Tense

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “Tense” by Zoë Sprankle. Zoë is an emerging queer writer based in New York City. She holds a BFA in Creative writing from Emerson College and is currently pursuing an MFA from the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. Her work focuses on the entanglement of grief and sexuality. She is in the process of writing a memoir. You can follow her on twitter @ZoeSprankle. This essay was edited by Meg Pillow. You can submit work for this series at gay.submittable.com.

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The spa is on Amsterdam and Broadway. I go because it’s cheap and the majority of Yelp reviewers have given it five stars, so I don’t think I’ll be raped or murdered there. In the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, I research “massage therapists near me” when I should be writing. I just moved to the city three months earlier. I know I have to write about the night in the hospital this time last year, but I’m too tired. Sometimes it feels morbid to me that I have to pinch and peel at my thinnest wounds to make a story. 

My body aches from wrangling the kids I nanny from the West Village to Crown Heights on the subway every day and after bumping into fire hydrants, pool tables, and people dressed as the Joker in Alphabet City on Halloween Weekend. I can feel the tension radiating from my shoulders. The knot in my back protrudes like a plump piece of ripe fruit, prodding at me from under the moss and dirt of my body, itching to be picked. Every sentence coming out of me feels forced and exhausted, so I leave the library, ready for someone to wring me dry. 

I have to use Google Maps to get to the Upper West Side which makes me feel cheap and tacky because Joan Didion and Patti Smith got around this city in their twenties just fine, without any electronic crutch. Wafts of bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches from the bodega lurk into the spa. When I walk up the stairs, there’s no music playing but a slight hum from the pulse of the shop beneath. An older man with a goatee seated on a distressed leather La-Z-Boy ushers me in and asks me if I want an hour. “Yes,” I respond, in a voice that’s too raspy and loud for the space, shattering what feels like sacred silence. I don’t ask how much an hour costs, even though I could. I’m twenty-three and I have the voice for those kinds of simple questions but, like Didion, I do not call the front desk to have the air conditioning turned off: “Was anyone ever so young? I’m here to tell you someone was.”

The rooms are separated by thin shoji screen partitions, and I can hear the movement of heavy hands gliding up and down someone’s body. Once the curtain is closed, I “undress to my comfort level,” which means I’m naked except my salmon-colored Victoria’s Secret thong. Even though thongs feel like a stick up my ass, I remember my older cousin Emily wearing them “to avoid underwear lines,” so I’ve had them in my crack ever since. I fold my clothes into a tight, neat pile as if my mother could walk into the room and inspect my neatness at any moment. I find a blackened penny on the floor, but it’s on the tails side, so I don’t pick it up.  

I don’t see The Masseuse when he drapes a navy blue towel over my body and puts his hands on me. The room is warm and dark. My cheeks pressed into the cushion, and my vision going in and out of focus on his New Balance sneakers. I think about the people I’ve been naked in front of in this city so far, the big and small hands of women and men that have been on and around me while the stranger digs his fist into me like a sculptor softening clay. His hands know where to go instinctively, and he starts kneading the tender spot below my shoulder. I’ve only gotten massages from women before, and I thought a man’s hands on me would make me uncomfortable, but they don't. Surprise. 

When I moved to the city, I decided I would let men touch me again, even though I had come out as a lesbian earlier that summer. I met a tall man at a friend’s party who was studying to be an actor and deemed myself a fraud to my community when he curved his fingers around my pelvis. I liked how small I felt next to him. He liked how tight I was and how it turned him on that I’d only been with women for the past two years. How we joked it was like he was “taking my virginity for the second time.” Whatever that even means.  

The hands of The Masseuse hurt and the pressure is too intense, but I don’t say anything. Instead, I’m thinking of my college twin bed and the film boy who shoved his fingers into me dry. He stood above me, hovering and blinking at me like a winking lamp post. At the time I thought it was my fault for not getting wet enough, for not being horny enough, for not being the sexual thing that I promised him earlier that night with my hands around a cup and tight, black leggings cutting off the circulation in my stomach. I told him his hands felt good, and I wasn’t lying. It did feel good to be wanted by someone in that way. 

With men, I performed my next moan and sigh like a woman in rehearsal counting on her cues. Aware of every hair on my leg. With women, I thought of nothing, and everything felt like it was being pulled out of me like smooth, soft silk. I don’t know what it means when a lesbian lets a man fuck her, or if that means she’s not a lesbian anymore, but my muscles hurt, and I’m too tired to figure it out now.  

I’m supposed to be relaxing. 

The woman in the room beside me releases soft and subtle sounds of pleasure. The people at the bodega below mumble their orders. Sirens erupt down the block, and I’m reminded of what my mother would say to ease my alarm as a child when an ambulance would pass: “someone’s just getting help.” 

Three weeks after my father killed himself, my mother and I went on a cruise. She’s not the kind of woman to require pampering, but during our time on the water, she insisted on surrendering. 

Somewhere in the Caribbean, we picked at our sunburns that peeled like wallpaper at the crowns of our foreheads. On the night of an 80s themed party, I put on a tight black dress that clung to my waist like a latex glove. My mother sang along to music she had memorized from childhood, and I watched her dance with the black water behind her. We forced our hips to sway, spinning on the edge of a crowd. I scanned the deck for someone my own age and latched eyes with a boy groping a beer. He leaned against the bar and motioned me toward him. 

I turned to my mother. “Is it okay if I go over there and talk to him?” 

She looked past me with her mouth barely moving. “You’re old enough to trust your own judgment.” 

She watched when the boy put his hand on my lower back and led me away from the bar. I was old enough to know what I wanted. 

The boy took me to roam the abandoned deck, and we passed couples in hot tubs with steam curled around their necks and bodies. When he offered me a cigar and my lips latched onto the sweetness, I felt like a woman and not a girl. He told me to watch him play blackjack, and I held his beer for him, watching the lime bob up and down. He swore when he won nothing. He took me back to his cabin and felt me up with the beer still in his hand. When I got back to my room, the lights were on, but my mother was asleep. I crumpled up the black dress into a coiled ball and discarded it in the bottom of my suitcase.

The next day my mother and I were given massages by Russian women in separate rooms and told to rest our sea legs. I was grieving and guilty. When the woman put her hands on my shoulders, she asked me my age. 

“I’m seventeen.” 

She lifted her palms away from my body and sighed. I could feel the heat from her hands on my lower back, even as they left my skin. “Too young to be this tense.” 

The Masseuse is dripping oil on me now. I feel his penis rub against the back of my knuckles in a rhythmic way, but I tell myself I’m probably overthinking it. This place has five stars. I try to ignore his crotch grazing my forehead, but I’m in my head. For the first time in months, I can sense I’m on the brink of a panic attack. I know I have to write about the night in the hospital this time last year but I’m too tired. When I think about being in my body too much, I’m convinced I’m going to die, which is what I tell my mother whenever she suggests I do yoga. I think about the irony of all this while the man nestles the crook of his elbow against my spine. It feels okay now that I’m slippery like a seal, and the oil feels like warm sun dripping on my skin. It would be a good idea to marry someone whose passion is to your benefit, like a masseuse or a chef, but I’ll probably marry a writer.

With a damp washcloth, he mops up the oil on my back until I’m slick and dry like the freshly waxed linoleum of an elementary school cafeteria. I’ll write when I get home, I tell myself. He digs into my neck again, and this time I wince and clench the table. He doesn’t sense my discomfort, or maybe he does. I bite my lip and pinch my eyes closed to get through it. I’m sure it will be worth it in the end. 

I’ve never known how to tell the people I’m with how much pressure and pain is too much, but I’m working on it. My college ex-girlfriend used to choke me while we had sex. Something about it felt dangerous and angry and loving all at once, so I let her hands curl around my neck like a tie twisted too tight. I didn’t know if I loved it or hated it, so I just let it happen to me. After her, I stopped letting people put their hands around my throat. I wouldn’t even wear a gold chain to bed because I was convinced it’d choke me in my sleep. It was after my mother told me how my father had gone about taking his life that my neck became sensitive. I couldn’t look at pull-up bars anymore, or hear sirens, or think about people who needed help. 

I can feel the massage ending like a needle running on the edge of a record. “Edge of Glory” plays faintly from the bodega downstairs. The Masseuse squeezes my calves and the balls of my feet. I can tell I’ll be sore tomorrow from all the toxins swimming out and around my muscles. But I like the feeling of being juiced dry like an orange. What’s left is a mangled exocarp, naked on a table. I can feel that some of the pulp has been squeezed out now, and sentences about that night in the hospital are starting to become less gritty. All because a man I don’t know dug them out from where my body was storing all the words and pain and pleasure swirling around. As soon as I’m on the street, I’ll write them down in my Notes app on my phone with oily fingers that leave the letters looking blurry. I’ll walk back to my apartment to write, all while in this guilty, wanting body of mine. I’ll write about how I checked myself into the same mental health facility that my father had been at five years prior, after his first suicide attempt. And how I felt him in the room with me when the swirling intrusive thoughts became too much for this body of mine to bear. How it was the first time I’d ever had a real desire to hurt myself, and this made a part of me feel closer to him than I ever had before. How cold the room was. I stayed up all night because my body couldn’t find a comfortable position. I couldn’t unclench. Was there anyone ever so tense? The Masseuse lifts his hot hands off of me, and just as I let myself sink into the pleasure of it all, it’s over.