Scissors, Paper, Stone: a Novel by Martha K. Davis

Author:Martha K. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Natalie both fascinated and terrified me. She was a black woman in my class at the massage school, one of three other minority people in a group of twenty-five. The other two were Japanese. In the beginning I had avoided speaking to all three of them. I had hardly been able to look the Japanese women in the eye. One day when the class split up to practice strokes for the neck and shoulders, Natalie looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t refuse. She lay on the table, and when I raised her head and rolled it slowly to the side, surprised at how much it weighed, she asked me, “Why do you hang out with white people all the time? Why don’t you talk to your sisters?”

At first I was pissed. What right did she have to tell me what to do? But as I slid my oiled palm down the length of her neck, working the sternocleidomastoid with my thumb, I also felt let in. She breathed deeply, and I could feel the muscle under my thumb soften just a little. It was a revelation to me: I could create change in another person’s body; I could help them to feel better. I had thought up to then I was learning bodywork for my own enjoyment. My realization gave me a rush of power and of something else. Gratitude. It softened me as well, let me think again about what she had said.

We exchanged a lot of information about ourselves that afternoon. She told me she was biracial: half white. I told her that I felt white, until somebody made a comment that reminded me I was not, and somebody always did. I told her that a couple of ex-lovers had said they considered me white, as though they were paying me the highest compliment. I felt hopeful, talking to her. I went home that evening and called the group she had told me about. Then I got freaked out and fell asleep for ten hours. After the day she questioned my alliances, I returned to avoiding Natalie. I was aware of her silent condemnation during our classes, only to be surprised when she caught my eye and grinned. She had a beautiful smile.

One night a couple of weeks after I received my father’s wedding invitation, I went to Maud’s with my ex-lover Alison and some of her friends, all white, and Natalie was there, playing pool with some of her friends, all black. I wasn’t surprised to see her; I’d been wondering since before she’d approached me in class if she was a dyke. We smiled and nodded to each other, and I followed my crowd further back into the large room. They all wanted to sit at the bar drinking and scoping out the girls. With Natalie there, I felt even more self-conscious than I usually did at the clubs. For a while, Alison and I stood together at the far end of the bar with our beers.

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