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Tigers Above, Tigers Below (Serial #5)"Jeremy!" she cries, feigning enthusiasm upon seeing him after her long weekend in San Francisco, "I've missed you!" Nowadays she only smiles slightly to herself whenever she says his name—they had once considered naming their youngest son Jeremy, Junior, until a friend told her that little kids named Jeremy got called "Germy" by other kids. Nobeko insisted that they name their son Stephen, after her brother. She has struggled desperately not to think of her own husband as "Germy" ever since, particularly when he acts just like one of their three children in need of her caretaking, or when he simply forgets that she exists except around midnight when he wants a quick fuck, and then he has to struggle to even remember that she has some other name besides "Mom," or "hey."
The second time the coins appear, Nobeko is in the bubble bath, dreaming of strange men and what they will do to her, touching the soft skin of her inner thigh, the thick curly black hairs floating just beneath her hand, and she feels a little light-headed when she notices two silver dollars resting on the arch of her foot that is posed next to the faucet. It occurs to her that these coins aren't even made anymore and that she hasn't seen a silver dollar since her father gave her one as a little girl. Afraid to move her foot in case they might disappear, she contemplates when an adult last gave her any kind of surprise gift, and can't remember. Maybe it was the surprise she had given herself, when she woke up one day ten years into her marriage to realize she couldn't stand her husband, that she had forgotten who it was she had meant to be when she grew up, and that she could have better sex by herself on her navy blue bathroom carpeting than with the warm-bodied man who waited in their king-size bed.
She leans forward to pluck the coins from her foot before she finally drains the water. Upon examination they appear to be ordinary silver dollars, minted in Denver in 1934. She tucks them away in a bottom drawer under one of her three diaphragms before toweling off and examining her so-called perfect body in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door:
Inventory: I'll be forty next month and people keep saying I look thirty, as though it should matter. I think about sex every ten seconds during the day but never about sex with Jeremy. I can't feel anything. Why can't I feel anything? I weigh exactly 116 pounds and have been 5'7" since I was fourteen years old and much chubbier. My body is as hard as a rock and every woman at the health club says "You're so lucky—you can eat anything!" and they are clueless. I only have to be obsessive; I only have to make myself crazy with controlling my days and losing my nights.
Stop. Inventory: Black hair trimmed every eight weeks to
perfect shoulder length; a dresser full of black tights and
bright sports bras, fifteen of each, for comfortably leaning over clients while I massage the stress out of their bodies; three children safely in bed, three children who will be grown any
minute now and leave me alone with a man I don't want to touch.
Stop. Touch your nipples, pinch them. Count: there are three safe
spaces in my life—the bathroom with a locked door, every
mother's safety net; the guest room closet behind the old skis
and skates where all the ideas still live; and the back hill at Silo
Park where I can sit on a blanket in the sun and safely cry. Nobeko lifts one of the four red scarves that are draped artfully across the corner of the mirror and ties one around her eyes, expertly knotting it behind her head. Lying on the bathroom rug with her feet up on the wall, she begins to travel into her shadow life, a world full of masks and laughter and tall men and women who tell her what to do and strip away everything and take away her control and make her try new things. There is feeling, there is hope, there is passion, there is the woman who parades as Nobeko the good mother and wife during the day but becomes "Isis" in the hours before dawn. Isis doesn't worry about sex every ten seconds because all she can do is feel strange hands
reaching down inside her, turning her inside out, rearranging her skin as though it were a simple thing to notice that she was wearing it with the wrong-side out, like a child who has dressed backwards. Then there is nothing left but to feel every sensation in the universe flow down from her nipples to her pussy, to touch her clit at exactly the right moment, and let the orgasms flow.
 Returning the scarf to the mirror with the others that she once asked Jeremy to tie her up with, Nobeko remembers his laughter, her embarrassment at her desires, and she checks to see if the silver dollars are still in the bottom drawer. Perhaps they are meant to be a kind of pre-payment for performing a nice blow job on the man in the bedroom who will nag her if she doesn't. There are so many tasks in a woman's ordinary day; this one often reminds her of the tiresome repetitiveness of doing the laundry, except that it doesn't take nearly as long. |
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