From the age of four to eleven I was tickled 2,152 times by twenty-five different women. Mostly by babysitters. Payed women contracted for a specific service:
To ensure bodily and psychiatric well-being of said child, supra, pursuant to codified parental instructions, dietary and bedtime strictures. Discrepancies being such as to null contract, all employment being contracted on a per diem and at-will basis, immutable by any parties or writ except said parents, supra.
Thankfully during these unsolicited tickles I left consciousness approaching the more intense consummation. I’d awake in a variety of locations—the stair landing, for one—and positions. Sometimes in bed, hearing my parents enter through the garage, home from their department dinner or theatre. She reading in the den with a named I confused with Lasagna (what we ate on Tuesdays).
I locked myself in the bathroom twelve times. Ten with babysitters. From the seventh lock-in on I adroitly buttered the external knob with margarine. Their soft, perfumed hands slipped instantly from the knob. One girl’s father was a volunteer fire fighter. An incident best forgotten.
I found in the trashcan a soiled tampon hidden among unconvincing and freshly crumpled toilet paper. Removing the covert item, I hide the brown tampon in her teal Jansport resting near our vestibule.
She’d tell my parents, “He’s tired out; I put him to bed,” while ice cracked in Dad’s nightcap. I’d descend the stairs with pajamed feet, relaying how I was tickled into a sweaty confusion, finding myself riding sheets and pillows not of my own choosing. Of course, I’d be rebuked for leaving bed, embarrass the sitter by heralding her dereliction and would be tickled worse next Friday under her care. Vindication for my outing her deficiencies. I choose to remain clement, awake in bed allowing them, collectively, to maintain the reality they desired.
The room warmed and her perfume intensified. The carpet smells fuzzy. I brown-in and exist in the kitchen. We make butterscotch sundaes with my sister. She lets me add marshmallows, me promising to brush extra well. My sister eats her sundae. Our babysitter made her sundae last, shoveling Neapolitan with a large scoop while I scraped butterscotch from my dish. She can’t find a spoon.
“Must all be in the wash,” she shrugs, having loaded the dishwasher earlier, “I’ll use yours.” She collects the spoon from my hand and I wait for her to rinse and wipe it. The used spoon, in her control, travels from my grasp directly into her own dish. Stabbing Neapolitan, she smiles, her eyebrows ascend, and she pulls a bite from the spoon between her estrus lips.
“It’s good,” she says.
I look at my knuckles—my sister’s hands still larger than mine—and pine for hirsute fingers like Dad. She continues using my spoon and my hands embarrass me, their lack of form and texturelessness: no hair, scares, veins, calluses, no dirt.
Like the back of my hand, people claim. There’s nothing to know and I must know nothing, I deduce, taciturn in my chair.
