Today, however, I sense my mother’s continued resistance in the area around her chest: heart and breasts and muscles for holding. So I slide one hand to her hip and place the other flat on the opposite shoulder, pushing my hands apart for a gentle stretch. I learned that this balances a person’s energy, but I like it simply to break the symmetry of the massage, to suggest a different kind. Then I do the same on the other side. A trickle of sweat tickles beneath my armpit. Last, I rest my hands firmly on her abdomen, rocking slightly, then gently lift them off.
Drawing the sheet up over her chest, covering her crescent breasts, the vulnerable place between them, I am reminded of last night, bending over Madeleine’s naked body. I ran my fingers along the valley between her breasts before taking each nipple, one by one, into my mouth. For a moment, I am disoriented, lost between the present and the past. I blink, pouring oil into my hand. Then I take hold of my mother’s wrist beneath the sheet and ease her arm out and spread the oil up one side and back down the other. I enjoy my memories of sex, almost as much as I enjoy having it. Madeleine is a new lover, a friend of an ex. She’s moving to New York at the end of the summer to start graduate school, which gives our relationship a little extra kick, a bittersweet edge because there’s no future together to look forward to or wrangle about. It doesn’t matter whether I like her. Last night, when I felt Madeleine’s nipple thicken under my tongue, I slid my palm down her body again, across her round hips, then pressed harder, kneading the skin of her buttocks.
I’ve lost my focus. Yet my hands go on, sure of their terrain. Does my mother sense some change in me, that I have left her momentarily? I look at her face as I knead the fleshy underside of her arm. The frown between her eyebrows is gone. Do my memories pull me inside them, altering the character of my touch? Can she sense my remembered desire? She is completely still. I don’t know what that means.
Sex comes up sometimes between my clients and me. I notice the change in their breathing, in their bodies, or occasionally in mine. A couple of women have wanted to act on their arousal, and so we’ve talked about it as I continued working on them, careful not to change the quality or the pace of my strokes. I’ve told them the way they feel is a natural response to being touched, and as we’ve talked my hands on their bodies have been firm and unambiguous. More often with clients, nothing needs to be said. Somehow, they discover on their own that the pleasure of being touched is its own reward.
But this is different: it is a question of attention. I could give a full-body massage blindfolded, but could I give one without full consciousness, my mind on something other than the woman lying before me on the table? I have had massages from bodyworkers who seemed impatient, in a hurry to finish and move on to the next client in a string of clients booked one after the other. I have had massages from people whose main interest was to talk about themselves. One woman repeated the same motion on the arch of my foot for far longer than was necessary, apparently immobilized by her thoughts. But I didn’t know what she was thinking; her sadness or glee or lust or rage wasn’t communicated to me through her hands. Only that she was not with me. I do feel caring. When I’m receiving bodywork from my friend with whom I trade, I feel more focused on. She works in response to my body’s particular needs. There is a gentleness that lets me know I am loved. I wonder if my mother can feel that from me.
Since I began working on her, other bodyworkers have told me they would be uncomfortable massaging their parents. They are afraid of feeling aroused or of their parent being turned on. Friends have asked me, Don’t you forget sometimes that the body you are touching is your mother’s and not Madeleine’s?—or Lynn’s or Annabeth’s or whoever I’m seeing at the time. Laura asks me this. Ever since she came home from Kenyon last month, newly graduated and set free, she has been very curious about my massage practice. Last week she asked how I, of all people, can possibly touch another person without it becoming sexual. I was pissed off by her almost hostile tone. But I rose to the challenge. Find out for yourself, I said, knowing I couldn’t make her understand with words that there are many kinds of touch. Each person’s body is a different size, color, shape, proportion. I never get confused about who is under my hands.
Last weekend I gave Laura her first massage. I expected her to be shy about her body, a little afraid to be touched, like my mother. She surprised me. She draped herself on the table as though she’d been receiving bodywork for years. Then she surprised me again. As I worked the knots in her rhomboids and across the fibers of her chunky calves, I felt her body sink into that place of near-mindless relaxation. I was happy to be giving Laura this gift I knew she received as one. I was glad she would now know exactly what I did for work and that I did it well. Then I became aware of her longing. For me. She was attracted to me. I wouldn’t have picked up on it during one of our walks in the city, but her body made it obvious. And it wasn’t the massage itself that was turning her on; I can tell the difference. She wanted me to touch her as a lover.
I freaked out. I faltered for a moment, forgetting which direction I was moving in. Then I pulled back into myself. I ignored the tension building in the room. I worked steadily, professionally. I hoped she would stay quiet and take her feelings away with her. But I couldn’t help my body’s response: her desire aroused me. It wasn’t until after I was finished, washing my hands in the bathroom, that I realized I hadn’t convinced Laura of anything.
My mother snores loudly. Startled, I flinch. I have been in another place completely. Unusual for me. She opens her eyes and gazes groggily up at me. I am working on her other arm now, my weight shifting from foot to foot, my hips swinging slightly. At least my body goes on. I haven’t stayed in one area repeating the same stroke.
“I fell asleep,” my mother says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s your massage.”
“I missed it. Did you do my other arm already?”
I nod. “You didn’t miss it. The body remembers.”
She closes her eyes. I can’t tell whether she believes me. My body remembers everything: how it felt to yearn for Laura in tenth grade, even before I understood that my desire would change my life. How it felt to climb out of her parents’ hot tub after realizing Laura couldn’t love me back the same way. Those memories seem very distant to me now. My adolescent attraction to Laura was plowed under a long time ago. I don’t want to dredge up those old feelings; they belong to another time and a younger, isolated me. I am no longer that girl. I am the woman whose body remembers how it felt to find myself at last in Alison’s bed, and then Gina’s, and then Amber’s, to discover that the world was much larger than high school and there were other women I could be close to besides Laura.
I rest my mother’s elbow on the table and bring her palm up to face me. With my thumbs, I work in circles. I concentrate on the broad pad of the-nar muscles below her thumb, then move up the lumbricals in the channel between each finger bone. I feel an ache in my own palms and wrists. I am clenching. One by one I shake out each hand, the way my mother used to shake down the thermometer. I lower her palm and, starting with her pinkie, wrap each finger inside my fist and pull, gently, until the finger slips out. I move her hand up and down, small movements, then side to side. The wrist is made up of eight separate bones. In my well-worn anatomy text, they look like pebbles, the small, pitted kind I sometimes find on Ocean Beach glistening in the wake of a wave. The kind I hold in my pants pocket while I walk, my fingers ceaselessly moving over its surface. My hands are always restless.
Another thing about Laura: she’s straight. I’ve been flirted with by straight women, and I end up feeling like an experiment, a dare they’ve set themselves, a story they can take back to their boyfriends. I can’t open myself to her again only to have her back out. And if we did happen to get involved, what then? There’s a reason I don’t sleep with straight women, the ones who want to go through with it. I have no interest in bringing Laura out. And maybe she’d decide she wanted to be with men after a
ll. I’m not looking to be her coach, her advisor. She should have already gotten their help at college.
Why is it so hard for me to stay focused? When I have finished with my mother’s arm, I try to shake it side to side, holding her wrist as though ringing a bell. My mother has retrieved some part of herself, some control or necessary attempt at it; her arm hangs awkwardly, tightly hinged. For a moment I am impatient. Relax, I want to command her. Then I smile to myself, remembering saying exactly that when I was first certified, until an early client told me, “You can’t force it, you know.” And then it struck me as funny: as though the body’s softening can be demanded by someone else. The only answer is to bring the client’s awareness to the fact that they are holding themselves back, tightening up.
Gently I take my mother’s elbow with my free hand and rotate it, moving her arm, her shoulder so that she can feel the freer motion. Again, I wonder if she has sensed my annoyance, if my touch changed. I breathe. I close my eyes for a moment, intent on my own movement, the slide of my muscles in my arms, my back. I keep my legs slightly bent. She will never know how much the practice of massage has forced me to grow up. As I knead the deltoids in her shoulder, I watch her face in repose. It is a different face from when we began, brighter, less tired, almost smiling. I lean into my strokes, gathering my strength. We both have worked hard to be here today.
The light outside has changed. It’s weaker, more orange, almost red. It slants through the bay laurel and eucalyptus trees out back in focused beams rather than in a shower of generous daylight. The shadows in the room have crept along the floor; now silhouettes of leaves tremble against my mother’s armchair and the white wall. Already I recognize darkness in the light. I can see how the planet is a ball of night but for the sun’s bounce of brightness. Shadows are usually perceived as the spaces not filled by the light, but it is the sun’s rays that seem to me to caulk up the flood of darkness. This is the time, in the late afternoon, I see how day is merely a shadow of light.
Still holding her arm aloft, I slide my hand down to my mother’s shoulder, up her neck to the base of her skull, then back again. My fingers drag along the trapezius muscle, a chronically knotted clump beneath the skin. She makes a small noise, one I know is of pleasure, release. I repeat the action, slower this time, a little deeper, wanting to extend her moments of enjoyment that happen below the level of her skin. Then I place her arm back on the table at her side, rest my hand on top of her hand. Hers is pale and a little chapped despite the oil, the knuckles bony. My hand over hers looks small and dark and entirely at home. For a moment I feel humbled by her presence lying trustingly before me.
This is why I love massage: these minutes, sometimes hours of stopped time, the movement of sunlight in windows, the arrival of breath, the body’s slow, sure knowledge of its work. Here there is always the possibility of one’s own self, allowed into being. I could dance this way forever.
I lift the edge of the sheet and cover her arm and shoulder. I move to the end of the table, by her head. I take a long breath, let it out, watch the sheet over her chest rise and fall. My mother’s eyelids flutter but remain shut. She knows where I am going. She is waiting for the long pull and stretch of her neck, the steady pressure of my fingers beneath the ridge of her skull. I lift my hands and begin.
CHAPTER 8
Catherine
Summer 1985
CHANGE SEEMS TO HAVE A way of sneaking up from behind. You might get what you were looking for, only to find it’s not exactly what you want. I wanted freedom. I wanted to be an explorer, someone uncompromising and very brave. I wanted to engage with the world on my own terms. I wanted to leave everyone else behind.
I’m nearly fifty. Half a century. It’s not that old. Even so, I have a hard time remembering that I still have responsibilities. I run a used bookstore in Fairfax. I pay rent for the top half of a small, funky house on a hillside above the town. I am treasurer of the local chapter of NOW. I date a man named Lloyd a couple of times a week. I am Min’s mother.
Always that. Especially that. She will be twenty-two in October. She has been an adult for several years now. She is everything I wished to be. Yet increasingly I worry that I wasn’t a good mother. Certainly nothing I’ve done turned out the way I originally thought it would. Have I been too hard on her? Have I given her the guidance she needs? Did I love her enough? Too much? Could I have done better?
I never thought much about marriage and family life when I was a child and making plans for the future. Or, rather, I studiously ignored them. Now it seems that Min will probably never have her own children, even adopted ones. She’s young, but she has shown no sign of attachment to anyone, besides me and Laura. I try to let her find her own way. I try to be the parent I never had. But I want to tell her not to turn away from the unexpected. Maybe she’ll have to make compromises, risk being wrong. I want her to succeed where I failed. About my own life, I can’t stop feeling—I don’t know why—regret.
These days I wake up early. I don’t mind. I reach for my glasses and lean back to watch the world take on color outside my windows. I like the way the long gray-green leaves of the eucalyptus trees lean and flutter in the wind or hold still in the first grip of sunshine. I feel okay in the morning, when I haven’t woken up from nightmares. No headaches yet, no upset stomach. There are reasons I feel old.
I’ve begun to dream about Laura. I dream I’m looking for something I’ve misplaced, and I search everywhere. Sometimes I’m in my apartment, sometimes in the house in Mill Valley that Jonathan and Min and I lived in, sometimes in my parents’ house in Rhinebeck. I search with the growing panic that I used to feel when I was married, knowing something was wrong and having no idea how to fix it. If I am aware in the dream of what I’m looking for, I always forget when I wake up. When I’ve turned everything upside down and I can’t think where else to look, I turn around to find Laura standing beside me, waiting for me to recognize her. In the dream she turns out to be my daughter, the daughter I had forgotten about until now. We have a tearful reunion, full of long, fierce hugs. I am filled with relief, and more than that, joy that my family is complete at last. Then I wake up. After the first moments of disappointment that it isn’t true, I am appalled. In the dreams Min doesn’t exist.
I love my daughter. I know it makes no difference to me that Min is adopted. I know Min is my child. I have had to prove it time and again. When Min and Laura were children and the three of us would go out together, it was Laura that strangers assumed was my daughter, even though she looked nothing like me. My hair is dark, much closer to Min’s black hair than Laura’s straw blonde. Mine is curly, theirs is straight. Laura didn’t resemble me in the least. And Min already shared some of my mannerisms; we were becoming more alike as each year passed. What was wrong with those people that they couldn’t see that? And when I corrected them, how dare they answer with, “Well, you can see how I’d make that mistake.”
I know who my daughter is. I dread these dreams in which she has no part. I wake up sweating, asking myself, Why can’t I remember? What was the thing I was looking for that I lost?
This morning the same thing happens. I wake up disappointed that it was only a dream, that my joy isn’t real. And then I feel guilty, and my sweat turns cold. I am an unworthy mother.
I throw off the down comforter and dress quickly. The sun is peeking over the hill when I slide the glass door closed and hurry down the deck stairs to where the Rabbit is parked on the side of the narrow road. The car starts on the third try. I drive into town, where everything is quiet, and pull onto Sir Francis Drake toward Point Reyes. I want to get to the beach before anyone else arrives.
My driving is automatic, instinctive, even on the steep, winding roads. I don’t want to think. When I arrive, I slip off my Birkenstocks, reach for my sweatshirt on the back seat, lock the car, and follow the path down to the beach. There’s someone with his dog much farther down, taking a morning jog. I keep walking, straight to the water. It’s
numbingly cold, and I feel the shock to my skin and then relief, the way I do putting ice on a sprained ankle. I stand letting the water lap at my feet. The wet sand buries my toes. I watch the waves build and break and roll back into the sea. I listen to their roar and hiss. I wonder if they would take me with them, or would they only spit me back out.
I remember the beach of my earliest memories, on Long Island where my parents used to bring Robert and me in the summer, before Andy and Susie were born. I remember holding my mother’s hand as I considered the height of the waves, and I remember being afraid.
I look down the beach at the distant cliffs, their craggy faces unmoved by the smash of the sea. I realize, surprised, that this is the beach Andy and I walked on the last evening of his visit. I haven’t been here since. We walked on this beach, and we fought. I couldn’t forgive him for refusing to accept Min as my daughter. And then he died, in Maine, drowned by the sea.
Goddamn you, Andy, you’re wrong. Min is not a foreigner, not someone on loan for a while. She is more my family than anyone. Why won’t you see it?
I am so tired. I stand, staring out, feeling as numb as my feet in the ocean. If he were alive, he would be in his mid-forties. What kind of person would he have become? I can’t imagine him. My memories of him seem dusty, put away. I rarely think of him. He’s been gone too long.
I am mesmerized by the ocean, the way I am by flames in a fireplace. The waves roar and they whisper. They rush toward me, tumbling over themselves, and they slip away. I shudder. Then I remember what day it is. Andy died twenty-one years ago today.
It’s almost as long as he was alive.
The next morning I sleep late. As far as I know, I didn’t dream at all. I feel well-rested. I lie in bed for awhile, then drive into town to do my laundry, reading the Chronicle and sipping take-out coffee on a bench outside while I wait. When I return, Min and Laura have already arrived, tracking sand into my three small rooms and spilling stones and shells from their pockets onto the kitchen table. They sit together exactly as they did in fifth grade, when they first discovered each other, arranging their bits of the sea into swirling designs, calling me in to look when they are done. A month ago they discovered a cache of sand dollars washed up onto the beach. They harvested the ones that were still intact and came to show me, bearing dozens of them in the lap of their shirts as offerings. I saw how bright their faces were with the adventure of it, as though no one but the two of them had ever had such luck. At the time I thought they were breathless from the wind, giddy from the sun and salt air. It’s been so long since the mere presence of another person moved me, lifting me up.
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