The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  Sarah said, “They didn’t knock me out, but they gave me drugs so I wouldn’t remember the procedure. That’s how they put it. Feels like I was knocked out.”

  A fleck of purple-stained ice bounced off her lip and hit her blue hospital robe. Ben reached for it. He put his fingers to Sarah’s mouth even as the ice disappeared with the heat of his skin. He wanted to help her, feed her, whatever he could do. She pushed his hand away, then held it and squinted at the television.

  Sarah said, “The egg sac or whatever, the ‘products of conception’ they call it—our little messed-up dead baby?—it was hanging out at the edge of my cervix. It didn’t want to go. Could’ve killed me. How was your night with Humble?”

  He shrugged. What was the right answer? “He’s a little creepy.”

  Sarah laughed. “He’s a sweetheart! What’s creepy about Hum?” They’d both seen Humble hold the baby and do a slow dance in the dining room until the tiny girl fell asleep on his shoulder.

  Ben started to explain, then couldn’t bring himself to say “dead girl shots” to Sarah’s pale skin, with the IV tape still gummy on her hand. “The nurse tells me you’re ready to go home.”

  She said, “When this show is over.”

  The TV laughed at itself.

  “Our insurance pays for about ten minutes in this hotel,” Ben said.

  Sarah shook her plastic cup. “Can I get another drink?” She had a stack of juice cups, one inside the other. It was past two in the morning.

  He said, “Your friends think I’m a jerk.”

  A janitor came in. With his back to Sarah and Ben and his head down, he emptied the garbage then ran a damp mop over the floor. He mopped around where Ben sat in the wheelchair, the only chair in the room. The janitor turned the lights out when he left, as though the room were already empty, leaving them in the dark with the glow of the TV and the monitors and buttons around the bed.

  Ben’s broken nose throbbed. His head ached under the ebbing of his personal alcohol tide. “We’re supposed to be out of here.”

  “It’s almost over.” Sarah flicked a damp, juice-stained finger at the TV. The show had twenty minutes left. Kathy Griffin rattled around at Brooke Shields’s ankles yelling, “Calm down! Calm down!”

  Ben gave in to Kathy Griffin’s demands. He felt calm. He wheeled his chair closer and held his wife’s hand. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, where thin bones lay under the skin, under the residual gum of IV tape. He said, “I can’t watch this without pain pills.”

  “Meds make it way better.” Sarah never took medicine. She didn’t believe in it. She never watched TV, either. Now, with this fourth miscarriage, though, she’d changed. She tapped the piece of paper, the prescription, on her tray.

  Ben said, “We have pills at home.”

  She said, “Not enough. Find a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Let’s make it our best friend.”

  Nyla stood in bare feet on the metal rung of a short ladder and earnestly scraped layered paint off a windowsill in her store. She wore a blue paper mask to keep dust out. Her shirt read YEAR OF THE POLAR BEAR! like it was a celebration instead of a cry for help, a big party instead of the year polar bears as a species could fall between cracks in melting ice caps.

  She had enough inventory to call the room a store. She had a countertop and a green ceramic bowl filled with burnished red chestnuts off the street, and a plate of lavender shortbread. The shortbread wasn’t for sale. Nyla baked, just to give back to the world. What was more wholesome than simple, organic ingredients turned into sweets?

  She chipped at the paint and hummed along to Amy Winehouse on her old CD player—because honestly, she didn’t have an iPod, and who needed all those new techno gadgets with their conflict minerals and strip-mining anyway? She chipped until she had maybe one inch of one windowsill cleared, with six more windows to go.

  This chipping would take a lifetime.

  Her store was just wider than a hallway and ran along the forgotten fringe of an industrial building. Amy Winehouse’s voice echoed against the cinder blocks, smooth, smoky, and contemptuous. Nyla stretched an arm for the remote. She turned up the tunes.

  Her lower back moved with the crick of the car accident ten years before. Her psychic yogi healer said she held on to that pain, and even at the time she’d countered, “Why shouldn’t I hold on to it?” Her husband, her beautiful, sunny-haired kayaker, had died in the car wreck. In cold weather the memory of him beat in Nyla’s back like a cracked steering column.

  Another car had crossed the line and smashed their Subaru on the driver’s side. Arena was five, in back, in a booster seat in the middle. That day, Nyla saw her daughter’s chest pour blood. An old metal camping lantern had cut through the girl’s Crater Lake shirt. Nyla had actually fallen over—had learned what it meant to be weak in the knees.

  When she tried to look at the disaster of her husband’s death as a cosmic lesson she knew only that she could pull a little salvage from the wreck. She built a life for her kids. Nyla had the gift of finding her husband in her daughters’ gestures and the color of their hair. They grew more like him all the time. If she could hold their lives together after that accident, adapt and move on, humanity could sure as shit band together, wise up, and head off the disaster of climate change. The trick was to stay positive.

  Amy Winehouse’s voice wound its way through the room like smoke.

  The secret of Nyla was that under her layers of cotton and Gore-Tex, under her fleece vests and scarves, her body was muscular, sleek, and flexible despite her car accident. She did everything possible to keep the synovial fluid washing her joints, and her muscles strong. She was in the slim minority demographic of women over forty who could still do the splits, both ways. She was practical in the way she dressed, and a hardworking machine, but under those clothes she was built for pleasure.

  Her store pressed up against a boarded-up dry cleaner’s. Crack addicts curled in the recessed doorway and cans of OE8 littered the curb, but there was a Starbucks practically next door. Starbucks, with their market research, was an indicator the neighborhood was poised for an upswing.

  She stopped chipping long enough to give her throbbing callus a minute off. She hadn’t been on vacation since forever, not even to Dubuque, where her cousin lived. But at the same time she’d barely ever held a steady job, so every day was kind of half vacation, right? She got by through teaching yoga classes and substituting in a cardio-kickboxing gym. Her husband’s life insurance policy made the house payments and supplied a basic college fund for the kids. Now she’d have her store, LifeCycles.

  Paint flakes gathered on the cement below, loaded with lead and chemicals. Nyla had a vacuum with a HEPA filter. She’d soaked the windowsill because wet paint gave off less dust than dry. None of this was healthy, but somebody had to get the work done, and Nyla was invested in that store.

  With the singing and the roar of the vacuum and the rush of her own thoughts, she didn’t hear the door open behind her. She didn’t hear it close.

  It was hot, breathing behind the blue paper. She lifted the dust mask and went back to vacuuming. She swung her hips, giving a fling to the vacuum cord. She shook her hair out. There was a tap on her shoulder. Nyla screamed!

  She dropped the vacuum handle and her upright Kenmore fell on her foot. A hand jostled her. She couldn’t turn fast enough. It was all in slow motion, a Hitchcock scene.

  When she did turn, there was Georgie, smiling, holding a green bottle of prosecco. Nyla’s heart squeezed under her ribs. Her face flushed. Dulcet loomed behind Georgie, white bobbles of earrings swinging.

  Nyla switched the vacuum off. Instantly, the phone rang. Maybe the phone had been ringing for a while? Her hands were still shaking, her heart tight. She said, “First business call! It’s official. You’re here to witness it.”

  She turned down the music, reached for the phone, and tried to put a smile in her voice. “Thank you for calling LifeCycles.”

  Nyla gestur
ed for Georgie and Dulcet to use the coat hooks. Amber candles burned on a side table. There was a couch covered with a blanket. Into the phone, she said, “Pardon me? No, we’re not a bike store. No, I understand, sure. That’s okay.”

  When she got off the phone she gave her friends a hug, a real hello. She said, “Welcome to LifeCycles!”

  Dulcet pulled out the bottom of Nyla’s T-shirt to straighten the image. YEAR OF THE POLAR BEAR. She said, “Nice. That comes just before the Year of No Polar Bear, right?”

  Georgie said, “You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked.”

  Nyla said, “It’s a store. People have to come in.” Then she looked at Georgie and added, “Where’s Bella?”

  “With Hum. Their first time home alone. We’re practicing, with the conference coming up.” Georgie lifted a hand to her breast as though adjusting her bra; it was the gesture of a nursing mother. “I should go back.”

  “You just got here!” Dulcet said.

  “It’s hard.” Georgie almost whispered this, into her own hands.

  A sound like a sudden rain cut in and added to the low notes of music playing. It was a splatter on the window, a man peeing. A drunk. It was an old man, or maybe only a man weathered enough to look old. A “hard liver,” as people said—but did that mean his liver, or his life?

  “Jesus,” Dulcet said.

  Georgie squinted at the glass.

  Nyla waited it out. “Sometimes that happens.”

  Dulcet opened the door. She said, “Look what you’re doing.” The man’s wrinkled face was red, his eyes so swollen and narrow he seemed practically blind. Dulcet, in her heels, towered over him. She said, “Go on, get out of here. Go!”

  The man struggled to zip up as he stumbled in his slow dance away.

  “The neighborhood’s in transition,” Nyla said.

  Dulcet asked, “From what to what?”

  This neighborhood had been in transition since 1805. It had been a working-class German settlement, an African American community, and home to many a quinceañera celebration. Now it was a hipster corridor mingled with drug house holdovers and a lot of hardworking families. It had an edge of racial tension.

  It was what Nyla could afford.

  The sky was an evening bruise. The stooped man pushed a shopping cart, and the rattle of loose wheels over ragged macadam drowned out Dulcet’s question.

  Nyla said, “Look at all the great parking!” She flung her hands wide. The street was nearly empty. “You don’t get parking like this downtown.”

  Across the street sat a Ford truck with a camper shell on the back, makeshift curtains, and an orange tow sticker on the window. A back tire had been replaced by a stack of cinderblocks. Another car was stripped: no hood, no doors. Wires hung out of the exposed seat covers.

  Ever optimistic, Nyla said, “I’m practically next door to Starbucks.”

  Her friends looked up and down the block. Nyla pointed. They followed her hand. Far off down the street, up a shallow hill, there it was: the green double-tailed mermaid, a siren.

  Dulcet said, “The Safeway kind of Starbucks.”

  It was indeed on the side of an old Safeway. It wasn’t the kind that meant market research. It was the kind that came blindly, one corporate franchise tied to another in parasitic relations.

  The phone inside rang again. Nyla went to answer. Sarah, the last of their party, stepped off a passing bus, breathless and expectant, holding a fistful of mums in green paper.

  Inside, Nyla said, “Hello?” Then, “No, I’m sorry. We aren’t a funeral parlor. Yes, end-of-use planning. It’s a little different.” She pushed the plate of lavender shortbread toward Georgie, and into the phone said, “End of use? It’s about objects. Recognizing planned obsolescence, factoring disposal in.” There was a lull while she listened. Her friends crowded into the tiny store. She said, “That’s all right. Thank you. Sorry for your loss.”

  She put the phone back into its cradle and held it there. She leaned on it as though she might keep another call away if only she held it down tightly enough. She said, “It’ll take a while to familiarize a clientele.”

  Sarah said, “The place is gorgeous!” The walls were painted deep ochre and decorated with bundles of dried lavender. Candles burned in small golden glass orbs. One wall was a dusky blue. Sarah ran a hand over it.

  “Pipe Dream,” Nyla said. “That’s the paint color.”

  “Of course it is,” Dulcet added.

  Sarah nodded, offered a smile, and handed over the mums. It was the first time they’d all been together since the night of the miscarriage. She’d already made it clear she wasn’t sentimental about that loss—she was determined to not be sentimental. A baby that dies at eight weeks gestation old is a collection of cells that hasn’t come together right. It wasn’t a thing meant to live. And that was the end of the baby conversation. She picked up a horse chestnut from a ceramic bowl.

  “Lovely, aren’t they?” Nyla said.

  “Like a testicle.” Sarah moved the nut through her fingers as though kneading a petrified ball sac. It was an embryonic plant. Everything was reproductive.

  Nyla sold cloth bags made out of undyed hemp canvas, with the words THE NEW RULES OF LIFE screen printed on one side over a silhouette of a genderless human seemingly giving birth to a bush. Sarah picked the bag up. A tag said the bag was meant to be used a thousand times then buried—given back to the earth.

  Who would keep count?

  Nyla lifted a basket full of notebooks. “A hundred percent sustainable. Recycled paper, vegan glue. There are tiny wildflower seeds in each page, the seeds of honeybee-friendly flowers.” She passed the notebooks around. “I’m waiting on a delivery of organic tea in compostable tea bags. No packaging at all, coming by bicycle.”

  Sarah flipped through the notebook and saw the flecks of seeds embedded. Each page was laced with embryonic plants waiting to be born.

  Dulcet cracked open the prosecco. The cork flew, knocking into a bundle of dried lavender and sending leaves flying. Georgie pulled a pomegranate from her paper bag and split it open in her fingers. Juice ran down her hand and over her wrist and dripped onto the cement floor.

  There were so many seeds inside that fruit, each one white as a tooth, wrapped in its translucent, garnet coat. The edible part of a pomegranate is an aril. Sarah had studied pomegranates in school. They used them as models. “A pomegranate is like an ovary,” she said.

  They were the image of fertility both literal and symbolic.

  Georgie’s fingers were pink with juice, her body round with baby making. Dulcet poured four glasses of prosecco. The booze whispered and hissed, tiny bubbles bursting. Georgie said, “It’s decorative. We don’t have to—”

  “Throw them in,” Sarah urged. Who was she to censor fertility signs?

  The arils hit the bubbly and laced the light drink with red, like blood in clear water.

  Dulcet asked, “What’s the theme of this store?”

  Nyla had found a rag and rubbed at a spot on the floor where pomegranate juice seeped into the concrete. Now she sat back on her heels. She said, “To go beyond sustainability. Beyond recycling and the common cycle of consumption.” She used the side of her arm to brush hair away from her face, and held her rag on her lap, where it bled a damp spot. “Reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle—we say that all the time, teach it to kids, but what’s ‘reuse,’ really? A purse made of fifty plastic bags? That’s crafts, not environmentalism.”

  Sarah’s bag was made out of fifty used plastic bags. The bag was cute. It was plastic and crocheted. She felt a little ashamed of it now.

  Nyla said, “Before the industrial revolution sustainability was a whole other question. People produced what they needed.”

  Dulcet looked around the room. “So, the plan is to sell what people need?”

  “The plan is to showcase what I value.”

  Dulcet said, “Honey, you can’t make a living anymore selling hippie bags and clover. The seventies are d
ead.”

  “It’s not about money. It’s about taking a stand.” She stood and brushed off her paint-marked yoga clothes, ready to pledge allegiance to her own dream. “Money is a construct, a made-up system, a fiction next to the reality of water and air.”

  And the anthem that played behind Nyla’s speech was Amy Winehouse crooning, “No, no, no …” It was a CD set to repeat.

  “I’ve got a development grant. I can promote the world I want, here, in this cheap spot. People buy what’s for sale and designers pave the way. I’ll be a positive link in that consumer chain.”

  Sarah expected Nyla to break into song, complete with hand gestures.

  “Cheers!” Georgie said. She raised her glass. She said it quickly, having found that spot to interject.

  Dulcet refilled her own glass. Sarah lifted a glass, too. Nyla was the last to reach. Then the four clinked their glasses, spilled prosecco, and sipped in celebration—only Nyla put her glass down without drinking.

  Sarah knocked on the wood of their small tabletop.

  Dulcet grabbed her wrist. “Stop knocking.”

  “It’s bad luck to not drink for a toast,” Sarah said. She knocked to call on good luck, to offset the bad.

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” Georgie asked. “I broke my no-booze-while-nursing rule for this.”

  Outside, a bus broke wind in a cloud of diesel and pulled away from the curb. A short woman with heavy bags in each hand had climbed off the bus and walked away like a slow-moving windup toy, a roll to each side with every step. Wind shook the leaves on a skinny tree. The world was toxic, dark, and cold out Nyla’s window.

  After a thoughtful pause—a pregnant pause?—with the determination of a mother ripping off a Band-Aid, when a swifter move could mean less pain, Nyla said, “I might be pregnant.”

  “What?” Sarah squawked. She couldn’t help herself. Nyla had two kids already! She was old. Older than Sarah. At least two years older.

  Georgie said, “That’s fantastic!”

  “Ugh. I can’t even imagine.” Dulcet drank again, without putting her glass down.