The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Dulcet said, “I’ve found two galleries to show my stuff. Both times, the show closed early.”

  Georgie said, “And they sold out, right?”

  Dulcet said, “Yes, that, too.” She snapped a photo of Georgie naked and veiled.

  Georgie tried to relax. She tossed her head back. She twirled the scarf experimentally.

  Dulcet said, “These’ll be a gift for Humble. Imagine he’s here—that he’s the one you’re posing for.”

  Ha! Georgie hardly thought Humble would care. He was a simmering pot on the stove, the way he skulked around the house these days.

  Dulcet said, “He’s one of the good ones.” Then she lowered her camera. She looked over the top of it. “What is that?”

  “What?” Georgie looked behind her. Then she looked at her own front, at her soft stomach and pale thighs. Her scar was a red grin along the top of her pubic bone. She’d only just started to relax. Now the anxiety meter shot up again.

  Dulcet said, “Above your ass, next to your tattoo?”

  Jesus. Embarrassing! What was it? Georgie twisted to one side. She brushed her fingers over her skin and ran a hand down between her own legs.

  Dulcet walked over to touch one finger lightly on the back of Georgie’s hip. “It’s huge.”

  Georgie twisted around the other way until she could see a bruise the size of a softball, purple and yellow and faded at the edges like a storm cloud.

  Dulcet traced a line up Georgie’s back. “And you’ve skinned your spine. In another kind of shoot, we could use it as a prop, it’s that dramatic.”

  There was nothing between naked Georgie and the world. “I fell down the stairs.”

  Dulcet let out a long whistle.

  She found an oversized tackle box. She opened one drawer, then closed it again and opened another. She took out a tube of makeup, a container of powder, and a few triangular sponges. She dabbed pale green concealer on her fingertips. “I’ll Photoshop it out, but it’ll be easier if we lighten it now.”

  Georgie let Dulcet paint concealer on the round backside of her hip and dot cool makeup along her vertebrae. Dulcet asked, “Does that hurt?”

  “No.” Georgie closed her eyes. She felt nerves radiate a hot pain under Dulcet’s fingers, and then again as Dulcet swiped her skin with a sponge.

  Dulcet said, “Has Humble seen it?”

  Georgie kept her eyes closed, without answering. The fingers on her back could be anyone’s fingers, taking care.

  Why go into it?

  When Georgie opened her eyes, baby Bella, in her pink onesie, was a sweet rosebud there on the floor, in her bouncy chair. She was pink and fresh, still figuring out how to lift her own head, a newborn baby girl. Bella smiled her small, toothless smile, glad to be part of the world, happy to be alive. She was beautiful. Georgie’s heart ached. Her skin warmed under the glow of the C-light as it poured light like an artificial sun kissing her bruised back.

  Arena had been raised to walk abandoned dogs at the pound—beautiful dogs they couldn’t take home. She’d planted trees every Arbor Day, though the trees mostly died the same season. She, her mom, and her sister had a tradition of forcing their way into Thanksgiving meals at Sisters of the Road, a shelter where Nyla thought it was edifying for a kid to serve a holiday dinner to black-toothed drunks.

  Community service didn’t faze her—but what was up with the idea of unearned punishment? Sure, she sold Crystal Light on school grounds, and she sold those individual packages marked not to be sold individually. So what? Lesson learned.

  But no. Here was community service coming at her again. Her assignment: litter. Also, meetings where she’d meet other losers.

  Each meeting cost $75. If she was one minute late, they wouldn’t let her in. If she missed a meeting, she’d have to pay anyway and then pay again at the makeup session. It was rigged.

  Her mom was totally lame about it. She’d said, “Take notes. Keep a journal. Later, it’ll all seem like a great story.”

  They were still trying to fight the accusations, but the truth was, Nyla could not afford a lawyer. Instead, she gave Arena a bound book made out of recycled paper, with a recycled cover, and a recycled card where she’d written, “Keep an Attitude of Gratitude. Life is an adventure! I love you always.”

  An Attitude of Platitudes.

  Nyla would quote a teacher she’d had: “Interesting stories happen to people who can tell them.” Arena was supposed to collect interesting stories.

  Arena wrote “My Prison Journal” on the cover in silver Sharpie.

  On Nyla’s bumper, another sticker declared nonviolent, not silent. Arena had never noticed how ineffectual her mother’s political opinions were until now. Her mama had no power.

  Nyla gave Arena a ride to the work crew pickup station. As she saw her off, onto a county bus, she waved and said, “See you at dinner! Remember, it’s all material, right? Tell me how it goes.”

  The bus was short and yellow, like a school bus but without the name of any school or district on the side. Inside it smelled like sweat and loserdom. It smelled like old backpacks, lost lunches, and guys who needed to shower. It was all guys, and her.

  On the short bus there was no way-back, no far-back, no place different from the front, no place to use her hiding skills. She sat in the second seat and put her forehead against the dirty glass of the window.

  In Red Azalea, Anchee Min, assigned the role of peasant under Chairman Mao, was taken away in a truck, starting from someplace called “People’s Square” in China.

  Was this any different? Arena was assigned the role of criminal.

  Anchee Min wrote, “My family stood in front of me, as if taking a dull picture. It was a picture of sadness, a picture of never the same.”

  Arena replayed her mom’s words: “See you at dinner. Tell me how it goes!” Her mom seemed almost happy, like this was a scholarship to science camp or some extended writing exercise.

  The bus took them to a barren hellhole strip outside of Tigard, a suburb. They got out and walked along a culvert on the side of the highway. A coordinator handed out orange reflective vests, plastic garbage bags, and gloves. He said, “Stay three feet apart minimum. No talking, no breaks.”

  The bus took off. The man in charge got busy with his iPhone, moved away, and lit a cigarette.

  Picking up garbage was as easy as picking blueberries in season: McDonald’s wrappers, Big Gulp cups, cigarettes, diapers, soda cans, a pair of pants, three pairs of underwear—two ladies’ and one pair of boxers.

  Arena had never touched what she still thought of clinically as a “penis,” and had no ready list of familiar pet names, stories about banana shapes and commas. She heard those stories, but she was a loner and a listener and school was one big reality TV show where up until getting expelled she’d been cast as an extra.

  Now, she held a blue and twisted rubber condom in her gloved hands, then put it in her bag.

  How many other hands had slid into the work gloves Arena wore? It was cold out, but the gloves were rubber and her hands started to sweat. The reflective vest smelled like old cigarettes. She was in the costume of somebody else.

  Arena could write that in her new journal: “Punished for crimes I never committed, made to wear the costume of a criminal.”

  The guy picking up trash beside her inched closer, breaking the three-feet-apart rule.

  He said, “Hey. You new?”

  She heard him, over the rush of traffic. She didn’t answer, though.

  He said, “I’ve been here three months.” He kicked his foot through the grass. “I’m an expert.” He walked right past bottles, cans, and chip bags.

  She picked up a brown paper grocery bag and put it in her plastic garbage bag. If her mom saw this, she’d get on the city about recycling the trash. She’d do more about that environmental injustice than she was doing to get Arena off the chain gang.

  The guy said, “You find good stuff. Last week I found this awesome bong, no shit.”r />
  Arena looked at him then. He was tall and thin, with skin like coffee ice cream.

  “It was, like …” He held his hands apart, his plastic bag swinging in one, tongs in the other. He whispered, “Had to smuggle it out in my pants. Looked like I had a woody so big I couldn’t bend my leg, but none of these homophobes wanted to pat me down.”

  Arena had to laugh. She said, “You did not.”

  He nodded. “I did. I’m AKA.”

  She said, “That’s not a name.”

  He said, “It’s mine. You can call me AK, like the assault rifle.” He made a gesture as though to gun invisible people down.

  He was pretty and girlish and handsome all at once. He seemed kind of gay, but also like he was flirting.

  She said, “I’m Arena.”

  He said, “Beautiful name.”

  “If you like sports.” She practiced looking him in the eyes. His eyes were so dark they were all one shade, almost black. His hair was shaggy, a short haircut that’d grown out, and his cheekbones were high and narrow.

  He asked, “What’d you do to get here?”

  “Sold Crystal Light to kids.”

  That cracked him up. He said, “Jesus! She’s dangerous.” He turned to the guy behind him, a red-haired slacker with tired eyes. The wind and rush off passing semis stole their voices.

  Arena’s hair blew in the freeway corridor’s draft. She asked, “You?”

  He said, “Knocking over old ladies.”

  The red-haired guy said, “Knocking up. And wasn’t that your mom?”

  They were clustered together now.

  AKA gave his friend a fake jab, a swing to his jaw that only pushed through air. His teeth were white, his fingers long. He was so tall and thin, it made him seem fragile as an insect, like his arm could come off under his heavy coat. He said, “I robbed ’em blind, and cashed in. It’s a cakewalk.”

  He giggled in a way that was no kind of threat.

  Arena said, “Right.”

  He said, “Serious.”

  Their leader marched through the tall grass, wheezing when he reached them. He made a gesture with his hands, like swimming frog-style, pushing the air, telling them to move apart.

  Arena nodded, and moved away. She let the roar of traffic fill the lull in voices, and disentangled another mangled condom from the scrub grass, then another pair of underwear. Who would lose their underwear on a freeway? How did that happen?

  Dulcet called Sarah and left a jumbled message: “God, I think I dropped my underwear somewhere along the freeway!” Her recorded voice launched into a story, even as Sarah deleted it. She didn’t have time! Now was the time to be ruthless, to play hardball—or blue balls, or whatever it took.

  Why wouldn’t Ben get his sperm checked? It’d been on their to-do list for months. Late one night, in bed, she’d asked him if he was scared to find out. She said, “It’s something we can address.”

  He said, “I haven’t had time.”

  But time was what they were losing, along with fertility. She was the one with the ticking clock, eggs, and ovaries.

  He was afraid of doctors—afraid to learn the limits of his own body.

  She’d be the most loving, nurturing, proud mother on the planet even if she had to kill somebody to get there.

  Reproduction is not passive. Ben didn’t get it. Adaptation occurs under stress. Four miscarriages had taught her a few lessons. Everybody knows about the black widow and the mantis, insects that eat their mates. On a relative scale, Ben would be fine with whatever happened.

  Outside town, fall chinook were making their way back to rivers to spawn and die. Spawn and die, spawn and die! Their stomachs would disintegrate while the fish were alive, starving the host bodies, making room for eggs or sperm.

  Sarah was old!

  She’d spawn if it killed her.

  She drove her Subaru down Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard. On the radio, a man with a clipped British accent reported that toxic levels of vitamin A in an energy drink had killed nine people. A computer error had moved a decimal point one space over and each individual serving was accidentally filled with enough vitamin A to blow out a liver.

  Nine people?

  Did nine people matter on a planet crawling with seven billion poorly evolved primates who called themselves human?

  We could lose a billion and still stock the grade schools and temp agencies, keep Starbucks hopping. We could lose over three billion, almost half, and only be back to a 1970s population. Who ever missed the current crowd, the masses, before they were born? These days people stood in lines around the block for brunch, for movies, for a free dinner in a church or an overpriced meal downtown. More and more, there was always the threat of some population vigilante with a gun out to cull the herd, a psycho unleashed under the pressure of crowds.

  With half as many people, though, humans had still been, apparently, expendable enough for World War II and Vietnam. Procreation and destruction walk hand in hand. With fewer than two billion people, it seems we afforded and weathered the losses of World War I, sixteen million people. The way to stop war would be to stop having babies, stop raising foot soldiers.

  Sarah was only one of the masses. She knew it. Her child would be one more.

  Reproduction is about survival of the species, but to an individual animal it’s about the nuclear family, the survival of biological offspring. The rest of the population is competition.

  She’d be a loving mama.

  The other humans, the ones who burned through fossil fuels, jammed the express lane at the grocery store, faked their way through the carpool lanes, and pissed in the communal well? They could screw themselves.

  She snapped the radio off. When she found a prescription bottle on her car’s console, she drove with her arms on the wheel and worked with both hands to open a childproof cap. It was her most recent post-miscarriage anxiety prescription.

  Sarah had, by now, completely given in to pills. Doctors wrote out prescriptions like love notes, trying to turn her into Dulcet—to make her not care. The pills helped! In a warbling, temporary way. They helped her to focus her concerns. And with the help of those pills, she resolved to spawn or die, spawn or die, spawn or die. She sang the words to herself.

  She was relaxed and desperate at the same time.

  She chipped the side off a tablet of Klonopin with her teeth, ignored the dosing instructions, and instead nibbled pills all day long, a little now, a little later. The smallest flake of a pill on her tongue, and the world mattered less. Time mattered less. She’d started to see the benefit: a military dose of Klonopin with red wine, dished out like a free lunch, would end the troubles in the Gaza Strip, no joke.

  Why didn’t somebody prescribe mood pills for whole countries?

  Her car was speckled with pink, pale yellow, and white pill crumbs, Klonopin, diazepam, Vicodin.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard was lined with junkies and hipsters.

  Sarah couldn’t stand their passivity.

  She couldn’t stand that she had to get older, and there was no way to stop it.

  A shaggy-haired waif on the side of the road held up a battered and grease-stained cardboard sign: PREGNANT. NO JOB.

  Bragging! Totally.

  The street corners were littered with the ever-present stacks of free stuff, and today most of it was baby gear: cribs, strollers, changing tables, and car seat carriers. These stacks of junk arranged themselves into nurseries, baby-friendly spaces artfully waiting at each curb. Each one said, “Our child is off to Harvard! Have our garbage!”

  At a stoplight, Sarah idled next to a free pile. A mobile jutting out of a box turned in the wind and played a soft, discordant song.

  That song, that noise! It was the Empty Nest song. The free piles mocked her.

  This was the deep life pain of snow leopards at the zoo. Those two animals would have a better chance at avoiding extinction if they were asexually reproductive, making autonomous biological choices.
Instead they were locked in a cage, one with eggs, the other holding the sperm, at a standoff in their collaborations.

  And this is what bothered her about Ben: his foot-dragging.

  If she were a lesbian lizard of the desert, a whiptail, there’d be no problem: The whole tribe is female, all potentially reproductive. The lizards put on a fake sort of sex show, a physical routine sans sperm. Only the lizards who do the sex dance lay any eggs at all.

  Sarah could totally fake sex—straight, queer, three-way, you name it—if it was the dance that brought about a baby.

  They had ten weeks until the doctor said they could try again. Her last egg might drop in that span. Then what? She’d be old. It’d be over. They’d donate their baby books to the library’s fund-raising book sale. Ben would pat her on the back and look at her in his apologetic way and they’d go to the Ringside for a steak dinner. They’d have mixed drinks and talk about saving for a trip to Hawaii or Thailand.

  They’d be old people.

  She was a problem solver. She could see the problem of mortality coming from way down the road. To do nothing was a maladaptive survival strategy. Even a lowly burr in a field knows how to scatter seed.

  Soon enough it’d be summer, and somewhere the summer aphids, those tiny green specks, would reproduce without the need for all this partnering, finagling, relationship building. Summer aphids, like Christ, are born from virgin mothers. The first mother in a lineage is a fundatrix, a foundress.

  Sarah should be the fundatrix of her own line.

  She drove past day laborers waiting for work on the side of the road. Men waited for yard work, building sites, anything unskilled. They visibly waited out their lives in hope of work. She and the men had that in common: forced passivity.

  So many men. So little work.

  So many swimming sperm under faded denim.

  She slowed her car, ignoring the traffic on her bumper. She looked at the men, because they were men—looked at their shoulders and faces and thick, dark hair. Some were tall, others weren’t. Some had awful teeth. Most looked strong.

  Every one of them was a walking sperm bank.