The Stud Book (7 page)

A haggard neighborhood regular stumbled out of the bushes in their wake and lurched down the middle of the road. The woman had gray hair, a limp, and a bottle of Olde English 800 sticking out of a black plastic bag. Her voice was a croak. “So you had the kid! Let me see the baby.” She hobbled over. She held her bottle by the neck, the bag sliding off like a badly fastened diaper.

Georgie pulled back the soft, clean satin blanket. Bella’s eyelashes were delicate lines. Her nose was a perfect button.

“Oh, a lovely one.” The woman’s breath was diseased. Her teeth pointed in every direction. She said, “That’s God’s little angel you got there.”

Who doesn’t love a baby compliment, even if it drifts in a cloud of gingivitis?

The woman pointed an arthritic finger. “She’ll turn on you, one of these days, you know.”

It was a curse.

The woman’s laugh was raspy with phlegm. She said it again: “Goin’ to turn on you.”

Were those flecks of spit raining down on Bella’s newborn’s skin? The baby’s closed eyes fluttered, showing the tiniest vein decorating one eyelid.

“She will not.” Georgie tried to keep her voice light.

“I got five li’l angels out there. Hell knows where they are now.” The woman twisted the cap off her bottle. When she drank, she tipped her whole body back and flung an arm out for balance.

A pale blue polyester nightgown peeked out from under the woman’s coat.

Shit. That nightgown! It was a flash of a nightmare. It was as good as Georgie’s own, or close enough to it. This woman was a mother who didn’t bother to get dressed, one possible future looming.

It was the wrong way to author a family.

It was a creepy reminder of the Gothic, within the family text.

Georgie lifted the edge of her garbage can by the plastic lip. With Bella in the other hand, she stooped to accommodate the can’s height and dragged it from the street to the sidewalk. The bedraggled drunk laughed. The can hit the back of Georgie’s foot at each step; like that laugh, it chased her home. Garbage chased her.

“I won’t let you down,” she whispered. She wouldn’t even put the baby down, actually, didn’t let her out of her arms.

The woman cackled and called out, “You read them baby books?”

Georgie didn’t turn, didn’t answer.

The woman said, “Here’s my advice—don’t worry! It takes a lot to kill a baby!” and she laughed again until she started to cough. Georgie heard a soft crash behind her as she scurried, as though the woman had fallen, but the laugh didn’t stop.

Kill a baby?

“Can’t go too wrong!”

Georgie was Quasimodo, staggering under her burdens. She’d surround her daughter with beauty, but there would always be garbage. She let go of the can when they reached the side yard and bent over her bundle, her baby. A car turned down the street.

Humble?

She peered toward it in the dusk and felt in her own hopeful gaze the wistfulness of a dog left home alone too long. The car slowed, then it lurched and veered around the drunk mama with the Olde English 800, who rose slowly to her feet to make her way, stumbling, down the center of the road.

D
ulcet Marvel was a tall, cool waterfall of a woman raised on Ritalin and Benadryl, built to last, entirely anti-baby. Why haul another little uterine hostage into the world to suffer through a rigged game? Why line up for public schools and cubicle jobs to work your ass off while the rich get richer and everybody else drops dead early?

She had her mother’s hips and her father’s hands. She had their silver serving tray and used it to hold jewelry, spare change, and pipes.

If she made it as long as her mom, she had twelve years left to live. If she lived as long as her dad, that might be closer to fourteen.

She didn’t hate babies, though maybe hated the world. That was possible, although she liked some things about living. She liked a vodka martini and the dusty, bitter taste of a Percodan on her tongue. She liked damp sex, hot strangers, and late mornings. She liked that first sip of the first cup of coffee each day—you couldn’t repeat the moment in the second sip, it wasn’t possible—and she loved her little dog.

Her job was to teach teenagers how not to multiply. On an afternoon when the air in the school gymnasium that doubled as a school cafeteria still held the sweet scent of canned corn and cheap meat,
while the city waited for their new mandrill to be born, while other women had babies in production lines at hospitals all over town or turned them out in home births, and in water tanks, and on the seats of public transportation, Dulcet was back in high school. She stood tall, nearly naked, alone in the middle of the gym under a ticking clock, in front of a crowd of teenagers who lined the bleachers.

She wore latex, her living anatomy lesson in a handcrafted, tailor-made transparent three-piece suit: a leotard-like one-piece latex swimsuit, a long-sleeved latex shirt over that, and a latex vest. The vest, marked with the wither of black lungs, was already on the floor. Her shirt showed white ribs and healthy lungs—the lungs of a country child! A nonsmoker! The shirt was as tight as a wet suit, with a zipper down the back. It ended at Dulcet’s narrow waist. The suit below it was laced with internal organs. A flower of ovaries bloomed just inside the cage of Dulcet’s hips. There was the curve of fallopian tubes, little question marks. She wore black boots, knee-high and high heeled. Her thighs were bare.

She was an anatomical superhero.

There were companies that specialized in latex women’s bodysuits for men, with hip padding and breast inserts. These suits let transsexuals walk the world in the ultimate female form. They came complete with catheters to let urine trickle from a man’s natural penis, which would be hidden, down through the folds of a latex vagina.

What Dulcet wore was harder to come by: an anatomically correct illustration of a woman’s internal organs made to cover a woman’s body, with the vulnerability of the inside lacing the outside. In her anatomy suit she was beyond naked: peeled of skin.

With a laptop and a portable projector balanced on a chair, she’d already been through her PowerPoint demo on genital warts. Everybody loved photos of genital warts! Flash those on a wall, and the place went silent.

When she spoke into her headset microphone, Dulcet’s voice boomed. She’d moved on to the particulars of hygiene. She said, “This is why, for the ladies in the group, you can’t actually lose a tampon. Quell that fear! Listen up, males, men and boys. You’re part of this too.”

She was here to tell the story of the body.

She pointed to her lower abs.

“The vagina is a short cave. It’s a major draw, but it’s not the Grand Canyon. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s not a black hole. The cervix is a barrier. If you lose the string or have sex without taking your tampon out—not that I’m advocating sex at your age, we already covered that—still, if it happens, save yourself an ER bill.

“Take a deep breath, relax, and bear down on those Kegels.

“You know your Kegels, right? Imagine a bowel movement. Then use your fingers. It’s your body, you can touch yourself. I can give permission for that, right?”

Girls giggled. There was a flash—somebody stole a photo. The room was full of camera phones.

Dulcet glanced at the PE teacher, who leaned against the cinder block wall. She was about Dulcet’s age, short with curly hair, dressed in the snug contours of a blue all-purpose tracksuit-turned-yoga-wear. The teacher nodded. Or maybe she flinched?

Everything in a public high school is politically on thin ice: All paranoia, all the time! Behind the teacher stood the vice principal, and behind her was the principal, a mini–Mount Rushmore arrangement staring out from the crowd.

Students fondled iPhones, BlackBerrys, cell phones, and games, the world in their palms. A few palpated the fake boobs Dulcet had passed around, looking for cancer lumps. Somebody flung one of the boobs toward the basketball hoop. It fell short. The PE teacher jogged over and picked it up. She gave a delicate scowl in the general direction of the audience but didn’t blow the silver whistle that hung from a cord around her neck.

Dulcet said, “Nice shot. Now, fellas, listen up. You can help with tampon retrieval. Cut your fingernails first. If it’s been in there a while, the retrieved tampon will stink. It will. It’ll stink to holy Heaven. And if it’s been in for a month, ladies, you might want to tell your doctor, but as long as you feel fine you’ll probably be okay. What you want to look out for are symptoms of toxic shock, like fever, vomiting.”

There were more flashes, more photos. Dulcet gave not one fuck about showing up on the Internet; her body was an extension of her public service work. If she started conversations in the blogosphere, that was good.

Besides, she didn’t take a bad photo. She was chiseled. She was a professional photographer herself. She could pull it off.

The latex suit was sheer between the bright blooms of organs. An observant student might see the dimple of a belly button and dark spots of pubic hair behind the translucent drawing of a vagina and uterus.

She was drenched in sweat under the suit. Worse, she’d had to cover herself in lube first, in order to pull the latex over her own muscles, angles, and curves. Now lube and sweat mingled until the outfit was torture, like a bad weight-loss program.

She drank from a bottle of water that rested on a wooden stool at her side. She had a duffel bag at her feet, mostly for the fake boobs. Her job was to get the kids’ attention.

She’d been over the gender-neutral parts: shown the pancreas and the appendix, traced the bronchial system, ribs, and heart. To some of these kids a heart was a cliché in a pop song, not a vital organ that could burst with too many of the wrong drugs. They needed to know what she had to offer.

A heart can skip and murmur even over basic things like a lack of adequate water or too little potassium. A brain is a fragile, adaptive organ. She had a dream of making a brain hat to show how drugs and frontal lobotomies worked.

She said, “Any questions?”

The room went silent, except for the ticking wall clock.

Dulcet said, “I don’t do this because I’m court ordered to as community service, or because I get rich from it. I do it because I want you to be in charge of your own body. You’re the ruler, and you can exist in your own benevolent anarchy as long as you know the rules.”

She walked a few steps in one direction, eyes on the crowd, then turned and walked back the other way. In the audience, one hand crept up slowly.

“Yes!” Dulcet pointed to the girl fast, as though she were fingering a fleeing suspect. The girl slouched in the middle of the crowd. Dulcet said, “Kudos to you, first one to break the ice. Let me give you a prize.”

When she crouched, the rubber suit folded and bunched at her waist. She dug in her duffel bag until she found what she was looking
for, then stood and tossed a paperback toward the girl in the crowd. It was a copy of Y
our Body: Right or Wrong?
Physical trivia. “Now, what’s your question?”

The girl said, “How do you pee in that?”

Dulcet said, “I have a slit, in the latex. Who else?”

Another girl raised her hand. This one asked, “Are you, like, post-op sex change, or what?”

Dulcet wasn’t sure she’d heard the question right. You had to get it exactly right on these school visits—conversation about transgender stuff had to be student initiated, or funding could be shut down fast. She put a hand behind her ear. “One more time?” she said.

The girl cleared her throat. She sat up a little straighter. She was heavyset. She said, “Like, were you born a girl, or a guy?”

I have a slit
, Dulcet thought.

Her job was to answer with authority and respect. The other part of her job—the part that didn’t show up on her résumé—was to physically remind kids steeped in media images that there’s more than one way to be female. She was tall, strong, short-haired, big-handed, and elegant. And she was direct. She said, “I am a woman. But people can be born in a range of ways. Gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, right?”

She aimed for the all-inclusive answers.

A boy raised his hand, or at least the person looked like a boy. Dulcet tried to avoid assumptions. She pointed and said, “Yes?”

“If you’re a girl, how’d you get so tall?”

She said, “I grew up, this is me. Now, any questions about your bodies?” She smiled in a way she hoped was kind, though Dulcet wasn’t a big smiler; it made her face hurt.

Without raising his hand, a boy called out, “Are we going to get a naked man suit in here?”

Another kid cupped his hands and yelled at the first one, “Homo!”

Somebody else said, “Show dill weed how his cock works.”

The kids laughed and one pushed another and then the bleachers were roiling with bodies. All the discomfort of not talking, not asking their questions, turned to the physical. Someone threw another fake boob. A kid caught it and flung it back. One boy collected three and juggled them. An A-cup skidded across the polished wood
floor. The PE teacher picked it up, tucked it in her sweat suit pocket, and just like that she had a third mammary down low on her torso. A jellyfish of a double-D fell as though from the sky, right behind the first, and took a dive past the teacher’s ear. The woman ducked, in a fine show of peripheral vision and fast reflexes. She said, “Let’s say good-bye to our guest. Thank you, Dulcet Marvel! Make sure to return all the props in good condition.” She led the kids in clapping, and they took that as a cue it was okay to leave. They clapped as they walked, a clapping stampede, like they couldn’t get free fast enough.