Minimalist Gossip Magazine Cover (49).pdf (13) - Flipbook - Page 76
FLUTTERING
by Lynn Hutchinson-Lee
Great-Aunt Jessie told me that twenty years ago they’d given her kegel exercises to do,
because of her leaking bladder. She didn’t tell my mam, or her sisters, but she told me
because I was of a different, more distanced generation, and would therefore understand.
Your generation, you know these things, she said.
She told me that it wasn’t chiefly her bladder that was the beneficiary of these exercises,
although in a way it was, because she no longer dribbled.
Dear, she said, putting down her teacup, getting in close and putting her veined hand
over mine, something else started happening. What was happening was down there, and
she lowered her head.
What was happening?
A fluttering, she said. A twitching.
When?
All the time. It wouldn’t stop.
Nothing like this had ever happened to her in her fifty years of marriage, she told me.
I was missing something, she lamented.
#
Uncle Winch, Jessie’s husband, used to climb mountains in his spare time. Whenever he
was about to leave for a new climb, he’d gather his equipment, give his balls a thumbs
up, and off he’d go, leaving Jessie with the children. He’d be gone for weeks and would
send her telegrams (this was decades before cellphones), writing things like, I’ve
conquered the wench.
Apparently, mountain-climbing is a sublime experience. You conquer everything.
Somebody told me it was better than sex, which explains a huge gap in the Jessie-Winch
relationship. When Jessie was in her early seventies, Uncle Winch fell off the side of a
mountain (she couldn’t remember which one, since to her all mountains were the same),
and plummeted into a crevasse. Oddly, she didn’t miss him, although he’d been a good
husband, more or less. She had desperately wanted to love him but thought he wouldn’t
let her.
#
I invited you here with a purpose, said Great-Aunt Jessie, because I have to tell
somebody, and knowing you, you’ll understand.
I watched her as she went out to the kitchen: her bent stance, mess of grey hair,
stooped shoulders, the bedroom slippers, the slow careful gait. I felt such a tenderness
for this woman who was about to open her life to me. At that moment, we were no
longer separated by generations but became sudden sisters. I felt as if we’d enacted the
childhood ritual of piercing the ends of our fingers and holding them against each other
to mingle our blood. She came back in with a fresh pot of tea, and I assumed with all the
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