My Mother’s Best Friend Taught Me How to Feel

I still don’t know how to explain what happened that afternoon. When I remember it, I have trouble separating shame from desire, because the two came at the same time and stuck to each other. I was eighteen and thought I knew myself. It turned out I didn’t know a thing.

The one who taught me was Renata, my mother’s best friend. They had known each other since their teens, had grown up in the same neighborhood, and to me she had always been a sort of stand-in aunt who showed up for birthdays and stayed late drinking wine in the kitchen. She was almost forty, divorced, childless, and carried that quiet certainty that she would grow old alone. Twenty years separated us. Never, even in my worst bouts of insomnia, would I have imagined what ended up happening between us.

There’s something I have to confess first, because without it none of this makes sense. At eighteen I had never reached the end with anyone. I had gone out with a couple of guys, kisses, clumsy hands in the back seat of a car, but I had never lost my virginity and, what weighed on me even more, I had never felt an orgasm. Not alone, not with someone else. I was starting to believe something in me was broken.

The closest I had ever come was with Tomás, a guy my age, handsome, attentive, one of those who seem to come straight out of a good recommendation. We were alone at his house that afternoon.

—Are you comfortable? —he asked me every two minutes.

—Yes —I lied, even though inside I was anywhere but there.

He sat me on a sofa, knelt between my legs, lifted my skirt with a patience I hadn’t asked for, and began to work his way over me with his tongue, slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. He did everything right. That was the problem. He did everything right and I still kept staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks, waiting for a signal from my own body that never came.

—Tell me what you like —he whispered.

I didn’t know how to answer. I had no idea what I liked. After a long while he sat up, frustrated, and I was more frustrated than he was. Since I didn’t get wet, I wouldn’t let him inside either; I was sure it was going to hurt. That was the last time he called me, and I understood. Nobody wants to waste an afternoon on someone who seems made of stone.

***

I never could talk to my mother about these things. Not because she was mean, but because between us those subjects were covered by a layer of silence neither of us knew how to break. So one day, almost without thinking, I ended up talking about it with Renata.

It was at her apartment, one of those afternoons when my mother had sent her to pick me up and we were left alone waiting for her to get off work. Renata asked me about my life, about boys, with that natural ease of hers that judged nothing, and suddenly I heard myself telling her everything. About Tomás. About the body that didn’t respond. About the fear of being defective.

—You’re not broken —she told me, and she said it with such certainty that I almost believed her—. You’re waiting to feel safe. Those are different things.

After that afternoon we saw each other more and more often. Renata became my refuge. She bought me books, recommended readings, sent me people to follow, talked to me about pleasure the way someone talks about the weather, without solemnity and without sleaze. And I, who had never had anyone to tell my fantasies to, began telling them to her. All of them. No filters, no taboos, certain that nothing was wrong with her.

What I didn’t realize was that those conversations were changing her too.

She confessed it to me much later, when there was nothing left to hide. That those afternoons had stirred things she thought were buried. That at nearly forty, divorced and resigned, she had begun to suspect that maybe her path lay beside another woman. What she never imagined was that that woman would be an eighteen-year-old girl. Her best friend’s daughter.

***

Words carry a weight one doesn’t measure. I told her my fantasies without realizing that, in doing so, I was planting them in her too. And in the loneliness of my room at night, I began to notice that when I remembered the things Renata had told me, the body that had never responded started to respond. Barely, like a murmur. But it was there.

Later I found out the same was happening to her. That she imagined me naked. That she remembered the times we had gone to the pool together, or that afternoon when I went with her to buy underwear and she, without my noticing, looked at me more than she should have. Her fantasies were broader than mine, more detailed, full of things I didn’t even know how to name. The experience I lacked, she had in excess.

What happened that day we didn’t talk about or plan. It had simply been imagined so many times that it already seemed to have happened.

Renata had texted me that afternoon. A silly question, whether my mother had gotten home yet. I told her no, that I was alone, that she wouldn’t be back until night.

—I’m on my way —she replied.

Three words. I read them and my mouth went dry. Something in the way she wrote them told me she wasn’t coming to drink tea.

***

I opened the door for her and there was no greeting. She kissed me before I could say hello, and I kissed her back as if I had been practicing all my life. It wasn’t a soft kiss. It was the kind that exacts payment for weeks of waiting, hands searching under clothes, without permission because neither of us needed it.

—Wait —I managed to say, breathless.

—No —she answered against my neck, and she was right.

We went up the stairs stumbling, laughing and breathing hard at the same time. We kept taking our clothes off along the way, one garment on each step, as if leaving a trail behind us. By the time we reached my room there was almost nothing left to take off. I didn’t feel even a hint of the shame I had felt with Tomás. With him I had hidden. With her I didn’t want to hide a thing.

Renata pushed me gently onto the bed and stood there for a second, looking at me, taking me in with her eyes before her hands.

—Easy —she said—. You don’t have to do anything. Today you just feel.

And for the first time in my life I obeyed my body instead of my head.

She started with my mouth, moved down my neck, stopped at my breasts with a slowness that made me arch my back without meaning to. Every thing she did she accompanied with her voice, asking me in a low tone what I felt, just like Tomás that afternoon, but this time I had answers. This time the body spoke before I did.

—There —I asked, and I didn’t recognize my own voice—. Renata, please, there.

She went down between my legs and when her tongue found my clit I thought I was going to cry from sheer relief. It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t waiting, it wasn’t the ceiling full of cracks. It was something growing from inside me and spreading like a current, slow at first, then unstoppable. I pressed my breasts with my hands, felt my whole body tightening toward a single point, and at last, for the first time, I knew what I had been looking for all those years.

The moans slipped out of me before I could hold them back. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I was discovering that I wasn’t broken, that I never had been, that I had only needed this place, this person, this certainty of being safe.

—Look at me —Renata asked from below, and I opened my eyes and looked at her, and that made it even stronger.

So strong that neither of us heard the car in the driveway. Nor the key in the lock. Nor the footsteps on the stairs, which we later learned had been quick because my mother had been following the sounds from downstairs.

The bedroom door flew open.

And there she was.

Time split in two. Renata still between my legs, me still shaking, both of us frozen in an image my mother would never be able to erase. Her face went from confusion to fury in less than a second.

—How is this possible? —her voice was barely a thread, worse than a shout—. I suspected it. So many calls, so many meetups. Since when? Since when have you been doing this?

No one answered her. Renata slowly sat up, looking for something to cover herself with, and I curled up against the wall, my heart still pounding for two reasons I no longer knew how to separate.

And that’s the most confusing part of all. Because that night I should have felt only shame. The shame of my mother discovering the relationship I had been having for weeks with her childhood friend, a woman twenty years older than me. And I did feel it, of course I felt it.

But beneath the shame, stubborn, impossible to snuff out, something else was still beating. The certainty that my body was finally working. That something in me had awakened and didn’t intend to go back to sleep. That whatever happened with my mother, with Renata, with everything that was coming, I was no longer the same broken girl counting cracks in the ceiling.

I still don’t know how to explain what happened that afternoon. But if I learned anything, it’s that desire doesn’t understand plans, or ages, or who should feel it for whom. It arrives when one feels safe. And mine came at the worst possible moment, in the wrong arms, in the most forbidden way. And even so, I wouldn’t change it for anything.