7. Naked Day

            So, I’m a minor exhibitionist. We’ve established that. But I’ve discovered there’s more to it than bits of semi-public nudity or acts of promiscuity.

It was one of those mornings after a night of sex so good that the after-glow lasts longer than the eventual sleep. I didn’t want to get up. I kicked off the covers and lay naked, feeling the air on my skin, feeling my skin under my hands… Okay I’d have to get up, but I didn’t want to get dressed. I didn’t want the feeling to get smothered under clothes. This is why I own a bajillion sarongs – sometimes real clothes are just too restrictive, but on this day, even that single knot at my hip was too much. Usually the knot is part of the appeal; I have a deep love of restraint, so clothes that remind me of or mimic such things in public are of course, right in my wheelhouse. Not this day. I just couldn’t bring myself to get dressed yet. I sat at my computer just briefly, to check email, and then wondered why sitting at my computer more than just briefly should require clothing of any kind. It didn’t. And I have a pretty cushy desk chair… I declared it Naked Day, and went about the rest of my emails and started in on some writing. Clearly Laundry and Blow Jobs was the thing to be working on, while writing in the nude. The stamp of my nakedness was permanent on everything I wrote; I couldn’t go back and put clothes on words I’d already written, and there was something delicious about that, even if I didn’t remember later which words they had been. Then I got an instant message from a friend. Chatting naked was fun, but it’s not like we were Skyping, so I felt compelled to go ahead and tell her it was Naked Day. She approved (though she couldn’t participate from work). It was the opposite of being partially naked where someone could see me if they looked, but didn’t know to look. She knew full well but couldn’t see. Interesting.

I got a drink from the kitchen. The palm and fingers holding a sweating glass are pretty much always naked, but with the rest of me unclothed as well, I felt it more …clearly. What else would feel different, if I did it naked? Understand that I have always been a walk around the house in my underwear person. I was raised in a family that was not body-shy and spent my summers bathing in a lake with my parents and siblings and cousins, so it has never been uncomfortable. If you live with me, you’re going to see some skin. That isn’t about sex, it’s about convenience and not giving a fuck. This was different. I was making it about sex, like I’d lately done with so many other things. The last time my clothes had been taken off it had been in the throes of rampant physical abandon, and I was carrying that into activities that would have otherwise quenched the lingering sense of it. I couldn’t imagine why I’d never done this, before.

Laundry was the obvious choice to begin with. There is always laundry, and since I’d started writing this whatever-it-is-I’m-writing here, it would forever be linked to and associated with blow jobs, so obviously that was an appeal I couldn’t resist. The best part was folding my husband’s clothes, touching the things I’d seen him put on and take off a thousand times, stacking his T-shirts by color because that’s how he likes it and it makes me feel all housewifey/chore = assignment-ish… No it wasn’t, it was folding the sheets, because you can’t do that without draping them across your body and knowing that they’d been washed because they had been positively soaking with come… No it wasn’t, it was carrying my kid’s stack of folded clothes to his room, because I had to walk in front of the big windows at the front of the house… Hmmm… What other chores happen in view of those windows? The kitchen is right there, so onward to dishes! The dishes were fun because you have to get wet doing them, and wet is, of course, infinitely more interesting while naked. I was not at all careful and might have made a bit more of a mess than was necessary. Then they were finished too quickly so I wiped the counters a bit, since I’d been splashing about so, but it wasn’t the same type of wet that trickles down your body from wrist to elbow to stomach to leg to toes. I decided I could at least gather up all the cans and bottles and rinse them better than I usually do for the recycling. This was nicely wet again, and I got to walk all over the house looking for them, but it was over even faster than the dishes had been. I took them, still dripping, to the kitchen recycling bin and discovered that they filled it up, completely. Now here’s a thing about the way my mind works: Once an idea has popped into it, it’s a done-deal. I can’t not do it. It’s like a rule in the programming of my brain. So the recycling had to go out. Naked.

Now the big, outdoor recycling bin that gets emptied by the trucks every week is only about twenty feet from the front door of my house. Logically, this should be no big deal, or so I kept telling myself. The thing is though, that there’s a big difference between being naked in the back yard at night and naked in the driveway at noon, and believe it or not, it’s not so much about the possibility of being seen. I don’t know the people who live behind me. As I think I’ve mentioned, I like to imagine they can see me while I am outdoors performing whatever blatant sexual activity my husband has bribed me to do (you can get me to do pretty much anything, with the promise of a cigarette), but in my imagination they are grad students from the local university. (Who else would throw parties that loud that go that late?) My neighbors to the front and sides of the house are not my close friends or anything, but I know who they are. I know them enough to know that A) they probably wouldn’t be exactly amused or aroused at the sudden appearance of naked me, and B) it might freak me out a little, if they were. But the thought had been had, so the thing had to be done. So I did it. There are always a lot of glass bottles in my recycling because I drink too much wine, and when – as on this day – the big bin is not very full, they make a tremendous crash when you dump them. I didn’t see anyone as I went out the door, but I didn’t look around really either (because if I did see someone, I wouldn’t be able to pretend I had the slightest regard for their tender sensibilities, and still get my task accomplished), and all I could think about was how jarring that crash of glass would be and how likely to make someone look up. That’s not quite true; I was also thinking about the fact that there are two churches and a synagogue in our immediate vicinity and people who routinely walk to them, not to mention the skateboarders on the next block, the abundance of stroller-pushing mommies and seemingly hundreds of dogs being constantly walked, all people I know enough to wave to. Why did it matter that I knew them at all? Why was it worse that it wasn’t a graphic sexual act??

I refused to rush despite all these fears, and yes the noise was deafening, but I was successful. I didn’t look around, but I didn’t run, and I didn’t cover. I still don’t know if there was a single witness.

And afterwards all I could think about was doing it again.

(Everybody's favorite anthem for disrobing...)