The Stud Book

Sarah’s cell phone sang in her pocket. Her hands were numb with cold. When she answered, Nyla said, her voice a susurrant whisper, “I don’t think Georgie’s doing too well.”

The zoo’s air was filled with the scent of cinnamon and grease—the “elephant ears” cart workers had started making their daily sweet fry bread—and Sarah felt that disconnect of being close and far away at the same time, a friend’s voice in her ear, the news crew blocking her view. She had the pacifier laced around her index finger. Absentmindedly, she tapped its rubber nipple against her cheek.

“You saw Georgie? I can’t get her to call me back.” Yes, it was a selfish hand that tightened down against her heart, but she, Sarah, was meant to be first in line to see the baby. She would know how Georgie was adjusting—her oldest friend, her friend from Lincoln High! Her friend who’d never moved away.

Portland had, for a while twenty years earlier, been low on young people. Portland, Oregon, you had to say, because somehow even the tiny spot of Portland, Maine, loomed larger.

When they were right out of high school there was a small crew of downtown club kids, so small it was easy to think you knew them all. It was a tiny scene with a big, weird social pressure to say, Yeah, I’m heading to LA soon. Or you could say SF, or maybe San Fran. You might say, A friend invited me down. Maybe you’d really go. Sarah and Georgie didn’t even pretend.

Georgie’s own mom had left back then, moved out of town like some kind of runaway—a runaway mother nobody went looking for.

Those years mattered! Sarah and Georgie rode clunker Goodwill bikes on streets that emptied out after dark and drank in dive bars where nobody asked their age. They colonized the old-man bars, laid the foundation for generations of hipsters who’d come along since. They drank at Satyricon, and saw Poison Idea and even Nirvana before Cobain really made it.

Portland’s last bastion of the permissive West died when they closed Satyricon’s punk rock doors. The club reopened for a while, under the same name, but it was thin and watered-down. It was in the original version where Sarah and Georgie saw Courtney Love in the bathroom, where they dodged a flying bottle when someone—Courtney?—flung it. It was definitely Courtney’s hand in the mythology of their shared memory. Even when they went to college, they only went to Portland State University, a commuter school downtown.

Now the dollar theaters were six dollars and all parking was metered.

Nyla and Dulcet were native Portlanders, too, though from the east side of the river. Grant High School. Sarah had known them almost twenty years—a long time, yes, but still she knew Georgie first.

She pressed the phone to her ear. “In what way isn’t she adjusting?” Her words came out through a tight jaw.

Nyla whispered, “She’s in the bedroom.”

“Georgie invited you over?” Sarah’s voice caught as she said it. She spun the pacifier on her hand, as a way to keep from shaking. The TV crew started rolling up their cables.

Nyla said, “We dropped in.”

We?

“You and who else?” Her voice cracked and her throat was raw, as though an alchemy of grief, jealousy, and guilt flourished in the onset of a sudden virus.

“Dulcet,” Nyla said.

Of course.

“She gave Dulcet all her painkillers.”

Dulcet would love that, Sarah thought. It wasn’t that Sarah wanted painkillers. She just wanted to be first in line for the offer, for any offer, from her friend.

She kept in check an urge to slide the pacifier into her own mouth.

Across the grounds Dale, the zoo vet, made a lazy S curve down the asphalt paths on his mountain bike. His jacket said zoo VET in white letters big enough to read across a stadium. He wore shorts all winter. He had an Oregon tan, which is to say no tan at all but the pink flush of bare skin working hard in a cold rain. His muscles shifted with the effort of an incline. He was a specialist in cardiovascular fitness and circulatory systems, and believed in constant motion. Sarah said, “Is she adorable?”

Nyla asked. “Georgie? She’s worn out.”

“I mean the baby. Of course the baby’s cute.” Cuteness in infant mammals is a survival skill. Sarah imagined a cross between Georgie, Humble, and little Lucy, the newborn man-ape.

Sarah had met Humble before Georgie did, years ago. They’d gone on what might be called one date. Back then, Humble drove a worn old Mercedes, and he coddled it. Sarah had her dog with her, Shadow, a cuddly new puppy that smelled like summer sun. They’d met up for a beer in the park. Late at night, after dark, he offered her a ride home, but it had pained him to allow her pup in his car. He couldn’t hide it.

That was the dividing line: How could she date a guy who begrudged her dear dog-baby?

Ben moved in with Sarah. He loved Shadow from the start! Now the dog was their aged and pampered thing, almost fifteen years later.

Georgie met Humble at a party in Sarah’s one-room apartment. Georgie didn’t have a dog. That baby? If things had gone differently, it could’ve been Sarah’s.

Then it would’ve been supercute. Ha!

Almost as cute as the baby she’d have with Ben, anyway.

All babies are adorable. They’re built that way, with big eyes, big heads, and button noses. Then that strategic, stumbling, and vulnerable walk kicks in.

The Cuteness Factor.

Grown mammals nurture and protect baby-faced creatures. Reptiles lay eggs and crawl away, and that’s a good survival strategy because otherwise they’d eat their own offspring. A lucky anaconda turns out a litter of maybe sixty at once, some alive, some dead, others as unfertilized eggs. It’s the original combo meal, a built-in food reward for procreating.

The offspring who survive are the ones who slither off fast. Let that be a metaphor to get your ass out of your parents’ house, right?

Nyla said, “It was weird. Georgie let the police in to look around. They left. Now she’s sleeping.”

Sarah asked, “Police? Why the police?” So even the Portland police had seen the baby before Sarah? She was totally last in line!

“I don’t know. Apparently they’d gotten a call?” Nyla said.

Dale charged his bike through a murder of crows; glossy black bird wings filled the air. Sarah’s timer beeped. Baby Lucy was in motion, motoring.

The news crew marched toward their van. Dale’s nylon shorts flashed in the gray light as he pedaled from one animal enclosure to the next.

“I should be there.” She tapped the pacifier against her thigh.

Nyla said, “It’s all right. We’re on our way out. But, hey, I hear you’re due for a new baby, too.” Her voice was a happy singsong.

Sarah’s heart stopped; her face flushed. Nyla’d heard? They’d been trying, she and Ben. Maybe she was pregnant. She hadn’t taken the test yet. It was too soon—too soon to let herself down if the answer came up negative.

“At the zoo,” Nyla said. “The monkey. It was in the paper this morning.”

Ah! That pregnancy. Apparently this round—like an early labor, an early birth—PR had issued a premature birth announcement. Admin was either confident or strapped for funds, desperate to bring in visitors and sway voters to approve the next levy. Not all pregnancies made it to delivery. Sarah knew that truth in the memory of her body.

“It’s exciting?” Nyla asked.

“Sure.” The mandrill family kept up their Brady Bunch routine in the zoo equivalent of a split-level, ranch-style house: a split-level, semiterrestrial enclosure. Baby Lucy looked out through a wrinkled old man’s face. Her ears were huge and pink, cute by design.

The thing was, that mother-to-be mandrill had already been declared genetically redundant and was given a birth control implant. She’d conceived against the odds.

“Can you put Georgie on the phone?” Sarah felt far away from her old friend. She heard the phone rattle. Nyla’s voice moved to the background, calling Georgie’s name. There was shuffling, and a wait.

Nyla came back on the line. “She’s sleeping.”

You can’t wake a new mother from that famously hard-won maternal sleep. Those sacred baby naps! Conversation over.

Dale, that biological illustration of muscle and circulation, dismounted his bike on a forested hill. Sarah watched him with the scientifically engaged eye of an ethologist.

Dale had all the markers of a virile male animal in his prime: from his hair to his coloration, his flat abs, and the ready way he entered a room. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, but so very healthy.

Sarah had her own fertility markers: full breasts, strong hips, good skin. Ben, her husband, was tall, which was a genetic plus in the brute world of animals, but he was a paper pusher. He spent his days at a desk in an office, making decisions on home loans. His slack shoulders had started to show the strain of sedentary work. He still had all his hair, though, that bloom of youth.

Thoughtful and kind, Ben was Mr. Steady, the most patient man she’d ever met. Being slow and gentle was one of his strengths.

Until it turned into a weakness.

He’d grown up in eastern Oregon, near the Washington border, near the Umatilla Chemical Depot, a chemical munitions storage facility. It was possible he had what the doctor called slow-moving sperm, or “low motility.”

Patient sperm?

And he was slow to get his sperm checked. His logic was that heavy pot smokers have slow swimmers, and they make babies all the time, so it’d happen!

Sarah made him drink three shots of espresso an hour before sex. Caffeine sends the soldiers flying.

She’d meet him after work, with a steaming cup of coffee.

By now it was conditioning: Coffee was foreplay, and a hard-on was hope.

When she went home she’d pee on a stick then watch to see: baby or no baby?

The teenagers had disappeared and left her holding their DNAladen, baby-spit-coated made-in-China pacifier. The zoo paths were dotted with families led by men in sagging jeans.

So why does a patriarch mandrill have that beckoning ass? Why does testosterone manifest as ornamentation? It’s about mate choice availability: His ass draws the ladies and holds the family together. One theory is that a bright butt helps a male lead his colony through the dense plants of the rain forest.

In the distance, Dale, in deep purple shorts, straddled his mountain bike and pumped up the side of a hill into the thick green manicured shrubbery of the Oregon rain forest where it had been groomed to make way for Employees Only paths.





Late that night, when Humble still hadn’t come home, Georgie called him, but there was no answer. She’d seen the conflicted way he moved around their house since Bella was born. He’d pick their daughter up, hold her close, one big hand spread across her tiny back, a perfect father. They had the same soft waves to their hair. His eyes might be narrow with sleep, and hers, too. Then half the time he’d put her down again, grab his coat, and head out without looking back. He’d say, “I have to work.”

Maybe he really did.

A permanent clutch of love and panic had moved into their home—they’d brought a baby into the world! They had the most perfect child! They’d screw up.

Paternity leave is built on vague terms for the self-employed. A lot of people had Humble’s phone number. When computers crashed, with small businesses on the line, they’d call him and he’d go and make things right. He worked whatever hours it took.

Maybe he was working now. That was possible.

And if he’d stopped somewhere for a drink? It wasn’t a crime. If it kept him from feeling like he’d lost all autonomy, Georgie could hold down the home front.

This was the truth about having a baby and a PhD: She knew the prescribed cultural mother roles, from domineering Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to domineering Peggy on Married with Children.

She’d read psychologist Erik Erikson’s theories of “momism”—every frustrated, repressed, suicidal, alcoholic, promiscuous, flatulent, or dandruff-ridden man was driven to his weaknesses by a controlling mom or an infantilizing wife. Erickson postulated that mothers ran the family the way a boss runs a business, only with more castration.

Momism.

If men stood for individualism, women were enforced conformity. Men were active and women beyond passive, a symbol of the sedentary. Christ almighty.

She’d read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and all those academic essays about Nurse Ratched: The woman’s role is to run a tight ward, robbing weak men of their masculinity. Wah!

She wouldn’t let motherhood put her in that emasculating spot of perpetrator and victim in one ovary-packing, mammary gland–wielding package, chasing her man home from bars, setting a curfew like he was a derelict teen.

No. If Humble missed dinner, that was his problem.

Georgie wrapped herself in a wool sweater, pajamas underneath. She held Bella in one arm and ventured out to drag their garbage can back from the curb. A cop car passed at the end of the block. Were those the same officers who had come to see about the baby? She stayed on her porch until they eased on by.

A haggard neighborhood regular stumbled out of the bushes in their wake and lurched down the middle of the road. The woman had gray hair, a limp, and a bottle of Olde English 800 sticking out of a black plastic bag. Her voice was a croak. “So you had the kid! Let me see the baby.” She hobbled over. She held her bottle by the neck, the bag sliding off like a badly fastened diaper.

Georgie pulled back the soft, clean satin blanket. Bella’s eyelashes were delicate lines. Her nose was a perfect button.

“Oh, a lovely one.” The woman’s breath was diseased. Her teeth pointed in every direction. She said, “That’s God’s little angel you got there.”

Who doesn’t love a baby compliment, even if it drifts in a cloud of gingivitis?

The woman pointed an arthritic finger. “She’ll turn on you, one of these days, you know.”

It was a curse.

The woman’s laugh was raspy with phlegm. She said it again: “Goin’ to turn on you.”

Were those flecks of spit raining down on Bella’s newborn’s skin? The baby’s closed eyes fluttered, showing the tiniest vein decorating one eyelid.

“She will not.” Georgie tried to keep her voice light.

“I got five li’l angels out there. Hell knows where they are now.” The woman twisted the cap off her bottle. When she drank, she tipped her whole body back and flung an arm out for balance.

A pale blue polyester nightgown peeked out from under the woman’s coat.

Shit. That nightgown! It was a flash of a nightmare. It was as good as Georgie’s own, or close enough to it. This woman was a mother who didn’t bother to get dressed, one possible future looming.

It was the wrong way to author a family.

It was a creepy reminder of the Gothic, within the family text.

Georgie lifted the edge of her garbage can by the plastic lip. With Bella in the other hand, she stooped to accommodate the can’s height and dragged it from the street to the sidewalk. The bedraggled drunk laughed. The can hit the back of Georgie’s foot at each step; like that laugh, it chased her home. Garbage chased her.

“I won’t let you down,” she whispered. She wouldn’t even put the baby down, actually, didn’t let her out of her arms.

The woman cackled and called out, “You read them baby books?”

Georgie didn’t turn, didn’t answer.

The woman said, “Here’s my advice—don’t worry! It takes a lot to kill a baby!” and she laughed again until she started to cough. Georgie heard a soft crash behind her as she scurried, as though the woman had fallen, but the laugh didn’t stop.

Kill a baby?

“Can’t go too wrong!”

Georgie was Quasimodo, staggering under her burdens. She’d surround her daughter with beauty, but there would always be garbage. She let go of the can when they reached the side yard and bent over her bundle, her baby. A car turned down the street.

Humble?

She peered toward it in the dusk and felt in her own hopeful gaze the wistfulness of a dog left home alone too long. The car slowed, then it lurched and veered around the drunk mama with the Olde English 800, who rose slowly to her feet to make her way, stumbling, down the center of the road.





Dulcet Marvel was a tall, cool waterfall of a woman raised on Ritalin and Benadryl, built to last, entirely anti-baby. Why haul another little uterine hostage into the world to suffer through a rigged game? Why line up for public schools and cubicle jobs to work your ass off while the rich get richer and everybody else drops dead early?

She had her mother’s hips and her father’s hands. She had their silver serving tray and used it to hold jewelry, spare change, and pipes.

If she made it as long as her mom, she had twelve years left to live. If she lived as long as her dad, that might be closer to fourteen.

She didn’t hate babies, though maybe hated the world. That was possible, although she liked some things about living. She liked a vodka martini and the dusty, bitter taste of a Percodan on her tongue. She liked damp sex, hot strangers, and late mornings. She liked that first sip of the first cup of coffee each day—you couldn’t repeat the moment in the second sip, it wasn’t possible—and she loved her little dog.

Her job was to teach teenagers how not to multiply. On an afternoon when the air in the school gymnasium that doubled as a school cafeteria still held the sweet scent of canned corn and cheap meat, while the city waited for their new mandrill to be born, while other women had babies in production lines at hospitals all over town or turned them out in home births, and in water tanks, and on the seats of public transportation, Dulcet was back in high school. She stood tall, nearly naked, alone in the middle of the gym under a ticking clock, in front of a crowd of teenagers who lined the bleachers.

She wore latex, her living anatomy lesson in a handcrafted, tailor-made transparent three-piece suit: a leotard-like one-piece latex swimsuit, a long-sleeved latex shirt over that, and a latex vest. The vest, marked with the wither of black lungs, was already on the floor. Her shirt showed white ribs and healthy lungs—the lungs of a country child! A nonsmoker! The shirt was as tight as a wet suit, with a zipper down the back. It ended at Dulcet’s narrow waist. The suit below it was laced with internal organs. A flower of ovaries bloomed just inside the cage of Dulcet’s hips. There was the curve of fallopian tubes, little question marks. She wore black boots, knee-high and high heeled. Her thighs were bare.

She was an anatomical superhero.

There were companies that specialized in latex women’s bodysuits for men, with hip padding and breast inserts. These suits let transsexuals walk the world in the ultimate female form. They came complete with catheters to let urine trickle from a man’s natural penis, which would be hidden, down through the folds of a latex vagina.

What Dulcet wore was harder to come by: an anatomically correct illustration of a woman’s internal organs made to cover a woman’s body, with the vulnerability of the inside lacing the outside. In her anatomy suit she was beyond naked: peeled of skin.

With a laptop and a portable projector balanced on a chair, she’d already been through her PowerPoint demo on genital warts. Everybody loved photos of genital warts! Flash those on a wall, and the place went silent.

When she spoke into her headset microphone, Dulcet’s voice boomed. She’d moved on to the particulars of hygiene. She said, “This is why, for the ladies in the group, you can’t actually lose a tampon. Quell that fear! Listen up, males, men and boys. You’re part of this too.”

She was here to tell the story of the body.

She pointed to her lower abs.

“The vagina is a short cave. It’s a major draw, but it’s not the Grand Canyon. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s not a black hole. The cervix is a barrier. If you lose the string or have sex without taking your tampon out—not that I’m advocating sex at your age, we already covered that—still, if it happens, save yourself an ER bill.

“Take a deep breath, relax, and bear down on those Kegels.

“You know your Kegels, right? Imagine a bowel movement. Then use your fingers. It’s your body, you can touch yourself. I can give permission for that, right?”

Girls giggled. There was a flash—somebody stole a photo. The room was full of camera phones.

Dulcet glanced at the PE teacher, who leaned against the cinder block wall. She was about Dulcet’s age, short with curly hair, dressed in the snug contours of a blue all-purpose tracksuit-turned-yoga-wear. The teacher nodded. Or maybe she flinched?

Everything in a public high school is politically on thin ice: All paranoia, all the time! Behind the teacher stood the vice principal, and behind her was the principal, a mini–Mount Rushmore arrangement staring out from the crowd.

Students fondled iPhones, BlackBerrys, cell phones, and games, the world in their palms. A few palpated the fake boobs Dulcet had passed around, looking for cancer lumps. Somebody flung one of the boobs toward the basketball hoop. It fell short. The PE teacher jogged over and picked it up. She gave a delicate scowl in the general direction of the audience but didn’t blow the silver whistle that hung from a cord around her neck.

Dulcet said, “Nice shot. Now, fellas, listen up. You can help with tampon retrieval. Cut your fingernails first. If it’s been in there a while, the retrieved tampon will stink. It will. It’ll stink to holy Heaven. And if it’s been in for a month, ladies, you might want to tell your doctor, but as long as you feel fine you’ll probably be okay. What you want to look out for are symptoms of toxic shock, like fever, vomiting.”

There were more flashes, more photos. Dulcet gave not one f*ck about showing up on the Internet; her body was an extension of her public service work. If she started conversations in the blogosphere, that was good.

Besides, she didn’t take a bad photo. She was chiseled. She was a professional photographer herself. She could pull it off.

The latex suit was sheer between the bright blooms of organs. An observant student might see the dimple of a belly button and dark spots of pubic hair behind the translucent drawing of a vagina and uterus.

She was drenched in sweat under the suit. Worse, she’d had to cover herself in lube first, in order to pull the latex over her own muscles, angles, and curves. Now lube and sweat mingled until the outfit was torture, like a bad weight-loss program.

She drank from a bottle of water that rested on a wooden stool at her side. She had a duffel bag at her feet, mostly for the fake boobs. Her job was to get the kids’ attention.

She’d been over the gender-neutral parts: shown the pancreas and the appendix, traced the bronchial system, ribs, and heart. To some of these kids a heart was a cliché in a pop song, not a vital organ that could burst with too many of the wrong drugs. They needed to know what she had to offer.

A heart can skip and murmur even over basic things like a lack of adequate water or too little potassium. A brain is a fragile, adaptive organ. She had a dream of making a brain hat to show how drugs and frontal lobotomies worked.

She said, “Any questions?”

The room went silent, except for the ticking wall clock.

Dulcet said, “I don’t do this because I’m court ordered to as community service, or because I get rich from it. I do it because I want you to be in charge of your own body. You’re the ruler, and you can exist in your own benevolent anarchy as long as you know the rules.”

She walked a few steps in one direction, eyes on the crowd, then turned and walked back the other way. In the audience, one hand crept up slowly.

“Yes!” Dulcet pointed to the girl fast, as though she were fingering a fleeing suspect. The girl slouched in the middle of the crowd. Dulcet said, “Kudos to you, first one to break the ice. Let me give you a prize.”

When she crouched, the rubber suit folded and bunched at her waist. She dug in her duffel bag until she found what she was looking for, then stood and tossed a paperback toward the girl in the crowd. It was a copy of Your Body: Right or Wrong? Physical trivia. “Now, what’s your question?”

The girl said, “How do you pee in that?”

Dulcet said, “I have a slit, in the latex. Who else?”

Another girl raised her hand. This one asked, “Are you, like, post-op sex change, or what?”

Dulcet wasn’t sure she’d heard the question right. You had to get it exactly right on these school visits—conversation about transgender stuff had to be student initiated, or funding could be shut down fast. She put a hand behind her ear. “One more time?” she said.

The girl cleared her throat. She sat up a little straighter. She was heavyset. She said, “Like, were you born a girl, or a guy?”

I have a slit, Dulcet thought.

Her job was to answer with authority and respect. The other part of her job—the part that didn’t show up on her résumé—was to physically remind kids steeped in media images that there’s more than one way to be female. She was tall, strong, short-haired, big-handed, and elegant. And she was direct. She said, “I am a woman. But people can be born in a range of ways. Gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, right?”

She aimed for the all-inclusive answers.

A boy raised his hand, or at least the person looked like a boy. Dulcet tried to avoid assumptions. She pointed and said, “Yes?”

“If you’re a girl, how’d you get so tall?”

She said, “I grew up, this is me. Now, any questions about your bodies?” She smiled in a way she hoped was kind, though Dulcet wasn’t a big smiler; it made her face hurt.

Without raising his hand, a boy called out, “Are we going to get a naked man suit in here?”

Another kid cupped his hands and yelled at the first one, “Homo!”

Somebody else said, “Show dill weed how his cock works.”

The kids laughed and one pushed another and then the bleachers were roiling with bodies. All the discomfort of not talking, not asking their questions, turned to the physical. Someone threw another fake boob. A kid caught it and flung it back. One boy collected three and juggled them. An A-cup skidded across the polished wood floor. The PE teacher picked it up, tucked it in her sweat suit pocket, and just like that she had a third mammary down low on her torso. A jellyfish of a double-D fell as though from the sky, right behind the first, and took a dive past the teacher’s ear. The woman ducked, in a fine show of peripheral vision and fast reflexes. She said, “Let’s say good-bye to our guest. Thank you, Dulcet Marvel! Make sure to return all the props in good condition.” She led the kids in clapping, and they took that as a cue it was okay to leave. They clapped as they walked, a clapping stampede, like they couldn’t get free fast enough.

Dulcet collected her rubber vest with the picture of smoker’s lungs, and her bottle of water. The PE teacher picked up stray boobs that had scattered like hacky sacks. The laptop and projector belonged to the school. Dulcet pulled out her flash drive and looped the lanyard around her neck.

A lanky high school girl cut free of the pack and headed toward her. Dulcet knew these girls, the ones who snuck up quietly afterward. Hers would be a personal question: Pregnant? Overly familiar with genital warts? One boob bigger than the other?

As the girl separated herself from the crowd, Dulcet saw it was Arena, Nyla’s daughter. She’d forgotten—Arena went to school there.

“You were great.” Arena’s voice was soft, lost under the high ceiling of the gym. “Here’s your thing back?” She handed over a gelatinous fake boob. It was warm, palpated by the masses.

Dulcet said, “Thank you, sweetheart. Cancer, or no?”

Arena said, “I think that one’s got it.”

Dulcet found the lump between two fingers. Arena was right. “Perfect. That could save your life.” They walked together toward the door. “So, you like this place?”

Arena looked away. “It’s life as I know it.”

They came to a closet in one corner of the gym. Dulcet said, “Well, this is my backstage.” The PE teacher came up behind them, carrying more silicone boobs.

Arena said, “They didn’t give you the faculty restroom?”

Dulcet said, “I don’t want to waddle down the hall in the outfit, my parts showing.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Arena said. She slouched, a sweet, shy girl, with her chest tucked in and her shoulders forward.

Arena’s father had died in a car accident in the same year, around the same time, that Dulcet’s father succumbed to cancer. Dulcet’s parents had four kinds of cancer between the two of them—breast, liver, prostate, lung. It was a whole season, an era, of dying.

So when Arena was little and Nyla was newly widowed, Dulcet had gone to Nyla’s house every day after she left the hospice. She’d brought Nyla wine, and brought the girls blueberries, strawberries, and overpriced gummy vitamins. She’d brought them Goodwill dresses and pens from the credit union, anything she could find. It was a way of grieving, to feed the girls vitamins and keep them dressed.

She and Nyla would sit together, ice packs on their puffy eyes, and they’d cry. They’d wash down Dulcet’s dad’s pain pills with Chardonnay, after he didn’t live long enough to need them all.

Dulcet was still washing down pain pills ten years later.

She tried to be an aunt figure, somebody Celeste and Arena could count on, but she forgot birthdays and showed up late for school events and slept through their fund-raisers. She got too drunk at birthday parties, especially when she tried to be domestic, and she never brought the same date twice.

Did Arena remember the strange light of those winter afternoons, after her father’s death? As the girl loped away now, she seemed relatively unscathed other than being so very much alone. Teenage girls were supposed to move in packs.

Dulcet ducked into the closet, a dark space, where one hanging fluorescent light warbled from the middle of the ceiling. The room was full of balls and orange cones, full of the smell of rubber.

The PE teacher had finished collecting latex breasts, and followed Dulcet. “We’ve got hand sanitizer for the props. Don’t want to take home swine flu. Need any help?” The woman let Dulcet’s fake boob collection tumble from her hands into to a tidy pile on the floor.

Dulcet said, “Actually, my zipper.” She pointed at her back. It was hard to lift her elbows all the way up, to reach her back, in that slingshot of a suit. The teacher hesitated. Dulcet said, “It’s under the vertebrae.” The zipper was camouflaged by a thin drawing of bone.

Dulcet felt cool air. The zipper went down. The teacher’s breath moved over her neck. “That was a terrific presentation.”

“Thanks.” Dulcet shook her way out of the tight shirt and tossed it onto a mesh bag full of volleyballs. She’d rinse it at home. Now she was in the latex bodysuit with the heart and arteries on it. A green scrawl drew the lymphatic system; the endocrine system was in blue. Dulcet knew well where the cancers lived that caused her parents’ deaths.

“You do a lot of these?” the teacher asked.

“Pretty regularly, in the fall.” Dulcet dug in her canvas bag.

“It’s full-time?”

Dulcet pulled out her Volcano vaporizer, a metal, cone-shaped smokeless smoking system, a way to get high without wrecking her lungs, setting off fire alarms, or getting busted by the smell. “Mostly,” she said, “I’m a commercial photographer. Nude portraits.” She moved a crate of basketballs to get to an outlet. “I patch together a living.”

Dulcet plugged in her Volcano. She could wait to get high until the teacher had gone, that was an option, but the PE teacher didn’t seem to be going anywhere too soon. Dulcet had already waited through her own presentation. She knew how to be patient. She also knew that patience came easier when she was high, and the Volcano would take a while to heat up. “I’ve got a chronic pain problem. This is totally legal.” She loaded the chamber with weed.

The PE teacher asked, “What kind of pain?”

Dulcet pulled the straps of the latex leotard-like swimsuit down over her shoulders. The suit clung. “Skin, bones, joints. Fibromyalgia, restless legs syndrome, TMJ. You name it.” She rubbed her jaw. She took both hands and twisted her head sideways until her neck cracked. Ghost cancer, a perma-hangover, love wedged in with bone-deep loss—who knew where the pain came from? It was always with her. She said, “Doing the body show makes my bones hurt.”

She peeled the suit lower. Her breasts sprung out, small and high.

Her goal? To feel and not feel, at the same time.

The Volcano whispered a promise only Dulcet could hear. Her mouth practically watered. Only pot and meds lifted the pain. The latex suit bunched around her waist. She left it there, let her damp boobs breathe in cool air. She bent and attached a valve and a balloon chamber to the Volcano, to collect the pot vapor. Dulcet had never been shy. She’d made a decision a long time ago to skip the shy routine.

The PE teacher said, “I’m a registered massage therapist.”

She touched Dulcet’s neck with a mix of professionalism and an invitation. Dulcet knew how this worked: When she wore her organs on the outside, showed that cartoon version of every heart and liver, it sent out a signal of easy familiarity. When she pulled the suit down, let herself be naked, strangers were willing to take risks.

She was a body, intimate and public at the same time.

The teacher smelled like roses and rain. She rubbed her thumb in small circles along Dulcet’s upper vertebrae and said, “Sit down.” Dulcet sat on a step stool. It was a low place for a tall woman, almost like sitting on a curb. She relaxed under the teacher’s hands.

“I work on micro-muscles. Most people only tune in to the larger muscle groups. They don’t realize how many muscles a body has.”

Dulcet said, “I do.”

The balloon on the vaporizer moved as though ready to inflate.

The PE teacher reached forward, a hand on both sides of Dulcet’s clavicle. She said, “Come see me, at my practice. I’ll give you a card. You don’t have to be in pain.”

One hand inched down Dulcet’s bare skin as though counting ribs. In that gesture was a question: Where were the limits of this particular intimacy? It was a conversation between two warm bodies alone in a badly lit room.

This was another moment in Dulcet’s sweet skin-story, nobody’s business but her own, an exchange between humans. No condemning bearded God paused to look down from his elitist Heaven and dangle that carrot in the shape of a cross, that bribe—a trick to pass up life’s libertine liberties.

Dulcet said, “If you’d want your picture taken, we could trade. I do nudes.”

The teacher’s breath brushed Dulcet’s ear, with the scent of mint.

The door cracked open and light cut in. There was a curvy silhouette, a woman in high heels whose hair glowed like new snow on a winter night against the dark of the poorly lit room, and as Dulcet’s eyes adjusted she saw the principal, Mrs. Cherryholmes, under that halo of weak fluorescents.

The teacher straightened up and scrambled backward.

Mrs. Cherryholmes jumped back and almost closed the door again before she got herself together to step forward. “Ms. Marvel, your check.” She waved a white envelope. There was a tightness in her voice that implied that their conversation wasn’t over.

Dulcet’s whole job could be over.

Her green lymphatic system and blue endocrine system, those pretty graphic designs, were bunched up in the latex at her waist. Without getting up, she said, “Thank you.”

Mrs. Cherryholmes put the check on one of the industrial shelves. The teacher made herself busy organizing soccer balls. As the principal started to turn away, something else caught her eye. She said, “What is that?”

The Volcano.

“Mine. It’s medical equipment.” Dulcet’s voice came out low, gravelly and relaxed.

The principal studied the Volcano, her eyes steady, taking it in. “Nice to work with you, Ms. Marvel. Ms. Tompkins, please see me in my office when you have a moment.” She closed the door.

The room went dim again. It smelled like rubber and sweat. Dulcet said, “So you’re Ms. Tompkins?”

Ms. Tompkins said, “I have to go.” But instead of leaving, she moved further back into the storage closet, to a rack of industrial shelving, and found a small box. She took out a card and handed it to Dulcet. “My massage therapy business,” she said. “Call me.”