The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  “Long enough to watch a movie. But, you know, she mentioned that her mom would be waiting for them at home, and I didn’t get the sense that either of them were lying. If you think they’re going out partying or something, you should just talk to her parents.”

  Janet closed her eyes and rinsed her hair, then resurfaced to say, “Sophie doesn’t want me to. She says she doesn’t want me to make a big deal of it every time she has a sleepover. She’s an adult, she says.”

  Eliza laughed. “We were all the same at that age. I remember wondering if getting my driver’s licence would make me a grown-up. Now I wonder if getting Botox will make me a bad feminist.” They laughed, while Eliza thought that maybe Sophie was using Binta as a cover for a boyfriend. To go over to a boy’s house, most likely. Sneaky! She didn’t want to mention this to Janet, who had enough problems dealing with her ex-husband and her anti-social son, who was getting into trouble at school and wanted to go live with his cool father on the West Coast. Usually Janet griped about her son, or her ex-husband. Despite Sophie’s fuchsia bustiers and tight tights, she was the responsible child.

  “So you think I should call the girl’s parents?”

  “Sure. Sophie is only fifteen. You need to know she’s safe. And why don’t you just invite Binta to come and sleep over at your house?”

  Janet made a face and sighed. “Children! My son will live in my basement forever and my daughter will move out before high school ends!” She turned off the taps of her shower. “Are you done?”

  “Oh, it’s just so nice to take a long hot shower. It’s something I never have a chance to do at home. And I…I want to put more conditioner on my hair. It’s getting dried out from the chlorine. No need to wait if you’re in a rush.”

  Eliza became invested in the fiction of moisturizing her hair. It was all a joke, this Amazon thing, an electrical distraction.

  When the Amazon came to shower, it would just be the two of them, like last Thursday. Except that it was Tuesday; the daycare swim class didn’t arrive until later.

  Where was she anyway? Chatting with the lifeguards? Why do you care? I don’t care. I’m just curious. Then why don’t you go out there and see where she is? If I went out there, it would be to ask when the spring swimming lessons are going to start. For the boys. That would be the legitimate question.

  Eliza put a generous dollop of conditioner on her hair, roiled it around. She felt dangerously awake. Or high on hash—did anyone smoke hash anymore? Streams of water ran off the ends of her nipples, down her butt and her thighs. Yes, this feeling reminded her of good drugs. Or her first intense sexual experience. Which happened, coincidentally, at a public pool.

  She was eleven. She already knew masturbation was wrong and bad, according to all the old guys who represented Jehovah. Not only did Eliza have to endure Garry the elder hanging around their house, she also had to attend a Monday night Bible study for teenagers. In fact, it was at a Bible study meeting that she had first heard and seen the word masturbation. It was in a pamphlet about sexuality. There was no definition of the word, except that it was unclean.

  Her curiosity was piqued. According to the pamphlet, many exciting, attractive activities were unclean. An illustration showed menacing handprints smearing a clean white towel: that’s what happened when girls let boys touch their bodies. Kissing was also unclean, because it could lead to more dirty handprints.

  Worried that Jehovah would see her inside her own house, she went to the public library—surely He wouldn’t notice her among the crowd—and looked masturbation up in the dictionary. Which led to another word she’d never seen before. Orgasm.

  Her mother had explained, once, about the actual mechanics of sex, and how easily a boy could make a girl pregnant, and what a disaster that is, Eliza. Meaning, she supposed now, more dirty towel. But she’d never mentioned any of this obscure vocabulary, like clitoris and climax. The library turned out to be a wellspring of seditious, delicious, adult knowledge. After a brief search, the Dewey Decimal system sent her directly to Our Bodies, Ourselves, first and radical feminist edition. She spent two hours sitting on the floor in a quiet corner, poring over the book. The mysteries were unveiled in beautiful line drawings and explicit photographs. The clitoris! Masturbation! Orgasm! Men fucking women, women fucking men, women fucking each other—so that a woman was always on top, unless they were doing that side-by-side thing. And her mother had never mentioned that people lick each other between the legs!

  That particular line drawing mesmerized her. It was so unlikely. She had a keen, wordless recognition of the doubleness of human sexuality, its wackiness and perfect logic—everything fits together!—the desperate seriousness of this behaviour and its wonderful comedy. Look, she thought, at their bums, and started laughing. Then quickly glanced around, to make sure no one could see what she was looking at. Shifting position, she felt how wet she was between the legs, which frightened her. Was she sick? Was that normal? Fifteen minutes later, from the pages of the book on her hot lap, she discovered that it was normal. The book could read her mind; it had anticipated the secret slippery workings of her body. She liked reading the Bible, most of the time, but any dunce could see that Our Bodies, Ourselves was an equally important book to have in the house. And there were no unclean towels in it.

  She learned that one way to masturbate was by using the water spray in a bathtub or shower. Like looking the word up in the dictionary at home, this was something she wouldn’t be able to do in her own shower, for fear that her mother, brother or Jehovah would catch her at it.

  The public pool, like the library, was full of godless people, the neighbourhood kids she went to school with, the tough-talking brats from the military barracks, packs of loud teenagers who were always laughing at jokes she couldn’t understand. God wouldn’t notice her misbehaving; he would mistake her for someone else. He couldn’t really keep his eye on every sparrow that fell to the earth, nor on every curious girl. That verse in the Bible was what her English teacher called hyperbole.

  She started swimming more often. In the showers, when the coast was clear, she began by sitting on the floor with the slack, off-white curtain closed behind her. Then she pulled the crotch of her one-piece aside and opened her legs into the institutional-strength spray, wiggling around until other girls or women came too close, or until it started to feel too weird.

  Eventually, she went beyond the weird feeling. The memory woke her like a slap, a disconcerting, pleasurable shock of sensation. She had almost forgotten; or not thought about it for many years. The first time she had ever had an orgasm was there, in the Mount Royal Public Pool shower rooms, behind the slack off-white curtain, with tile-squares imprinted on her bum cheeks. She didn’t know what was happening to her, except that it was glorious and frightening, too, because uncontrollable. She staggered up onto her feet—her thighs were trembling—and leaned against the wall. Drenched inside and out, dizzy, she wondered if someone at the Kingdom Hall had made a big mistake. Did Jehovah really disapprove of something that felt so crazily good? She wanted, more than anything else, to do it again.

  Suddenly, the Amazon appeared and yanked Eliza across thirty years, from one shower room to another. As she sauntered in, she pulled down one of the shoulder straps of her bathing suit and a breast popped into the air. The breast remained exposed, nipple erect, as she stood and fiddled with the shower taps on the opposite side of the room. Eliza was taken aback by the woman’s brashness. Who let a breast bob around like that while they tried to adjust the hot water? You either keep the suit on or you strip the suit off. This was a come-on. And not subtle. It worked.

  “Sometimes that shower doesn’t get hot,” Eliza said. “We don’t know why. It’s the slowest one to warm up.”

  “Ah, thanks. I’ll use another one then.” The Amazon turned off the taps and walked across the tile floor, just three, four steps, to the shower next to hers. It was a border crossing. Turning toward Eliza, the woman turned on the taps, the handful of
breast looking around for a hand. The water poured down cold, forcing her to step back.

  When it was warm enough, she stepped back into it. “That’s better.” Then she turned again to Eliza, the breast still out, round, gorgeous, not as heavy as Eliza’s, and looked her full and directly in the eyes, without smiling. She said, “Sometimes it happens.”

  Eliza had no idea what she was talking about. “What? What happens?”

  The woman raised her eyebrows and stepped closer. “Chemistry.” She lifted her shoulders and hands in that classic “who knows?” gesture, then pulled down the other side of her bathing suit. Still looking at Eliza, she peeled the whole of it down her torso, her hips, her legs. She only looked down to step out of the suit and hang it on the taps. Eliza glanced at that finger-wide line of dark pubic hair that stopped at the cleft. On either side of the line, the woman’s pussy was freshly shaved, spotted here and there with a few ingrown hairs.

  As she stood up naked to her full height, she said, “My name’s Shar. Rhymes with star. What’s your name?”

  “Eliza.” Her tongue felt thick. It was too real, too fast. And she was married. And she was in the shower room at Annie’s. She was a mother of two small children. And thoroughly married. To a man. Janet was probably still out in the change room.

  “Nice to meet you, Eliza. Would you mind giving me a little of your shampoo? I forgot to bring mine.”

  “Sure. Here.” She bent down and handed Shar the bottle. It was a neighbourly gesture—she had often shared with or borrowed from other women at the pool—but the long, slender bottle, passing hands, contained more than soap. Eliza was aware that recasting a shampoo bottle as an emblem of lust was completely goofy. But it didn’t feel that way.

  Shar said, “Thank you,” and poured out some of the creamy white liquid, passed the bottle back. From the corner of her eye, Eliza watched her rub the shampoo into her hair, then gather up some suds and rub them over her chest and shoulders. She cupped her breasts in her hands, squeezed them together, let water pool there, in the cleft. Eliza felt lust gather in her mouth, her throat, her stomach, then funnel straight down into her clit. The craving was like a needle; it hurt, but she was already getting used to it. Her breasts ached; she felt like a teenager at a high school dance. What she had wanted to do to the other woman, she now wanted to do to herself, hold her own breasts, squeeze her own nipples to make the electrical lines connect, clitoris to nipples, nipples to fingers. She opened her mouth; water poured in. She swallowed it. Then she cocked her head back, let the water spray over her face so she had to close her eyes.

  Now what? she wondered, unwilling to accept what was happening. The fantasy had walked into the shower room and was rinsing the horsetail shampoo out of her hair. Shar? What kind of name was that?

  Shar turned off the water and left the shower room.

  Eliza followed her. There was nowhere else to go.

  “I thought you’d turned into a fish!” Janet crowed. She was in front of the mirror, dressed, hair half-dried. Shar walked to the far corner of the room, where her bag and clothes hung on pegs. Eliza grabbed her towel and watched in a daze as Janet finished putting on her makeup.

  Eliza dried her body, rubbing the towel between her breasts, aware of how swollen she had become just from standing beside the Amazon. Janet was talking. Shar was silent, her face giving nothing away, though Eliza felt her attention. Eliza made perfunctory conversational noises in Janet’s direction. She felt separated from her friend by an invisible glass wall. Janet’s mouth was still moving; she tossed her face cream in her bag, hoisted the bag to her shoulder and looked Eliza hard in the face. “Okay?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Let’s have a drink next week. Okay?”

  “Sure, that’s a good idea.”

  Janet said goodbye in a singsong voice and walked out the door.

  The two naked women stood looking at each other from opposite sides of the change room. The Amazon was smiling, to herself, it seemed, not showing her teeth. Was it a challenge, that smile? Or an invitation?

  Eliza did not ask. She walked over to her, lifted her hand and touched Shar’s collarbone.

  “Mmm,” Shar assented, and Eliza felt the woman’s voice in her own mouth. She traced the bone outward, to the muscular shoulder, her fingers skidding on the damp skin, continued down the biceps and paused a few inches above the elbow. The breast was beside her hand. She remembered this, from years ago, in Greece, the urgency but also the languidness of touching Thalia, how sex with a woman was not defined by the penis and its insistent path, searching for the way in, and then, once inside, pushing for orgasm. With a woman, the sex could go on and on, and on. This was sex, standing beside a woman she didn’t know with her hand on her arm. Orgasm could subside and more touching could begin, not the old highway of penetration but another road, barely defined, meandering off into the forest, dipping into the riverbed, reemerging into another geography.

  The surprise. That’s what she had forgotten. How surprising a body like her own could be. How intimately she could know that body before touching it. And not know it.

  Shar made a quarter turn. Her breast grazed Eliza’s hand, and that hand opened, did what it had wanted to do and closed on the warm globe of flesh, fingered the nipple. Shar breathed, “Oh, fuck,” as Eliza took the nipple between her thumb and index finger. Squeezed, rolled the nub of it harder while feeling her own clitoris respond in kind. Shar dropped her towel on the bench and lifted her hands to Eliza’s breasts.

  Many thoughts rose, knocked, insisted; Eliza refused them all, floating instead in the sensation of being touched. The only admonition she paid any attention to was Don’t get caught. She was attuned to the door, to both doors, the one leading out into the hallway of Annie’s and the other that opened to the pool. There was no one there; she would hear the daycare workers because of the children, she was always aware of children but now she didn’t hear any of them. The lifeguards had no reason to come into the change room. Don’t get caught, don’t get caught.

  Shar lowered her mouth to Eliza’s lips. The Amazon had a small but full mouth. Her chin was narrow, her jaw narrow, she was so different, and so familiar. Requesting tongue, Eliza opened her own mouth wider. Shar didn’t comply. Eliza licked her lips, asking again. No. When she licked them a third time, she felt the Amazon’s hand slide, sideways, between her legs. Shar leaned down and took Eliza’s lower lip in her teeth, bit down, close to hard, and in that way, by the teeth, delicately held her entire body in position. Eliza gasped and opened her legs wider, hoping Shar’s hand would do more than it was doing. Eliza began to make small, shy hip-thrusts, hoping to encourage those fingers up, inside. No. Shar bit Eliza’s lip a little harder, then let it go, pushed her tongue into Eliza’s mouth.

  Was it possible to come just by kissing? Eliza stood perfectly still, hoping that Shar would finger her clitoris, that she would bring her to orgasm; it would happen so easily.

  But she didn’t. She just grazed the tip of her clit, back and forth, back and forth. Eliza wanted to cry. The top of Shar’s thumb and index finger lightly grazed the outer lips, too. Eliza had to stop herself from grabbing Shar’s hand, pushing her fingers inside. She knew that wasn’t allowed. Shar had stopped kissing her; she slowly drew her face away. Her eyes were enormous. They stared into each other’s eyes: that, too, was sex, a penetration so intense that Eliza dropped her eyes, unable to tolerate the intimacy of this stranger’s gaze, a stranger who had pinned her, trapped her precisely as she had wanted to be trapped. Her eyes slid down the woman’s long arm, landed in the flash of palm there, the hand held sideways, rubbing between her thighs, oh excruciating slide, the sharp saw missing its mark. The incompleteness of the pleasure hurt her. The sound was small, a trapped animal whine; she was making it. Her head dropped down, heavy, her mouth hung open, empty, as she watched Shar’s hand sliding her open, saw the long thumb, the side of her index finger pull back, away, glistening and slick, then slide forward agai
n. The smell of sex was stronger than that of chlorine.

  Shar’s hand suddenly went still. Eliza went rigid with protest: Why did you stop? The Amazon leaned back slightly. In the separation between them Eliza heard herself: she was panting. Shar lifted her glistening hand to her nose, inhaled the smell, then drew her tongue slowly up from the base of her thumb to the top of her index finger. Eliza felt a spasm radiate from her clit through the flushed swollen skin: the first rise of orgasm. As Shar licked the side of her hand again, slowly, like a large animal licking salt, Eliza felt that same tongue licking her pussy.

  She stepped backwards, almost stumbled across the tiles. This was her side of the change room, where her things were. She sat, heavily, mouth still open, legs akimbo. The sides of her thighs were slick; she shut them and immediately wanted to open them up, lie back, spread, pull Shar’s face into her.

  Shar smiled a happy wolf grin. “Waaoow! That was hot!”

  Together they heard the sound of the children coming down the hallway. Eliza grabbed her towel, wrapped it around her body. Shar stepped into her thong: three black elastic bands holding a small triangle of blue leopard skin over her pubis. Looking at her ridiculous underwear made Eliza remember how young Shar was. Eliza had never worn a thong, nor wanted to. But watching Shar pull up tight jeans over moist skin, wriggling her round buttocks out of sight, Eliza saw for the first time the appeal of this impractical item of clothing. It was like Sophie’s pink bustier: stripper clothing trafficked into daily life, made underwear. On cue and straight out of a striptease, Shar peered over her bra-strap shoulder, campily bit her fat lower lip, and winked. Eliza’s whole body responded to these gestures. She felt vanquished. Shar had slain her with sexual clichés.

  Again, she wanted to cry. To sob out her frustration. Instead she said, “The kids are coming in.” The sound of her own voice brought her back to herself, the self she normally was, not a horny teenager but businesswoman mother wife upstanding community member. The sexual blush became the reddened face of guilt. What on earth was she doing? She reached for her blouse. The door opened. A chattering stream of children poured in between the two half-naked women.