By Jennifer Wortman
For your fifty-eighth birthday, your husband buys you an electric foot massager, a big hunk of plastic with lots of buttons and two snug caverns for your feet. He used to massage your feet and you wonder if he doesn’t want to touch them anymore because they’re old and ugly, doesn’t want to touch you for the same reason, but he does want to touch you, sometimes, and you want to touch him. Sometimes. You’ve never liked using the word “touch” in this way, the creepy mix of euphemistic and literal. But now you’re using the word “touch” in this way, just as you’re using the words “old” and “ugly” in ways you hate. If thinking a word counts as using it. Then again, what words mean more than the ones you say to yourself?
Once, you and your husband couldn’t keep your hands off each other and where did that time go and where did the time go and these are exactly the kind of thoughts you shouldn’t entertain on your happy birthday but always do, especially now, when there’s more behind than ahead.
Your husband plugs in the massager and the buttons blaze green. You shove your feet inside and the little machines inside the big machine whirl around and squeeze. It’s almost too much, but in a good way—like sex used to be almost too much, but in a good way.
Before you met your husband, you dated men who thought you were too much in a not good way. One ended each encounter with “Be easy,” to which you’d respond, “Be hard.” You were already gleaning what that “be easy” meant: be easy for me. Precisely because your husband never told you to be easy or implied as much, an ease grew between you, and it was glorious. But also, sometimes, these days, it’s a little like the cheese on your salads you ask the waiter, because of your fucking cholesterol, to “go easy” on—you barely know it’s there.
The machine, with ruthless skill, probes the places that hurt, and the hurt’s a pleasant hurt, cathartic and warm. You turn up the pressure. A sharp, screaming pain squinches your bones and you yelp, slamming the button to ease the pinch. It was too much, in a bad way. But now it’s good again, maybe even better with the flush of relief.
Your husband says he can take the massager back, find a different model or a different gift, but you say no, no, no.
You squirm your feet in their little caves and crank up the pressure once more.
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.
MoonPark Review 