I wasn’t in the mood when he slid his hand up my nightie but I was even less in the mood to argue. I could convince myself to tolerate the ten minutes of faking interest and pleasure. It was the two or three minutes afterward, several minutes of what seemed an eternity that I found almost intolerable, as I waited for him to roll off me. Those few minutes evoked an emotion I couldn’t understand, much less label. Wavering between disgust and surrender, it was the most pervasive feeling of despair. It reminded me of late Uncle Maury and the mole on his left cheek. Looking back, I don’t think the mole bothered me as much as the one, wiry, black hair that protruded from its spongy core. The urge to rip it out mixed with the urge to throw up—knowing I could do neither. Each time he’d say, ‘Come here and give your uncle a kiss’, I would close my eyes in defeat and obediently do as I’d been asked, my stomach turning in time with the heartbeat that pounded in my throat. Now, I lay underneath two-hundred-pounds of sweaty flesh, struggling with those same feelings, the ones I had closed my eyes to hide twenty years ago. The spoken, ‘I love you,’ that I once used to conclude our lovemaking was now replaced with the unspoken, ‘Get off me!’ “Damn baby, that was good.” His words came with exertion.
