by Kristen Mae
I tried again and again until my arms were limp noodles and my knees and the tips of my toes were raw from chafing them against the board. Once, I balanced on the board for a fraction of a second, and Mike screamed, “That’s it! You’re doing it!” as I fell off. He kept insisting that I’d done it, but I wouldn’t let it count.
“I never got my balance,” I kept saying. “I didn’t really have it.”
We’d been in the water for at least thirty minutes. I looked toward the shore and saw that Oren and Claire were watching. I was beginning to think I might have to accept that quarter second of almost-standing as my achievement for the day, but I decided to give my battered arms one last try.
I paddled out with Mike and, because he knew I was running out of energy, he warned me to hold out for the perfect wave. “It’s worth it to wait,” he said. “If you take every decent-looking wave you see, you miss the really good ones.” I had a paranoid feeling that he wasn’t talking about waves at all.
After passing up eight or nine swells, I saw a thick wall of water coming at us—we’d be right at its center. I turned to see what Mike thought, and he yelled, “That one!”
I paddled my poor burning arms as hard as I could. The wave surged beneath me and I set my hands, grunting as I did one final push-up and hopped my legs underneath me, staying as low as I could. I waited to flip over, but miraculously, I didn’t. I held my arms out as Mike and I had practiced so many times on the beach, keeping my knees bent and my body in a low squat. I wanted to see if Oren was watching but I was too afraid to shift my concentration from the water in front of me.
As the wave slowed, I felt the board lose momentum along with it, and I tipped and let myself sink into the water. Mike was behind me, which meant he’d fallen before I had. I’d stayed up longer than Mike! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so triumphant. Seaweed brushed against my ankles again and I kicked it away, too thrilled with myself to be grossed out. Oren and Claire splashed toward me waving and clapping.
“You surfed!” shouted Mike, coming up behind me with his board tucked under his arm.
“You did better than I did!” said Oren. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed the top of my head.
From behind Oren, Claire beamed with pride. “Oren, your wife is tenacious as fuck.”
“That she is,” said Oren, laughing. “That she is.”
Back at home, Oren and I unloaded the car and shook out what seemed like buckets of sand from the towels, blankets, and bags we’d brought with us.
I loaded towels into the washer, still high from my victory over the waves. Oren poked his head in the door of the laundry room. “I’m going to mow the lawn now since I’m already dirty.”
“Good idea. I’ll get a shower and then pull something together for dinner. Is it awful that I just want to throw in a frozen pizza?”
“No babe, that sounds great.” He gave me a light kiss on my hair and said, “You were incredible today. You should’ve seen your face when you got it.”
“I was making a face?” I paused in the middle of stuffing clothes into the washer. “How weird did I look?”
He laughed. “Not weird at all. It was the awesomest face I’ve ever seen. Like this.” He exaggerated a look of fierce concentration, scrunching his forehead and clamping his lips between his teeth.
I grimaced, and he chuckled and kissed my cheek before turning to go back outside.
Smiling to myself, I started the washer and headed to the master bathroom to shower. Clumps of sand were still wedged in between my skin and bathing suit, so I stepped into the shower to peel off my suit and let the sand rain down on the tile floor.
While I waited for the water to warm up and sweep the sand away, I surveyed myself in the mirror—a thing I did not often do. But between my success with surfing and Claire tossing out her wild, unconventional ideas, I felt uncommonly brave and curious.
I had an attractive physique, I knew, curvy yet toned from running. But not beautiful. Definitely not beautiful. Beauty attracted violence.
I turned sideways and scrutinized the bend of my waist and my hips, the strong arc of my runner’s hamstrings. And what else? Was my body more than a dependable machine, a sum of functioning parts quietly performing their jobs every day? I couldn’t see any part of myself that was worthy of admiration or…arousal? Is that what I was looking for? I saw only skin, a storage sack for my bones.
What did Claire see when she looked at herself in the mirror? I remembered how, under the beach umbrella, she’d stretched her legs out and dug her toes into the sand—a slinky movement with a vague sexual quality. Not that she was flaunting; I hadn’t gotten the feeling Claire was trying to impress anyone, least of all me. She was just…Claire, and she happened to not give a shit who saw her making love to the sand with her feet.
Maybe I could learn a few things from her.
I stepped into the now-warm shower and stood under the rushing water, trying to imagine what it would be like to be free in that way. Today after I’d had my successful run on the surfboard, Claire had taken the same board and ridden the waves with her waifish body and hipster bikini like she was a dancer and the water was her stage. What would it be like, to believe in my own beauty? That it existed in the first place, and also, that it couldn’t hurt me? What would it be like to not fear attention, to not worry that I might attract an unwanted gaze?
An image appeared in my mind, then, sudden and unbidden…Claire, with the tip of her finger in my mouth. I froze. What the fuck? In spite of the hot water of the shower, goosebumps sprang up on my arms. I tried to erase the thought, tried to shove it back to wherever it came from, but it was too late; the image was already branded onto my brain. A wave of feeling spiraled out from my gut and tore through the fibers of my muscles, set my groin pulsing with an intensity that bordered on pain.
I massaged shampoo into my hair, frantically scrubbing my scalp and trying to work up as much lather as possible. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed the image to go away. But instead of it fading, more came, one after another, forcing themselves on me like a slide show. Claire throwing her head back in ecstasy. Me pressing my lips against her earlobe. Claire sliding her hand up my inner thigh.
I hugged my arms around myself and tried to catch my breath. The sound of my heart pounding in my ears was far louder than the rushing water. The images kept coming—our skin, our mouths, our hands…I’d lost control of my thoughts. My stomach roiled violently and what the fuck with the pulsing, why? This tidal wave of sensation, this feeling of coming undone—it was like what I’d felt with Oren years ago, but much more intense and totally beyond my control. Why? For a woman…and a friend, no less. The pulsing between my legs was unbearable. I put a hand there with the intent to stop it and gasped. Whoa…no. I jerked my hand away and blushed as furiously as if I’d had an audience.
Jesus, had I fallen in love with my friend? No, that wasn’t it. While I did love Claire in a way, what I was feeling now was not love. It was desire.
NINE
The next morning my eyes sprang open before my alarm went off and I fought a too-fast breath, a chest compressed into a tight ball of anxiety, and some other viscous emotion I didn’t want to acknowledge. Heat everywhere, all over me, stuck like cobwebs to my shoulders and neck and chest. Between my legs. Heat. The same images of Claire still gushed through my brain. My hands trembled even worse than before.
So I ran, this time on the road, with shoes. I wouldn’t have risked running on the beach barefoot like I’d been doing, not for the distance I required now. My insides had turned into energy soup, so electric that the air I occupied seemed to crackle and spark.
My feet hit the gravel with a new kind of crunch, a quicker, more intense step. Every footfall sounded like need. That shocking slideshow of Claire I’d seen in my mind, that rolodex of desire, I could push that away with some success if I tried hard enough. But the thing that slid into the space left behind—this pulsing longing—I could only
run it off, and I ran it off hard until my lungs burned from exertion and I could no longer feel my legs spinning beneath me.
Monday morning I discovered push-ups. Not that I’d never done push-ups before, but I’d never used them as a way to channel unpleasant energy, and I needed that. I ran early and far, then came back and started in on the push-ups. At 8:30 Oren emerged from our bedroom rubbing his eyes and found me grunting and sweating all over the living room floor. He told me I had great form.
Oren came home early from the lab that afternoon with a can of beige paint for our bedroom. I hung my eyes on the color like it was a life preserver, chewed my lip over its flat, boring neutrality: Let me be boring and neutral again before I burn away. Please let this boring beige lure me back into my usual state of sexual indifference. I begged and begged, but I must have imagined Claire’s finger in my mouth a hundred times while I painted my bedroom walls.
Oren was very pleased with the color.
Claire had been sending me texts since our day at the beach, the ordinary sort of texts friends send each other, asking me how practicing was going or how my run went or if I’d ever tried putting chia seeds on salad and was it any good? The mundaneness of her texts only served to highlight the absurdity of my thoughts. We were supposed to get together Wednesday after lunch to study before rehearsal, but I texted her Tuesday afternoon to cancel, claiming I had errands to run. I needed time to get my mind and body back under control.
She responded with several phrases in Italian and “translate these.” Playful, like always, and completely innocuous, but each time my phone buzzed with a text from her my shrieking heart catapulted itself out of my body, leaving behind a gory trail of blood as it sprinted down the hallway and out the front door.
After the fifth text, I turned my phone off.
My mom called. I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. “You sound like something’s wrong,” she said again and again. I wanted to tell her everything, from the panic attacks to the surf lessons to whatever this craziness was with Claire. I wanted to tell someone. I couldn’t figure out if these feelings were real or if I’d only turned inside out because I’d dredged up the terrible memories of my past. Was this a silly crush, or lust, or something else? Did it matter? Was I a lesbian? Did that matter? What about Oren? I still loved Oren.
I told my mom about the new house, about our pretty back porch and the fruit trees. I told her about the pair of sandhill cranes who’d taken up residence in a field nearby. Sandhill cranes mate for life. I told her about the orchestra and quartet, the upcoming trip to Italy, and I mentioned Claire, but I tiptoed around her name as though, if I kicked it too hard, an alarm would blare and I would be caught so obviously lusting over my friend.
Wednesday—rehearsal day—I awoke and felt almost normal again. For most of the morning, my skin hugged my muscles with tranquil indifference, and my lungs maintained a steady fill-and-empty rhythm. But then I ate strawberries for lunch and when I bit into a particularly large one, I noticed how my lips puffed around the edge, how my teeth sank into its flesh and my tongue felt around for the sweetness. I thought how I wanted to taste Claire that way, and every part of me lit up and my breath became so ragged that I had to grab onto my kitchen counter so I wouldn’t fall over.
But the thoughts kept coming. I imagined myself in quartet rehearsal, laying my violin across my knees and hyperventilating with desire until everyone thought I was having a heart attack. Claire would rest a hand on my knee, concerned, and I would pick up her hand, take one of her fingers in my mouth and suck it like I’d just sucked that strawberry, right in front of everyone. Standing there at my kitchen counter, I almost choked on the bite of strawberry that was still in my mouth.
Wednesday afternoon, I took a deep, cleansing breath, the kind I normally used to calm myself before auditions, and opened the door that led to the backstage hallways. I had arrived early enough to quartet rehearsal that I could get ahold of myself before Claire arrived. The whole drive over I’d kept reminding myself that my attraction to Claire was like performance anxiety; no one knows you have it except you. I could control my breathing and focus on my music, and my colleagues wouldn’t have any reason to suspect I’d suddenly developed the hots for my friend.
Raymond arrived just as I finished setting up four chairs in the middle of the room. “Oh, hey, Hazel. How was your weekend?” He set his viola case down on a chair near mine.
“It was fine. I…learned to surf.” And developed lustful feelings for Claire. My heart rate accelerated and I had to remind myself that Raymond was not privy to the inner workings of my body.
“You serious? In one day, you got it?”
“Well…it took about fifty tries, and I thought my arms were going to give out on me from pushing up so many times. I’m still pretty weak.” Mostly from the billion push-ups I did to purge my insane sexual fantasies.
“You gonna be able to hang in there for rehearsal?” He punched me lightly on the arm and almost startled me out of my skin. His eyes widened at my overreaction. “That sore?”
“No, I’m fine.” Flames crept up my neck. I scrambled to think of something normal to say. “I mean, sure, I’m sore, but I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m playing viola.” I plastered a grin on my face.
“Ah, true, true. Viola’s a workout compared to violin.” He held up his instrument like a trophy, appeased.
Katrina and Claire came in together then, laughing and smiling, clearly on the tail end of some conversation. I engrossed myself in putting rosin on my bow.
“Hazel!” Katrina was exuberant bordering on giddy. “You missed an awesome Italian study session!”
Oh. They’d studied without me. I hadn’t considered that possibility. I looked up at Claire and a fierce wave of jealousy shuddered through me. I shook it off. She glanced at Katrina then back to me, rolling her eyes as if to say, “She drove me nuts.” My heart calmed a little. This was just Claire, playful and silly. She wasn’t going to lie down in the middle of the room and invite me to smear myself all over her. She was going to act like a regular person and thus I, too, could act like a regular person. I took a deep breath and finished rosining my bow.
Once we’d all taken our places and tuned, Katrina bent over and picked up a folder she’d stashed under her chair. “This,” she said, passing around a paper to each of us, “is our itinerary for Italy. We’ll fly out on Saturday, have Sunday to settle into our accommodations, and start with the students on Monday.”
“Oh, Katrina, you are so organized. Look at your highlighting.” Claire held up her paper to show where flight numbers and times had been marked in bright yellow and green.
“I am nothing if not organized,” said Katrina.
“Man,” said Raymond, leaning back in his chair. “I still don’t even know a lick of Italian. You ladies keep scheduling these damn study sessions for times I can’t come. If you all leave me alone over there, I’ll probably get lost and never be found again.”
I kept my eyes on my own itinerary. “Don’t worry, Raymond. I think we’re all in the same boat. Except Claire—she’ll be fluent in Italian by the time we leave.” I was damn impressed with how not insane I sounded.
Claire clicked her tongue. “You guys don’t give yourselves enough credit. Especially you, Hazel—you know a lot more than you think.”
I shrank in my chair.
“We just know our limits,” said Katrina. “Anyway, I think you only invite us to study with you because you enjoy having an audience while you inhale Italian faster than everyone else.”
Claire raised her eyebrows suggestively. “You’re right, Katrina. I do enjoy an audience.”
Raymond laughed, Katrina groaned, and Claire looked at me and grinned in her usual friendly way. I forced a smile in return and prayed someone would grab a fire extinguisher to put out the flames that had erupted on my chest. She couldn’t possibly know how fast my heart was beating—could she? “Shall we start rehearsal?” I said, trying not to sound lik
e I was begging.
“Yes, please,” said Katrina, shaking her head in bewilderment.
We rehearsed for two hours—just long enough to ease my fear that I might grab Claire’s hand in the middle of rehearsal and lick it. It was as though spending time with her made it easier to believe I could continue to spend time with her. A normalcy-begets-normalcy kind of thing.
By the end of rehearsal, I had convinced myself I was going to be just fine.
I passed all the next morning in a mostly relaxed emotional state, arranging my music room with single-minded focus until I had every item exactly in the place I wanted it. By lunchtime, I’d only lost control of my thoughts twice. Once was while I was organizing my books on the shelves and came across my copy of Pablo Casals’ Joys and Sorrows—I had a momentary flash of my hand reaching to grab the same book off Claire’s bookshelf and her taking my hand from the book and laying it against her cheek. Then again later as I stared at my bare wood floors and contemplated what kind of rug I would put there, I thought of the fluffy white rug in Claire’s music room and imagined her sprawled out on it wearing nothing but a bra and underwear, pawing at her breasts and thighs and between her legs, hungry and desperate and panting at me like she wanted me to do something about it.
Insane.
In the afternoon, I flipped myself wrong-side out. Playing through some of my old violin repertoire, the notes rippled through me in a way they never had before, pulsing and penetrating and unsheathing my nerves. I had to put down my violin and listen to other violinists on YouTube playing the same pieces I’d just been practicing, to see if the experience was the same if the music came from another source besides me. It was.
