She picks up the giant bowl and holds it against her stomach like bag of groceries and tells me to “give her that spoon,” which I do.
She turns away and begins to stir. The back of her is a monolith.
All I can hear are grunts. They are the ugliest sounds I have ever heard.
I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me
It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.
By the time I decided to try it my chest had already unclenched, not from crying, but because I removed myself from the interrogation that had brought it on and did tactile things. I washed dishes, opened a Newcastle, put a beach towel down on the patio.
When I took off my clothes and lay down on the terrycloth, I had emotionally estranged myself from whatever it was that had brought about the tangle of emotions that tight-roped somewhere between sex and fear. I just wanted to make myself interact with the outside world, even if it was just fresh air and the sound of birds and lawnmowers.
The sun was hot on my skin but not too hot. Every time I lay out under the sky wearing really only nothing it makes me horny. There’s something about the sun falling on skin that’s normally hidden. Maybe the receptors there are more sensitive to the rays or something. I don’t know. That’s when the challenge to masturbate about my dad came back into my mind and I thought, let’s give science a chance here.
I started as I always do, licking my fingertips and moving them south and then in small up and down motions, circular, up and down, circular, circular, up and down, up and down, I cleared my mind and then thought about my dad.
I tried.
I tried and tried and tried.
And while images of him came and went, my clit wasn’t responding and my brain couldn’t keep an image of my dad long enough from me to even get an image to generate a proper scenario to hold on to.
After a long while the images started to come easier, but they were fleeting. My dad was younger. His skin tight and tan, his hair black. There was a lot more of it. His chest hairs were not gray. He had his clothes off. He was holding his dick. I was a little girl. I was naked. I was tan. My dad’s face. Again and again. He is naked. We are naked in the swimming pool. He is holding me against him. His dick is bobbing up against my bare buttocks. I am still not aroused. My dad lying next to me. We are sideways. We are naked. I am hairless. He is stroking the length of me. My dad’s face. My dad holding his dick. My dad standing in front of me, I am sitting on a toilet, we are naked. He tells me to watch him. My dad lying on his side naked. I am lying on my back naked. He is holding himself. He is looking all over me. He tells me that’s a good girl. He is masturbating. I am getting aroused now. He is masturbating and he is telling me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and I am just lying there and then I am back on the toilet again and he is standing in front of me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and he is jerking off in front of me and I am coming and I came.
I wonder about it all, why the father that came into my head was so young, the places and positions so specific. Then I think about how much I like watching men masturbate. Then I think, no. I think, I am creating drama in order to justify my perversions.
My dad never touched me when I was young.
He never did bad things like this.
These were things in a perverted woman’s imaginative mind.
I love my dad. He loves me. It’s made up. It’s not any kind of fucked up memories dredged up from some forgotten, deeply buried incidents.
I am pretty positive. I mean, there were other things, but never with my dad. I am pretty positive about that.
I think it is weird that I did this but I think maybe part of me “made him” his younger self because if I pictured him how he is now, his old self, gray, skin sagged, hunched, that would just be horrible and gross and even weirder. I think masturbating to his younger self made it almost like it was someone else, someone I knew decades ago, which, is true.
He never touched me. I love my dad.
There was no mother in that house. There were a lot of boys and men and there was me. That is all. That is how it was
My dad has a tool shed. Its walls are vertical aluminum waves and in the summer, when you are hiding inside of it, the heat stifles. My knees eat the dirt and I hold my breath when I hear them coming. My brothers are running outside. They are looking for me. This is real fear. No joke. No playing around. I smashed the wall of the fort they were making. The wall it took them two days to get higher than their heads. It was made of dumb dried clay-mud bricks they had made with a wooden mold my dad had put together for them in his workshop, which was adjacent to the tool shed I was hiding in. I used a sledgehammer. Not a heavy one. I felt so powerful. I smashed the fuck out of that wall and I was crying while I crushed it. In that moment I wanted to kill them. I hated my brothers. I didn’t care that they would kill me for this. I did not care. In that moment, all I wanted to do was destroy. And I did. Every blow shook my ribcage, rattled my skull. My halter top inched down and down until my baby nipples showed, tiny and pink. Snot fell onto them. Tears fell onto them. My hair stuck to my wet eyes and my snotty nostrils. The air was filled with the dust from the breaking and I choked with it. When everything was smashed I fell to my knees and I remembered this lady from a movie I saw where she found the hands of her murdered children buried in a cornfield. I thought about how crazy that lady looked with all of her out of control snot and tears and screaming. I saw myself outside of myself for a minute and that sort of woke me up and I “snapped out of it” and saw what I had done. Instinct told me I had better get the fuck out of there and I did. I left the sledgehammer. I pulled up my halter top. I hid in the tool shed. Their fury paralyzed me. They were banshees. I felt their tornado of anger whirling around the house while they searched for me. It shook the walls of the shed. I writhed myself small and squeezed as tight as I could into a place under a shelf and between the scalloped wall and a wood cabinet. I will not talk about the cramping, or the thirst, or the blood from sharp edges of BB gun holes in the aluminum or the brutality of the retaliation when they finally found me.
That day taught me there is a safety in all of those things. I am decades older and I look for that safety. I say, “sit on my chest big boy,” and, “deep enough to draw blood, please,” and, “as tight as you want, for as long as you want, double knots.” There are tears and snot and nipples and sticking hair like before. There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. I hand them the sledgehammer. I am their fort wall.
I still hide in the tool shed. It is so very, very useless.
An Unsteady Place
Thirty-three starfish, forty-two seashells, eighteen crabs, fourteen lobsters, ten waves, eight gulls, twelve fish, seven lighthouses, four fishermen, eleven pieces of coral, sixteen sailboats, nine seahorses, and a handful of signs indicating the direction you need to take should you want to go to the beach. In bas-relief on shower tiles, on the edges of towel racks, mounted to drawer pulls, painted on wallpaper, dotted on baseboard tile squares, crowded into baskets on mantels, on wooden steps, in bathrooms, mounted and framed and hung on walls, painted on dishes, decaled on drinkware, the bottoms of bowls, sculpted into the handles of serving utensils, hanging from the ceiling, stitched onto towels, on lamp bases, printed on bed sheets, comforters, pillow cases. A fish skeleton key rack. The beachside vacation rental drove the point home like a mother reminding you of every single thing you needed to be afraid of.