By NEYSA KING
This piece is an excerpt from the novel How to Be Loved.
Cláudia’s eyeliner is dark as earth and heavy as her parrot-red lipstick. As she bends over to speak to me in low tones, her blouse falls open. I don’t know what it means to be attracted to her; I just want to be near her body. But she’s a college student from Rio, and I’m five years old. For the last year she’s been my nanny—dressing me, feeding me while Mom and Dad work. Every other Friday, if I’m good, she shucks me into my two-piece bathing suit with frills on the bottom and a pink butterfly on top and takes me to Singing Beach, where I can play with the skinny-legged sandpipers that the ocean is lava. Run, chase, run, chase, run, chase—my long, dark curls wet and heavy, and my suit bottom sliding down my straight hips—until the sunlight stretches as long and pale as a skeleton across the sand.
But today her two semesters at Boston University are over, and she’s going home.
In the terminal abutting the train platforms, she sits next to me on the edge of a long planter nurturing a red maple sapling. Mom and Dad are somewhere behind the foliage. I can’t see them, but I can hear them arguing. Meanwhile, Cláudia is asking me where on my body she can give me a kiss goodbye.
I look at my hands and say nothing, so she places a finger on my pale cheek and says, “Here?”
“No,” I say.
She traces her finger up my cheek and lingers on my forehead, just above my right eyebrow, “Here?”
“No.”
She slides her finger down my face, neck, shoulder, arm and onto my hand, “Here?”
I hesitate, so she pulls my hand to her and kisses the palm of it fatly, leaving a smear of red lips there. She hugs me, stands up, waves to my parents, and walks toward her train and out of my sight. Over the course of the day, I rub her lips into my skin with my thumb, creating a tiny red globe in the center of my hand. I like the waxy wetness of it, and I can feel it long after the red is gone.
Thirty years later, I’m asleep on South Beach, dreaming I’m walking around a home that’s not my home. Dirty dishes are stacked in the sink, torn papers on the table. I keep forgetting to feed the cat. Eventually I come to a staircase. At the top, a landing opens out into a large room. The floors are unpolished and the walls unpainted. A dead TV leans against the wall. There’s a couch still in its shipping plastic. Why haven’t I bothered to take care of this place? Why do I keep wanting from the world when I haven’t made use of what I already have? When I wake up, it’s late afternoon. I roll over and brush sand absently from my body. The ocean is changing from its midday greens into its evening blues.
At the shoreline, a woman with long red hair, pink skin, and freckles is walking north. She’s beautiful, and I imagine walking down to talk to her. After a year in the arms of South Beach, where one cannot help but see tits and ass all day every day, where sex is sex is sex, I’ve accepted that I like women, and that I’m okay with that. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Admitting these feelings to a woman, let alone acting on them, feels like I’m five years old again sitting on the edge of a planter. It’s a piece of me that feels under construction. As I watch her,the woman walking north pulls down her swimsuit to her belly, exposing large, round, freckled breasts.
It’s not uncommon for women on South Beach to swim topless. All the same, I stare shamelessly. To my surprise, another woman following behind her also pulls down her swimsuit from her boobs to her belly. Three more appear and follow suit. In a huddle, five topless women move together into the waves like some descent of water nymphs (is that what you call a group of nymphs, or is that woodpeckers? It might be a murder of water nymphs). About 25 yards from the shore, they stop and form a circle, holding hands. Their bare bodies are red with sunset.
For a year or so before puberty, I had a recurring dream of walking into a red room, red pillows tossed over red carpet and against red walls. I would find my way to a pile of pillows and lay down until a woman who I did not know found me, removed her clothing, and lay with me. I told myself at the time it wasn’t about sex so much as abundance—a feeling that I could be loved without limits. Mom was gone, Cláudia was gone, and I just wanted a woman to hold me. But who was I kidding? It was always about sex.
I stand up, walk to the shoreline to get a better look at them. In saltwater thigh high, the women are laughing and shouting and pointing to each other’s bodies. They’re touching each other. They’re jumping up and down so their breasts bounce. I feel a pressure in the center of my chest, like my heart is a ripe red fruit being pressed into juice. My first impulse is to turn around and go directly home. I even walk a few steps back toward my things, but on the way it’s like I slip through a narrow opening in spacetime, into a dimension where I might choose joy over fear, and suddenly I find myself swimming out to them, saying that whatever they’re doing, I want in.
The woman with freckles reaches out her hand first, beckoning me into the circle. “You can join, but you have to be topless,” she says.
I don’t reply because I have already removed my top.
“We’re celebrating our bodies, but it’s not sexual,” says another woman with a pixie haircut and subtle green bags beneath her eyes. “We all read the same book about the power of pussy.”
I step into the circle, more grateful for my sex than ever before. This is divine feminine worship, but I am just here for the boobs. Besides, the woman with freckles is next to me, gazing at me with slack eyes. She grabs my hand and I swallow hard. Her bust is firm and plump and covered in freckles, as if a jar of them were spilled there, and she’s massaging her thumb into the fleshy pad of my palm.
Slowly I let myself look around the circle—the pleasant, pleasant shapes. One woman, I think, looks like a Botticelli painting: a plump hourglass with small, circular breasts and pink nipples. Another woman’s breasts are flat, turned downward. She has a boyish kind of shape— straight and thin and fun. The fourth woman’s breasts reach in different directions like house plants leaning towards the sun. And the fifth woman has no breasts at all—two semi-circular scars sit above her diaphragm, small, nippleless pads where her breasts were, soft and subtle.
What animal part of me is reacting so strongly to mounds of fat? Why do I want so desperately to have sex with these shapes? The freckled woman moves closer to me and grazes my thigh with her hand. I let her, pushing my wet skin against her searching fingers while the red fruit in my chest engorges into my throat. The women spin the circle around so the woman with the mastectomy scars is standing in a single ray of sunlight spilling onto the water. The women take turns describing her body, focusing on her chest. Some of them touch her. She smiles, then laughs, then jumps, then shrills her voice across the still, green water. I stay still and quiet the first round so I do not appear too eager. It is Botticelli’s turn next. The circle spins around until she is standing in the ray of sun.
When she says “I consent to be touched,” the pressure that’s been building in my heart pops. Warm, red liquid courses through my body. Freckles reaches for her, and I watch a hand glide over her curves. She describes her as “tender” and “creamy,” then she looks at me, sensing my eagerness.
I think about baking cookies—that moment you test their doneness by reaching into a hot oven and pressing with one finger to feel the give of the dough. I press my finger around her areola and brush my thumb over the small, red nipple. I let her fat fill my hand. The heartbeat in my palm pulses against it so the backflow of blood that re-enters my heart carries the feeling of holding her.
I mumble something about Botticelli and hear nothing else until we are spinning the circle around again. Now I am the one standing in the sun.
I hear the word jubilant. Freckles lets go of my hand. She tells me I look like an Amazon with my strong shoulders and pronounced sternum. She cups my left breast, then my right, then my left again. Images of the two of us, bright red and entangled, spill out behind my eyes. Then she crosses her arms over her own chest and makes a movement like she’s shivering. The sun has disappeared behind the condos to the west. The sky is darkening and the wind has picked up. We pull our suits back on and wade to shore.
I walk back with the group to their claimed space on the beach—towels and coverups strewn onto the sand, a red cooler full of White Claws and sparkling water. Freckles gives me a lingering hug, invites me back to her Airbnb for drinks, “to chat.”
I actually gulp. Like a teenager or cartoon character. This is going to happen.
I trot back to my towel to collect my belongings. A man I don’t know is standing nearby. He’s my height, with a ballcap and a blue tank top with a marlin on it. He grins at me—dumb and adolescent—until I finally register that everything I just did with these women was in public. But my heart is pumping new blood through my body now, and I’m not ashamed. I shrug at him, knowing what he wants from me and because it is easily given. It’s not so easy with the woman waiting behind me. As much as I would like to know what her love is like, I do not know what will happen to me if I give myself a thing so long desired and denied.
The man shifts his gaze back to the place in the water where we were moments before, as if wanting to re-see us there. I, too, want that. But the red sun has dipped below the bay, leaving only a few purple streaks in a cloud overhead, which are already integrating into the blue. I collect my towel, tug on my shorts, and turn west toward home.
Neysa King is a multi-genre writer whose work has been supported by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, O, Miami, and Miami Book Fair, among others. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Rainbow Body and has completed her first novel, How to Be Loved.
