song, maybe a waltz. He took her hand and put his other hand around her waist, looking into her face tenderly. I stood up and went to refill my drink.

  When I came back, the other couple sat at the table by themselves, bickering. I looked for Morris and Jill and saw them on the dance floor. The woman at the table was fussing with her husband’s lapels. He seemed to be explaining to her how she should have ironed his suit at the hotel. I sat down across from them, sipping my Scotch and watching Jill and Morris do what I imagined to be the foxtrot, though I wasn’t sure where this impression came from. They didn’t have much style, but they were enjoying themselves enormously. I grinned. The woman stood and tried to pull her husband up with her. “Come along, darling, I want to dance,” she coaxed. They disappeared into the throng.

  I had lost sight of Morris and his wife, as well as of my father and Angela. At the other tables that I could see, people chatted in groups, some angled excitedly toward each other, others leaning expansively back in their chairs, holding forth. No one else was alone. The candles on the tables had an odd halo. I was getting drunk.

  I sat back and gulped the last of my drink and wished I had gotten someone in San Francisco to come with me. Natalie would have been an excellent choice, if I hadn’t driven her away. We could have walked around holding hands and made out in the arbor where my father had kissed his new wife. We could have made out on the dance floor. These straight white people all needed a little shaking up. I looked around at the women at the other tables, considering which one I would ask to dance. I would take her hand and lead her to the dance floor. The night wasn’t over yet. I stood up to get myself another drink.

  I turned over, and the late sun woke me up. I moved my head and groaned. I had a massive headache. I could hardly open my eyes; they felt dry and swollen. My mouth was parched too. My empty stomach roiled uneasily. I tried to go back to sleep but after a while gave up and opened my eyes. I didn’t recognize the room I was in. It was a hotel room but not mine. Underneath the light blanket, I discovered I was wearing a man’s undershirt. My silk tunic and pants were draped over a chair near the bathroom, ruined by large water stains. I realized I must have thrown up on myself, at least once. I wondered who had tried to soak it out.

  I couldn’t remember anything about the night before. I had a vague memory—or had it been a dream?—of my father yelling at me, his face red with anger, while I shivered in the wind. I was sure about having sat with Morris and Jill at dinner. After that there was nothing; I couldn’t bring it back. Concentrating only made my headache worse.

  I was splashing water on my face in the bathroom when the hotel room door opened and Morris looked in. He entered the room when he saw the empty bed and then stopped when he noticed me standing, my hands and face dripping, in front of the sink.

  “Oops, sorry. I wanted to check on you. Jill has gone out for a little while and left me in charge.” He shrugged and grinned, as though no one should attempt such a reckless act. I liked him.

  “Is this your shirt?” I asked, plucking at the front of my makeshift nightwear.

  “Yes,” he said, averting his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed to have lent me his undershirt or to see me wearing it. I crossed the room and sat back in bed, pulling the covers up. He relaxed visibly and sat down on the edge of the chair where my ruined tunic was draped.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Like someone ran over me with a convoy of trucks. Do you have any aspirin?”

  He looked confused for a moment, then put up his index finger. “Jill does. It may take me a moment to find it. I’ll be back.” He hefted himself up and left the room, leaving the door ajar behind him.

  I lay back against the pillows, trying to ignore the slow heaving in my stomach and instead concentrate the pain in my head into one small area. There was a knock at the door. “Still here,” I called, expecting Morris.

  It was my father. He was wearing shorts and a polo shirt and sandals, and his eyes had large circles under them. He didn’t look particularly happy for a newlywed.

  “Hi,” he said from the open door. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said, sweeping my arm before me, indicating that he should make himself at home. He approached and sat at the edge of the bed beside me. Briefly, I wondered how long it had been since he last did that, when he would come in to say goodnight and give me my backrub before I went to sleep. The truth was he had stopped some time before he actually left, somewhere around sixth or seventh grade. My father sat hunched over, his arms crossed. He appeared to be thinking hard. Maybe he had a hangover too.

  Finally he looked up at me. “You don’t feel so hot, do you?”

  I shook my head, and pain shot through my skull.

  “Well,” he said, “Angie would probably be pleased.”

  I sat up straighter. “What do you mean? Why? Did I say something offensive to her last night?” Angela seemed like the type who got easily upset.

  “You don’t remember what you did?” He looked disbelieving.

  I was careful not to shake my head again. “No. After about seven or eight o’clock last night, I draw a complete blank.”

  He looked away from me. I realized his unhappy expression was a look of disapproval, almost distaste. I began to be alarmed.

  “Dad, what happened?” I asked.

  He put one hand up to his moustache, tracing each side with his thumb and forefinger. This was difficult for him, I could tell. “You made a pass at Angie.”

  “I did?” A part of me was pleased. What shocking behavior of mine had they interpreted as a come-on? “What, you mean I asked her to dance and she couldn’t take it?”

  He frowned. “No, Min, she was flattered that you asked her to dance. I mean after the dance you invited her up to your hotel room. Then you tried to kiss her. In front of everyone.”

  Could I have done that? The thudding in my head wouldn’t stop. I knew the answer was yes.

  He still wouldn’t look at me. “Min, I’m sorry to have to say this, but you brought it on yourself. I don’t think you should come down to see us for a while. Angie doesn’t forgive easily once someone’s on her shit list.”

  “But, Dad, I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.” I winced. Where the fuck was Morris with the aspirin? I couldn’t have this conversation while my head was splitting apart.

  He sighed and put his hands flat on his knees, hoisting himself up to a standing position. He was like a boss firing an employee, not like a father who supposedly adored his only child. “There’s nothing else to say.” He was looking at me now, his hands casually stuffed into his shorts pockets. “You embarrassed me and you hurt me. Not to mention Angie.”

  I couldn’t stand the way he was gazing at me, as though I was some foreign object like a large insect he had found among the clothes in his suitcase. I put my hands up to the sides of my head, trying to hold it together. I was almost in tears from the pain. “I can’t defend myself, Dad.”

  “You’re right. It’s indefensible.” I remembered the times I’d gotten in trouble as a kid by dumping out and hiding the contents of his wallet
, or demanding more candy, more time to play on the swings, more stories at bedtime, testing the limits of his love. It was in his saying yes or no, consistently and constantly defining the boundaries of our relationship, that I knew he wouldn’t disappear. All or nothing, Morris had said. He almost looked like the father I remembered, but not quite. He turned and left the room.

  I thought I might be sick again. Beneath my skull the pain was relentless. I had blown it. I had gone and fucked it all up. I had lost him in one single night. We would never be close, we wouldn’t even be comfortable in each other’s presence again, and it was my fault. If it hadn’t been for the steady drumming inside my head, I would have screamed as loud as I could until somebody came running to shut me up.

  PART TWO

  1985

  He comes to me like a mouth

  speaking from under several inches of water.

  I can no longer understand what he is saying.

  He has become one

  who never belonged among us, someone

  it is useless to think about or remember.

  —GALWAY KINNELL

  Weeks ago, I said, I want to be only happy

  with you, and you said, There are always other

  feelings.

  —HONOR MOORE

  To survive the Borderlands

  You must live sin fronteras

  be a crossroads.

  —GLORIA ANZALDÚA

  CHAPTER 7

  Min

  Summer 1985

  I FOLD THE SHEET DOWN across her hips, tucking it between her buttocks and the table. Her stomach is like a bowl of dough, rising gently as she breathes. Her breasts lie flat on either side of her chest. Her skin is dappled by sunlight falling through the trees outside the long, open windows. I pour almond-scented oil into my palm. I glance at her face. Her eyes are closed, her head is tilted slightly away from me. Her eyebrows are drawn together; the ridge between them looks like a frown. Her skin is pale for a white woman, as though she never goes out in the sun. She has dark circles beneath her eyes. I’m not sure if they have always been there. Her frizzy hair has silver threads now, but it’s the way it springs off her head that I’m fascinated by. Why did I never notice these things when I was young? I rub my hands together, warming the oil. I bring them slowly to her stomach, resting them side by side on her soft, pinkish-white skin, then press in deeper. Other people have told me how powerful it must be to give massages to the woman whose body you came from. Well, I wasn’t born from this body. But it’s true she is my mother.

  With the flat of my palms I begin a circular rocking that grows to a wider stirring motion, hand over hand. There are four distinct layers of muscle in the belly; I was tested on them in massage school when I graduated three years ago. In my mother, I can feel each sheaf of muscle as it holds itself hard against me. Most days I feel no change, but today something is different. Her stomach is like a balloon deflating, letting my hands sink further down.

  Behind me in the kitchen, the refrigerator begins a low hum. I can hear the clock too, but I don’t need it to know I’ve been working for about an hour. The shapes of sunlight through the leaves flicker on the woven cotton rug, on the windowsill. I look up. My hands continue their easy dance. Outside, the bay leaves, with the June sun shining through them, are bright green, translucent, imbued with settled calm. A wind picks up; they flutter, softly rustling. The sky beyond, what little I can see, is a deep blue. Blue, green, white walls, the burgundy of the sheet beneath which my mother lies. The weight of my hands, following her body’s lead.

  Two months ago, my mother asked me to give her these weekly massages, thinking they might ease her chronic headaches and the churning in her stomach that is new and she says is getting worse. She said she felt comfortable with me. She said she was reluctant to receive a massage for the first time from someone she had never met. I was gratified. I wanted a chance to move beyond my brief visits home, our monthly lunches out sitting on opposite sides of a table. I was tired of all our talking. And I wanted to be able to give her something without seeming to offer it. We agreed on a fee and a time. Both of us were relieved, I think, to establish the boundaries of a professional relationship.

  The first thing I discovered was that her skin was touch-starved. At the end of her third massage, she told me that she wished she could lie beneath my hands for days at a time. That was a big admission for my mother, to want that kind of extravagance for herself. Even with Lloyd, her new “beau” as she calls him, she seems physically wary. She doesn’t touch him in my presence, not for comfort or out of affection, much less desire. When she confided to me her craving for—as she sees it—the luxury of received touch, it was the first time I had any clue my massage was helping her.

  But she couldn’t tolerate the weight of my hands pressing beyond the surface of her skin, even on her back where most people ask for the deepest work. I like to begin there with long, firm strokes, then go in deeper, gathering the muscles between my hands, then press my thumbs along them. If there has still been no release, I will use the bony point of my elbow, guiding it carefully with my other hand to avoid the fragile vertebrae. My mother would hold her breath even before the petrissage, hunching her shoulders as though she were protecting herself from harm.

  It isn’t often a client resists so forcefully, or rather the client’s body; my mother wasn’t aware she was pulling away from me until I told her. Most of my clients are relieved when I focus on their areas of discomfort, marveling that I can zero in on their pain right away. Those places are easy to find even without asking. It’s like running your fingers over a topographical map: you can’t miss the mountains. My clients might say, “That’s sore there, can you tell?” while I’m working on a muscle that’s as intractable as an iron rod. My mother’s entire body was like a suit of armor, not highly muscled but hard and unmoving nevertheless. Those first weeks, I was careful to ask her how she liked the pressure I was using as I varied my depth, trying to find a way in. I worried there was something I was doing that hurt her. I kept asking her to breathe, then reminding her that breath is not forced, it is allowed. She said the massages felt wonderful, while I became frustrated by the stillness with which she held her body. I could feel no change, no softening, under my hands. I thought I was wasting my time, and I wished she had asked some highly recommended stranger from Marin County to work on her instead of having me drive all the way up from the city.

  But now I know her body, its subtle messages and miniscule movements. I can feel its limits, and I don’t try to push past them. Watching her face and listening to her breath, I can alter the depth of my touch without asking. Whatever makes her shoulders sore, her head ache, I know now I am the means of relief, not the cause. Maybe it was merely coming back, staying with her because she wanted it, that allowed me to shift my expectations. And she, for her part, has less need to keep me out. This, too, happens at the level of the body. In our speaking life, we have never been in such accord.

  As I knead my mother’s stomach, smooth it, and then work gently in under her ribs where I encounter tightness like a clenched fist in everyone I massage, I can almost feel the insistent pressure of my fingers just below my own heart. Suddenly, my body longs to be touched. I breathe in, filling my lungs with air. A moment later, my mother takes a deep, slow breath. It raises her ribcage, making more room for me underneath. I hold my fingers still beneath the bone—I can usually tell when she has had enough—and I look at her face. For the first time I see a liquid glimmer between her closed eyelids. In the whole of my life with her, almost twenty-two years, I have never seen my mother cry. She clamps her face down against her tears, as if she believes her determination can make her feelings disappear. I’ve wondered for a long time if she might be depressed. She doesn’t tell me how she’s feeling. That’s one of the places we still don’t go. I know she can get anxious, that small setbacks can seem like catastrophes. But something else is going on now, something more. I wonder if she knows what h
as brought up her tears. And if she knows, will she ever tell me? Or is it enough to be able to acknowledge it to herself?

  I back off, retreating to her belly, circling with the flat of my hands. She breathes in again, then lets her breath float out. I am not imagining this; her lashes are wet. A rare tenderness for her washes through me. I don’t need to know her reason. I can feel tears prick my eyes too. I look away, out the window, at the leafy shade of the laurel bay covering us, sheltering us. Perhaps I should be concerned about her, but instead I feel that something good has just occurred.

  I finish with long strokes across her thighs up over her hips to the center of her abdomen, then I reach both hands around her waist until they meet beneath her spine. This is hard for me to do from the side of the table, off balance. I have to rely solely on the strength of my arms and hands. But I do it occasionally, waiting, waiting, then sliding my hands up and around, because my mother has told me it feels like being held, and because I have learned how important it is to connect the back and front, binding the body together.

  Sometimes with my clients, I work up along the sternum to the muscles of the chest above the breasts. I look for as many ways to touch whole lengths of the body, to bring sensation from one area to another. Women usually come to be massaged because of an ache in their back or difficulty turning their head, some one reason that they want me to make disappear. They have no idea until the acute pain is relieved that they hurt somewhere else or that a part of their body feels nothing at all. Sometimes they become aware that their physical body is holding emotional pain. The trauma may have been stored for years. I wasn’t trained to be a therapist or to make diagnoses, but I do know how to listen, to remain present with my clients as the new area is discovered and the change slowly takes place. I try to connect for them the body’s map, to show them through touch that they are not made up of separate pieces.