by Tx, x
Exactly Raisins
She sprinkles Craisins over the salad authoritatively.
It’s okay, you really only need some sort of dried fruit, really. It doesn’t have to be exactly raisins.
She is a mom and I am not.
Let me see that, and she tips the edge of the glass measuring cup I am holding.
She hums mmm-hmmm while poking her nose. It moves in small figure eights. I try to see her eyes to determine what that might mean, but they aren’t looking at me so I can’t exactly tell.
She releases the rim and I pour the dressing I had just finished whisking on top of the grainy green bubbles of broccoli, the red of the Craisins pokes through the liquid white like they are trying to survive. I feel like saving them. I know they were never meant for this.
She picks up the giant bowl and holds it against her stomach like bag of groceries and tells me to “give her that spoon,” which I do.
She turns away and begins to stir. The back of her is a monolith.
All I can hear are grunts. They are the ugliest sounds I have ever heard.
I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me.
It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.
By the time I decided to try it my chest had already unclenched, not from crying, but because I removed myself from the interrogation that had brought it on and did tactile things. I washed dishes, opened a Newcastle, put a beach towel down on the patio.
When I took off my clothes and lay down on the terrycloth, I had emotionally estranged myself from whatever it was that had brought about the tangle of emotions that tight-roped somewhere between sex and fear. I just wanted to make myself interact with the outside world, even if it was just fresh air and the sound of birds and lawnmowers.
The sun was hot on my skin but not too hot. Every time I lay out under the sky wearing really only nothing it makes me horny. There’s something about the sun falling on skin that’s normally hidden. Maybe the receptors there are more sensitive to the rays or something. I don’t know. That’s when the challenge to masturbate about my dad came back into my mind and I thought, let’s give science a chance here.
I started as I always do, licking my fingertips and moving them south and then in small up and down motions, circular, up and down, circular, circular, up and down, up and down, I cleared my mind and then thought about my dad.
I tried.
I tried and tried and tried.
And while images of him came and went, my clit wasn’t responding and my brain couldn’t keep an image of my dad long enough from me to even get an image to generate a proper scenario to hold on to.
After a long while the images started to come easier, but they were fleeting. My dad was younger. His skin tight and tan, his hair black. There was a lot more of it. His chest hairs were not gray. He had his clothes off. He was holding his dick. I was a little girl. I was naked. I was tan. My dad’s face. Again and again. He is naked. We are naked in the swimming pool. He is holding me against him. His dick is bobbing up against my bare buttocks. I am still not aroused. My dad lying next to me. We are sideways. We are naked. I am hairless. He is stroking the length of me. My dad’s face. My dad holding his dick. My dad standing in front of me, I am sitting on a toilet, we are naked. He tells me to watch him. My dad lying on his side naked. I am lying on my back naked. He is holding himself. He is looking all over me. He tells me that’s a good girl. He is masturbating. I am getting aroused now. He is masturbating and he is telling me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and I am just lying there and then I am back on the toilet again and he is standing in front of me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and he is jerking off in front of me and I am coming and I came.
I wonder about it all, why the father that came into my head was so young, the places and positions so specific. Then I think about how much I like watching men masturbate. Then I think, no. I think, I am creating drama in order to justify my perversions.
My dad never touched me when I was young.
He never did bad things like this.
These were things in a perverted woman’s imaginative mind.
I love my dad. He loves me. It’s made up. It’s not any kind of fucked up memories dredged up from some forgotten, deeply buried incidents.
I am pretty positive. I mean, there were other things, but never with my dad. I am pretty positive about that.
I think it is weird that I did this but I think maybe part of me “made him” his younger self because if I pictured him how he is now, his old self, gray, skin sagged, hunched, that would just be horrible and gross and even weirder. I think masturbating to his younger self made it almost like it was someone else, someone I knew decades ago, which, is true.
He never touched me. I love my dad.
There was no mother in that house. There were a lot of boys and men and there was me. That is all. That is how it was.
My dad has a tool shed. Its walls are vertical aluminum waves and in the summer, when you are hiding inside of it, the heat stifles. My knees eat the dirt and I hold my breath when I hear them coming. My brothers are running outside. They are looking for me. This is real fear. No joke. No playing around. I smashed the wall of the fort they were making. The wall it took them two days to get higher than their heads. It was made of dumb dried clay-mud bricks they had made with a wooden mold my dad had put together for them in his workshop, which was adjacent to the tool shed I was hiding in. I used a sledgehammer. Not a heavy one. I felt so powerful. I smashed the fuck out of that wall and I was crying while I crushed it. In that moment I wanted to kill them. I hated my brothers. I didn’t care that they would kill me for this. I did not care. In that moment, all I wanted to do was destroy. And I did. Every blow shook my ribcage, rattled my skull. My halter top inched down and down until my baby nipples showed, tiny and pink. Snot fell onto them. Tears fell onto them. My hair stuck to my wet eyes and my snotty nostrils. The air was filled with the dust from the breaking and I choked with it. When everything was smashed I fell to my knees and I remembered this lady from a movie I saw where she found the hands of her murdered children buried in a cornfield. I thought about how crazy that lady looked with all of her out of control snot and tears and screaming. I saw myself outside of myself for a minute and that sort of woke me up and I “snapped out of it” and saw what I had done. Instinct told me I had better get the fuck out of there and I did. I left the sledgehammer. I pulled up my halter top. I hid in the tool shed. Their fury paralyzed me. They were banshees. I felt their tornado of anger whirling around the house while they searched for me. It shook the walls of the shed. I writhed myself small and squeezed as tight as I could into a place under a shelf and between the scalloped wall and a wood cabinet. I will not talk about the cramping, or the thirst, or the blood from sharp edges of BB gun holes in the aluminum or the brutality of the retaliation when they finally found me.
That day taught me there is a safety in all of those things. I am decades older and I look for that safety. I say, “sit on my chest big boy,” and, “deep enough to draw blood, please,” and, “as tight as you want, for as long as you want, double knots.” There are tears and snot and nipples and sticking hair like before. There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. I hand them the sledgehammer. I am their fort wall.
I still hide in the tool shed. It is so very, very useless.
An Unsteady Place
Thirty-three starfish, forty-two seashells, eighteen crabs, fourteen lobsters, ten waves, eight gulls, twelve fish, seven lighthouses, four fishermen, eleven pieces of coral, sixteen sailboats, nine seahorses, and a handful of signs indicating the direction you need to take should you want to go to the beach. In bas-relief on shower tiles, on the edges of towel racks, mounted to drawer pulls, painted on wallpaper, dotted on baseboard tile squares, crowded into baskets on mantels, on wooden steps, in bathrooms, mounted and framed and hung on walls, painted on dishes, decaled on drinkware, the bottoms o
f bowls, sculpted into the handles of serving utensils, hanging from the ceiling, stitched onto towels, on lamp bases, printed on bed sheets, comforters, pillow cases. A fish skeleton key rack. The beachside vacation rental drove the point home like a mother reminding you of every single thing you needed to be afraid of.
In every cupboard, towels with nautical themes are stacked neatly with labels indicating the size of towel and method of use: hand towel, body towel, beach towel, wash cloth. Tiny laminated instructions with filigree and smiley faces explain how to use each appliance; washer, dryer, microwave, dishwasher. Quiet coaches.
At first it’s charming, but eventually their naggy cheeriness begins to annoy. I know how to use a microwave. I know how to dry my clothes. I know how to wash dishes.
There is no way you can make a mistake here.
***
After two delicate attempts, Frank gives up on begging the children to temper their steps. Their excitement of having stairs and bunk beds overwhelms them and they rampage. I watch him watching them. His face is lit up with something that looks a lot like pride.
Anna gets on her belly and slides down the stairs, taking her little brother with her. Hands clasped around his tiny ankles, they bump–scream their way down the stairs. I think about stopping them, but I am unsure. They look like they might bite.
***
Every day I pack a beach bag of every possible thing: suntan lotion, rubber bands, whistles, scissors, a sewing kit, wooden stakes, magazines, floppy hats, Frisbees, throwing stars, kickstands, pencil sharpeners, parachutes, jumping ropes, courage, swizzle sticks, tweezers, and machetes.
I do my best to anticipate.
We bring towels that have been brought before and sandwich them between our bodies and the hot sand, symmetrical. I place the chairs just so. Frank pounds an umbrella into the sand. When he is finished, he stands back with his hands on his hips, surveying our setup. He is breathing heavy and I wait for him to see through me but instead he says, “Alrighty!” and then captures the kids in his arms and runs them toward the sea. I want to ask him how he knew to do that.
Their screams disappear into the waves.
I sit in a chair and watch the sea roll them around in its mouth.
***
At night, we twist loose, fighting silent blanket wars; each of us noiselessly willing the other to shut the windows that bring the cold night air of the sea to freeze our skin.
I, always the cold one, lose. I throw the blanket from his back, stand, stride, and slam the glass closed, faintly remembering just seven hours earlier how delicious the opening of that window was; the cool air quelling the sweat of my brow, the crevasses in my skin. I think about change and how suddenly or how gradual, it can happen, how it makes almost everything unreliable. I shiver.
I slide back in alongside him, surrendered. Fight forgotten, I snake my hands around him, taking his warmth for my own.
***
My son digs for sand crabs where the waves slick the sand dark. His bare feet make tiny tracks that the sea licks away at crooked intervals. It is like he is being tasted and savored.
My daughter plays in the water with her father. He brings her back to me shivering wet, face strangled with a clown’s smile, spread too wide and unsettling. He sets her down and she stumbles into my arms. Her fingertips grip my shoulders like pincers and I swear I can feel the press of shell against my skin.
My husband lies on the bright colored terrycloth, eyes closed to the fight of the sun. He doesn’t see me shudder and wince.
Anna whispers she wants to tell me a secret. She leans in and opens her mouth revealing a black green strip of seaweed. I pull on it and, like a magician’s scarf, it ribbons out into a small clumped pile crawling with tiny sand gnats. The last bit plops and I cringe at the noise. My daughter laughs a gurgle sound and skips down to the wet to help her brother with the crabs. Their heads touch briefly and I cannot see who they are for a moment, their forms black in front of the sun.
I look at the sky knowing that with my attention missing, there is a chance that something bad might happen. I watch a cloud change from a bird into a dragon into a skull.
***
It looks like a home but when you open a drawer it is empty. It looks like a home but anything easily moved is nailed down. It looks like a home but the cabinet under the bathroom sink has individually wrapped toilet paper, the kind you find in hotel bathrooms.
The home of this house is strictly a façade. It’s like I can see bone, blood, and skull through razor cuts in a perfect face: a whore in a habit.
I can feel the house holding heavy, threatening to turn inside out. I flip light switches with wishes and hold countertops as if I could stop them from folding and caving if they so chose. I take careful steps in case the foundation begins to lift, tilt.
***
We have been here weeks, days, months, hours. The roar of the surf is an unrelenting constant that takes away time. Everything is blurred together, spilled paints on a garage floor.
As the days tick by the front entryway fills with sand, plastic toys, and beach towels that never seem to dry. They lump wet in slumped shapes that wait to scare me when it’s dark.
Everything seems to be something else and I am finding it hard to keep track. I have begun counting the starfish on the wallpaper that lines the hallway. I know their number is 33. I pray they stay consistent.
***
Frank doesn’t see, but I do. He turns his head after they change or before. Whites come back to eyes, fins separate back into fingers, gills close and become skin. They continue their coloring, or reckless chasing or stuffed animal playing, looking exactly like our children.
I have given up trying to alert Frank to their changing; before I can finish my words, they revert back. Or never were? No. I see the salt they leave on their seats, in their beds and in the grime resting in the bottom of the bathtub. I can smell the depths they’ve come from. It slithers up from underneath them like fumes. It’s as though they are soaked in sea, bloated with black water that sustains the life of blind things.
Frank has stopped asking me if I am alright. He watches television, drinks a beer, reads the paper. He turns his head after I change or before.
***
I put their sandwiches on plates painted with suns and seashells; when their antennae detect the crusts, they click louder and louder until I cut them off. I use the sharpest knife and do it quickly. I set the knife on the counter. I give them back their plates. I back away. Toward the counter. Toward the knife.
When they growl I feed them grapes or crackers. I toss and run. They scramble, squirm.
I cannot watch them eat.
As soon as they are asleep Frank washes me in the shower. He covers me with soap and then uncovers me, taking his time with my transformation.
There are waves on the walls. The soap dish is a clamshell. Frank calls me his mermaid.
I panic and look down. I relax when I see my legs.
He dries me with a sailboat bath towel.
He says he loves how my new brown skin makes my hidden parts so visible in the dark, how the white triangles make them easy targets for his fingers, his tongue, his cock. Of these things I am sure. They are what they have always been. They are reliable. As he puts each inside of me, I feel them reminding me of how sure the world can be.
***
With the prior day’s sun and surf causing us to sleep until the time that is called brunch, the mornings become afternoons, the afternoons become evenings, and the evenings in-between—a place neither here nor there. It’s an unsteady place and it’s then that I find myself leaving Frank’s side, heading down the staircase to count the starfish in the hallway. I know their number. I know it will not change, should not change. I hold their consistency with a grip that frightens.
Sand sticks to my bare feet when I pass the lip of the entryway. I am careful not to look. I know the beach towels are lurking there, damp in the darkness, waiting to be something
that can scare me.
I finish counting and start again.
33.
***
Before we know it the sun gives up on us and we’re back at the entryway which has accumulated a small dune. Frank sighs and says something about a cleaning deposit before placing one foot on its grade and then the other. He asks, “Who’s first?” and they begin to fight for position; claws jab and then lock, jab and lock. The sand shifts and Frank begins to slide towards them. “Break it up, guys!” he orders and their chaos dims and breaks. I step back, and watch them grab and climb; hands now, in his. They slide down the other side and call for me with words bubbling thick and coarse. I know I can run but I don’t.
I climb.
***
At the table, mottled beaks open wide revealing teeth spirals that wind crooked in rows upon rows and I know it’s not food they want. It rots before them piled and stacked hiding sailboats, crabs, and coral. I think it might be me they want, but even that I am not sure of. Nothing tender has come from them. I have not seen it. Have not looked for it. Have not given it.