I courted mothers, but I had to pay them. Money was the headline to the relationship, the guarantee that I hired a mother’s affection. The past few years, as I had broken from my mother and tried to purge her influence, I accrued professionals, women who soothed and tended me, arranged my hair, adjusted my spine; women who asked me to undress and left the room. Per the contract, I’d remove my clothes and lie on their tables, wait for their hands.
I lay down on white paper for Susan, the nurse practitioner. She scraped an expert Pap smear and looked thoughtful as she palpated my breasts. She reviewed my nutrition and sleep, my hormones and sexual health, for as long as I wanted. For Barb, the aesthetician, I left my clothes in a heap on a cushioned stool. I put on the thick robe that hung above, snugged it at my waist, then lay flat. She sanded her palms from my knees to pelvic bones, her face intent on her work. I was her task. We knew what was going to happen. After she waxed my legs she moved to the head of the table and peered at my brows. She worked upside-down, stroked on warm wax and yanked it up again. “How are the boys?” she’d say, not listening, which gave me the room to answer with words but not depth, no investment. When I started yoga, I noted Geralyn’s silver toe ring and the health of her taut, muscled back. I bent my body to copy hers. At the end of the first class, she lowered the lights and instructed the class in her soft tone to sink into our mats, cover ourselves with a blanket, deepen our breath. My eyes were closed, and I could hear her feet pad across the carpet. She crouched beside me and whispered, “Would you like another blanket?” I nodded, shy at being made special, and hungry for it. She left and returned, dropped heavy wool over my ankles and unfolded its weight up my body. She took her time, conscious hands as she smoothed the blanket under my chin. I never opened my eyes. Tears traced the sides of my face as I tried to be still and receive. My body called, “more,” as she lifted her hands away.
• • •
Seated across from me in a tiny office bedroom, Flora said, “Tell me, what’s going on for you?” Such authentic interest alone could move me, and I outlined for her the body she’d meet in a few minutes, its injuries and tensions, the chronic plagues, the new discomforts past forty. She listened, another kindness. She knew the emotional world was made manifest in the body. Yes, yes, I thought, as I eyed the table, which was draped with clean sheets in pale colors and a cotton blanket, turned down. Touch me.
She left me to undress, and I folded my clothes. I wanted to stay aware, to absorb all the care the money and the hour would allow. As requested, I removed earrings, rings, necklace, hair clips, made myself blank. I settled into the sheets, a place to begin again. This is what I was always seeking.
Flora tapped on the door. “Honey? You ready?”
I liked the asking, then the waiting.
I propped myself up on my elbows to watch what she did, as she uncapped vials, mixed oils. “Lie down now,” she said, a quick pat on my head, and I set my face into the cradle. Flora pushed a shallow pillow under my ankles, adjusted this and that. Barefoot, she circled the table, her fingertips in contact with my back. I read their warmth, that there was nothing insistent in their pressure. This was just her work. She set her open hands onto me, over the tripled layer of cotton. I tracked her solid, standing form in relation to my prone, self-consciously relaxed body, and how she inserted her body into the space we shared. I was, as ever, on guard, aware that no boundary holds.
The massage lasted beyond the hour I’d paid for. I was always careful never to want more than was allotted, but Flora kept on. When she finished, I was deeply worked, sore with it. I scheduled another appointment a week later, then added another for the following week. I didn’t care what regular visits might cost. Like the right therapy at last, it called.
The next session was gentle, the next a pursuit deeper in. The next, we’d agreed to the bargain, my skin to her hands, her hands to my body, our mutual education. We worked together, as I undid my physical pieces for her, one by one, and she attended each thoughtfully. This calmed the psychic churn, something I could never manage on my own. Each week, returning, my body revealed the gentle shifts she’d encouraged. Look at your hip flexors, she’d say. Much more range. See how your vertebrae have spread apart? Each week I left her office in need of rest and water, clarified and properly attended.
While she worked, she asked for history and talked about her own, her varied life and its many incarnations. The exchange was balanced, her, me, her, me. She took an acute interest in the book I was writing about my mother, asked questions that probed the relationship, that pondered creativity. Many times after Flora I went straight to my desk, stirred and awake. We examined her troubles and trials, her several marriages and what she still missed. We both accepted ancient foolishness and dangers, laughing at ourselves, sometimes so hard she’d stop the massage to sit and catch her breath. I confessed secrets of my marriage, laziness of mothering. She showed me the poems that filled her notebooks. There was always another era I’d forgotten to explain—oh, the day I delivered!—or some life chapter she hadn’t yet covered—farming on a kibbutz!—and, eyes closed, I absorbed her competent touch, soaked up her voice, her Southern cadences rising and dipping. They rocked me.
For a year we went on weekly. Flora was a therapist who could be a friend, without its being weird. We said we should go out for coffee, but we never did. We said, come look at my garden, my tulips, but we didn’t. In such frequent contact we couldn’t help but keep close track of each other’s lives, enumerate regular habits and constant truths—“How was the dentist?”—and I involved myself in her concerns more deeply than I did with most good friends, but a tacit clause in the contract prevailed, boundaries insisted on by the money, guaranteed, and we kept to the office at the top of the stairs in the converted Victorian.
One day I was on Sylvia’s table for acupuncture, as Flora gave a massage to someone in the next room, and my agent phoned. I’d been expecting the call, too jumpy to benefit from the needles. Sylvia and I mostly were chatting, which she indulged when I was agitated. She handed me the phone and stepped out. The book had sold. When she returned, I was still on my back, stunned, and I burst into confused tears. She called Flora in from the hallway, where she was stocking linens. The three of us celebrated with triumph and disbelief. They held me, hugged me. They saturated me with praise and sent me out into the world.
• • •
It was an afternoon two months later, August heat trapped in Flora’s tiny upstairs room. She had the shades down, darkness a stand-in for cool. It was stifling.
I lifted the sheet off my skin. “Would you mind if I just didn’t have this?”
“Lord, no,” she said. Each week she’d seen me in naked sections, a quarter of my body bared at a time with evident borders. “You do what you do, honey.”
I kicked the sheet to the floor, exposed all. It startled me that I didn’t mind, that I’d assessed the risk unconsciously when usually I was so very aware, exhaustedly so. Flora’s capable hands went to work, re-signing our invisible contract. I lay still and softened muscle as she pushed into my flesh. Both her hands took hold of my thigh, and I gave her its weight, abandoned intention, dropped my will. Like a meditation that slips for a mere second into transcendence, I allowed the rapture of this woman’s love, felt fully loved. The instant sprang away, disappeared, but it had undone something. I tried to come back, to focus on the boxy room. She moved to the calf, shin, the foot, which she held, waking my toes with the pads of her thumbs. She came to the head of the table, where she buoyed my head’s weight in her hands and pressed her palms and fingers against my scalp. My mouth felt lazy. Flora, usually a train of talk that couldn’t be halted, exhaled and sighed, no words, and we shared stillness, the efforts of our bodies adding to the close heat. Raising me from the shoulders, she slid her arms under me and gathered the muscles on either side of my spine, held me up, and I surrendered. Each breath was a risk, her forearms strong under the wings of my back, new courage, a brave s
ubmission.
Flora, always attuned, felt the give, the shocking change. She swept her touch along my shoulders and arms, the soft sides of my breasts, down my legs, over my knees, onto my feet, holding and releasing, holding. I watched her face, the black eyes she turned often to mine. I looked at the ceiling, yellow sunlight striping the walls. She moved her hands into the space beneath my ribs, and I let out breath. “Another,” she said. Her hands pushed, and stayed. “There you go.” I felt panic hint. Most people resist abdominal massage, the tender core unguarded; it’s too much. Many therapists don’t like to work there either, vulnerable to the power of someone’s stored trauma, but I was now so naked, and a hard stone lived there that I could not get at on my own. I wanted it loosed. She shaped the tissue and moved muscle, getting to a buried dungeon. She went on, in, and I told myself this wasn’t too much, I could go in, too.
Tears had started, leaking a thin track to my ears. Flora stayed quiet, and the crying turned hard. I felt her hands inside my gut, sinew telling me some old story, and I had to attend. “Shh, shh, shhh,” she said, not to silence the full-throated sobs, but to stay with me, the cooing of a real mother. My body began to heave, the sobs deliberate, one after the other, and I dissolved into the shhhh, the whisper, the backward falling that was not into empty rage and desertion, but with amber sun around us, late-day orange on the familiar skin of Flora’s arms.
I kept my eyes open, regarded my unbroken nakedness to my toes. Flora hefted one arm under my shoulders, as I cried. She wrapped her other arm in front, gathered me to her, and then the dangerous miracle: I gave away the last things. Naked; naked breasts and hips, unguarded tummy, throat exposed, knees, bared thighs and bottom, naked, I let her hold me up, yielding to infant grief, and she kept me at her chest, her skin sticky where it melted to mine.
The word came as an animal—TRUST. You trust her, I thought. Peace. This woman looked after me.
After many minutes, we were reverent. She knew she’d reached a place no one had. We knew I’d let her. I didn’t make jokes, as I usually would, putting metal back into emotion. I wanted to savor the body’s mysterious achievement. We marveled together.
She left to give me privacy. Astonished, I considered the depths. They would close back up, I knew, but in this moment I was ravished. I dressed, the sleeves of my shirt confusing, and opened the door, a small breeze passing in. Flora came back and held me, both of us standing. “Honey,” she said. Her body felt small, now that I was up, her strengths absorbed back into her frame, but she was all there. You had only to look at her to see what shined forth. I had let myself be lifted, held, carried, had felt what it felt like. I couldn’t believe it.
• • •
The next week, I came for the massage and—well, I should have predicted this—I did not know which way to go. I’d been so revealed that it felt dishonest to be less than that, but I also couldn’t go around gapingly torn open. It was exhausting, had taken me liters of water to restore a capable self after that session, which I left in a trance that lasted into the following morning. Besides, tiny scraps of reserve and apprehension had begun to flutter against me again.
Flora talked on, and it grated. She had tax trouble and renter’s complaints. She was looking for a cheaper place to live but was worried about breaking her lease. She knew I needed an office.
“Why, you could rent my place,” she said.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I wanted to keep her attention on the massage. “I’ll come and see it.” But it was the wrong price, and it was all her viney plants, aging cats, splayed painting materials, family photos, kitchen disarray. She’d clean up and take her things, of course, but no. “I’d love to help you move,” I said, “but I don’t want to rent the apartment. Thank you for thinking of me though.” I’d arranged each sentence several times. I got careful with offers, knew the nasty turn they could take right before they evaporated.
She left a message on the phone—her landlord wanted to meet me, said I could rent it. “I told him all about you,” she said, singsong. I felt adamant and annoyed. Back off, I thought, don’t manage me. Your affairs and mine are not intertwined. She had the flu, Sylvia said, and I stopped by with soup and flowers, staying put on the couch as she related symptoms for ten minutes. She asked me to refer more friends.
I did not want to take part in Flora’s troubles. This distressed me. Wouldn’t a friend help? Sylvia gave her rides when her car broke down. I struggled with what to offer, besides my custom and the money I paid. I cared, but I needed her to remain a grown-up, my grown-up, and she seemed to be careless with this charge. We weren’t, after all, friends. We had our contract, the terms that had allowed me to be more naked than in any sex, aware of my body cradled. I had written the check for that.
When she moved, I came by the new place and, finding her not at home, left a bouquet of lavender on her windshield, no note. I’d biked and hadn’t had room for pen and paper in my summer pockets. But, lavender the sort of language we used to speak together, she called to thank me. I listened to her voice mail, glad I’d avoided one of her sighing discussions.
We drifted, conversation grew parched. At a session, I tensed under her hands, drew back. She couldn’t undo my stiffness. We weren’t working together anymore. I was angry about this.
To my relief, Flora left town. Usually, though I tried to be supportive and amiable, I felt bereft when friends moved away. But I wanted Flora off me, my skin coated with her oils and clogged. I heard from Sylvia where she was going, without taking it in. Something to do with her dying father, a duty, but also care, a calling with her. Good: let that calling no longer be me.
• • •
A few years later, Flora moved back. Elated, Sylvia imagined the pleasures she’d share again with her friend, and how Flora’s reappearance would better my life, too. I was wary. What would be expected of me, how had I failed and what would I be held accountable for? I carried the drama around.
I meant to call her but didn’t do it. After several months I ran into her in the post office, the small-town denominator, an abrupt meeting, edged by old intimacy. We’d had something, we knew that. We’d cared, respected, and shared hard, beautiful hours. We’d loved. We stood in formal parallels by the large oak doors and caught up, but without visible feeling. I felt afraid and was trying to head off accusation, if it was going to show up. I’d let Flora be my mother, and then mother had marshaled its alarms and savagery, and I couldn’t stay whole. Our agreement had evolved, loosened, and we were well into a relationship that promised to nourish—did nourish—but had normal limitations, human complications. Someone else might have rolled with it, paid no attention to the stripped contract, but the only thing I knew how to do, no matter what I told myself, was to get up and run.
Boundaries
Ellen and I are formal with each other now, like people who have never met in person. She sends me short, uninflected e-mails, and I respond in a day or so with something short, too. She praises our children; I agree and thank her. We do not use exclamation points. Urgency has left us. Although our houses are across the tame Clark Fork River from each other, walking distance, and the kids are inseparable, we’ve secured perimeters to keep safe from contact. Our long, close friendship ended two years ago, and I’m not sure what we’re starting.
• • •
If Abby had stayed, I’d have known Ellen mostly by report. They’d met in some previous city, had moved to Missoula at the same time. Abby introduced us at the All Women’s Run. We stood around before the start. They talked and I listened, and Ellen listened to me and Abby. Each relationship its own container, the duos didn’t blend. Ellen provided Abby with something I didn’t, I thought. They used to backcountry camp, seek out remote waterfalls, adventures of self-reliance and physical strain. Abby and I liked to have long coffees in busy student cafés, make up reading lists of novels for each other. The serious runners gathered at the starting line and set off, and we followed at the walkers’ i
ncreasing distance, three abreast on a windy day, which made conversation hard to share. We pushed jog strollers, while Ellen shouldered the weight of her solemn infant in a structured backpack. Abby had described this brilliant friend, her honors and scholarly pursuits, her pure physical endurance. Maybe Ellen had heard Abby talk about me, my intellect and achievements, but I doubted it. Consumed by my boy, I didn’t show ambition and aptitude anymore. Those were no longer useful.
I asked Ellen about herself, a way of showing Abby respect, and her answers were brief, polite. She did not open. She didn’t seem a match for Abby, whose warmth defined our first breezy moments a year earlier at the gym. I’d come for prenatal water aerobics, and entering the locker room I saw the woman’s bare back, her shirt and bra already off. A copy of The Nation, unusual in Missoula, showed over the top of her tote bag and beckoned, but I chose a separate bench and turned my back, too, carving the false privacy. Several inches taller than me, the woman seemed to rule her stomach, its taut skin stretched to pale, except for the linea nigra that ran a darkened seam down the middle of her bare belly. I looked her body over, seeking the future. I remembered a day at the start of high school; in the claustrophobic proximity of the dorm bathroom, I saw breasts of older girls for the first time, unlike the breasts of my mother or grandmother—the rude freshness of the flesh, that warning. That was when I realized, nauseated and faintly aroused, that womanhood would come for me.
The Nation reader and I struggled with our bathing suits, clumsy fingers and swollen feet. We were grunting, effort overriding our discretions. How wretched we were, how many tasks had become humiliating. We looked up, and a smile burst across her face. We each asked, When are you due, before we said our names, then tumbled into that gentle, competitive monomania of pregnancy, collecting the specifics of OBs, digestion and sleep, supplement brands and yoga poses. We were preoccupied with comfort. She was four weeks away from delivery, and I still had months to go, endless and lagging. Nice to meet you, we said as we left the cocoon of the locker room for the pool, as we lowered into the weightless blessing of water.
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