A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Part 4

When I arrived home, my hair was in long wet strands and I was s.h.i.+vering, and Bruce asked me if I didn't know when to come in out of the cold. "This might be something you don't understand yet," he said, "but this weather looks just the same watching it from inside." He took a clean towel and wrapped my head. In simple ways, Bruce and I took care of each other, which sounds old-fas.h.i.+oned, but it is the truest form of love that I have ever shared with a man. He bent over and rubbed my feet hard, finally working his way up past my ankles, wandering toward my knees. We stretched out on the living room floor, and with me on top we crashed our way to happiness and exhaustion.

Afterwards Bruce fell asleep as he always does, his foot on top of mine so that we were still two leaves connected, his lips parted as if there was a word there about to be spoken. I lay on my side and watched the snow drifting, piling up around the fenceposts, covering the pines with a dreamy blanket that in a day or two would snap the weaker limbs.

Lorna's favorite color was black. Black worn loosely: an extra-large sweater over black pajama bottoms. Sometimes, black worn skintight: a one-piece ebony bodysuit revealing her every shallow breath. Looking at Lorna in an outfit like that was painful-her chest thin and hollow as a bird cage, but it was her hair that Bruce couldn't get used to.

"It's not shaved, Dad. It's crewed. A friend of mine in El Paso did it. Barber clippers and a pair of manicure scissors. You wouldn't believe how heavy hair really is." She bounced her head from side to side, demonstrating the lighter, less burdened Lorna to us.

After she arrived, food was the theme at our house, at least as far as Bruce was concerned. He knows that he's at his best slouched up against our old pine table with a bratwurst or grilled cheese sandwich in his hand, listening intently and shaking his head, every once in a while leaning back in his chair to get a better perspective.

Bruce and Lorna were polite with each other, friendly and talkative, and they were agile, too, quickly skating around the serious talk-Lorna's personal life, her health, her plans for what was out ahead. I stayed out of their way, relaxed in the demilitarized zone of the kitchen, made tuna salad and poured chips into a bowl, opened beers for us and a c.o.ke for Lorna. She didn't want beer or anything that could cloud her mind, she said. She walked over to the window. "It's so gorgeous out there. I want to see it all."

Dorsey Newquist, our neighbor who lives about a mile down the road, would have spit teeth if he'd heard her call this place gorgeous in late November. He had to work it, throwing hay to his cattle early mornings, opening the creek, repairing downed fencelines. Just before lunch not long ago he arrived at the front door, told me to turn my stove off and to grab my gloves and jacket and camera. In his old green International, he drove me out to the far side of Shepherd's Hill, parked at the gate, and then walked me out to the pond.

"There she is," he said. "Eight hundred dollars of drowned prime." He took two b.u.t.terscotch candies from his pocket and we unwrapped them and put them in our mouths. Dorsey sucked so hard that I could hear the candy clicking against his teeth.

At first, beneath the mirror of ice on the pond, it looked as if a big brown-red blanket had been frozen, but as I stood there and studied it, an ear took shape, a huge marble eye, and then the sorry unsophisticated face of a Hereford. Later I brought Bruce back and showed him, although the water level or some condition had changed and the cow had drifted a little farther out and was harder to see. The next time, when we took Bruce's cousin, Paul, the cow was back near the bank and turned the opposite direction. Jokingly, I hummed the theme to The Twilight Zone.

Bruce and I drove out several times in the following weeks and watched the strange migration of Dorsey's cow under the ice-it was one of those oddities of winter which we came to look forward to, like pizza every other Friday night. A couple of times we met Dorsey on the road when we were driving out there. He'd stop and stand at the side of his truck and with his eyes watering from the cold he'd laugh and threaten to get an ice pick and a barbecue and to come with us.

Bruce always said the same thing to him: "We're ready for a party whenever you are."

Lorna didn't want to see Dorsey's cow, though we told her it was a once-in-a-lifetime. "It moves," Bruce told her, "it dances under ice," but we couldn't convince her to take the ride to Shepherd's Hill.

She wrinkled her nose and looked sideways at us. "I'm worried about you two," she said.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," I told Lorna. "I've been worried about your dad for a while," I said, tapping the side of my head, crossing my eyes.

"Huh," Bruce said and danced me backwards to the couch where he pulled me down, tickled and wrestled me until I took back my comment.

When we suggested going to a movie, Lorna didn't want to see that either. "I'm tired of Hollywood. Know what I mean?"

The one thing she did want to do was sleep. We put her in the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hall where she fell unconscious for ten or twelve hours each night, arose cheerily, then fixed breakfast for herself.

"A coma," Bruce said when I mentioned it to him. "A blackout. I've seen it before. Don't worry. She's just had a hard time and has to get caught up with the world again."

Even when she sat on our sofa after ten hours of sleep, though, she was squint-eyed and drowsy, her thin legs drawn up under her, her arms always wrapped around herself-as if she was keeping something in. Or out.

I couldn't imagine what kind of life in El Paso had exhausted her to that point, but there was no way I wanted to ask about it either. Privacy, I told myself, is sometimes the best comfort we can be given.

Midday, she returned to bed. Several times I knocked and then quietly opened the door to check on her. She would be spread over the top of the blankets as if she fainted there, and she seemed so sound asleep that I could easily open and close dresser drawers and the closet without disturbing her.

That's how I found the gun. I was putting a couple of Lorna's clean T-s.h.i.+rts in the drawer-trying to be helpful-and the gun was right there on top, in clear sight, though it took several seconds for the idea to register. I stood in my tracks, not moving, not really believing what I saw, but my heart was pounding anyway. I watched my hand reach out and then down into the drawer, and when I finally touched it and felt the cold sorrow of that metal and saw the realistic detail of the snub nose, I knew it was no cigarette lighter. Slowly, quietly, as though the gun itself was sleeping, I withdrew my hand, then turned to look at Lorna before I slid the drawer shut.

Out of the corner of my eye, before I had fully turned toward her-I would almost bet my life on it-there was a small quick movement: Lorna's eyes closing. When I looked directly at her, though, some instantaneous wave had pa.s.sed over her and she was totally still, eyes closed, her head tilted as in loose sleep.

For a second, standing there, I doubted myself, thought I was imagining things, but after I had closed the drawer and quietly left the room and had time to replay the whole scene several times I felt sure about that brief tremor in Lorna.

That night I called Bruce downstairs to the laundry room, and as we pretended to fold clothes I told him what I'd seen. He picked lint from a towel and listened.

"Maybe she needs it, traveling alone the way she does," I said. He nodded his head.

"Maybe she's just used to living in rough places," I told him.

"Not much doubt about that," Bruce answered.

What we couldn't say underneath the bare light bulb that hangs over the washer were the darker possibilities. I could see that Bruce clearly didn't know what to do.

After that I watched Bruce drink double scotches before dinner, pouring the Dewar's with the easy wrist of the bartender that he used to be long before I knew him. There were times when he'd stand at the opened refrigerator and bend down into the milky light, and if I asked what he was looking for, he wouldn't know, there was just something he was craving, and in minutes, he'd walk away empty-handed, frustrated, and shaking his head.

Upstairs, in a corner of our bedroom where Bruce has claimed an old rolltop desk as his headquarters, I started finding pages from a yellow legal pad-Bruce trying to find a place to start with Lorna. Like a nervous freshman about to deliver a speech, he jotted down the words he might use with her. Lorna, you're my only daughter and I have to tell you that I'm worried. That would be crossed out, and then, below it: Honey, I've been through my own rough times and there's not a thing you have to hide from me. In the corners of these pages were the sad scribbles and aimless marks of someone sifting through what to say to his own daughter.

I'm not a mother. The fact is, motherhood is a romantic notion that my ovaries could not live up to. There's a scientific term for my specific infertility, but I've always just told the men in my life that, internally speaking, I was tied up in knots.

You didn't have to be a mother, though, to sense the awkward vacuum that existed between Bruce and Lorna. They would be together in the kitchen and no matter how close they stood or how relaxed they seemed they were continually on guard. Tiptoeing. Straining. There was no anger, but something worse, because anger is just sparks and fire and in a while it blows itself out. What separated them was cool and more threatening-the product of years of trouble and late night calls and I don't know what else. A bitter divorce with Lorna's mother. Dreams that unraveled. Hormones and bad summer vacations. Bruce had told me long before that he constantly wavered between feeling he had somehow failed Lorna and, at other times, that she had cruelly failed him, oftentimes with enthusiasm-calling him to say she was living in a Jeep or had sold her amethyst so she could go water-skiing in Mazatlan, then spend a month zigzagging across Mexico with her boyfriend.

During Lorna's visit I became expert at tucking myself away, at burying myself in a good book or becoming totally involved with fixing a leaky faucet. I told myself that I was giving Bruce and his daughter the time and s.p.a.ce to patch things up, but I could hear them in the next room artfully dodging each other, and sooner or later the TV would come on, the monotone six o'clock news winding its way between them.

The first night that Bruce and I slept in the new blue bedroom we could still smell the paint. I told Bruce to breathe through his mouth and also to get his arms around me fast. I wouldn't say that blue is my favorite color, but given the purposes of a bedroom, there's a reason for blue. Try howling. Try two bodies writhing on a Beauty Rest mattress in the rhythmic darkness just before midnight.

Bruce had to remind me, however, that Lorna was just down the hall. "Quiet," he said, and it was the first time in our whole short, wonderful life together that our love had become noise.

Hungry elk wandered down from the mountains and gathered in groups of two's and three's in our yard. They discovered the dryer vent on the back wall of our house and stood there to get warm, basking in the sweet, foreign breeze of fabric softener. Curious at dusk, they stood at the dining room window and peered in at electric lights and the quiet chaos of our lives.

Lorna did not believe in G.o.d, she told us. She believed in electricity or some such force that held the universe together.

And guns, I wanted to add. Something small and deadly enough to fit in an evening bag.

She talked to us while she did a crossword puzzle. "What's a six-letter word that means to join?" she asked.

We ran through possible answers until Bruce finally came up with it. "Solder" he said, and cut into a piece of steaming lasagna I had just served. In our household, though, to join was not that easy.

At the seventh-grade dance in Grover City, California, my math teacher, Mrs. Wigenstein, made it look so easy. She simply put her hand on the shoulder of some shy boy and her other hand on some girl pressed up hard against the wall and then gently pushed them together, and soon, miraculously, all the seventh graders were waltzing or twisting, some of the less creative falling back on a version of the Virginia Reel we had been taught in PE, but everyone was dancing. We called her "The Matchmaker" and we relied on her back then, but, in fact, Mrs. Wigenstein was just a gray-haired intermediary, something which I evidently lacked the skills for.

Bruce and I turned on the radio, blasted a few of the songs we liked, danced, and tried to get Lorna to join us. She watched us and shrugged, said she was tired. I don't know if it's just that I have especially good ears or if some part of me is curious about other people's business, but two or three times I heard Lorna's m.u.f.fled crying from upstairs. I guess it was crying-small sobs collapsing into a long low whine. I'd run the dishwasher or turn the TV on, and in a while, halfway up the stairs, I'd listen closely. No noise from her room. Lorna fallen into her hundred-year sleep.

A month pa.s.ses quickly for someone who is sleeping most of that time, but for those wide and painfully awake it is viciously long and annoying as static.

Bruce, naked as the glorious day he was born, rolled in the snow and groaned with the pleasure of seals and Eskimos. Then he lay still-played dead-and let the cold work up through him.

Ask anybody here and they'll tell you we have a dry cold in winter, which doesn't mean much to me. You still need to stuff newspapers in the sills of the windows that don't shut tight. You still need a hot-water bottle some mornings to thaw the handle of a car door which has turned to stone overnight.

Bruce, however, had a high tolerance for that dry cold. First, he was in the hot tub on our back deck, the steam rising up off the water like vapor from a lost world, every once in a while his foot or arm making a giant splash. Then, it was as if some alarm went off in him. He sat on the top step of the tub for a minute, gained some kind of balance which I can only guess at, and rolled off into the snow, groaning, flas.h.i.+ng me the white half-moons of his b.u.t.t.

Lorna had driven our Jeep into town, and for a few precious hours we were alone.

I knocked on the window, put my hands together like I was praying, and asked for more, but Bruce couldn't hear me.

Dense cold and wet heat-it's a Colorado ritual.

"No," Bruce told me later. "It was just to keep me from going crazy." By that time he was wrapped in a red and black beach towel and was standing in the dining room. He had quit dripping by then. I had taken a kitchen towel and turbanned it over his wet hair and kissed him on the nose, and as I backed away I could see the puzzled look on his face. "Who is she, Eileen? I don't even know who that girl is."

Each morning the snow revealed to me the incidents of the night before. I saw where Rainbow, a neighborhood cat, had crossed our deck and, at the edge, left its yellow spray. On a nearby hillside I saw the big, bald lines where neighborhood kids had been sledding days before on plastic garbage bags. A few of the bags were threaded on a bare pine bough at the bottom of the hill, waving in the wind, waiting for when the kids came back for their next run.

Early one morning, though, before I'd had a chance to see anything in the snow, I saw Lorna near the front door quietly putting on her jacket. The skimpy luggage at her feet made her plans clear. Directly up and to the left, I stood unseen on the stairway.

I watched Lorna pull on a pair of gray insulated boots we had bought her. Carefully, as if she were dressing for more than the cold, she wound a m.u.f.fler around her neck and tucked its fringed ends into her jacket. She pulled an envelope out of her tote bag and walked it to the bookshelves and left it there for us to read-just thanks and so long and don't worry. She pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the door. Even where I stood-safe, distant, a flannel robe around me-I felt the cutting air blow in.

Long story made short: I didn't stop her, didn't say good-bye, didn't wake Bruce so that maybe . . . I don't know. I guess maybe covers a lot of territory. I turned and went back to bed, slipped under the covers where I found Bruce's warm lanky legs, and I fell into the same murky sleep as that little bear under our deck, the one who must have been dreaming of summer and suns.h.i.+ne and something better than pizza to eat.

Later that day, after errands and a long wait at the pharmacy, I drove home, then hurried from the car to the house with my arms loaded-sacks and dry cleaning. I didn't even manage to get the car door shut. When I had unlocked the front door of the house and set down my load, I turned around and started back to the driveway to close the car. There were my purple gloves and scarf that I had dropped onto the snow-covered ground in my hurry from the car. Like a woman who identifies herself with a string of pearls or her ragged kitchen broom, I saw myself in an instant out there-just three small dabs of color on an otherwise endless, frozen plain. Besides its hundred other tricks, snow can do that, can show you in a lightning flash just who you are.

I stood there looking for I don't know how long. Looking and thinking. Thinking and burning.

At first I thought the far-off throttled roar I heard was my pulse pounding in my ears, but the sound slowed and then gathered momentum and then finally crested over on the east ridge. I looked up at a black spot coming closer, weaving, rearranging itself into a twoheaded form, the dark green rounded nose of a snowmobile finally visible. I could smell gas and oil and see its foggy gray trail drifting up into pines. It barreled toward me and the two shapes on the snowmobile became people, neighbors-closer and closer-until I could see that it was some snow-masked man driving, and holding on behind him, blonde hair streaming, one of the Ramos twins throwing confetti. They waved at me when they drove by, but I didn't even have time to get my hand up.

Nocturne.

It was a Tuesday night when Maize and I ran out of money in Santa Fe-a place dusty and old and, if you aren't careful, the last place you might visit. We knew that we didn't have much cash left, but it was a surprise anyway to dig to the bottom of my purse and find only a Revlon eyebrow pencil tucked in the bottom folds. Like someone who suddenly finds herself in deep, dark water, I woke up fast. I dumped my purse out on the queen-sized bed and rummaged through the collection of cosmetics and Kleenexes, pens and maps, car keys, paper clips, sungla.s.ses, and lotion. Nothing. Not a dollar bill. Not a quarter. I stood up with just a towel around me and I looked at Maize for what would come next.

Maize, my cousin, was a homewrecker. She was tall for a woman and dark haired, my wingless angel, and wherever she moved, in whatever room, to pick up a magazine or to just stand at the window, she stayed at the center of things while everything else slid to the edges. "Why would a man want salt when he could have honey?" she would ask me and then fold her legs under herself wherever she was sitting, and for many men, it was just too much. Compulsion, obsession. Wanting what you can't have, which makes you want it more. Maize-a name she had given herself three years earlier in Portland when she found it in a Farmer's Almanac-said that she did not make up the rules of life, but that, thank G.o.d, she had the brains to break them.

"Now what?" I asked Maize. I had just finished a long, hot shower. I was wrapped in a big white hotel towel, and I didn't need anyone to tell me that what I had been feeling up until that point was happy. Then, while I was digging through my purse for a comb, the facts started to drift and I realized the money was probably gone-blown in the week and a half we had spent in Santa Fe.

It was the first time I had run my course and come out flat broke, scared, and older. Maize never knew any other way to live but like this: on tightropes or where she found easy pa.s.sage into others' lives. Whether what she had was borrowed, stolen, or given recklessly to her in darkness or over a bottle of booze or out of some weak, twisted pa.s.sion, Maize made the most of everything. She spent big and looked good. And when the money ran out, as it often did in those days because there was a cycle to it all-getting and spending and laying waste-she fell and fell hard. That time, starting with that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, she took me down with her, my beautiful milk-skinned cousin, chestnut hair, long legs ahead of her time. Her blue eyes were what I thought of then as medicine.

"O.K., Regina" she said. "Relax. Let's do a quick accounting." But in my heart of hearts, if there is such a thing in me, I knew the money was gone. How could it not be? In room 217 of the El Dorado we had temporarily shed our former selves and a.s.sumed the lives of queens. Four hundred dollars worth of new lingerie was a reason for being. Once a day we ordered baseball-sized steaks that melted in our mouths. Neither of us cared about jewelry, but in well-made clothes, in leisure, in the wonder of lying naked and watching late-night cable TV we thought that we felt the presence of G.o.d. We were astounded to look over and see each other in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night room. Maize would laugh and say that she remembered, but only vaguely, when I was waitressing. I reminded her that somewhere-ten or twenty lives ago-she had driven a school bus, driven it badly, watched while one kid in the back of the bus crowned another with a crescent wrench.

Maize was not easy to upset. She'd had so many ups and downs that they had all become one big movement. So standing there in the El Dorado with the threat of being broke was merely something in the pa.s.sing for her, some sign that we were now in the middle of things. Maize pulled out her suitcase and tote and casually searched them. She came up with Bill Barnes's Firestone credit card, which she claimed to be an authorized signer for. She held it up, the red and gold plastic which at that moment offered no safety or comfort for me.

"Maize," I said, "that won't buy us food."

"Well, of course not," she told me. "But if the fuel pump goes or a tire shreds, you might just end up thanking me. Well, thanking Bill, actually."

Bill Barnes was an orthopedist who claimed to finally understand the finely woven fabric of his life when he met Maize. "Nice man," Maize had said of him, "but terminal sentimentality. I've seen him cry about the beauty of bathwater."

I looked over at my cousin who sat glamorous and rock hard in the El Dorado. She was wearing a green silk lounging robe-a short little low-cut surprise we had bought a couple of days before.

"O.K. Just let me in on the plans here, Maize," I said, sitting next to the small storm of objects I had dumped on the bed.

From what I knew of her, she never actually thought about money. Her mind worked through parallel subjects: cars, airline tickets, good leather pumps, a nice bottle of Bordeaux that could have easily paid my monthly rent back home in Des Moines. Somehow, she figured a way to these things. She kept her eyes open and jumped at the means made available to her. I had seen men offer their lives to Maize in airports while waiting at the luggage racks or for the rent-a-car. I had watched hotel clerks soften to her, finally writing off her entire bill, suggesting she come back in the spring when the cherries were in bloom or the festival began or the warm, blue sky turned seamless. "Aren't people just the greatest?" she would turn and say to me.

That was one difference between Maize and me. There were about four people in the world that I loved, only a handful that I could tolerate, and everyone else scared me to death. Runaway trains and drunk drivers don't faze me, but put me in a room full of people and my heart starts pounding against my ribs.

There in Santa Fe on that Tuesday night I was looking at Maize, waiting for my cousin, my thirty-eight-year-old madonna of the pick-pockets, to put our world back into place and set it spinning.

"It's not like I just snap my fingers and there it all is," she said to me from across the room. Her green robe was half-unb.u.t.toned. We indulged each other like that. Some pretty flesh. A ginger thigh.

"Well, I didn't expect you to," I told her, "but we're out of money and we're in your territory now."

"Gee, thanks." She bit the edge of her thumbnail. She crossed her legs and tapped a bare foot on the plush, silvery carpet. "Not to worry," she told me. "Look, we're two young, ablebodied women."

Maize had ample practice working through her financial worries. She had stripped several people bare of their savings, cashed in gold Krugerrands, p.a.w.ned dead women's jewelry, given love and sympathy in return for an almost new Audi. True to her word, she had spent the money and driven the car into the dust. She didn't know that the small red light on the dashboard was an oil warning.

And yet, this is not to say that Maize was all bad. In fact, in those days she was probably at her best-freewheeling, lively, able to carry on a great conversation in a bar. She could talk politics or come to a convincing moment of truth about some great painting. Babbling incoherently, she could fake French or Portuguese for those listening with untrained ears. In those days-in the good days that I remember-she was a beautiful thing to watch, all kidskin and smooth moves. That was before she lost the faith and cut her hair and took a couple of steps down in the world-falling off in Memphis, shoplifting in Detroit.

But on that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, even though we had run up against and hit the wall, Maize still had the faith. She ran out to the parking lot and she spent fifteen minutes searching the car, and when she came back to the room-lo and behold-she had two rolls of nickels and a pocket of loose change.

"Well, my little Fig Newton, oh you of little faith," she said to me, "get your clothes on. I'm taking you out."

Nightlife with Maize. Window-shopping. Driving around with a decent radio station tuned in. A bottle of sloe gin that we pull out from under the front seat of the car, then stopping at a convenience store for lime Icees. "What do you call this drink?" I asked her.

"Sloe gin lime Icee," she said.

"What if it's a cherry Icee?"

"Oh, that's a cherry Rowdy," she said. "Totally different drink, Reg.

I had never been lost and out of money before, driving around in a town that I didn't know, although it was something that happened to me later many times. A seed gets planted. A taste for fine things is acquired. Maize's face and voice, as I remember them, still go straight to my quick.

We were in Bill Barnes's gunmetal blue Volvo station wagon-a nice enough vehicle with cruise control, the car's t.i.tle in the glove compartment signed right over to Maize. "Hey," she said, "at least we're mobile." I loved the way she held the steering wheel with the flat of her palm.

We dropped into a couple of bars and proceeded to the H Lounge. The bartenders there were shovel-nosed and all business. A few couples danced with the stiff uneasiness of eighth graders. Maize leaned against the bar and scouted. Two drinks and four dances later, a young gallery owner named Tommy Sodoma was eating honey-glazed peanuts out of Maize's hand. And some three hours after that, Tommy was lying in an alley, the rough imprint of a brick still on his forehead. He had proven a little unwieldy back there in the moonlight. When his lack of generosity became apparent, when it was clear that Tommy did not feel like making a donation to us that night, Maize picked up a brick-the only brick, she swore to G.o.d, that she ever used-and gave him some much-needed rest right along the hairline.

"Jesus, Maize. Is he dead?" I asked when we returned to the car. Somehow, I couldn't ask that standing over him. There was a thin stream of blood. There were shards of moonlight on the ground. His arms and legs spread out so that he lay big as a Norway spruce.

"Breathe easy, Regina," she said. "He's just taking twenty winks. He's going to have a two-egg hangover tomorrow, though."

As it turned out, Tommy didn't carry enough cash to even get us into the track, and I think Maize regretted having to use that brick. It just was not her style.

Two weeks. Three weeks. I don't know how to tell time when I'm spiraling downward. Maize had my hand and we slept in the back of the car. We washed ourselves over the sinks in dirty rest stops. We had a bar of lavender soap and two big, borrowed El Dorado towels. We took our s.h.i.+rts off and submitted ourselves to cold water and the aftermath.

Maize told me that it would be all right. She kept watch for her next opening, for the place where she would enter another life like a golden breeze, smelling of lavender, ordering with flawless Italian off a menu.

At night, stopped somewhere along the road, we put newspapers up to the car windows. We ate peanut b.u.t.ter straight out of the jar with plastic spoons while Maize told me her life story. Getting and spending and creating the waste that trailed her from Minnesota to the Gulf. "Ever lie on a beach and let the tide roll in around you?" she asked me. "Ever let those dark-skinned waiters walk down and serve you gin and tonics on the sand? Those waiters bend over you, Reg, the gla.s.s cold and slick, and it's enough to take your breath away."

We slept a lot for those two or three weeks. Bad dreams. Long, one-way nights, and in the morning, lines of hair-trigger light at the edges of the newspaper. "It's time to get up, Regina," Maize said each morning.

"What for?" I asked.

But Maize always had a way of getting us up and moving. She opened all the car doors and persuaded me with sunlight. She would put her hand on my face and I would recognize that which I could not have, but which I wanted all the more because of it.

Two weeks. Three weeks. And then we separated, figuring one-on-one was easier, surer mathematics. She wanted to go north where Bill Barnes was fly-fis.h.i.+ng for the summer. Walking away from me on Market Street, my cousin Maize was both my inspiration and the saddest thing I knew. Hot blood in cold veins-I love her still. She took me down with her for one long, dark month. That was several years ago, but something was planted.