He thought I was sexy. Funny. Fun. Interesting. I assumed that growing up in Turkey and studying engineering hadn’t offered him much opportunity to meet lots of women. I felt a bit guilty—but mainly grateful—for that.

He was from a highly educated and sophisticated secular Muslim Turkish family; he’d come to the United States to earn his PhD from MIT. I’m a first-generation born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, American daughter of Orthodox-Jewish European Holocaust survivors on both sides. I graduated from Brooklyn College—a first-generation college graduate, back when Brooklyn was not the coolest borough in the world.

Thirty years later, my skin is sagging, my former triathlete body is showing signs of wear and tear. Thanks to COVID, I’m exposed as never before. During the pandemic we’ve been alone in our little house on a hill, a hodgepodge of menorahs and mezuzahs, silk rugs and complicated tiered teapots, ornate exotic cups and saucers. We’ve spent more time together in the last eighteen months than we probably have all our married lives. The folds on my neck, the spots and creases on my face and hands, the loosening flesh on my still reasonably toned arms, are on constant and full display. I try to laugh it off, take it in stride, but those deep-set heavy-lidded eyes that look back at me from the mirror, along with those endless, somehow judgmental, advertisements for creams, ointments, lotions and potions that I spend far too large swaths of time contemplating, feed my growing concerns. Words like atrophy, brittle, and deterioration replace lithe, supple, and elastic in my medical charts. I have medical charts.

But those masks. I love the masks. Sure, they guard against health risks. But they also hide drooping skin and sagging jowls. At least that’s what I hoped.

I was abruptly relieved of that misapprehension when a fit young man came to look at our bathrooms in anticipation of a long-avoided but badly needed makeover. I felt old familiar stirrings as I admired his broad shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist visible even under his loose T-shirt. I adjusted my mask and sat down to consult with our potential contractor.

His opening gambit: “I’m going to talk to you like you’re my mother.”

From sixty to zero, just like that. My accelerating heart, my fizzing blood. Flatlined.

Sitting at the table across from me, my handsome, still-with-a-full-head-of-hair husband raised a thick salt and pepper eyebrow. His eyes were bright, his smile evident even under his black mask, which only added to his already well-established piratical allure. I shrugged. “Can I get you some milk and cookies, then, before we begin?”

Still, at night, every night, my husband falls asleep with his hand cupped around my breast. He comments that he’s amazed at how they’ve filled out over the years. I wriggle my legs between his. Eventually we separate to deep, full sleep; in the morning we greet each other again. He immediately reaches for me, sighing in what I recognize as contentment. I run to the bathroom and brush my morning breath away, so I can talk to him face to face. He’ll ask about a spot on my face that he hadn’t noticed before. I inquire about his back, if the new office chair is an improvement. After a while, he jumps up, yes, he jumps, to make us coffee. It’s well known that I’m useless before coffee. We sit side by side perusing the morning papers, sipping our drinks, smearing avocado onto our toast. At some point we go to our separate home offices. We graze in the kitchen during the day, occasionally meeting. More often not. At night we regroup in the living room, me on my couch, him in his chair.

Between surges, there was the rare social, and socially-distanced, event. One of those was a girlfriend’s birthday party. A bunch of late-middle-aged women, if sixty-something is still middle-aged, sat around and imbibed, laughed, and nibbled. Naturally, as it does, the talk turned to sex. More specifically, to vibrators. Anecdotes and mishaps. I shrank, uncharacteristically, into my seat.

Am I the only woman who has never used one? As sexually enthusiastic as I consider myself to be, I’m also, perhaps strangely, I thought now, conventional. What goes on in my bedroom, or living room, kitchen, den, dining room, bathroom, backyard, stays there. Intimacy is that. Intimate. It’s not anything that involved mechanical or electrical assists.

It wasn’t too late. Or was it? No. No. It wasn’t something I needed to introduce into my life. Not now. Probably never.

I began casually. “Oh, that party I went to? All the women talked about their vibrators.”

“Tell me more,” he says. “Tell me all about it.” He wipes the hair off my heated face.

One week later, he’s playing chess, I’m doing killer sudoku. We’re both on our phones, half paying attention to an English mystery streaming on our large screen television. I hear a car in our driveway, then the newly familiar thump of a package landing on the mat. I’m pretty sure I haven’t ordered anything. While I verify that on my phone, my husband abandons his chess game to answer the door. I resume my game. A few seconds later he hands me a deep pink, but tasteful, box. His eyebrow is doing that lifting thing that it does. His smile is subtle, his eyes are warm and open.

I study the packaging. “You bought me a vibrator?”

He shifts his weight from foot to foot. He’s shimmering in the soft blue TV glow.

“You bought me a vibrator.” No question this time.

“Designed by MIT girls,” he says. Like it’s icing on a cake.

Heat rises from my center to my face. My fingers are tingling. From zero to sixty, just like that.

-Simi Monheit

Simi Monheit has been writing for the last ten years, after switching from a tech career in Silicon Valley. Her work has appeared in Moment, Chautauqua, The Forward, and Jewishfiction.net. She has been featured on KQED’s Perspectives. In 2020, she was a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2021, her short story won tenth place in the Mainstream/Literary category of the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition.