One of my grandsons, a medical practitioner, told me that the best answer to wakeful nights was to sleep naked. There is much to be said for it. The body, unfettered by the binding of clothes, lies between the sheets as if they were a skin. It’s the fifth sensation, that of touch, which in the absence of another carries its own sensual message.
It was years before I reflected on the body, as such. It’s not all about beauty, something I understand as I get older. I cannot entirely buy into the idea of the body as temple; if so, there are a few crumbling ruins to consider. Angkor Wat and the ruined palaces of the Greeks come to mind. Yet these are the places where we go sightseeing. Just to look at a fold of skin on a beloved person can still fill me with awe and a certain delight.
The first unclothed body I saw was that of my father. This was one of the primal scenes of my early life. I can describe it no other way. It happened when my parents and I were living in the cottage in the Far North. A curtained window linked the kitchen and the bathing area, in the lean-to. This is from my story, ‘All the Way to Summer’, in which the narrator thinks of Oliver Reed in the movie version of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: ‘I raised the curtain and he was rubbing himself dry in the dark room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflections of the flames from the copper fire … that same pale English flesh, the colour of potato flesh. He was long and spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.’
Bodies were more private when I was a child than they are now. I didn’t see my mother’s body until she was an old woman, but then I think she covered up a lot of things that were hard for her to acknowledge. Her hair was as dark as a blackbird’s wing when she was young, her eyes a gleaming brown that my father said were black when he first knew her, her skin never tanned even though she often worked outdoors. She was a tiny woman who worked like a dervish, as hard as any man, and in the end her body became a damaged shell full of pain, the spine a bent ‘c’ shape. I wished that I had seen it when it was young.
I don’t recall whether I was curious about my own body in childhood. I know I was hungry all the time, rather plump, with straight brown hair that suddenly curled in adolescence. I know I told outrageous stories about bodily functions to other, usually older, kids, gleaned from my imperfect reading of adult books. In my fevered imagination, none of it applied to me. I knew my body was different from the one I had seen through the window, that my father’s had an unexpected attachment. But the body was a secret taboo subject, and children had to be covered up. Girls were taught to keep their dresses over their knees, to reveal nothing. A part of me understands that. To love children well, the gaze of adults must remain chaste. This means not just one’s own children, but everyone’s. There are many who cannot be trusted. If the sight of impoverished children in the back streets of Asia pained me, so too did the sight of men, wearing gold chains at the throat of their open-necked floral shirts, eyeing them. It’s a pain that doesn’t leave me.
Yet it was in Asia that I discovered how bodies fascinate children. In the streets of Saigon, children would come up to me, pinch my flesh and run away laughing. They would come back and do this again. How old? they would ask. They would want to press their arms against mine to compare the colours, to trace the lines on my hands.
I was sixteen, turning seventeen, before I became truly aware of my own body and its power. I was necking with an older boy and he ran his hands over me. ‘You have a beautiful body,’ he said. ‘Do you understand that?’
Later that year, I was invited to be a beauty queen. It was suggested that I parade in a bathing suit at the local summer carnival in Rotorua. How it all unravelled forms the basis of a story called ‘At the Lake So Blue’.
I had been hanging out with a summer crowd and we girls were oiling one another’s skins to improve our tans, as we lay in the grass beside a lake. The young men with us were part of a water-skiing group. In a desultory kind of way, they eyed us up, contemplating who would be a good candidate to represent the group as beauty queen of the year. The other two girls had already had a turn, so they looked to me. I had felt like the plainest girl there, but all of a sudden, they were telling me what a great figure I had, and asking me my measurements. And I found myself looking at what I had to offer and knowing it was good.
In the end, I turned them down, in the face of disapproval from family and the woman I worked for. It wouldn’t do to show off my body like this. It cost me the friendship of the group but I don’t recall any regrets. I found myself agreeing with my elders. When I revealed myself, the audience would be of my choosing. But I had learned some things about myself.
The power of the body.
Soon my body would be busy with other things besides being admired.
It hasn’t been a particularly clever body. It was only a moderately good dancer, it wasn’t the body of a gymnast, it learned to stand on its hands once, and only once, it missed balls when they were thrown. But it has served me well enough.
I remember these things sometimes when I’m stretched out on that table, experiencing the body’s burn of skin on skin. The way one looks after it, comforts it as it ages, in moments of bliss gives oneself over to it.
Outside I hear voices of people
walking past in the street,
which is reassuring when the rough
stuff begins, although it turns
out bearable enough. When it is done,
I accept the cup of chrysanthemum
tea, the assurances that my liver
is sound, that I am indeed
a healthy person, if a little tender.
I eye the reservations book.