“All right, everybody, turn off the taps. Let’s go!” The children did as they were told, and the small bodies, the swimming suits in red and pink and green—one boy was wearing the same bathing trunks that Jake had, bright yellow with green frogs—began to file out. The Amazon began to scour her prize-winning tits with the loofah.
The children disappeared. As they would disappear, soon enough. Children never lasted for long. They would return as young adults in their twenties, and Eliza would still be here, a naked old woman, rubbing shampoo over her back and under her arms because she couldn’t be bothered to bring soap.
She was forty-two. Not old yet. Though older, she thought, than her, the naked woman across the room, bent over now and shaving her legs. Amazing what women did in public places these days. The Amazon seemed to have no shame. None of the regular women ever shaved their legs here. It reminded Eliza to at least take off her swimsuit and soap up her chlorine-smelling skin. One shoulder, the other—the polyester was thinning already. She pushed the suit down over her breasts, her hips, legs, stepped out, hung the dark blue skin of herself on the shower faucet.
At least the woman had turned her ass to the wall to bend over. What, Eliza wondered, did the wall see? The flower of the vulva, intricate folds and layers. Thin or thick labia? Slender and folded in and in, like her own, or fleshy and succulent, folding out, like a red canna or a calla lily. The comparison was right, she thought, defending herself to an invisible judge. It used to be Andrew’s fond joke: my wife peddles genitalia. Though it was never completely a joke. It was true. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants.
It was hard not to look at a naked body, bending like that. The nipples gathered water, turned into two small waterfalls. The length of the planes of bone invited the eye to glide down the healthy flesh. Creamy skin, black hair. Like the heroine out of which novel? The muscles in Eliza’s legs and arms flexed as the Amazon sent the razor down her ankle. Maybe she was a fitness instructor. Ashtanga teacher. Personal trainer. Did anyone do aerobics anymore? It was spin classes and hot yoga now. Even Pilates had become passé. Every time the woman drew the razor up her shin, a series of muscles in her torso actually rippled.
Eliza closed her eyes, glad no one else was around to see her staring. They all looked at each other’s bodies, covertly, shyly, it was natural. There were so many bodies, long and lush like this woman’s, or voluptuous and plump, like Janet, or straight-hipped and small-breasted. The woman with the sore neck and rich son still had a slender waist and a nice ass, despite stretch marks and more than sixty years of life behind her. Another older woman came sometimes, too, and she was hilarious, always crooning in the change room about how wonderful it was to see the other women naked, how different everyone was. People didn’t talk to her too much; her enthusiasm frightened them. She was large and jiggly, great-breasted. Hers was the shape of that ancient goddess dug up in Turkey, and it became mightily apparent how much she liked that fact when she announced it one day, to the embarrassed silence of the other swimmers. Eliza had smiled and said, “Well, it’s always good to have a goddess in the change room.” A few others laughed politely while the big woman guffawed with delight. That’s why she was frightening; it wasn’t just her enthusiasm. People were not accustomed to blatant happiness; it made them as nervous as naked flesh.
Eliza’s own was a fairly fit, fairly shapely body, the round, stretched belly of a woman with kids. Muscular thighs from years of cycling, though now, with the kids, she hadn’t made any overnight rides in years. She rode her bike around the city, through the ravines, sometimes down to the lake. She loved bringing the boys with her—they were getting more and more confident on their own bikes. But having the boys along meant that cycling wasn’t exercise. She guarded the swimming as her own. It made her body smoother, stretched away some of the extra fat.
She glanced at her again, then away. Lovely to look, not nice to stare. The Amazon straightened up and thrust her long-bladed shins into the spray. She was finished. But she stayed on, under the hot water, rubbing the last of the soap off herself. Their eyes met briefly; briefly they smiled. Eliza felt a tug at the root of her clitoris. She felt wet. Down there. That’s what happened with ovulation: it was biological.
She squeezed some conditioner into her hand and massaged it into her hair. Other people had sex once a week. She had the pool. Twice!
She couldn’t remember the last time she had had sex with her husband. More than a month ago? More like six weeks. Surely the current dry spell couldn’t have been more than two months? Please god. That was life with two small children, night-wakers both. It was nothing to be ashamed about, sexlessness.
And I’m not ashamed, she thought. I’m just horny. She realized she wanted to be fucked upside down and sideways. Obviously she was ovulating. The survival of the race had once depended upon fucking. No longer, of course. The opposite was true now. The last thing the planet needed was more fucking humans. And Andrew did not want to have another one; the last of her eggs were falling through her body. Soon there would be no more. She had never felt so lustful in her life.
The Amazon spoke in a surprisingly loud voice. “That was fun.”
“Sorry?” Eliza tried to decipher the echoey words, but she had water in one of her ears. She felt her face turning red. Knowing she was blushing made her blush more.
“It was fun to race you.”
“You beat me.”
“Mmm,” mm-ed the tall woman. She grinned. “I did beat you. Soundly. I like winning.” She grinned more.
Eliza found she couldn’t respond to the come-on of the woman’s tone. Who talked like that? No one she knew. She smiled back politely and brushed water away from her face. “I would love to swim more. Get in shape.”
“You’re in beautiful shape.”
Okay, so maybe some people did talk like that. Eliza closed her eyes and put her head back into the spray. Her neck felt too exposed. She said, “Thank you. Likewise.” She knew the Amazon was looking at her, for she had invited the other woman’s eyes by closing her own. She felt the live current running through the air between them. That much electricity in a shower room had to be dangerous.
Her heart thumped in her throat and her water-drum ears. It has come to this, she thought. Flirting with a hot young woman at the pool. Andrew and I must have sex. But had Eliza flirted? Or had she been flirted with? She was too busy for sexual innuendo, or too tired. She flipped through her mental Rolodex of fellow school moms and dads. In eight years, in the school playground, at the park, dropping off and picking up for playdates, she had not flirted with a single one of them. They were sexless zombies with toddlers and full-time jobs. Just like her.
She put her hand on the tiled wall beside her to keep her balance. That was the solution, she had found, to many of the problems of middle-aged, middle-class life: Keep the eyes closed. Maintain balance. She listened to the water splashing. When she turned her head sideways, to get water out of the one ear, she peeked at the tiled floor. Someone’s tangle of long brown hair. You’d think women, at least, would clean up their own messes. A pink hair elastic, too, curled like a little neon worm on the white squares. Her other ear filled up with spray.
When she opened her eyes, the Amazon was gone. Eliza stayed exactly where she was, her heart still pounding. She did not want to be reminded of the past. But that’s why she came here, partly, to be reminded of those two long hot seasons in Greece at the beginning of her adult life. On the island of Lesvos, as a matter of fact. She would not admit to anyone how often she remembered the island and all that happened there. Not daring to go out into the change room, she put a second round of conditioner on her head and stood swaying under the spray, deconstructing their brief exchange. She rinsed her hair, again, hoping that, as the label said, the rosemary oil would stimulate her scalp and the horsetail would nourish her follicles. (She read the label five times.) Skin ruddy in the heat of the spray, she stood there, frozen, wasting the precious water of Lake Onta
rio.
When she entered the change room, it was empty. As she had hoped. But now she was disappointed. She stood there naked, dripping, and imagined herself fully dressed, pushing out the swing door and catching up with her to say…what? What could she say?
She put her towel on one of the benches and sat down. Unbidden, the voices of the children in the pool came to her. She pushed them away. All children sounded like her own children now; it was infuriating. She would have thoughtlessly thrown her body in front of a speeding car to save any one of them. Little bloodsuckers. She didn’t want to hear them, nor the lifeguards calling commands across the water.
She took up the towel between her legs and dried her thighs, her belly. Then she stretched it higher, to dry off her breasts, and opened her legs slightly, pushing against the taut fabric. There wasn’t enough pressure. So she held the towel loosely in her left hand, covering herself, and with her right hand she burrowed under, and slid her middle finger between her labia. She was shocked by how swollen her lips were, and her clitoris, how wet she was. At least the electricity still works, she thought. She had to stop herself from doing more, though the pornographic narrative came to her with surprising ease: She sprawled back on the wide bench and spread her legs wide. She slipped her middle finger into…At that moment, the tall dark…Et cetera.
She shook her head. Pathetic! There were tears in her eyes. She was crying for it! Which made her laugh; a plaintive squawk leapt up and collapsed in the air of the change room. Could it actually be longer than two months? Was that possible? There wasn’t a rule in the standard marriage contract about conjugal rights. No legislation stated, You must have sex with your wife/husband at least once every fortnight. Now that the kids were older, she was ready to go back to the original agreement, at least once or twice a week. More in the summer.
But the last time they had managed an intense, fast session of fucking was…before Christmas. Before Christmas shopping. Usually she did her Christmas shopping in November, to avoid the crowds. And it was before that last teacher professional development day, because she was in a bad mood about it then, too. Would that have been…early November? Forget lovemaking, though she liked that, if it happened. Lovemaking required planning, time and a total absence of children from the house. The hurried sex suited her; it was to the point. They were usually both so pent-up that it was excellent, like desperate teenage sex, though with a better sense of humour and finer mechanics.
Anyway, without sex, she was becoming a menace to society. She stood up, dried off brusquely, like she was drying off—what? she wondered, surprised at her own roughness. A wet dog. No! A wet pussy. Good grief. Hurry up and get some clothes on, you slut.
3
Ice
SLUT. THAT WAS ANOTHER WORD SHE HADN’T THOUGHT of in ages. She was out in the cold morning air, walking quickly, a hat on her head. But she was warm from swimming; she could walk all the way to work without feeling the chill.
Slut was a word she liked, now that she was safe from it. In high school, it had been the dreaded insult: you slut! She had been called that, a few times, by mean girls. That horrible year, Grade 10. Why? She couldn’t remember the details anymore. Alas, she had never been overtly slutty. Alas? Did she regret it? No. Had the woman at the pool been slutty? Was that slutty behaviour? Or just sexual?
For a teenager, being slutty made life complicated. She had never dressed like a slut. She always had one nice boyfriend at a time; she didn’t lose her virginity until she was in Grade 12, at seventeen, like many of her friends. How they had wanted to get rid of it, the albatross of virginity. When she had sex for the first time, with a boyfriend of many months, she was so happy. Not because the sex was good. It was non-orgasmic, perfunctory and painful. It hurt more than she had expected it to. But when she walked out of his parents’ house (they were away for the weekend) into the wind and red leaves of a bright October morning, she thought, Here I am, now I know.
She knew almost nothing, but every girl has to begin somewhere. She was thrilled by that invisible slip of broken skin, ever grateful to the boyfriend for doing his best. He came in about twenty strokes, and he’d come three times before that, while they were driving each other crazy with kissing and touching and licking. It was his first time, too. There, said the condom, and the sex smell, and her blood on the towel underneath them, there. Congratulations! You are now part of the glorious human mess.
When she had her first son, she felt the same sense of joining, becoming the rightful holder of a passport into the human world, this (he was screaming, ten days old, colicky, while she held him, feeling as helpless as he was, tears running down her face more slowly than the milk springing from her macerated nipples), this is what it means to be here. Sex and the squalling infant. They were as basic as food, as mundane. And as laced with the same mystery as that other big event, death.
What had happened there, in the change room? Would she really have followed the Amazon out into the street?
Slutty essentially meant horny, didn’t it? Or showing you were horny. Showing that you liked sex. But weren’t most healthy girls (and women) horny, at least sometimes? She certainly had been, in school, and a lot of her friends were, too, though they masked it as longing for certain boys. Horny wasn’t a word for girls in the mid-1980s. Boys were horny. Girls were pretty. Or not so pretty. Or really smart. Or sluts. Stupid slut.
A terrifying yet perfect word, with that slippery s and the gaping u and the t sharp as a slap. Slut. Satisfying to say. Like fuck. The sounds contained the meanings. How about cunt? She recoiled inwardly. Awful. Cunt was such a bad word. Once, an aggressive driver had pulled into her lane so quickly that he almost slammed into the vehicle ahead of him. Incensed by his own mistake, he stuck his whole shaggy head out the window and furiously screamed at her, You fucking cunt! From the back seat, five-year-old Marcus piped up, “What’s a cunt, Mommy?” She managed to say, “Oh, the man was just unhappy, dear.” In a joking voice, she called out, “There’s no need to yell!” And Marcus called back, in their usual game, “Because my ears are very good!” and they laughed, though she was still gripping the steering wheel too hard, shaken by the man’s ferocity.
She shook her head, to fling the words away. You fucking cunt. She was passing the kids’ school now; the sidewalks had been salted. But once she crossed the street, the ice was positively glassy again. Yesterday, the city was a giant slush pile demarcated by puddles. Overnight the temperature had plummeted. The morning news had listed the accident locations across the city, with a seven-car pile-up on Highway 401; amazingly, no one had been killed, though three people were hospitalized in serious condition. She’d listened to the report while putting the cereal bowls on the table, getting out the milk, a bowl of raisins. After Andrew had ushered the boys downstairs, she had told him about the accident and said, “Take the subway. Don’t drive today. I’ll walk the kids to school.” But he reminded her that it was the last day of a sale at a local sporting goods store; he wanted to get the boys new skates. “Be careful, then, okay? Please?”
Something, someone drew her eyes up and over a passing car. Speaking of the word slut. Sophie was on the other side of the street, coming toward her. Janet’s daughter. Lovely Sophie, who had recently undergone a transformation so profound that her mother was still reeling. Before the girl had left for Victoria to visit her (recently absconded) father in August, she’d been a sweet fifteen-year-old wearing pedal-pushers and rubber boots, helping her mother dig up irises in their front yard. When Eliza saw her again in the fall, she was on her way to school in high-heeled boots, black tights, and a tight shirt opened to reveal something hot pink and bustier-like: an item of clothing that would have been at home in a stripper’s closet.
The mid-winter Sophie wasn’t showing cleavage, but even in the cold she managed to project the promise of naked flesh. She wore wedge-heeled army boots this time, with grey tights as the base, layered with black thigh-highs that didn’t quite reach the hem of her pri
vate-school-girl skirt. Sophie was not in a private school; her clothing dialect was stripper-ese, with the thigh-highs clearly enunciating garter belt. She wore a close-fitting wool jacket, also army green, that emphasized her waist. Bright brass buttons. A fat slash of China-red lipstick on her full lips. Her whole face had a plump suppleness to it. She looked juicy. Eliza’s gaze summoned her, for Sophie suddenly lifted her kohl-ringed eyes, searched for a split second before a big smile wiped the sullen intensity off her face. Eliza waved.
The Change Room Page 2