Summer 1985
I FOLD THE SHEET DOWN across her hips, tucking it between her buttocks and the table. Her stomach is like a bowl of dough, rising gently as she breathes. Her breasts lie flat on either side of her chest. Her skin is dappled by sunlight falling through the trees outside the long, open windows. I pour almond-scented oil into my palm. I glance at her face. Her eyes are closed, her head is tilted slightly away from me. Her eyebrows are drawn together; the ridge between them looks like a frown. Her skin is pale for a white woman, as though she never goes out in the sun. She has dark circles beneath her eyes. I’m not sure if they have always been there. Her frizzy hair has silver threads now, but it’s the way it springs off her head that I’m fascinated by. Why did I never notice these things when I was young? I rub my hands together, warming the oil. I bring them slowly to her stomach, resting them side by side on her soft, pinkish-white skin, then press in deeper. Other people have told me how powerful it must be to give massages to the woman whose body you came from. Well, I wasn’t born from this body. But it’s true she is my mother.
With the flat of my palms I begin a circular rocking that grows to a wider stirring motion, hand over hand. There are four distinct layers of muscle in the belly; I was tested on them in massage school when I graduated three years ago. In my mother, I can feel each sheaf of muscle as it holds itself hard against me. Most days I feel no change, but today something is different. Her stomach is like a balloon deflating, letting my hands sink further down.
Behind me in the kitchen, the refrigerator begins a low hum. I can hear the clock too, but I don’t need it to know I’ve been working for about an hour. The shapes of sunlight through the leaves flicker on the woven cotton rug, on the windowsill. I look up. My hands continue their easy dance. Outside, the bay leaves, with the June sun shining through them, are bright green, translucent, imbued with settled calm. A wind picks up; they flutter, softly rustling. The sky beyond, what little I can see, is a deep blue. Blue, green, white walls, the burgundy of the sheet beneath which my mother lies. The weight of my hands, following her body’s lead.
Two months ago, my mother asked me to give her these weekly massages, thinking they might ease her chronic headaches and the churning in her stomach that is new and she says is getting worse. She said she felt comfortable with me. She said she was reluctant to receive a massage for the first time from someone she had never met. I was gratified. I wanted a chance to move beyond my brief visits home, our monthly lunches out sitting on opposite sides of a table. I was tired of all our talking. And I wanted to be able to give her something without seeming to offer it. We agreed on a fee and a time. Both of us were relieved, I think, to establish the boundaries of a professional relationship.
The first thing I discovered was that her skin was touch-starved. At the end of her third massage, she told me that she wished she could lie beneath my hands for days at a time. That was a big admission for my mother, to want that kind of extravagance for herself. Even with Lloyd, her new “beau” as she calls him, she seems physically wary. She doesn’t touch him in my presence, not for comfort or out of affection, much less desire. When she confided to me her craving for—as she sees it—the luxury of received touch, it was the first time I had any clue my massage was helping her.
But she couldn’t tolerate the weight of my hands pressing beyond the surface of her skin, even on her back where most people ask for the deepest work. I like to begin there with long, firm strokes, then go in deeper, gathering the muscles between my hands, then press my thumbs along them. If there has still been no release, I will use the bony point of my elbow, guiding it carefully with my other hand to avoid the fragile vertebrae. My mother would hold her breath even before the petrissage, hunching her shoulders as though she were protecting herself from harm.
It isn’t often a client resists so forcefully, or rather the client’s body; my mother wasn’t aware she was pulling away from me until I told her. Most of my clients are relieved when I focus on their areas of discomfort, marveling that I can zero in on their pain right away. Those places are easy to find even without asking. It’s like running your fingers over a topographical map: you can’t miss the mountains. My clients might say, “That’s sore there, can you tell?” while I’m working on a muscle that’s as intractable as an iron rod. My mother’s entire body was like a suit of armor, not highly muscled but hard and unmoving nevertheless. Those first weeks, I was careful to ask her how she liked the pressure I was using as I varied my depth, trying to find a way in. I worried there was something I was doing that hurt her. I kept asking her to breathe, then reminding her that breath is not forced, it is allowed. She said the massages felt wonderful, while I became frustrated by the stillness with which she held her body. I could feel no change, no softening, under my hands. I thought I was wasting my time, and I wished she had asked some highly recommended stranger from Marin County to work on her instead of having me drive all the way up from the city.
But now I know her body, its subtle messages and miniscule movements. I can feel its limits, and I don’t try to push past them. Watching her face and listening to her breath, I can alter the depth of my touch without asking. Whatever makes her shoulders sore, her head ache, I know now I am the means of relief, not the cause. Maybe it was merely coming back, staying with her because she wanted it, that allowed me to shift my expectations. And she, for her part, has less need to keep me out. This, too, happens at the level of the body. In our speaking life, we have never been in such accord.
As I knead my mother’s stomach, smooth it, and then work gently in under her ribs where I encounter tightness like a clenched fist in everyone I massage, I can almost feel the insistent pressure of my fingers just below my own heart. Suddenly, my body longs to be touched. I breathe in, filling my lungs with air. A moment later, my mother takes a deep, slow breath. It raises her ribcage, making more room for me underneath. I hold my fingers still beneath the bone—I can usually tell when she has had enough—and I look at her face. For the first time I see a liquid glimmer between her closed eyelids. In the whole of my life with her, almost twenty-two years, I have never seen my mother cry. She clamps her face down against her tears, as if she believes her determination can make her feelings disappear. I’ve wondered for a long time if she might be depressed. She doesn’t tell me how she’s feeling. That’s one of the places we still don’t go. I know she can get anxious, that small setbacks can seem like catastrophes. But something else is going on now, something more. I wonder if she knows what has brought up her tears. And if she knows, will she ever tell me? Or is it enough to be able to acknowledge it to herself?
I back off, retreating to her belly, circling with the flat of my hands. She breathes in again, then lets her breath float out. I am not imagining this; her lashes are wet. A rare tenderness for her washes through me. I don’t need to know her reason. I can feel tears prick my eyes too. I look away, out the window, at the leafy shade of the laurel bay covering us, sheltering us. Perhaps I should be concerned about her, but instead I feel that something good has just occurred.
I finish with long strokes across her thighs up over her hips to the center of her abdomen, then I reach both hands around her waist until they meet beneath her spine. This is hard for me to do from the side of the table, off balance. I have to rely solely on the strength of my arms and hands. But I do it occasionally, waiting, waiting, then sliding my hands up and around, because my mother has told me it feels like being held, and because I have learned how important it is to connect the back and front, binding the body together.
Sometimes with my clients, I work up along the sternum to the muscles of the chest above the breasts. I look for as many ways to touch whole lengths of the body, to bring sensation from one area to another. Women usually come to be massaged because of an ache in their back or difficulty turning their head, some one reason that they want me to make disappear. They have no idea until the acute pain is relieved that they hurt somewhere else or that a part of their body feels nothing at all. Sometimes they become aware that their physical body is holding emotional pain. The trauma may have been stored for years. I wasn’t trained to be a therapist or to make diagnoses, but I do know how to listen, to remain present with my clients as the new area is discovered and the change slowly takes place. I try to connect for them the body’s map, to show them through touch that they are not made up of separate pieces.
Today, however, I sense my mother’s continued resistance in the area around her chest: heart and breasts and muscles for holding. So I slide one hand to her hip and place the other flat on the opposite shoulder, pushing my hands apart for a gentle stretch. I learned that this balances a person’s energy, but I like it simply to break the symmetry of the massage, to suggest a different kind. Then I do the same on the other side. A trickle of sweat tickles beneath my armpit. Last, I rest my hands firmly on her abdomen, rocking slightly, then gently lift them off.
Drawing the sheet up over her chest, covering her crescent breasts, the vulnerable place between them, I am reminded of last night, bending over Madeleine’s naked body. I ran my fingers along the valley between her breasts before taking each nipple, one by one, into my mouth. For a moment, I am disoriented, lost between the present and the past. I blink, pouring oil into my hand. Then I take hold of my mother’s wrist beneath the sheet and ease her arm out and spread the oil up one side and back down the other. I enjoy my memories of sex, almost as much as I enjoy having it. Madeleine is a new lover, a friend of an ex. She’s moving to New York at the end of the summer to start graduate school, which gives our relationship a little extra kick, a bittersweet edge because there’s no future together to look forward to or wrangle about. It doesn’t matter whether I like her. Last night, when I felt Madeleine’s nipple thicken under my tongue, I slid my palm down her body again, across her round hips, then pressed harder, kneading the skin of her buttocks.
I’ve lost my focus. Yet my hands go on, sure of their terrain. Does my mother sense some change in me, that I have left her momentarily? I look at her face as I knead the fleshy underside of her arm. The frown between her eyebrows is gone. Do my memories pull me inside them, altering the character of my touch? Can she sense my remembered desire? She is completely still. I don’t know what that means.
Sex comes up sometimes between my clients and me. I notice the change in their breathing, in their bodies, or occasionally in mine. A couple of women have wanted to act on their arousal, and so we’ve talked about it as I continued working on them, careful not to change the quality or the pace of my strokes. I’ve told them the way they feel is a natural response to being touched, and as we’ve talked my hands on their bodies have been firm and unambiguous. More often with clients, nothing needs to be said. Somehow, they discover on their own that the pleasure of being touched is its own reward.
But this is different: it is a question of attention. I could give a full-body massage blindfolded, but could I give one without full consciousness, my mind on something other than the woman lying before me on the table? I have had massages from bodyworkers who seemed impatient, in a hurry to finish and move on to the next client in a string of clients booked one after the other. I have had massages from people whose main interest was to talk about themselves. One woman repeated the same motion on the arch of my foot for far longer than was necessary, apparently immobilized by her thoughts. But I didn’t know what she was thinking; her sadness or glee or lust or rage wasn’t communicated to me through her hands. Only that she was not with me. I do feel caring. When I’m receiving bodywork from my friend with whom I trade, I feel more focused on. She works in response to my body’s particular needs. There is a gentleness that lets me know I am loved. I wonder if my mother can feel that from me.
Since I began working on her, other bodyworkers have told me they would be uncomfortable massaging their parents. They are afraid of feeling aroused or of their parent being turned on. Friends have asked me, Don’t you forget sometimes that the body you are touching is your mother’s and not Madeleine’s?—or Lynn’s or Annabeth’s or whoever I’m seeing at the time. Laura asks me this. Ever since she came home from Kenyon last month, newly graduated and set free, she has been very curious about my massage practice. Last week she asked how I, of all people, can possibly touch another person without it becoming sexual. I was pissed off by her almost hostile tone. But I rose to the challenge. Find out for yourself, I said, knowing I couldn’t make her understand with words that there are many kinds of touch. Each person’s body is a different size, color, shape, proportion. I never get confused about who is under my hands.
Last weekend I gave Laura her first massage. I expected her to be shy about her body, a little afraid to be touched, like my mother. She surprised me. She draped herself on the table as though she’d been receiving bodywork for years. Then she surprised me again. As I worked the knots in her rhomboids and across the fibers of her chunky calves, I felt her body sink into that place of near-mindless relaxation. I was happy to be giving Laura this gift I knew she received as one. I was glad she would now know exactly what I did for work and that I did it well. Then I became aware of her longing. For me. She was attracted to me. I wouldn’t have picked up on it during one of our walks in the city, but her body made it obvious. And it wasn’t the massage itself that was turning her on; I can tell the difference. She wanted me to touch her as a lover.
I freaked out. I faltered for a moment, forgetting which direction I was moving in. Then I pulled back into myself. I ignored the tension building in the room. I worked steadily, professionally. I hoped she would stay quiet and take her feelings away with her. But I couldn’t help my body’s response: her desire aroused me. It wasn’t until after I was finished, washing my hands in the bathroom, that I realized I hadn’t convinced Laura of anything.
My mother snores loudly. Startled, I flinch. I have been in another place completely. Unusual for me. She opens her eyes and gazes groggily up at me. I am working on her other arm now, my weight shifting from foot to foot, my hips swinging slightly. At least my body goes on. I haven’t stayed in one area repeating the same stroke.
“I fell asleep,” my mother says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s your massage.”
“I missed it. Did you do my other arm already?”
I nod. “You didn’t miss it. The body remembers.”
She closes her eyes. I can’t tell whether she believes me. My body remembers everything: how it felt to yearn for Laura in tenth grade, even before I understood that my desire would change my life. How it felt to climb out of her parents’ hot tub after realizing Laura couldn’t love me back the same way. Those memories seem very distant to me now. My adolescent attraction to Laura was plowed under a long time ago. I don’t want to dredge up those old feelings; they belong to another time and a younger, isolated me. I am no longer that girl. I am the woman whose body remembers how it felt to find myself at last in Alison’s bed, and then Gina’s, and then Amber’s, to discover that the world was much larger than high school and there were other women I could be close to besides Laura.
I rest my mother’s elbow on the table and bring her palm up to face me. With my thumbs, I work in circles. I concentrate on the broad pad of the-nar muscles below her thumb, then move up the lumbricals in the channel between each finger bone. I feel an ache in my own palms and wrists. I am clenching. One by one I shake out each hand, the way my mother used to shake down the thermometer. I lower her palm and, starting with her pinkie, wrap each finger inside my fist and pull, gently, until the finger slips out. I move her hand up and down, small movements, then side to side. The wrist is made up of eight separate bones. In my well-worn anatomy text, they look like pebbles, the small, pitted kind I sometimes find on Ocean Beach glistening in the wake of a wave. The kind I hold in my pants pocket while I walk, my fingers ceaselessly moving over its surface. My hands are always restless.
Another thing about Laura: she’s straight. I’ve been flirted with by straight women, and I end up feeling like an experiment, a dare they’ve set themselves, a story they can take back to their boyfriends. I can’t open myself to her again only to have her back out. And if we did happen to get involved, what then? There’s a reason I don’t sleep with straight women, the ones who want to go through with it. I have no interest in bringing Laura out. And maybe she’d decide she wanted to be with men after all. I’m not looking to be her coach, her advisor. She should have already gotten their help at college.
Why is it so hard for me to stay focused? When I have finished with my mother’s arm, I try to shake it side to side, holding her wrist as though ringing a bell. My mother has retrieved some part of herself, some control or necessary attempt at it; her arm hangs awkwardly, tightly hinged. For a moment I am impatient. Relax, I want to command her. Then I smile to myself, remembering saying exactly that when I was first certified, until an early client told me, “You can’t force it, you know.” And then it struck me as funny: as though the body’s softening can be demanded by someone else. The only answer is to bring the client’s awareness to the fact that they are holding themselves back, tightening up.
Gently I take my mother’s elbow with my free hand and rotate it, moving her arm, her shoulder so that she can feel the freer motion. Again, I wonder if she has sensed my annoyance, if my touch changed. I breathe. I close my eyes for a moment, intent on my own movement, the slide of my muscles in my arms, my back. I keep my legs slightly bent. She will never know how much the practice of massage has forced me to grow up. As I knead the deltoids in her shoulder, I watch her face in repose. It is a different face from when we began, brighter, less tired, almost smiling. I lean into my strokes, gathering my strength. We both have worked hard to be here today.
The light outside has changed. It’s weaker, more orange, almost red. It slants through the bay laurel and eucalyptus trees out back in focused beams rather than in a shower of generous daylight. The shadows in the room have crept along the floor; now silhouettes of leaves tremble against my mother’s armchair and the white wall. Already I recognize darkness in the light. I can see how the planet is a ball of night but for the sun’s bounce of brightness. Shadows are usually perceived as the spaces not filled by the light, but it is the sun’s rays that seem to me to caulk up the flood of darkness. This is the time, in the late afternoon, I see how day is merely a shadow of light.
Still holding her arm aloft, I slide my hand down to my mother’s shoulder, up her neck to the base of her skull, then back again. My fingers drag along the trapezius muscle, a chronically knotted clump beneath the skin. She makes a small noise, one I know is of pleasure, release. I repeat the action, slower this time, a little deeper, wanting to extend her moments of enjoyment that happen below the level of her skin. Then I place her arm back on the table at her side, rest my hand on top of her hand. Hers is pale and a little chapped despite the oil, the knuckles bony. My hand over hers looks small and dark and entirely at home. For a moment I feel humbled by her presence lying trustingly before me.
This is why I love massage: these minutes, sometimes hours of stopped time, the movement of sunlight in windows, the arrival of breath, the body’s slow, sure knowledge of its work. Here there is always the possibility of one’s own self, allowed into being. I could dance this way forever.
I lift the edge of the sheet and cover her arm and shoulder. I move to the end of the table, by her head. I take a long breath, let it out, watch the sheet over her chest rise and fall. My mother’s eyelids flutter but remain shut. She knows where I am going. She is waiting for the long pull and stretch of her neck, the steady pressure of my fingers beneath the ridge of her skull. I lift my hands and begin.