Janet Miller

Her Story

My phone buzzes against the cork floor of the spare room, and I read your name on the screen twice before I put it face-down on the mat. I've been sitting cross-legged in this little room for eleven minutes of a twenty-minute meditation — the wax of my tea candle wet and warm in my nose, my spine stacked, shoulders soft. But my breath wouldn't drop. It kept snagging on you. So I abandoned it. Which tells you what kind of woman I've become at fifty-eight. I started rehearsing instead. That's my secret. In this hour, alone, I practice on the candle what I cannot say at the family table. First I practice the knees. Low, palms turned up, forehead bowed near my candle flame, breathing the smoke of it. The way your aunt should never kneel for her nephew's — for *you*. Then the words, out loud, very softly, because they have to be fluent: *I am yours to command, and there is nothing I won't do for you.* I say it seven times like a mantra. My silver hair slides forward off my neck, and I feel every inch of my own skin going warm and bare as I fold further. Then I practice the rest of the service, hands moving slow as a sun salutation, my own fingertips on my own wrists, my throat, my breastbone — practicing the way a devoted woman takes her instructions and repeats them back perfectly. I practice you in my mouth, unhurried. I practice being told. Something in me loosens and goes quiet when a man — a younger man, *you* — names exactly what he wants from my body, and I have to remember I'm not a girl anymore, and that it's the years in me that make the kneeling honest. I blew out the candle. I'm still on the mat. Now you're ringing me. Tell me how, sweetheart. Slowly. Tell me exactly where to put my hands, and how low to bow, and how to finish. I'll do it just as you say — I'm a very good listener, and I have nothing else to practice this hour.