I wake to his hands rubbing my back in a rhythm that is a hair too fast. I am facing the window, listening to the early birds. He starts at my spine, touching the scar there from the surgery that opened up my back to bind stainless-steel-scaffolding onto my curved and rotated vertebrae. I focus on his hands and realize I can feel pressure but not sensation. I feel his hands as if a barrier were between them and me, but they are warm and it feels nice, so I sigh to let him know I appreciate his touch.
I remember weekend mornings, wandering into mom and dad’s room in search of company. I’d find them lying in bed just as we are at this moment. Dad's massive body curled around mom's tiny one. She always slept on her side, knees pulled toward her tummy. Sometimes a hand was on her leg, sometimes on her arm, other times on her hip. Rubbing up and down, or in large circles. Rhythmic, just like now. Pressing. Sometimes dad whisper-murmured things into her ear that I could not hear as I stood in their doorway or sat on the edge of their bed. Secret whispers or requests or suggestions inserted between the comments of our shared conversation. I pretended not to notice.
She never looked at him, was never facing him. She lay still, her eyes closed. Dad sometimes moaned out loud—a drawn out, multi-syllabic sound he made not only when he was rubbing her, but also during other activities, like reading the newspaper.
Usually she lay there quietly, unmoving, and eventually he would stop touching her. Other times she said, "Stop!" followed by a small kick against him, similar to the one she delivered to my piano teacher’s cat when it unexpectedly pressed against her leg. She pulled her whole body away from the animal, horrified, her mouth twisted into a deep, shocked scowl.
"I hate cats," she explained later as we drove home.
"Stop!" The same sound she used when she was disgusted by something. Sometimes Dad stopped. Other times he didn’t.
"You're too rough," she would explain.
"Ah, she's so hard. So cold," he would reply. Maybe to her. Maybe to me. Maybe to both of us.
She would not respond.
My husband is rubbing me now. First my back, then my shoulder, then a breast. His hands are warm, and not too rough. I do not kick or bark at him, but I do not offer my own hands, beneath the covers or above. I offer small sounds of encouragement instead, barely audible sighs. Soon he is snoring again, his hands still. I am glad, because I dislike morning sex and do not want this morning rub to become something more. I could feel him against my bottom through the yoga pants I slept in, which he calls armor. I do not want to have to say no if he wants more. I would not say no if he wanted more, and I don’t want that either.
Later he gets out of bed to rush to a meeting. When he is gone, I roll onto my back and place my hands on my tummy. For many years after the surgery, the skin near my belly button was extremely sensitive. It would jump and twitch at the faintest brush.
"That’s to be expected," an orthopedic surgeon says during a check-in more than a decade after the surgery. He is not talking to me, but to the medical students watching him touch me, poking lightly, I think with a little medical instrument, but possibly with his gloved hand. I say nothing. I am thinking about Toni Morrison's Beloved, about Sethe sitting still in 1860, while School Teacher instructs his students to draw her animal characteristics on one side of a piece of paper, her human ones on the other.
The sensations used to be intense. Now, I feel very little when my fingers rub my tummy. The tips of my fingers are cold, but the skin does not move at all in response to my touch.
Julia Burns has spent the bulk of her career as a social scientist studying other people’s lives. She returned to creative writing after a 22-year hiatus to excavate her own. Themes of memory, body, power, and fear drive her creative work, which has appeared online but resides primarily in her journal.