Big Ruthie Imagines Sex without Pain

Abstract

She imagines it the way she tries to reconstruct dreams, really reconstruct. Or builds an image while she is praying. She imagines a blue castle somewhere on high, many steps, a private room, fur rag, long mattress, white stucco walls, tiny windows. She imagines leaving her body. It frightens her. If she leaves her body, leaves it cavorting on the bed/fur rug/kitchen table (all is possible when there is sex without pain) - she may not get it back. Her body may just get up and walk away, without her, wash itself, apply blusher mascara lipstick, draw up her clothes around it, take her purse and go out to dinner. Big Ruthie herself will be left on the ceiling, staring down at the indentations on the mattress and rag, wishing she could reach down and take a book from a shelf. She does not now nor has she ever owned a fur rug. But when Big Ruthie achieves sex without pain, she will have a fluffy fur rug. Maybe two. White, which she'll send to the cleaners, when needed. She imagines sex without pain: an end to feeling Ruben tear at her on his way inside, scuffing his feet so harshly at her door, unwitting, can't help himself, poor husband of hers. She thinks there must be a name for it. She has looked it up in various books and knows it is her fault. All she must do is relax. It was always this way, since the honeymoon. Of course the first months she told herself it was the newness. She is so big on the outside, so wide of hip, ample of waist, how could this be - a cosmic joke? - this one smallness where large, extra large would have smoothed out the wrinkles in her marriage bed? When all her clothes are size 18 plus elastic, why does this one part of her refuse to grow along with her? At first she thought, the membranes will stretch. Childbirth will widen. Heal and stretch, heal and stretch. But no. She has never healed, never quite healed. From anything. She carries all her scars from two childhood dog bites, from a particularly awful bee sting. I am marked, she thinks. Ruben is the only lover she has ever had. OK, God, Big Ruthie says, well into her thirty-fifth year, I'm not asking for sex without ambivalence or sex without tiny splinters of anger/resentment. I am not even asking, as per usual, for a new body, a trade-in allowance from my ever-larger and larger layers of light cream mounds. I am not asking you to withdraw my namesake candy bar from the market, to wipe its red-and-white wrapper from the face of the earth. I have grown used to the teasing. It's become second nature, in fact. And I am not asking you to cause my avoirdupois, my spare tire and trunk to melt in one great heavenly glide from my home to Yours. I am only asking for a slight adjustment. One that I cannot change by diet alone. As if I have ever changed any part or shape of my body through diet. For once I am not asking You to give me something that just looks nice. Make me, O Lord, more internally accommodating. Big Ruthie, turning thirty-five, prays. Alone, in bed. She is afraid. She is afraid she will lose herself, her body will siphon out into Ruben's, the way the ancient Egyptians removed the brains of their dead through the nose. Ruthie wants to carve out an inner largeness, yet fears she will become ghostlike, as see-through as a negligee, an amoeba, one of those floaters you get in your eye that's the size of an inch worm. A transparent cell. Mitosis, meiosis. She will be divided and conquered. She imagines her skin as nothing more than a bag, a vacuum-cleaner bag, collapsing when you turn off the control. No sound, no motion, no commotion, all the wind sucked out of her. Still. A fat polar bear lying on the rug. Hibernating without end. No one will be able to wake Big Ruthie or move her in order to vacuum. No one. She mentioned it once, timidly, to the Ob/Gyn man. He patted her on the knee. Mumbled about lubrication. Maybe the pain didn't really exist, Big Ruthie thought. Maybe it was her imagination and this was the intensity of feeling they talked about. …