When I was ten years old, I started masturbating using the Jacuzzi jets of my parents’ bathtub. I’m not sure I even had a concept of masturbation at the time, aside from something boys laughed about, religious peoples said you could go blind from doing, and maybe something, vaguely, from Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
When I started using the jets, I had been on a self-imposed exile from baths since seeing Jaws. I was afraid of all standing water and would only take showers. I was afraid of what I couldn’t see and what might lurk beneath me.
“Do you really think a shark is going to come out of the drain?” my mother asked.
Did I really think a shark was going to come out of the drain? Well, rationally no. And yet, before the discovery of the jets, when I lowered myself into the bath, stared at the drain, watched the water rising over me, this rationality slipped away. I felt shark’s teeth.
Now, I would label these “intrusive thoughts,” but I didn’t know that then. I just knew that once I discovered the Jacuzzi jets those intrusive thoughts went away. The promise of the sensations from those jets felt addictive, joyful, and I wanted to feel them again and again. At ten, I learned there was a pathway to pleasure that existed wholly inside of me. More importantly maybe, I learned that pleasure was an antidote to fear.
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Four years later, when I was fourteen, my Nana, my mother’s mother, died of cancer and the intrusive thoughts started up again. When she died, people said things like, “You’ll see her again” and “Now you have a guardian angel looking out for you.” They told me that I might be sad now and missing her, but I had to remember that she would always be watching over me. If this was meant to be comforting, I didn’t take it that way. Instead, it made me imagine my Nana as someone like Santa Claus—always watching and keeping a list of the presence or absence of my good deeds and sins. Sometimes I wondered how my Nana saw everything. I didn’t exactly believe or not believe in heaven, so I pictured her floating in space, like a giant cloud or moon that watched over life on Earth. I saw her staring down into our lives the way I peered over the top of the one-gallon fishbowl of my betta fish.
I did not think about my Nana watching over me in the times I should—on someone’s lap in a car full of boys driving too fast, all of us drunk or stoned. No, I thought about her ability to always be watching over me exclusively in the moments just before I entered the bathtub with the jets. I stood naked beneath the bright lights and mirrors of my parents’ bathroom and wondered with terror: Would she be disappointed? Ashamed? Disgusted? Was I supposed to feel those things?
I held these thoughts as the water filled past the jets. I should feel shame. Maybe this was a problem, and I shouldn’t be doing it, and something was wrong with me. Maybe the religious people were right. Maybe I would go blind. I thought about the boys at school who joked about jacking off and when they asked us girls if we ever touched ourselves there was only one acceptable answer— “Ew, no! Of course not, that’s disgusting!”
To be seen was to be ashamed and to admit to experiencing pleasure was to be disgusting.
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My Nana had never seemed particularly prudish or ashamed of sex. Eventually my mother would tell me that my Nana had told her when she was young, “The women in our family just like sex too much.” I didn’t know that explicitly when I was fourteen, but looking back, I think I took the shame from my peers about masturbation, my peers who had internalized it from the society we lived in, and improperly placed this shame into my all-seeing grandmother.
My family was not particularly religious, but we were in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We were Episcopalian, and the Baptists down the street prayed for us because we had a female minister and sometimes meditated. In middle school, we, the girls, lined up against the wall with our hands pressed against the ends of our shorts as our principal marched in front of us with a ruler. I was filled with fear by the sound of the ruler slapping her hand and the sound of her orthopedic shoes stopping in front of me. I wanted to be simultaneously noticed and not seen and I was terrified of that terrible phrase: too revealing. When my boobs started getting big, before I would leave the house, my mother would jerk the tops of my shirt upward as if to cover me. But outside the house, other people—older women, teachers, and mothers of friends—still eyed the tops of my shirts disapprovingly. My body turned into a battlefield where a war raged from sides I didn’t fully understand. I transferred this confusion onto my dead grandmother, imagined her staring at my naked body and shaking her head—too revealing.
When I got in the tub, I waited to feel my Nana’s eyes on me with the same certainty I had felt the shark’s teeth. I waited and I waited, and I felt nothing. I turned the Jacuzzi jets on. If my Nana was in heaven, the idea of her spending her time watching me was harder to believe than a Great White emerging from the drain to eat me.
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For the past eight years, I’ve done a type of embodied dance practice. It’s a practice that requires one to tap into their internal states and externalize these states through dance’s physicality. Once, at a workshop, a facilitator put the class in pairs and said that one of us would need to embody the state of repression while the other person was tasked with embodying what it meant to be free. In my pair, I embodied repression first. We were asked to imagine what it felt like physically: how did we move? Where did our eyes go? Where did our hands go? Were our limbs heavy? I walked with my body pulled inward, my eyes downcast, my shoulders hunched, and I moved slowly because it felt like there was too much weight crushing over me. What weight? Other peoples’ ideas of how I should be.
There was little guidance on what we were supposed to do with our partners, but we didn’t have to stay together. We were both allowed to move around the room as much as we wished, but only the free partners roamed while the repressed ones stood, hunched over and angry, in one spot. It was as if we were carrying too much weight to move. In my repressed role, I wanted my partner to suffer with me. Understandably, they did not want to suffer because they were free. My partner left, and I watched them angrily. It was painful to see how freely they moved, and yet I could not look away. They leapt across the room. They twirled, they laughed, they whipped their hair. If they looked at me, it was only for a brief smile, a brief beat, before they danced away. The hatred I felt for them was visceral and intense. I wanted to turn my body into a bear’s and maul them until they were repressed like me. The sensation and realization of this hatred was quick and shocking.
And then we switched roles. I straightened my spine, I looked across the room, to the ceiling; I looked at the other dancers; I glanced at my partner who was now moving hunched over with their eyes downcast. I leapt toward the center of the room and forgot about them entirely.
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My grandparents met when my grandfather’s brother married my grandmother’s sister. My grandmother was older than the sister who was getting married. She was twenty-seven. Was she considered an old maid? No one ever said that. Instead, they talked about all my Nana’s boyfriends and the boxes full of mementos she had amassed from them. She kept these boxes locked away. She did not share them with anyone.
At the time they met, my grandfather was in the Air Force and stationed in South Dakota. Sometime after the wedding, my Nana took a train from Charlotte, North Carolina, to South Dakota, alone, to visit him. When my Nana left South Dakota, my grandfather chased the train in his car so he could catch a final glimpse of her. That final glimpse: her smoking a cigarette on the back of the train with a cowboy.
“A cowboy,” my grandfather would say after my Nana had died. His eyes would fill with tears and his voice would crack. He would shake his head, pour another shot of whiskey, laugh, bite his lip, and take a sip. “A cowboy,” he would repeat, and a tear would fall into his glass.
Sometimes I wonder about my Nana on that train ride. I wonder if she had a clear destination for her life—a life with my grandfather; or, if her thoughts wandered instead. If she thought about all the places along the way she could get off, the ways she could live, or the lives she might have. I wonder if she liked riding alone, if it gave her the time to imagine all the lives she could lead.
After she died, when people told my grandfather she was watching over him now, he would shake his head, smiling like someone who knew a secret. They were married for forty years, and he knew as I did, she did not fully belong to him.
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I’ll be thirty-five years old this month. It will be my twenty-fifth year of masturbating—of having sex, communion, with myself. Why was it so disgusting for girls to touch themselves? To have desires and a clear path to fulfill those desires? Desire is a messy thing. Desire with someone else is messy. When I was a teenager, my mother was terrified of this messiness. She never let me close the door to any room when a boy was in the house, but my desire felt respected, safe, protected when it was just me by myself.
Desire, alone, helped me know myself. This sounds nice, maybe, but there have been countless times I have wished out loud, “I wish I didn’t know this about myself.” Why? I can’t pretend to be turned on when I’m not, or I can, but only for a little while before my body reminds me of what it really wants. I want things and sometimes the world acts as if I’m not entitled to those things. I have had boyfriends who are nice and good and decent and stable, but they do not turn me on, no matter what, and other boyfriends who are less stable, who don’t have careers, but know how to make me cum and hold me in the right way. I keep getting off the train for cowboys, never making it all the way, and all the while collecting boxes full of mementos I keep locked away.
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My grandfather never dated after my Nana died; he cried when people mentioned her name. When she was dying, I sat on their bed as he sat at her feet. She was sitting in a chair with oxygen tubes in her nose and her skin so jaundiced it was almost green. In my memory, I watch my grandfather rub the blue vein at the top of my Nana’s hand as she is dying, and I think I know what worship means.
There are times when I long for my Nana. Mostly, I long to know who she had been at the age I am now, and if there are similarities between us and, if so, what wisdom she might offer me. I realize, and am frustrated by, the fact that I am still thinking of her only in relation to myself. When I have this yearning, I try to picture her. I see her on the first floor of her house. She is sitting in a rocking chair in a small room behind a staircase. I’m in the hallway looking in and the door is cracked. I can see her silhouette, but she is facing away from me. There is a box in her lap, but I can’t see what it is. I want to know what is in that box, but every time I walk closer to the door, the image of her pulls farther away so that parts of her remain a mystery, one that does not wholly belong to me.
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Emily Mathis is an educational psychologist and completed her MFA in fiction at UNCG. Her work was a finalist for the 2022 Rash Award and the 2022 Chester B. Himes Award, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Broad River Review, Inklette, 5×5, FLARE: The Flagler Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and others. She is revising an autofiction project.
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nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They’re a current MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore and also hold a BFA in photography and book arts. nat is also the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and managing editor of Welter Journal. They are the author of preparatory school for the end of the world, you stupid slut, and specter dust, among others. Past publishers of their writing include Delicate Friend, perhappened, Corporeal Lit, and trampset.
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