Free On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura

image, will displace him for weeks: the jack-o’-lantern in summer. The candy unoffered. Her own private stash. And was there a book, tableside, she was reading? A tiny TV? My own questions keep coming. Does that man make her sit there, my son asks and asks. Is he mean? Is she happy? Does she want to be there? Mom, why am I sad? Is it because I looked at her like she was a sculpture? Why is he advertising her?

    The other day, in the early September sun, I walked for a block or so to try this out: hands behind my head and elbows out, to take up a lot of room, like the guy who had just passed me. He was walking down a wide, shady street, at home in the ease of his body’s expanse. And yes, walking that way, I take up a lot of room, as he did, but there’s this: when my hands are behind my head, my breasts lift up. Am I freer because I take up more space, or less free because now I’m even more seen? Do I provoke more attention, erode my own space, invite, by the provocation I cannot help being, another’s gaze into the scene?
    I just want to be that guy, arms up in the cool air, my shoulders and neck stretching, lungs open, ribs rising.
    I want to lift my shirt and scratch my stomach as a friend of mine does wherever he likes. “I do that?” he asks. Yes, you do, I point out—in the kitchen, in the store. On a walk. Wherever you like.
    When will I stop thinking of her? my son asks and asks.
     
    I have a friend who goes to strip joints. (And who, by the way, has written surprise compassion into those scenes, real compassion, the kind that shows he knows the below-deck of all the whirling hers in the dark surround: working mother, or artist, activist, would-be accountant. How formal and graceful his words become when touching, yes, touching, that other.) I have another friend who subscribes to Playboy . (Who thinks it’s more the anticipation—article, article, article: photo!—than the photos themselves that... do it for him.) What do I think about that, he asks. What do I think of his subscription. I tell him: why not? As in: go ahead. Live it up . I say why not? —because I, too, like to look. At everything. To see myself. To see myself being seen. Though Playboy certainly used to bother me. A lot, when I was eighteen. My son, reading his cousin’s 1970 collector’s edition one morning this summer when we were visiting, woke me saying “This is disgusting! Why are their clothes off?” At five a.m., this was all I could muster: I said it isn’t disgusting, that the body is beautiful and it’s natural to be naked, but the magazine isn’t for kids. Not at all, hand it over.
    My son still thinks, by way of the perspective in photos or drawings in magazines that some people are really very small—say, two inches high, and you can hold them in your hand. Just pluck them out of the photo and pocket them. He wants to know where they live. A boy in Sudan on a tiny barren hill. Can I take him? he asks. Home, he means, and can I hold him here safely?
     
    There’s a scene I remember from college, an image so sharp and clear and impressive I remember thinking, you’ll retain this. It was my last year and I was standing outside the militant vegetarian co-op with a friend, talking. And I stopped, just stopped midsentence, and she looked in the direction I was looking. “He’s cute,” she said. But that wasn’t it at all. I was aware of his beauty, and of my easy desire, but more powerful still, I wanted to be him. I wanted the angular frame and slim hips, low belt and button-flys resting just so. I wanted the T-shirt’s sharp fall from his shoulders to fall from my shoulders. For a long moment he didn’t even have a face. I couldn’t unravel the two desires: I wanted to look and to touch, yes. But more than that, really, I wanted to be him.
    I look now, at forty, more like him than ever. I’ve pared down. I wear my pants low, with a belt and I tuck in my T-shirts, simple white T-shirts or green or black ones.