The Stud Book (21 page)

“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 dead.”

“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.

“It’s either that or menopause,” Nyla said. “Missed a period, and that old familiar feeling.” She gave a squeeze and a lift to one of her boobs.

Georgie said, “Who’s the father?”

Nyla waved a hand, then picked at a spot on her table. “This man.”

Dulcet said, “Obviously.”

Nyla said, “Speed dating.”

Georgie said, “Five minutes?”

“You move fast,” Dulcet purred.

Nyla said, “He was nice.”

Sarah didn’t say anything. Her face had turned splotchy below her eyes. Her ears were red.

Nyla said, “I’ve been a single mom a long time. I can do it again.”

Sarah knew the stats—women became pregnant more often after one-night stands than in long-term monogamy. Right before menopause. It was an evolutionary strategy.

It was a desperate move.

Sarah was desperate! Precisely. So why was she so monogamous? Because she wanted an actual family, that was why. Her ghost babies gathered around her, all of them clawing at her, not one of them alive.

“How do you feel about—” Her voice cracked, but she went on. “Population, and the environment?” She nodded at the store, the slim eco-merchandise. Sarah didn’t have one baby yet. Nyla would have three. That was edging on baby hoarding.

Nyla said, “This could be the child who saves us.”

Dulcet laughed. “That’s a lot of pressure on one kid, darling.”

Georgie said, “Have you seen a doctor?”

Nyla shrugged it off. “I’ll find a clinic. But I’m pretty versed in pregnancy.”

The phone rang. She said, “Probably somebody wanting a bicycle, or a funeral, or a funeral on a bicycle.” With a smile in her voice, she answered, “Hello? LifeCycles.” Then she said, “Yes, that’s me,” and she listened.

She turned her back to her friends. She turned the music down until Amy Winehouse was a whisper.

She said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Arena wouldn’t sell drugs. She doesn’t do drugs.” There was a pause. “I’m sure all parents do say the same thing, but this time it’s true.”

When she got off the phone, she found her keys. She said, “I have to go. Lock the door on the way out.”

Dulcet asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I think it’s fine, but the police detained Arena. They say she sold kids crystal meth. Where would she even get that?” Nyla grabbed her purse, though it wasn’t really a purse. It was one of the hippie bags.

Georgie called, “Want me to go with you?”

Nyla was at the door, then out.

A sprig of dry lavender fell from the wall in a discreet hiss and rattle. The women sat together at the high, small table. Sarah rapped her knuckles against the wood of the stool she sat on, wanting to bring anything like luck her way.

Georgie said, “Crystal meth?”

Dulcet said, “At least Arena has a product.”

Georgie said, “That’s my future babysitter.” She reached for her keys, too, as though to run home and protect her child.

Sarah said, “She’s pregnant? Nyla’s pregnant? She’s almost forty-five.” Sarah’s face was still blotchy. Her shoulders slumped. She said, “That’s just not fair.”

Dulcet’s phone rang. She checked the number then silenced it. “Mr. Latex.” She added, “This guy wants to see me in my rubber skivvies. Private show.” She rubbed her thumb and fingers together: money.

Georgie asked, “Are you going to do it?”

Dulcet said, “Are you crazy? For all I know, he’s a cop.”

At the word
cop
, Georgie scanned the street. It was a nervous tick, since the day they’d showed up at her house. A flash of paranoia made her want to run home and clutch her daughter. Instead, she put a hand on Sarah’s wilting back. She asked, “Sarah?”

Sarah waved her away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Dulcet reached for Sarah’s hand. She said, “Honey, sometimes the worst things in life are free.”

Sarah straightened up only long enough to reach across the table for Nyla’s untouched drink. She wasn’t pregnant. Maybe she never would be. She poured Nyla’s drink into her own glass, and she drank.

N
yla tried hard not to be the kind of mom she never wanted to be. Still, in the car with Arena she couldn’t help but say it: “What were you thinking?” Her old car seats sank in the middle, forcing mother and daughter to rest in grooves they’d made over years of driving together.

Arena said, “I don’t know what everyone’s freaking out about.”

“You’re expelled, for one thing.” Nyla had to work to keep her foot from pressing on the gas pedal and racing home, as though home were some kind of safe place, a place where Arena could be a kid again.

“It’s not fair,” Arena said, and sounded like every child ever called on the carpet.

One thing Nyla had learned through raising children was that kids’ emotions run deep. They resonate against the tight landscape of inexperience, but even from the first day they’re about the same struggles as adults, navigating unsteady terrain between love and loneliness.

A truck in the next lane released a dark cloud of diesel, visible where it cut across the arc of a streetlight. The world smelled like
breast cancer in the making. To live in a city means living with other people’s choices.

Arena said, “Dulcet was kicked out of high school, too. You don’t rag on her for it.”

“That was twenty years ago.” Dulcet had been kicked out for smoking hash on school property. She didn’t graduate; she went to summer school instead. Nyla could’ve been kicked out, too, back then, but on that particular day she was working on a letter to the editor of the
Oregonian
about landfills and the use of Styrofoam in the lunchroom, petitioning for change. Her decision to stay in the library that afternoon involved perhaps an hour, and separated her reputation from her best friend’s ever after. She could smoke hash all summer! She could stand outside the party store midafternoon looking for old men to buy them booze, and nothing changed—she’d become the good girl. Now she said, “Besides, that was different.”

“Right.” Arena looked out the window, then dragged a strand of dark hair across her cheek.

Nyla should’ve been spending more time with her daughter, not opening a store and reading
Peace One Day
.

This was her fault.

Arena was a good student, with a distinct learning style. She wasn’t a fast reader, but was committed to ideas. She’d been reading one book all year—
Red Azalea
—that’s how dedicated to ideas Arena was. She read the pages backward and forward and drew illustrations in the white space.

Now there would be a hearing. There’d be a big fine. There’d probably be a social worker sent to the house. There was a yellow slip of paper in Nyla’s bag documenting the charges and dates in question. Nyla said, “You’re kicked out of Maya Angelou High.” Arena’s high school, in a lousy neighborhood, was close to bottom rung. The school slogan was “Still I Rise!” a line from an Angelou poem.

Arena said, “I’m not the only one who does it, you know.”

Nyla said. “Dulcet only sells prescription drugs to friends. Adults. And only when she’s broke.”

Arena blinked her eyes. “Dulcet sells drugs? To which friends?”

Nyla realized she’d screwed up. In a fast effort to redirect, she said, “We’re talking about you.”

Arena said, “I mean at school, now. Other kids sell it. It’s really not that big a deal.”

Nyla wanted to say all the right things, only the right things, and at the same time she wanted very much to scream. She said, “Listen—just stay away from those people.”

Outside the sky was dark. In the winter in Portland the days were short, the sky was so often solid clouds, and what little they saw of the sun set by four o’clock. Now it started to rain, a fine mist that built up on the windows and blurred the lights of oncoming traffic. Nyla’s wipers made a muddy smear across the windshield. A scrawny man lurched across the street at a crosswalk. His hair was scraggly, his teeth half gone.

“You see him?” Nyla pointed at the man as he struggled to cross the street. A history of meth showed in his flat lips and missing teeth. He dragged one leg. “He’s a cautionary tale.”