On the autumn equinox, I take modern dance class with the teenage gals, shower, drive to pick up some son or other. My two younger sons are still the age to be picked up, carried from here to there — the football game, a JROTC event, their dad’s house, my house.
I have a sort of triangle-shaped sundress with a bubble hem comes mid-thigh. I sit in my car and cup the inside of my leg — the fullness over the gracillis, which I can flex for a little more firm roundness. And I think: Well, now, this is soft.
I have never in my life been soft. Not this kind of soft.
In my 20s, the parts that were muscular were lean and wiry; the parts that weren’t muscular were vaguely squishy, with bones under them. Now over top of the muscles everything is firm-balloon-like to the touch.
Suppose it’s middle age, or could be I’m lifting heavier than I have before — though in the grand scheme of things I’m a noodle, to be honest, a feeble noodle except my legs are pretty stout.
I like being soft, though. I keep putting a hand on my stomach or the inside of my thigh. My shoulder, sometimes. That fullness — I keep using that word, but that’s it, a word like outward pressure, all those Ls, a word that means having something worthwhile inside, like a peach is full, or a plum, or a wineskin (I imagine), or a baby’s cheek.
The sun glints on the somewhat smeary windshield. Oak leaves look dusty. They’re out of juice, but they won’t turn til later in the year. Dogwood leaves, though, have dipped their tips in russet and birds eat their scarlet berries.
I wait, wait at the turn up Ashland Terrace. A truck pauses to let me go, but it’s an annoying left on a curve up a hill and I can’t see what’s speeding up the road from the other side.
Cars pile up behind the truck. He keeps a lookout to see what’s coming and when the way is clear he waves me on: Come on, go.
Again I feel like a middle-aged, near-elderly lady. It’s understandable if I get out my glasses to read labels or take extra time peering over the steering wheel at an intersection or otherwise act a little muzzy in public. Sales girls call me sweetie. Homeless folk call me Miz Lady.
Strange, is it, that I don’t mind this? It’s like a small cloud of invisibility. It’s been well-documented, the invisibility of middle age, and here it is.
I’m beset by lovers, though.
It’s somewhat odd. No one really cares to look at me. (That invisible cloak helps.) Rather the conduit seems to be talk, or touch. And by talk, I mean, people are lonely, I don’t know that I’m so very kind, but I try to be kind. I do understand the stakes.
And by touch, well, it’s like being that peach some youth wants to caress, then crush. I feel the same way, drawn to my own flesh — pinching my thigh under my green dress with the bubble hem — because this is so novel, this sort of magnetized gravid softness.
Up hill and down hill. 1940s houses, still clapboard mostly, some with vinyl siding, line the roads. Modernist apartments, shoddy now but whitewashed, catch the sun in tall plate-glass windows. For a moment, as always when I drive past, I want to live there behind those big windows facing west.
Lovers —
I make chitchat, keep my distance, try not to create closeness that will hurt anyone’s feelings. Some people are okay with those chasms, the steep intimacy of strangers that ends as suddenly as it starts. Some, no, give them an inch and in return they want to give you their whole lives. And I just can’t.
Touch, that’s tricky until it’s simple. I have learned, now, after two quarters of a century, that what I carry with me is enough. Turning up is my gift. What the lover brings, then, skill, sarcasm, tears, smooth or shaky touch — that’s him. The realization hit me quick, like stepping through a door. It came almost simultaneously with that gray cloak of invisibility. I no longer need to be pretty.
At the bakery, I look at the other vague, fuzzy-haired ladies. Are they, too, beset by lovers? And is this why? At maybe 50 or 60, you tumble back into a child’s simple sense of presence, but with an adult’s awareness?
A mystery, isn’t it?
Mostly I keep to myself. Or share a little smut, that’s fun, sending stories back and forth. I aim for surreal tender — bizarre, but not mean-spirited. I’m reminded of how Palahniuk called his books romances, can you believe that? Maybe I’ll make a genre of it. Or give it as a handle to a character in a Shadowrun game. Surreal Tender, the Technomancer.
The sun sinks from the zenith, 3:30 to maybe 4 p.m. The day seems endless.
I’ve written lovers, and smut, and soft, but you’ll notice I haven’t written love. That, well, I think it’s the light lancing across the sky, a line like a golden thread, sun to horizon, my sternum to —
I don’t know where. A name forms in my mind, but I won’t type that now. And the lance of light was there before I met any person with any darling name.
I think longing — but I’ve written that so often. Will it make a difference if I write it again?
Young me, somewhere, pining, spinning the heart thread.
At twilight, my sons and I walk down the levy. The sun sets and the moon rises just past half full and in the shadowy water meadow four deer leap, now one leading, now one following, taking turns, catching up, standing in solace awhile before bounding forward again.