by Monica Drake
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 pu
t 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.”
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Ba-da-boom!
W. Somerset Maugham famously said that, and he said it again now in Georgie’s ear, and he threw his head back and laughed.
His words were scrawled on a piece of paper tacked to her wall. She was at her computer, a desktop set up in the dining room. With a one-term leave from an adjunct teaching job at Portland Community College followed by Christmas break, this was the moment to dust off her dreams. It would be the longest consecutive stretch of time she’d had off from work since she was thirteen, since her mom transferred with Nike to Malaysia and her dad forgot how to buy groceries, since she got her first period and had to take the city bus to buy her own tampons. At thirteen she washed cars. She made blackberry pies from berries that grew in an alley and sold them by subscription to residents in a retirement home.
Twenty-five years later, this was her big break. Her plans for maternity leave? She’d write a book. Author a book, even. She’d been patching one together for ten years already, in bits and pieces—it was her PhD dissertation: Implied Narrative and Suppressed Symbol in the Paintings of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
She could smell the best-seller possibilities!
With a shift in tone and scope she’d turn her dissertation into a commercial manuscript—play up the romance, the tragedy. Manufacture a lot of deeply felt emotion.
Pssst! They don’t tell you this in grad school, but here’s a tip: People go nuts for deeply felt emotion.
Vigée-Lebrun was a beautiful raven-haired portrait artist who flattered her patrons and worked her way into Marie-Antoinette’s life as a court painter. She lived at the Palace of Versailles with her infant daughter. When the French Revolution hit, when Marie-Antoinette lost her head, Vigée-Lebrun and her child escaped overnight, in a seriously competent mother moment.
This woman’s life was destined for the big screen! Georgie opened the file. Bella slept in her bassinet. The house was quiet. First thing Georgie did was revise the title of her work: The Secret Narratives of Vigée-Lebrun.
Readers love secrets.
Success inched closer. Somerset Maugham could have his laugh, but she’d win out and find her own rules. Her writing project had a nerve-racking sense of suppressed urgency.
Back when Georgie’s mom left town, Georgie dropped out of school. Social workers tracked her down. Her dad must’ve given them Sarah’s address. She was with Sarah’s family, eating their Pop-Tarts, bread, and tuna. She had Pop-Tarts hidden in her pockets. Heat pumped out of the vents in Sarah’s house, a minor miracle. She slept in Sarah’s extra bunk bed, on an extended sleepover, ready to leech love from a family that wasn’t hers.
She was a stray.
Now the bruised feeling around her C-section incision had started to lessen. Bella, mid–baby dream, scrunched up her face like Margaret Thatcher on a bad day—like Marie-Antoinette, when politics took a wrong turn—but still she slept.
What could go on in those new dreams? Freud suggested dreams were about working through repressed urges. What would be repressed in a newborn baby? Maybe Freud didn’t take care of enough babies.
Georgie readied her hands over the keyboard.
To spell and to cast a spell came from the same Middle English, the same source and sorcery, the same impulse and high hopes: to charm an audience.
The goal was to get the right letters in the right place, the right words in the right order, and seduce. She started to type, launching in earnest into her project, and at that very second, as though tied to the touch of Georgie’s fingers against the keyboard, Bella woke up and began to cry.
That angel. The girl’s face got so red! Was that natural? Did babies ever have aneurysms with all their screaming? And what were those blotches on her cheeks?
Georgie picked Bella up to croon in her ear. Then she saw marks, little crescents, etched in her daughter’s forehead. Claw tracks?
They weren’t deep. It was like a rat had prodded the child.
A rat?
If Georgie were to call the advice nurse again, what would she say? Hey, remember me, the one who gave my daughter drugs? I have one little question.…
No. Instead, she turned to the computer, held Bella in her arms, and typed, “baby + blotchy + cuts on forehead.” Thousands of answers and nonanswers came up, a world of parents trying to sort things out from home.
One search result read: cancer.
Georgie’s heart, her blood, her brain—everything stopped, instantly sick. She held her daughter closer. Cancer?
Oh my God! They’d spend every minute together. Life was short.
She tipped the baby back and looked at Bella’s face again. The splotches had subsided but the slim nicks in her forehead were still there. She pulled the sweet bundle closer, talking herself back off that ledge: not cancer, not cancer. Not everything is cancer.
There were other answers to choose, all more reasonable, more manageable. That was the beauty of Internet medical advice: options.
Georgie had Googled health and baby answers every day of her daughter’s life so far. And as this thought crossed her mind, she reenvisioned her whole book proposal: new idea, new project. It was so clear! It wouldn’t be the book she had set out to write ten years earlier, but it was the book that mattered now, the one that’d save her sanity. She opened a blank document and typed:
Fifty Things You May Not Need to Worry About in Baby’s First Year (But Can If You Want To): A Hypochondriac’s Guide to Child Care
She started a list:
1. Crazy newborn waking-up faces
2. Crossed eyes
3. Acts deaf
4. Funky breathing
5. Poop styles
6. Crying jags
7. Staring
8. Red face
9. Bruises
She wasn’t a doctor. She was a mom who knew how to self-soothe, as they said in babyland.
She wrote:
10. Baby:
a. Sleeps all the time
b. Sleeps when held
c. Sleeps when swaddled
d. Never sleeps
e. Looks half-asleep when its awake
Her daughter wasn’t even a week old, and there she had it—ten ways to go insane. Another day or two, this book would write itself.
She’d never leave the house again. She’d stay home, write books—cast those written spells—and coo at her baby until the baby grew into a girl who could talk. The two of them would talk together. Everything that mattered was already there in those dark rooms.
She was still on the computer, rocking Bella on her lap and darting from one link to the next, when she came across a notice: “Lit Expedition: Ecotours of the mind.”
It was an upcoming conference, scheduled for Portland. It was a world of major literature in her own backyard, less than two months away. It was listed as “The First Annual …”
It couldn’t be annual if it hadn’t even happened once yet. She had an urge to grade that line like a freshman placement exam. But no, she’d let it go—that wasn’t the relationship she had with the m
aterial.
This time, she wanted in.
Johnny Depp was listed as keynote speaker. Johnny Depp?! Gilbert Grape. Captain Jack Sparrow. Edward Scissorhands. Donnie Brasco. The Johnny Depp who channeled Hunter S. Thompson, with his thin mustache and shaggy hair, the man whom she’d known since 21 Jump Street, who was entirely familiar yet unreachable and surreal. That man was coming to the Oregon Convention Center to wave at a crowd and talk about environmental literature?
Okay. So she’d leave the house after all.
Even Vigée-Lebrun, that rococo painter, knew when to exit the castle.
This—this!—was the balance Georgie sought as her book project swerved from the academic to the popular then into a list of neuroses and baby poop. The life of the mind. Bring it on. She e-mailed her name to the organizers. She typed, “Hello, I’d love to volunteer to introduce speakers for your upcoming conference.” Calm and polite.
She hit “send.”
And before that message disappeared, she saw her mistake: “Hell, I’d love to volunteer …”
Ah! One dropped letter and she’d turned her voice on the page from an English major with a PhD into an enthusiastic cowboy.
Hell yes. She’d love to volunteer!
She put on classical music. The music was for the baby but also for her. It was Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The music was thrilling! It was the dance of Georgie’s high hopes set to a score. The conference would be her way of stepping back into the stream of the academic conversation. She needed it.
Please, please, please.
The organizers got back to her mid-overture. They said they’d love her help—they were desperate for volunteers!—but also that they wouldn’t have exact assignments until the day of the conference.
Georgie wrote back, pecking at keys on the keyboard one letter at a time, one-handed, while she held Bella against her chest. She typed, “Thank you!” She couldn’t say it enough. Then she added, respectfully, “One detail. If I don’t know my assignment in advance, how will I have time to research and write the introductions? I’d love time to think about it.” She wanted to put her writing skills to use. Her mind hadn’t gone with motherhood; she was still part of the discourse, the academic dream. The blaring classical music, that Academic Overture, was the sound track to Georgie’s life.
