Minimalist Gossip Magazine Cover (49).pdf (13) - Flipbook - Page 77
tea-drinking that she was still fortifying her bladder with the kegel exercises.
Here we are, dear, she said.
#
Great-Aunt Jessie’s secret was this: after Uncle Winch had been dead a year, she took a
secret lover. It was a man she’d met in the doctor’s office where they’d told her about the
kegel exercise. Because of her new-found fluttering, which was too beautiful and intense to
bear, she wondered if this man could help quench the fires, so to speak, and she invited him
for tea. In those days, many matters were negotiated over tea.
The man’s name was Bill. A simple enough name. Bill worked with his hands. He was a
carpenter, which she found more accessible and refreshing than Winch’s actuarial science.
She had never understood what an actuarial scientist was or did, with the mysterious fog
around it, but she appreciated carpentry. As Bill lifted the cup to drink his tea, Jessie
watched his hands. Long sensitive fingers, blue veins like rivers, an impossibly delicate
touch. That would be from the precise fitting of small joints together, she assumed. He
described the joints: dado, mortise and tenon, half-lap, bridle, dovetail, and their very
names gave her the deepest pleasure.
Bill took Jessie out in his canoe in August, to watch the meteor shower. They docked on an
island in the French River, and sat on a steep rock perched over the water. Night lowered
itself around them, and they drew close to one another. Jessie and Bill skin to skin, rocking
on the moss, gasping like two fish hooked on a line, sliding back and forth under the sky. All
night their bodies collided and pulled apart, skin viscous, her innards wet and full.
Fluttering. The fluttering went from one side of the night sky to the other, and the shooting
stars fell around them.
Jessie took Bill to her bed every night for five years. At the end of the fifth year, when he had
not appeared at her door at his usual time of 9 p.m, she found out he had had a heart attack
on the bus and had died instantly.
Those five years were more glorious than anything I’d ever lived, said Jessie.
She said I could tell Mam and the others after she died, but not while she was still alive.
My generation is still very closed, she said.
She lamented that other women could not have had someone like Bill in their lives, or the
pleasure given to her by her kegel exercises.
#
Jessie died of a stroke. It was sudden and massive. In her coffin she looked tidy and proper.
A small, prim widow. Navy blue dress up to her chin, white gloves, hair in controlled waves,
her favourite hat. I looked at her hands in the white gloves. Maybe she didn’t want their
naked pleasure to be seen, the hands that had caressed the carpenter in so many
impossibly beautiful ways toward the end of her life. I thought of her hair on the pillow, on
the mossy rock, stuck to her forehead in those wild moments. Great-aunt Jessie, fluttering
in the meteor shower, flying now out the hospital window to meet the shooting stars.
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