The Stud Book (40 page)

She ran. He fumbled to get up behind her.

La la la …! Nyla hummed and stirred her Amish bread. Life was good, getting better all the time, if she could only shake the guilt and the ache in her side and the limp of her sore foot.

She’d called the courts and said she wouldn’t press charges—the attack was a misunderstanding, water under the bridge, right?—but the boy had a record. He was on probation. His future was in the hands of the state.

She added a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and a cup of sugar, everything in equal proportions. The starter was the “mother bread,” meant to be divided.

Nyla was the mother bread’s mother.

Every ten days forever that starter would be ready to split, like cells dividing, turning into twins, triplets, quadruplets.

Bread without end, amen.

Every ten days she’d have a new gift to give away. It was a chain letter in dough form. They’d all make bread together, tending that baby. She’d give a starter to the parents of that boy when she found them.

Her answer to the world’s despair was bread.

She lifted a cup of dough out of the starter. Two more times, and she had three gifts. Nyla had three lumps of bread dough individually packaged in plastic bags, each one round and white.

She headed for Sarah’s.

This was the day to spread her love.

Dulcet claimed it as a day to spread her legs and her latex. A day to get the bills paid. The banks had shut down one of her lines of credit, though she had made her payments on time and met their incredibly high interest rate. It was the new lending climate. Her other cards
were maxed. The schools hadn’t brought her in to do the body show since the “incident,” as she thought of it, in the closet.

She had options: sell off photography equipment, give up the cheap lease on her studio, or pull out the latex suit.

Mr. Latex was her answer, her angel. He would be her stopgap.

He seemed genuine in his urges. Maybe he was a dedicated cop sustaining an undercover ruse, or a patient and conniving murderer. More likely he was a man pushing sixty who saw death skulking on the horizon and wanted his needs gratified in this lifetime. She slid out a clothing bag from under the bed. Like a vampire, the latex suit didn’t do well stored in the light of day. She unzipped the case and lifted her organs out. There was the lung vest, the respiratory system, and the underlayer of ovaries, uterus, and kidneys. The pieces were well oiled with a silicone that gave them a shine. Inside, it was dry and clean and powdered. She laid it on the bed.

The one part that was missing from this woman’s body, she thought for the first time, might be a developing fetus in the uterus. She hadn’t considered making a pregnant anatomy when she ordered the suit. She always thought of it as anti-baby.

She put her hand inside, behind the uterus, and wondered how a baby doll might work, upside down, against her own skin, under the latex.

She could take a Sharpie and draw in a simple, tiny embryo. Then she’d be in Nyla’s body, that fertile, fecund maker of babies.

Nyla was on the verge of an empty nest, and suddenly—Inexplicably! Wham!—pregnant.
Ding-ding-ding!
What were the odds of that? Dulcet was pretty sure Nyla had engineered the situation on purpose.

Clearly, Nyla had lost all sense of herself except as a mother.

Dulcet pulled off her dress, kicked off her underwear, then sat stark naked beside the suit and began to rub a water-based lube across her stomach. She worked lube over her bony hips and along the arch of her ass.

The goal was for the suit to happily glide on, not tear or overstretch. Latex clothes are big bucks. This one was tailor-made, and it was her income; she babied that precious fetish wear.

Nyla, uneasy about leaving the house since she had started showing up on the local news, scrambled to her car. She locked the doors and revved the engine, always grateful when the car started. She’d been recognized more than once by neighbors, as
that woman from TV who beat up some punk
. Her neighborhood business association invited her to teach a class in self-defense for small business owners.

The newspaper found reasons to get extra mileage out of her photo:
ECONOMY WORSENS, VIOLENT CRIME ON THE RISE
. And there would be her picture, the poster victim of rising violent crime. They were saving money by rerunning the image.

She didn’t feel like a victim. She’d put up a serious fight. It was possible that, out of the two of them, she was the only one fighting. That kid could not keep his hands up, to protect his face, to save his life.

Alvin Kelvin Aldrich was the prisoner who set the record for crowding in the juvenile jails. His sweet, sad face showed up under headlines such as
SYSTEM OVERBURDENED
.

She hurried up Sarah’s front steps. Her breathing was shallow. She was kind of a wreck. She cradled what she’d come to think of as her Bundle of Love, the starter dough, knocked on the door, and kept her coat collar pulled up high.

The city was a sprawling jail under cement-gray skies. Nyla had donated what extra money she could come up with to the Oregon Humane Society that month. She gave money to save ringed seals. She bought a magazine subscription from a kid who came to her door even though she didn’t believe the magazines would ever be delivered.

It was her ongoing effort to atone.

When the door opened, it wasn’t Sarah or even Ben. It was a big, silent, brawny, weathered man. Thieves? Nyla’s fist tightened, with an urge toward self-preservation. But she couldn’t start another fight, not ever, not in that town. She tried to think peaceful thoughts. “Is Sarah here?”

The man rotated his thick neck to gaze back into the house. Nyla took two steps away. She felt hands wrap around her shoulders, and when she moved she stepped on somebody’s foot, gave a yip, and flung her Bundle of Love.

“Hey, darlin’.” Sarah’s voice, behind her, was the burble of a
river. “I was in the backyard. What’d you bring us?” Sarah picked up the Ziploc bag of white starter dough from where it’d tumbled under an azalea bush and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Salt dough clay?”

Nyla said, “Friendship bread. You can use it to make other starters, too, and expand the circle of friends.” Her voice was nervous and thin.

Inside, the house had the smell of men at work: cut planks, fresh dirt, and sweat. Ben came downstairs with damp hair like he’d just stepped out of a shower. He walked in a cloud of berry shampoo—not the smell of work at all. Sarah took the starter to the kitchen, leaving her alone with Ben. Nyla still hadn’t forgiven him for abandoning Sarah during the miscarriage.

Now she asked, “What do you have going on?”

“We’re adding a deck!” Then more quietly, confidentially, Ben said, “She’s been fragile, since the last miscarriage. Home improvements keep her spirits up.”

There were the sounds of a handsaw being drawn back and forth against wood. Sarah came back from the kitchen, and Ben put a hand on her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him. They seemed so happy together, completely partnered. They even looked alike. Nyla missed the days when she’d had a husband. She missed it more than anyone could imagine.

Sarah and Ben’s lives were perfect and easy.

All Nyla did, all she’d ever done, was work. She felt it now, watching the hired men. She’d rehabbed her own houses. She knew how to use a Sawzall, for God’s sake, that mark of an ambitious, self-sufficient homeowner.

The pain in her side spoke up in its way. Ugh. Nyla put a hand to it.

Seeing Sarah and Ben so happy together, surrounded by all that industry, improving their lives, made her miserable, even as she was happy for them, and she couldn’t hold on to both emotions at once. They seemed so suddenly Ken and Barbie, both of them lanky but an average Oregon height, where women ran tall, the two of them like a pair of grande Americanos in that Starbucks daily measurement system, or a Subaru’s compact Outback, all those ways of saying middle ground, evenly matched in their long limbs.

She couldn’t stay there. It was easy to excuse herself—she was incidental to their happiness. She got out.

She wanted to see Dulcet.

Dulcet, her dear debauched friend, that lone wolf, would be an antidote to the overwhelming hit of Sarah and Ben’s domestic bliss.

Arena marched at the edge of the road and heard her feet crunch gravel along with a symphony of crickets, tall grass rustling, and the hum of electrical wires. The road was empty and the dark was crowded with noise. There were no lights. The stars were clear but small and far away between cloud cover. Starlight? That was a joke. The stars didn’t light up anything but themselves.

She’d taken the last bus out.

She used her iPhone to find directions to the address of the house on the back of AKA’s photo. She tried to use the same phone to light her way, but that dim light only made her feel more visible against the dark.

She could use the phone to actually make a call. To talk to her mom, to tell her about the hippie. Arena’s wrist was red and swollen.

But this was her mom’s fault. She never wanted to talk to her mom again.

She wanted to see AKA, cry into his shoulder, smell him up close. The thought of his caramel skin kept her going forward. She thought about her own virginity thing. This was the time: She’d find AKA and tear his clothes off. She’d give herself over—pull his body so close even their molecules could mingle.

Her thigh muscles tightened against the cold night. She came to a mailbox and used her phone to light the numbers of the address on the side of it. She was closer.

Her legs were machines. Her breath was shallow. She could smell AKA’s mix of cigarettes, sweat, and soap, and tried to imagine his room in the house he grew up in: clean sheets, a doting mother, a woodstove. Houses in the country all had woodstoves, right?

After forever—miles?—she found the address in black numbers on gold squares stuck to a mailbox. She slid the photo from her coat pocket; it was hard to see the details in the dark. She held the photo close to the light of her phone.

This was the house.

The mailbox, covered in rust, crumbled when she prodded it
with a finger. A car approached from far away. Its lights ran across Arena, illuminating her on the side of the road. She ducked behind bushes that grew in the culvert. The culvert was full of rain, though, and it soaked through the fabric of her Toms.