“Where’s the other instructor, the boy?” Renee said. It was day one of Women’s Wellness Camp, which Renee had embarked upon in hopes of having a young man’s hands on her body, even if it was for some instructive purpose like correcting her stroke, but the firm young college student she’d envisioned teaching her to kayak—the one she’d seen, in fact, on the website and knew to be real—was not to be found on the dock.
“The boy?” said the instructor, a woman in her seventies, face stiff with amusement, legs sun-browned, scratched up with the sorts of old wounds that served as evidence of life rather pointedly well lived. “We don’t employ children. Anyway, you got me.”
“The website showed a picture of a boy,” Renee insisted. “A young man. And the kayak instructor listed on the staff page is Ralph.”
“Well, maybe I’m Ralph,” the woman in her seventies said mysteriously. “Your Ralph.” She gave a little jerk of her head as she said it, as if to heighten the ridiculousness of anyone of Renee’s age and station seeking access to the world’s Ralphs. “All right, grab your oar.”
“You mean paddle?”
“Call it anything you want, princess. Call it Ralph.”
Renee had suffered the usual love story: boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy impregnates girl, twice, boy makes girl take teaching job in the suburbs, giving up her various passions—poetry writing among them—to pay her share for a house the bank would own for the next thirty years, and, when girl starts heading round the bend toward fifty, boy leaves girl, by now clearly well past girlhood. He leaves her for—no surprises here—a girl: twenty-six, basically a child, breathless, whipper-snappery, good at whatever nonsense tech-industry job the universe offers that sort of person.
Not that Renee minded much. She was sick of the boy, the man, she might as well call him now, also nearing fifty.
She’d seen him since in spandex, zipping through the streets of their old neighborhood on a racing bike. He’d tapped two gloved fingers on the window of her Subaru as he passed—a kiss-off or a wave, she could decide. He’d been tagged in hiking shots on Facebook that still appeared on her feed, holding up cardboard signs and pointing at the elevation with a quizzical “Am I really here?” expression. Apparently, he was hitting all the high points in the country. Apparently, this had always been his dream. Apparently, he’d had many dreams. Skydiving. Technical climbing. Sex with a woman who could be his daughter.
He was living—no one could argue with this, not even Renee—his best life.
This Women’s Wellness camp, pitched to her by a neighborhood housewife she recognized from years of dog park visits and youth soccer sidelines and whose name, she supposed, she might as well learn, had seemed to Renee like a way to begin living hers.
Though it was getting off to a bit of a rough start.
“The kayak instructor is a disappointment,” she reported during evening activities. She and her bunkmates had chosen Body-Positive Papier-Mâché, which, with the help of wine they’d concealed in their water bottles, was becoming lively. “Do yourselves a favor and avoid her.”
“I tried Archery,” said Evelyn, a large woman who required machinery to sleep. “No complaints. You should have seen the hottie who helped me with my grip. Ralph, I think he said his name was?”
“Ralph?” Renee set down her newspaper stack. “I was looking for Ralph. I need Ralph.”
“We all need Ralph.” Evelyn tugged her shirt over her head and began wrapping sodden paper strips around one arm.
It was the second time that day Renee had seen Evelyn remove her shirt. Earlier, while Renee was driving their group carpool to camp, Evelyn had flashed a couple of truckers on the highway from the backseat. Renee had never been a boob flasher, or friends with boob flashers, wet T-shirt contest participants, even bikini wearers. She had always known better, and so had her sensible friends. Yet the reaction of the truckers—who had cheered and applauded, tapping at their horn—struck her as sweet, nearly heroic. Who were these kind men, these Galahads, ensuring no middle-aged woman’s random highway flashing went unappreciated, keeping the old myths alive for no reason now beyond tact?
“Claim your body,” the young instructor urged Renee, who had not yet gotten started. “It’s yours, right? So, celebrate it! Make art with it!”
“I feel like doing a tit,” Renee said.
“Or you could do an elbow. A foot is easy.” Concern creased the instructor’s brow.
“You should absolutely do a tit,” Evelyn said. “Body positive!”
“Body positive!” the rest of them sang out tipsily, Renee among them.
It was a joke. Women’s wellness was a joke. Look around: these were the unhealthiest women Renee had seen in her life! They had so little to show for their time spent on Earth. But did Renee kid herself she was different? For what had she lived? She—they all—had given everything to their families. They had spent themselves. Had anyone asked them to? Had they thought there was something else they were getting?
But this was old thinking. She could take a page from Evelyn’s playbook. Live bigger. Make more of a splash. She unbuttoned her shirt.
“Well, you ladies are certainly going for it!” The counselor tried not to look at Renee’s plastered tit, the papier-mâché almost dry enough to peel.
“That’s how we do things!” Renee responded.
“Body positive!” added Jackie, a densely packed woman with a frozen shoulder. She slugged wine from her water bottle, making no effort now to hide it from the counselor.
“There,” Renee said suddenly.
All of them, including the counselor, turned to look.
“That’s Ralph.”
It was indeed the same young man she’d seen featured in the camp catalogue: tall, with the broad shoulders of myth and romance paperbacks, not that she read that kind of crap. But that was where fantasy broke down. He was rather more puffy than muscular, as if he’d been fed a diet of exclusively processed carbs, or as if he’d been a football player once but hadn’t kept up the workouts. He had a goofy smile, ears that stuck out, a bit like her younger daughters’. She put that disturbing detail away. Yet there was a brightness about him, the sheen of youth and vigor. He was a man, after all, a young man, one who had made himself available this weekend to the cause of women and wellness.
He would do.
Ralph tested the mic. “Hello, hello?” he said. “So I’m Ralph?”
“Hi Ralph!” someone who was not Renee but might as well have been screamed.
He began reading announcements in a shy, jokey way. The women, mostly obedient up to that point, arranged compliantly into their various activity groups, their knitting clusters and story-telling klatches, their acupuncture and meditation circles, began to show signs of restlessness, of edgy, raucous energy. “We love you, Ralph!” another woman shouted. Two or three women whistled.
Am I no different from these others, Renee wondered? Yet she found herself cheering with the rest, swept up in the giddiness, the emerging hysteria.
“So, a couple more announcements?” Cheers and whistles drowned out Ralph’s next words.
“This is a little too much reality for him, isn’t it?” Jackie said. “He has no idea what he’s in for.”
Reality? Renee thought. No idea of what? The extent to which women let themselves go, become hooting, cawing barn animals for whom sexuality is an absurd performance? As if this descent into invisibility, into not mattering at all, were somehow preordained, no help or hope for it—this was just how it was?
“Yeah, the poor boy is frightened of us,” Evelyn agreed. “Good Lord. He will be devoured.”
He did look frightened, a smile glued to his lips, hands all but useless at his sides.
Renee could think of a few things he could do with those hands. Twenty minutes with Ralph in a boathouse. That’s all she needed. That’s all she needed in the world. “What’s he teaching tomorrow?” she demanded of the body-positive papier-mâché instructor, her plastered tit pointing at the woman like a pistol. “Find out.”
The next morning, day two, Renee sought Ralph at Archery. Instead she found the seventy-something-year-old woman, the same one from the day before. Sunlight caught her chin whiskers.
“Well, look who it is,” the woman said. “We must stop meeting like this.” She laughed at Renee’s expression. “Here, grab yourself a bow and some arrows.”
“I thought you were the kayak expert.”
“The kayak expert.” She gave Renee an unpleasant I-see-you smile. “We all do everything here. I thought you were here to broaden your horizons.”
“That is why I’m here,” Renee said, suddenly confused. “At Archery. Learning to arch.” It was meant as a joke. Word play.
“To arch?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think I want to see that.”
Well, what the hell was that? Renee thought. “So,” she said, “this is called a… what, exactly?” Maybe she could cover her embarrassment at the minefield of accidental sexual banter she may or may not have stumbled into with technical questions.
“A bow?”
“Sure, but aren’t there different kinds?”
“Yes. I see you really know your stuff. We call this kind plastic.” She pronounced it like a foreign word.
“But the style—”
“How about less talk and get those arrows flying, Katniss?”
“OK, Archery sucked,” Renee told her bunkmates at lunch. She felt bruised after her morning session with the seventy-year-old. Every interaction with the woman abraded. It was as if the woman knew her thoughts, her fantasies even, and had deliberately thrust herself in fate’s path. She was bruised physically, too, the skin along her forearm red and swollen where the string had slapped it with each arrow’s release. She blew on it softly.
“That’s not supposed to happen. Your instructor really did suck. Mine put his arms around me.” Evelyn laughed.
“Mine didn’t,” Renee said. “Thank God. Though I wouldn’t mind a tussle with yours. Honestly, all I wanted from this experience is a man’s hands on me.”
It was a mistake to admit this.
“Wait, what? You came to Women’s Wellness to hook up? And you’re not gay.”
“Well, of course it sounds insane when you put it like that,” Renee said. “You should visit my mind. It all makes sense there. There was that cute picture of Ralph doing kayak lessons on the website?”
“Was there?” Jackie made a face. “I’m just in it for a break from home. No cooking, cleaning up after people, driving to practices. And fresh air. But mostly no cooking.” She gave Renee an appraising look. “You do know he’s a kid, right?”
“Of course he’s a kid!” Renee said. And then she scurried over to the program assistant to check the master schedule and pin down with certainty his assignment for the next session.
She wasn’t going to do anything, after all. She wasn’t a predator. And he wasn’t a kid, strictly speaking. He had to be at least twenty-one. She just wanted to feel something. To be gazed upon. Seen. She wanted the brush of this kid’s skin on her skin. Just a hand. Even an elbow. She would take an elbow!
The whole thing was foolish, Renee thought a quarter of an hour later, as she headed to the docks. Unless maybe it wasn’t. She could get lucky and end up in a two-person kayak with Ralph. She could get lucky, period. She believed in luck, the same way she believed in lust, that edge of insatiability that made her feel restless and hungry, not just living but alive, never mind her aging face, the knee just then giving her pain. Never mind the way, as she crested the hill and approached the waterfront, lit to sparkles by the sun just beginning its descent, she limped.
“Where’s the instructor?” she asked a top-heavy woman, hair clawed back in a pink scrunchy.
“Boathouse.”
“Which instructor is it?” Renee asked, suspicious, but the woman only shrugged.
The instructor’s back was turned to Renee when she entered the shack. A gladness sprung up in her at the sight of the bent figure, baseball capped, broad shouldered, well-fleshed backside on display. A sense of all being right with the universe. “Hello!” she said mellifluously.
The instructor pivoted. The body Renee had been ogling turned out not to be that of Ralph but of the seventy-fucking-year-old woman. Again.
The woman’s smile died as she recognized Renee. “Looks like I have a fan.”
“You were scheduled for Archery.” Renee trailed her out of the shack. She was disconcerted at the fullness and apparent tautness of the older woman’s haunches. By the way she’d gazed at them.
“Was I? Well, I’m here now.”
“But you’re scheduled for Archery. Archery,” Renee insisted, as if arguing could undo reality.
The woman stopped. “There is something really off about you.” Her tone caused the woman in the scrunchy to turn and watch.
No, you’re off, Renee wanted to say. But the moment felt charged, menacing. She was being looked at like she was the menace. Which was ridiculous! But she had been gazing at the woman’s haunches. She’d let out that mellifluous hello.
“I’ll leave,” Renee said, and she did.
She would do no further sessions for the remainder of the day, she decided. She would lay low in the cabin, and later take her journal to the waterfront and write poetry. A thing she hadn’t done in forever! She would write toward poetry, anyway, letting all the nonsense that was her life find form in words and be released, leaving behind wisdom and profundity of universal appeal, ideally in the form of a few lines of credible verse, which she would then publish in a small but respectable journal, to be followed in subsequent weeks by other similar pieces, which eventually she would collect into a chapbook and which would win a prize, a big one, freeing her from the irritating portions of her life and the necessity of further employment. Fantasy, of course, but an enjoyable one, and harmless, as the Ralph fantasy was harmless. Not a sign that she was off in some damning and fundamental way.
Afternoon, at length, arrived. She found a flat rock jutting out into the reed-ringed lake. There, all but hidden from view, she wrote. She had filled half a notebook page with ramblings—they began with a list of medical and dental appointments she and her children would need to get done before summer, to avoid filling summer with medical and dental appointments—for children who did literally nothing they led packed and complicated lives—but her thoughts circled back to her last encounter with the woman. While at first it had seemed as if the woman were thrusting herself in Renee’s path with intention, she had to admit it must seem—at least to the woman—the opposite: as if Renee were pursuing the woman. Stalking her!
And what if she were?
The question snaked into her thoughts innocently enough. But how had it gotten there? What if she—Renee—were stalking this poor woman? What if Renee were crazy—cracked! And dangerous?
Absurd!
Breathe, she told herself, calming herself. Breathe it out.
She was doing this, allowing her vision to blur comfortably, when the tip of a red kayak nosed into view, close enough, if she reached forward, to touch.
It could be him. It could.
And so she leaned forward. That’s what she was doing—leaning forward on hands and knees, reaching—when the kayak eased forward like something she’d manifested, and it was not Ralph but the old woman in the kayak, her face not three feet from Renee’s. Looking at her.
They both held their breath like that, their bodies frozen. The woman’s face was slack with surprise. At some point she closed her mouth. Renee heard the sound of her teeth clack together. She might have heard her swallow.
Then the kayak was gone.
Released, Renee threw herself backward. The moment had been excruciating. Of course the woman had not sought Renee, any more than Renee had sought the woman. But would the woman think Renee had sought her? Had that been the reason the woman hadn’t spoken? Was it fear? Terror, even? Of her, Renee?
She thought of the slackness of the woman’s expression. That had been the most unnerving thing of all. Had Renee caused her to have a stroke?
Renee half ran back to the cabin, careful to keep a calm, bemused expression on her face, despite her jack-rabbiting heart. Inside, she forced herself to stretch out on her cot, under the covers, and she lay there for minutes, panting, a cold feeling in her bowels. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she had a virus. Could she be accused of stalking? Could she be prosecuted? It didn’t at that point seem farfetched.
She hid out for the remainder of the evening.
Sleep, that night, was difficult. They had once again drunk wine, and Renee, having skipped dinner, found herself beached on a sandbar of wakefulness. Evelyn’s sleep machinery whirred gratingly. Still, Renee resisted the impulse to go out for a night walk, as much as she craved fresh air, black open sky, the possibility of stars. As if she would take such a risk! She’d probably end up entangled with the old woman, who would undoubtedly also be out for a night walk. She’d probably inadvertently assault her. The thing would end with Renee in prison, maybe for murder!
Never mind: the weekend was almost over, and then Renee was going home. It was spring. Summer would come. A few weeks of lessons, then freedom. Ten more years of that and she might begin to think of retirement. She would endure a few more chance sightings of her ex in spandex on neighborhood streets. She’d see him at the occasional occasion: a wedding, a graduation. Life would continue, a daily struggle to maintain appearances, to keep her children fed and reasonably educated and seen to for the waning years of her influence over them. She would also try to keep some part of herself alive, some desperate, edgy part. Call it hunger. Call it lust. It didn’t matter what you called it. She would try to remember what it was like to want someone, to want to matter.
That’s what she would be nostalgic for: wanting.
As she looked around her table in the cafeteria the next morning—day three, the final day—she felt the heaviness of her impending return. They all felt it. Conversation faltered all around the large room, among the two hundred or so middle-aged campers. The light was too bright, everyone’s face puffy or tired. They all looked old. There was no sign of the seventy-something-year-old woman, at least. Renee thanked the universe for that.
“Grab a granola bar for the road, OK? And fill out a survey? To say whether you had a good time? And what we might improve on? For, like, next time?” one of the impossibly young instructors was saying. “Oh, wait, hang on, everyone…”
Ralph was approaching the mic. Sweet, puffy, jug-eared Ralph. Elusive Ralph. No one screamed at his appearance, reality all too well set in, yet still the sight of him buoyed Renee’s spirits in some way. He carried an armload of stiff white swells with tattered edges. Packing supplies? Trash?
“What the hell is that?” Jackie said.
“Oh, no,” said Evelyn, clutching Renee’s wrist. “No. No.”
And then they all knew.
“Um? We have some… I think they’re body parts to give back? This one says…” He held up an enormous hump of papier-mâché, turning it over in search of a name. “Evelyn!”
“Fuck me,” Evelyn whispered, then trudged to the front of the cafeteria to claim her misshapen shoulder. It seemed like it took about a quarter of an hour for her to cross the floor and return. She stuffed the shoulder under her chair without looking at it. “The fuck was I thinking.”
“No, it’s great,” Renee said, suddenly shaky with laughter, sick with it. “A living room piece?”
Evelyn flashed her the finger.
“And, hmm, what could this be? Let’s see….” Ralph and the young woman sorted through the discarded parts. A couple of pieces thudded to the floor.
“Do not touch my tit,” Renee muttered. “Do not.”
“Body positive!” cackled Jackie.
And then they were all laughing, the bunch of them.
“Renee!” Ralph smiled, brandishing Renee’s plaster tit like a prize. “Come get it! This is a… Wait, what is this?” He turned it over in his hands.
“A man’s hands,” Evelyn snorted through tears. “A man’s fucking hands.”
“Oh,” said Renee. “Well, fuck.” Then she rose and straightened her shoulders and went to him, went sauntering, as flushed and fluttery as if she’d done it, as if she’d cornered the boy in the boathouse and he were holding the real thing.
Winner 2024 EROTIC Contest: Fiction
On Schemmel’s story, judge Bojan Louis writes, “This story expertly builds and maintains tension via the humorous exploits of a middle-aged character’s desire. While skirting elements of romantic comedy the characters of ‘Women’s Wellness’ are all aware that sex, intimacy, and the erotic might be well beyond their grasp, but despite that knowledge they persevere in their search to be touched and to be seen.”
Ruth Schemmel’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, swamp pink, Fiction, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Orleans Review. She received a 2022 Jack Straw writing fellowship and a Pushcart nomination for a ghost story. A former Peace Corps volunteer and current community college instructor, she has taught English learners in Ukraine, the Bronx, and the Seattle area, where she lives with her family.