A warped John Denver tape has been playing at Ramones speed for several minutes. I lose track of the melody then Felix’s falsetto hum catches it. Felix called “Age before beauty, Devon!” at Marilyn’s house. Since I’m the youngest, I’m stuck in a nest of Archie Annuals and empty Sun Chip bags in the backseat of Marilyn’s van. Seatbelt off, elbows on the drink console, I recite my poem about a man who can’t tell his wife he loves her. Marilyn suggests I rhyme my line ‘knots up his tie’ with ‘objectify.’ Her husband sells insurance. Felix favours the part of the poem where the husband holds the wife’s breasts for support. We turn off the highway, and head towards Marilyn’s cottage near Gravenhurst where we’re holing up for a weekend of writing. The one-bedroom cottage is plywood and scrappy and roosts on rock separated from a weedy lake by a thick stand of spruce and pine.

Inside there are cobwebs and fly carcasses and stained curtains made of cut-up floral bed sheets. The tap water is brown and rust-flecked, and though a day bed lives on the porch, the rain and single-digit temperatures make that option less than desirable. With her bad back, Marilyn has dibs on the bedroom, but Felix can crash on the couch in the main room with the wood stove. I can take the air mattress.

“Let Devon do the blowing,” Felix says.

“She’s got the lungs for it,” says Marilyn.

“I might have used a different word.”

Their innuendos wash over me. They’re obsessed with my breasts. The writing group concedes that the quality of my breasts entitles – no, obliges – me to write about them. “They’re a bless- ing,” says Felix. A divorced technical writer pushing forty, Felix compliments me with a reserved appreciation that I believe and enjoy. Haiku about my jujube lips. About my curls grazing the points of my shoulder blades. My scapulae. I’m twenty-six and make no innuendos, but I anticipate the debates about the success of my breasts as much as I do the comments on my poems.

We boot up our laptops and write in timed bursts. Then we read out loud and write again. After dinner, Marilyn lights a fire and piles pillows and sheets on the floor as we unroll our sleeping bags. We can’t find the air mattress so I make a bed from two couch cushions. I tell them about my colleague at Midtown College who planned her own wedding without informing the groom. She sent the invitations,” I say, “booked the hall and bought a dress. The morning of the wedding, she presented a tuxedo to her live-in boyfriend of ten years and told him to hurry up. ‘Good for you!’ I said, but less than a year later, the woman left her husband and moved in with an E Commerce student. “What a bully,” Felix says, a dollop of admiration mixed in with his disdain. Our group relishes the topic of bullies. Felix likes to pass around his before-and-after weight loss photographs, mounted side by side in a mock magazine ad, and framed. In high school, he had cracked 300 pounds before he got that the eating that comforted him also fed the bullies’ taunts.

Marilyn had been a different sort of teenage target with her lazy eye and a tippy-toe walk at odds with her carrying voice. She nods at me, eyebrows forced into high, surprised arcs.

“The boyfriend could have stopped it,” I say.

“What, and be humiliated?” Felix asks.

“No matter what he did,” I say, “he was set up for humiliation. Staying with her all those years without proposing. That was humiliating. Unless all along he wanted her to take him in hand and marry him so he wouldn’t have to decide.”

Felix sits with his knees together and shoulders forward, his body apologizing for having once taken up more than its share of room.

“Bullies want control more than anything,” he says. “Knowing that is the key.”

“To what?”

“Freedom,” he says.

Marilyn has dropped asleep, her face pink from the heat. She’s co-opted my sleeping spot, so I gently punch her biceps. Her eyes fluttering, she springs up and into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. I cover the two couch cushions with a sheet and unzip my sleeping bag into a blanket I tuck around myself.

“Do you think marriage makes a difference?” I ask Felix. “You were married fifteen years. You should know.”

“Only when you’re in love.”

I sleep, but not really. Because Felix’s hand is cupping my heel. I don’t want Felix, yet he wants me. Curiosity trumps anger and my foot freezes. I don’t react. What happens is his responsibility. Fingers trace each toe then the ball, switching back then forward covering each centimeter again and again, charging the foot with
the frail helium heat of a silk balloon. My skin is thick. He can touch me without reaching me.

Then his mouth latches onto the back of my knee, tongue and teeth working my tendon soft. His thumb digs hot circles up my thigh. My face mashes the pillow. I breathe in smells of mold and mouse urine and panic. I can’t think yes or no. It’s my body and a hand and a mouth. I squirm, sweaty, itchy. Even though I don’t want him, I want his desire. Sounds come from Marilyn’s room – a snore, a creak – and I hiss and shove Felix away. He slides right back. In the morning, darkness dissolving, Marilyn bounds awake with a cheer. She slips into her shorts and runners and heads out for her seven miles around Lake Barge. Within minutes Felix has slipped his body over mine. He takes short, audible breaths high in his chest as if to hide his dense, clammy belly and the fatty muscle pads like breasts. His knee nudges my closed legs. “No,” I say. “I won’t.” He doesn’t retreat. I struggle against his flesh and sweat, but he has me pinned, my cheek on the air mattress, its rubber smell clotting my throat. My fists pound his hard, flat buttocks netted with hair. Leaden and slowing, the air clasps my limbs as in a dream. Pachyderm means thick skin. This hurts. A miserable elephant, I don’t matter.

I rally. Saying no should count. He is fifteen years older and my friend. I push but the message stops between my brain and my limbs. The paralysis lies in my cells. My tongue is swollen. I am mute. He’s taking what he needs, like a dog humping my leg. Unable to shake him off, I shut down. Minutes pass – seconds? Felix has on his jeans and golf shirt, and I am crouched, numb, in the claw foot tub scrubbing him off my body with brown water and a hard tab of soap, feeling absent and wronged. The screen door slaps behind Marilyn, and she’s saying “Hop to it!” and “Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er!” I dry off, dress, pack. Sunglasses on, I pretend-sleep on the drive back to the city while Felix and Marilyn talk about writing – writing still! –until I’m getting out at home and the weekend is over. Let me tell you about the story I wrote. ‘Humping’ is how I described what Felix did to me. I wanted you to see him as an animal. But I did consider Felix more of a friend than I show in that story. We’d talked in his car as he drove me back to my apartment after our writers’ group meetings. We admired each other’s work and flattered ourselves that we had talent. My owning up to spending time alone with him other nights might have made you write me off.

Earlier that month, Felix had asked me to stay with him after a meeting. I’d said, “No,” and I’d meant it, though alone in my bed, later, and in the days before the cottage trip, I’d imagined us together. By lying paralyzed that night at Marilyn’s cottage, had I sanctioned what he did to me in the morning? Part of me had liked his hands there, the part that throbs at stories of women perched on men’s knees, square hairy hands on plump breasts, the part that longs to tumble, in a helpless thrall, in the path of a man’s arousal. But that morning, I said what I meant. He didn’t listen, and he didn’t stop. In a story I read recently, a seventeen-year-old girl was fondled by a fifty-year-old man in his car. The girl didn’t want this man but didn’t fend him off. The girl’s inertness stirred and infuriated me. The man’s desire, too. I don’t touch anyone who doesn’t want me to, but last week, at the Carp Motel, I allowed the new man I’m seeing to lay his hands on my throat as my body shimmied, happy and afraid.

“I’m free,” I said.