The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Nyla called after her, “Do you need anything, while we’re here?”

  Georgie’s only answer was the rustle of a comforter and pillows tossed on the bed. Dulcet studied the label on the vial like a fine bottle of wine. She cracked the lid and took out a tablet.

  “We love you!” Nyla shouted.

  Dulcet swallowed her pill with a handful of water from the kitchen faucet. She pulled out her pipe and her stash, and ran the pipe through her damp fingers. “Not much of a welcome.”

  In the back room, the TV spoke in a low murmur.

  “New moms are a world of two. When you’re nursing, your body fills up with chemicals, relaxing hormones—”

  “Relactating,” Dulcet offered.

  “—that make you happy to lie around.”

  “They have synthetic drugs for that now,” Dulcet said, and wiped a drip of water from her chin. She rested her baggie on the counter then packed the pipe. She said, “Who wants to stick around to be your own kid’s best cautionary tale? It’s a setup.” She let her lips find the narrow stem of her pipe and took a swift hit.

  Nyla opened the cake box and touched a finger to what was left of the glazed fruit on top.

  Dulcet’s exhale filled the kitchen with smoke. She tipped her head back to blow the smoke up. Her thin neck was marked with tendons. Her eyes softened.

  Nyla hissed, “Sweetie, there’s a baby in the house!” She turned on the fan over the stove, opened a kitchen window, and flapped her arms to drive the smoke out.

  Dulcet said, “Doing what I can for the planet, supporting hemp farms, right? Hemp fields pull carbon dioxide right out of the air.”

  Obligingly, she blew into the fan’s updraft.

  Nyla flapped both hands at the smoke as though trying to fly, to urge the toxic air out. She said, “Arena wasn’t a cuddly baby. She wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, I thought she was autistic.”

  Through yellowed teeth, and as Nyla did her flapping dance, Dulcet said calmly, “Arena turned out perfectly fabulous.”

  Arena had slipped from her high school halls to sit on the edge of a turnaround pit on the side of the road across the street from school, just far enough away to escape the rules. She gave a gentle pat to the dead ferret wrapped around another girl’s neck. A yellow sign over their shoulders read SLOW CHILDREN. Someone had spray-painted an arrow pointing down from the sign to the spot where Arena sat, where smokers and stoners regularly perched along the decidedly uncomfortable corrugated aluminum railing meant to keep cars from sliding into the parking lot of the veterinarian next door.

  She was a lanky colt in a tiny T-shirt that said I ♥ POPCORN and skorts, that skirt-short combination, short enough to fit the child she’d been five years earlier. Her dark hair hung like satin.

  The girl in the ferret pelt, with a jumble of black dreads, watch-gear earrings, and lace-up boots, rested beside her with her eyes closed.

  A guy sat cross-legged in the gravel, wearing the outfit of disenfranchised white boys since the breakout of the Clash thirty-some years earlier: a T-shirt, black jeans, and Converse. Arena knew the Clash from listening to her father’s records. She listened to vinyl in her room most nights, imagining her father’s voice channeled through scratches and guitar riffs—the Melvins, the Clash, the Wipers. Romeo Void. Even the Slits and Wendy O. Williams channeled her dad, because otherwise? She could barely remember having a dad—only knew what it felt like to want him.

  The girl in the ferret neckerchief opened her eyes to offer Arena a smoke. Her eyes were dark, and her smudged makeup was even darker. For Arena, looking directly into anyone’s eyes was like looking at aluminum reflecting the sun, or a swimming pool on a bright day.

  She was bad at it.

  She shook her head no at the cigarette. “Why start something I’d have to keep doing? It’s enough to brush my teeth and change clothes.” She kicked her vegan-friendly Toms red wrap boots into the gravel. Her mom had bought her those boots. Her mom, a yoga instructor now trying to get a store up and running, was always broke but up on the good causes, and with every pair of Toms sold a poor kid somewhere got new shoes, too.

  Arena pretty much was that poor kid.

  “Who changes clothes?” This girl, total steampunk, had worked hard to look like she’d been in the same black rags since, what, maybe 1889? “Social pressure to change clothes is just a way capitalism keeps us on the rat wheel.”

  The Clash kid, in his own uniform, said, “Weren’t you, like, Goth last year?”

  She said, “Visigoth. It was a specialization, but I’ve evolved.”

  Arena said, “Smoking is the biggest corporate scam ever.”

  “Not if you buy the Indian kind.” The girl scratched her head through her mass of hair. She had rings on every finger, spiders, cogs, and crystal.

  The Clash guy said, “You sound depressed.”

  Arena asked, “Because I don’t smoke?”

  He ground the cherry of his cigarette out in the gravel. A button on his messenger bag read ALPHA NERD. He said, “Where’s your zest for livin’?”

  The Visigoth-turned-steampunk waved her cigarette. “Your spirit of adventure!”

  “American Spirits of adventure. Blue pack.” Alpha Nerd tapped his pack on the ground twice. “What’d you come out here for, then?”

  “Reading break.”

  “Right on.” When the girl nodded, her black dreads shifted in a thick mass. “They don’t let you do that in there?”

  “Not enough.” Arena found a book in her pack, Red Azalea by Anchee Min. Inside, the school’s hot halls smelled like crushed ants and gym shoes. If she sat in the grass of the school lawn by herself, that’d be weird. But when she sat with the smokers it was, like, sociably antisocial.

  She opened the book to a dog-eared page. Red Azalea was a memoir about life in Mao’s China, written by a girl assigned the role of a peasant. The author lived in barracks and slept in a room with eight other girls, each inside her own mosquito net.

  Anchee Min wrote, “I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday under the mosquito net.… The air felt creamy. It was the ripeness of the body. It began to spoil. The body screamed inside trying to break the bondage.”

  Arena knew that scream.

  “My body was in hunger. I could not make it collaborate with me.… I tossed all night, loneliness wrapped me.… The mosquito net was a grave with a little spoiled air.”

  In the school halls football players sent one another porn shots and videos of cheerleaders sucking them off, or whatever they could lift off the Internet and make look like it was their life. Lockers were decked out with raw beavers, boobs, and cocks, and slammed shut fast when a teacher walked by. Sex was everywhere—in mute shots of naked bodies, grunting videos, and jokes—but to read about sex without pictures was a totally new kind of thing.

  She was maybe the very last virgin in the whole school.

  Reading about sex was intimate. Reading about anything was like this really cool secret code from one brain to another, like ESP. Arena looked at the letters. How was it that letters turned into sounds? And sounds formed words and the words could mean absolutely anything and everything, even body fluids—and what exactly let her brain know how to decipher meaning from marks on a page?

  Weird.

  Writing was the most abstract art ever. She wrote in the back of her book, rough lines, making the letters as awkward and cryptic as possible. She wrote, “gOd.” Then she turned the page to Alpha Nerd. “What do you see?”

  He said, “God?”

  She nodded. There it was, the collective delusion. She’d made him see God in a few lines.

  Alpha Nerd, Son-of-Joe-Strummer, who probably didn’t even know who Joe Strummer was, said, “Want a pick-me-up?”

  She put a hand to her shirt, over the muscle that ran from her chest to her shoulder. A pink and white scar ripped through her skin there. She held her eyes open and steady. To let Alpha Nerd’s eyes meet hers was an exercise in connecting, like
hands over her body. He said, “First one’s free.”

  She said, “You’re that kid we learned about in seventh grade. In that peer pressure video?”

  He grinned. “Everybody does it.” It was a line from the film.

  She reached out a hand. He put a packet in it. She tried not to blink. His damp hand brushed her skin. She could smell the earth below where they sat, the dirt and dust. She could smell oil on the ground, as though a leaking car had idled there. She closed her fingers around the package. This was new terrain. She’d stepped into the video of their seventh-grade cautionary tale. The paper of the packet was solid, like a promise, crisp as the page of a magazine.

  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!