Massaging Back to Beautiful

“There are road bumps on the outsides of my thighs. I can’t recognize myself,” I say to Abie. “I was beautiful once.”
“You still are and you’re always beautiful to me,” he says without looking up from his magazine. He collects Men’s Health, but he doesn’t look any different.

I stand in the door way with my hands on my hips. “I don’t want to be beautiful to you. I want to be beautiful. I was an actress once. And I’ve lost it.” I lean over the brown mottled dressing room counter and put my head in my hands, my hair hangs over my face and chest.

“C’mere.” Abie says.
“What’s the point,” I say, “and don’t answer that.” He has a one-track mind. Sometimes I think he’s my male counterpart, until he makes one of his puckered-ass red-neck comments.
“It says here fat massages can speed up fat loss by thirty percent. Breaks down and helps metabolize cellulite. I kid you not. I’ve got my master’s remember?”
“You don’t have your masters.”
“Well I took masters courses. Pre-med. So you game or not?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m game.”

And that’s when Abie began those nightly massages, using the edges of his hands like a deba bocho and then his two hands to grab and wring out fat like the old clothes wringer machine that stood in the screened veranda in our Lake Alverna country house. I didn’t mind because I was getting my body back and coming into my own again. Course he’d try to slip a finger or two up my cunt and I’d get really pissed off, but meanwhile he was getting all turned on so when he finished, I’d give it to him anyway. I wanted to shine in the sun again. One day, he came home with these red steel sandals─“Put your running shoes on and these over, see, and then you do those kick outs and all that shit from the Twenty Minute Workout. And if you want to take off your clothes, you can.”

I’m still in my Clearwater nudist mode, so I slap on those five-pound sandals over my hiking boots and do kick-outs, twenty to each side and twenty to the back. Abie reads his magazines with his eyebrows arched like kid’s rendition of a bird flying, his lids lowered and glasses slipping like jeans below the hips. I have to hand it to the man, even when we come home late after a flick or a fight, he’s there pulling my flesh. I’m getting my body back, hopes of youth antd joy, sweetness and dreams─my skin’s going to shimmer stars in the daylight and glow hot as a mid-day summer sun at night.