She Matters (22 page)

When Mary arrived at the gallery I was on the verge of tears—about her, I thought—and proud. I gripped her, everything between us intensified. We sat down on the gallery bench. She held my hand. I could offer Mary no more than gape and wordlessness. I knew her, the many shapes and directions of her, could feel all she had brought to bear in the making of such work. How startling to feel—to actually know—the scope of her loss, its roots and defining duration. I remembered the silhouettes of the mammoth Southern plants; the haunted empty rooms; the ongoing, anonymous grief she'd captured in her series of roadside crosses stretched over Montana, markers for the victims of car accidents. I fathomed, I realized, the complete narrative of her work. Disaster, desertion; rescue, comfort. I'd listened to the conversation of an artist with herself. She was not silent. She roared, mourned. I told her this, or something like it, garbled by emotion, and she looked at me. “Susanna,” she said, in tears, “you've done the same.” The two of us shared friendship, motherhood, wifehood, womanhood, and even more—an unsayable volcanic core. We were orphans, and all this time we'd been trying to figure out how to make that beautiful.

M
y acupuncturist kept talking about Flora, this amazing massage therapist, gifted. Sylvia sorted her tiny needles and chatted, her middle fingers pressing along meridians until she found a point, pierced me. Flora painted, Sylvia said; she had an instinct for gardens; she wrote poetry. “You'd love her, and she'll adore you.” Sylvia, who'd been proctoring my physical well-being for some time, urged me to book a massage.

Flora resembled my father's mother. Looking at her petite, stocky body in the first meeting, I kept losing my place, drawn back to the lost comforts of that grandmother, dead in my childhood. Flora could have been fifty, she could have been sixty. There was something perpetual and elemental about her. In a blue flowing top over white pants, she was fit, easy in herself, a seaside-goer. Although she talked in a honeyed accent, her Tennessee roots or South Carolina, I felt certain we shared some genetic link, which made me happy, and I asked about her people. She told a lot. She made eye contact and leaned forward with confidential joy. I have always been a sucker for women like that.

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 submission.

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.