A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Part 3

They led her down the hallway, and I guess to Gloria's car, then on to the hospital. I really didn't know this girl, but when she stepped from the tub she did a curious thing that has made me think of her again and again. She closed her eyes, deliberately closed her eyes. She kept them closed down the hallway and perhaps even in Gloria's 72 Valiant as it reduced Flagstaff Highway to nothing but a cold, black line. I don't know why she closed her eyes and kept them closed, Gloria urging her to take step after step. It was like the blind leading the blind: the Navajo girl who had just miscarried and Gloria, our dorm manager, lonely and confused.

"This is what happens when you're fifty, sweeties," and Gloria would pull the elastic belt on her robe and let it snap back. We were never quite sure what this demonstration was supposed to divulge, but she would follow it up by pointing at her face and remarking on the disgusting enlargement of her pores. "Don't let anyone kid you," she'd tell us. "Life only gets uglier, meaner." She lived at the far end of the hall in a special apartment. She had a patchwork rug she had made herself, and a small TV with large rabbit ears. She continually complained about the reception, and raised h.e.l.l if the stairwells weren't kept clean. Though she often mixed up our names and got the dates for our fire drills confused, Gloria did well that night, letting the Navajo girl lean against her in the darkness cut only by stars and pine tops.

I don't know why I have to see these things: the Navajo in the bathtub, the miserable way we reconcile ourselves to our lives. I was going to take a shower. I had shaved my legs and washed my hair. I could hear them beating on the door nearby, calling for her to come out. The water on my back was hot and furious, yet the commotion called me, too. When they broke the lock and opened the door, the milky steam rolled out upon the cold hall air.

Sometimes it takes years to fully see things. I think back upon this scene and see the small things: the soap, the toenails painted red, Gloria's hands as they attempted to comfort.

We went back to our rooms and talked about it, how they have to stop the bleeding, sometimes with drugs, sometimes surgically. "It's nature's way," Dawn Kramer added, though we all ignored her, for what this prima donna from Chicago knew about nature wouldn't have filled a single page. For weeks after, I thought about the Navajo girl and the way she closed her eyes, what she was shutting in or shutting out.

Like I said, none of us ever used that bathtub again, which was an unfortunate thing, for baths are healthy and soothing. They enfold us, they bring light to the mind, and they emulate the water from which life so warily crept millions of years ago.

Gloria returned in her Valiant the next morning, hushing us, telling us to mind our own business. The Navajo girl, she finally said, was fine, though she left school permanently for her home in Window Rock. I've never been there, but I like that name. I like the idea of a window in a rock-an opening in a black, hard s.p.a.ce-a sliver's pa.s.sage into the soul.

Dixon.

First, it is not true that my brother Dixon went crazy in Vietnam-chewed his fingernails completely off and gutted a Huey helicopter in a rage when his R and R was suddenly bagged. h.e.l.l, Dixon never was in Vietnam. His three years in the Air Force were mostly spent in Biloxi where he was a.s.signed to the motor pool and stayed long weekends in Gulfport on windy beaches with sand in his eyes and his shoulders constantly sunburned. He's buried now in a small cemetery called Dutchman's Acre, a place so quiet and green that it doesn't rightfully belong to this earth. Yeah, sure, he was big enough to gut a helicopter, but Dixon was slow and calm, and he always respected what wasn't his.

That's why the story about Dixon and Misty Waters doesn't make any sense either, because Misty was somebody else's wife, and Dixon may have liked to tease her-he might have even thought she was pretty-but as he used to say to me, his oldest sister, "It's clear as day on the insurance form. She's somebody else's beneficiary."

I'll tell you-crudeness does not know when to stop. There are versions of the Dixon-Misty story that put those two in the Texaco and Mobil gas station rest rooms going at it, full tilt, right up on those dirty counters next to where the rusted sinks are always dripping. Never any toilet paper or hand towels in those places. The mirrors cracked and filthy. Mind you-all of this on Misty's half-hour lunches from the bank. If Dixon were alive, he'd die at the thought of himself banging away to the tune of impact wrenches, some big Buick getting its tires rotated nearby.

But it was the dead twin story that brought my mother to her breaking point. She marched into my kitchen one morning not so long ago, and she said that my father was too old, so it was up to me to stop all this horse trash about Dixon. Her hands were shaking and there were big tears in her eyes. My mother is barely five feet tall, Dixon's death has been a real setback for her, and standing there dressed in one of her bright golf outfits-though she's never played a day of golf in her life-she presented a pet.i.te but imposing argument.

"Mom," I told her, sitting at the table, still in my robe, "I love to see you, but I wish you'd call before you drop in." I was eating a bowl of Cheerios and, like a kid, reading the back of the box, trying to get my energy up. Mornings are hard on me. The good, deep sleep I used to have has become a rare commodity; I toss and turn, drift in and out of a dark fitfulness. I think rather than dream.

"What? You think your seventy-year-old father should go defend Dixon's name? Wake up, Hillary," she said, her hands on her boxy hips, a pose she a.s.sumes for the most serious subjects that intrude on her life. "Being part of a family isn't a free ride, you know. There's responsibility and it's looking you square in the face. I'll admit that Dixon had his hard times and did not always think in a straight line, but what I'm hearing about him is absurd and downright mean. Wherever he is," she said, looking awkwardly up and then left and right, "he doesn't deserve this."

For the most part, my family believes in good citizenship, not religion, so it was difficult when Dixon died. We had no place to send him-no beautiful, light-filled landscape to imagine him in. Yet, even without a heaven, we found ourselves still thinking of Dixon as being somewhere, though when we spoke of him we never knew in which direction to refer. We craned our heads upward, or, then embarra.s.sed, we peered far out beyond the freeway to the muted horizon.

I have never liked being trapped in a corner where suddenly all the alternatives are savagely reduced, but that's just where my mom had me. I turned forty-one last December and that's old enough to talk and think for yourself, though age has no meaning when your mother tells you she's. .h.i.t rock bottom and needs your help. Dixon was her only son, her first and probably last mystery, the one she made cherry pie for, the one who would send her to a chair laughing at his knock-knock jokes or his imitations of the latest dances. Once, demonstrating the moon walk for us, he backed right off the front porch and corkscrewed his elbow hard into the ground. Had to wear a sling for two weeks, and if you asked him about it, Dixon just laughed and said he'd do anything to get a two-week prescription of codeine.

Everything else you've heard about Dixon, all the little pieces of gossip that have floated your way, they hold about as much truth as a wet sock. I know that most nights Gordon Jenner can be found in a local bar yakking away about somebody, and more often than not, it's Dixon. Jenner puts his feet up on the table, and he tries to make a living off my brother-stories of Dixon in camouflage and war paint, of Dixon wrecking cars and just walking away from them, the smoke spiraling up and the gas tanks about to blow. But Jenner has silt for brains. He's lived too long down in Hillam raising those blue-ribbon Charolais and married to a woman who, after ten years in this country, still speaks only j.a.panese. Oh, I'm not saying it isn't pretty to hear her bent over the flowers in their garden, sing-songing her language under a blue sky, but what the h.e.l.l is she saying? She could be complimenting your clothes or telling you to go diddle yourself, and you'd stand there, just like I have plenty of times, with a big dumb well-digger's grin plastered on your face.

Jenner has always played stupid, said he doesn't know what I'm talking about. "Look," I told him, my hands deep in my pockets, "I'm not accusing anybody, but there are some crazy things being said about Dixon, and I just want them to stop."

He stood there leaning against his truck, his arms folded across his barrel chest, his tanned face like an old sunbaked apple. "Now what interest would I have in talking about the dead?" he asked me. I didn't have an answer for that because I truthfully don't know what's in Jenner's head, though with a man like him a hatchet and a pair of tweezers would be the easiest way to find out.

Jenner is pigeon-hearted and about a million miles away from knowing Dixon. Even when my brother pinned his last dollar bill to the inside of his flannel shirt and started walking toward Santa Fe, he had fire and smarts, he had years of good looks left in him, and the dashing honesty of a real live prince.

The dead twin story spread in waves through our small Kentucky town, first through the graineries and discount hardware outlets, then through beauty salons and dime stores, and finally settled in the worn linoleumed kitchens that are the heart of this community. It was a lackl.u.s.ter little tale which basically seized on the opportunity to make a monster of the baby Dixon.

"Rolled over and suffocated his own little twin for an extra G.o.dd.a.m.ned bottle of milk. The newspaper sort of covered it up. April 14, 1949, you mark me. They called it a baby sudden death. Huh!" Jenner's stories started going that far back, reaching crazily into the black side of his make-believe.

Lloyd Ebson's kid was tending bar that night at Crazy Eights and he told me just how Jenner leaned back in his chair when the talk lulled, and told that little story, and when his listeners were appropriately quiet and stung, he called over to Ebson's kid to order him up a fried egg sandwich, then dowsed it with ketchup and mustard and Tabasco when it came. It made Ebson's kid half-sick to see fresh eggs treated that way.

Somewhere between Canasta and her volunteer days at the public library, my mother heard all about Dixon and his twin, and, like I said, it hit her hard as concrete. That's when she came asking for my help with those big tears in her eyes, her voice high-pitched and breathy-just on the edge of those old-woman sobs that can wrench your gut and turn your will to toothpaste.

"Hey," I told her that day as she stood uninvited in my kitchen, "I've talked to Jenner and he just denies everything. What do you want me to do? Get an attorney?"

"You're a smart girl," she said. "You run a business and manage to take a couple of vacations a year. I know you'll figure something out."

But it was not that easy. I spent days staking out plans to stop Jenner, then gave them up when they became ridiculous even to me. I wrote three different letters to him, each one becoming surlier, each one falling further away from intelligible correspondence. I didn't send any of them. Late at night, my patience and creativity mostly used up, I slipped into visions of tire slashing and low-grade arson-you know, garbage cans or at most a toolshed. I tried to envision myself holding a gun-small caliber-something sharp and clean and plenty intimidating, but I remembered what my father had told me: "Unless you're willing to fire it, a piece of metal is not very persuasive."

I have always settled the conflicts in my life with the easiest, most accommodating methods I know of-whatever that says about me. When Armand, my ex-husband, and I parted company, he wanted to take the new Ethan Allen living room set with him to Atlanta and I wanted it to stay, so I took a quarter from my purse, flipped it, and told him to call. He paid two neighborhood boys to help him load it into the U-Haul, although Armand was an exercise nut, and as it turned out, he was able to lift the sectional into the van himself. He wore an old pair of cutoffs that day, and when I saw him bend over and haul up that furniture, his legs hard and muscled as a ropewalker's, everything in me wanted him to stay, and if it hadn't been for my pride, which disguises itself as indigestion, I would have walked out there, kissed him, and asked him to extend my credit. He drove off that night, even though the second gear of the U-Haul was whining like a sick cat, and then two years later Dixon was dead and it seemed to me that my losses were mounting in a reckless way.

I don't know how to measure the empty place that those two left in me-meteor crater or the bottomless, black sinkhole my father scared us with when we were kids at bedtime. If it's true that Armand stole my heart, then Dixon took some other vital organ, because I swear, the world around me just does not feel the same. Nothing smells as good as it once did: the sweet hickory of a summer barbecue, the soap on a man's skin that used to haunt me for days. It's all gone, vanished. Just a puff of black smoke, and then the piercing white light of an empty room.

The word karate would have never interested me. It was the telephone number 588-KICK that kept running through my head. I heard it on the radio about fifty times a day-a major ad campaign, I guess, and it worked. When I called, I expected an Oriental voice to answer-a Shing Lu or a Chan Chung-but it was Tony Ramirez-owner, master, fifth-degree black belt-who said, "Tuesday is when you begin."

Certainly I was naive. Definitely I was grasping at straws. I did not have the total scheme laid out in my mind, but I knew that I needed to equip myself in some way to bring Gordon Jenner to the silence that seemed ripe and waiting for him.

And then, too, the stakes had been upped when my mother made a scene in a local Safeway. She spotted Jenner's wife on the produce aisle, and when Mom could get no response from her as to what her husband had against Dixon, she started chasing the other woman through the store, imploring her to tell what she knew. There they were, each pushing those big unwieldy carts, running up and down the aisles until my mother banked her cart into a canned goods display and had her forehead engraved with a 16-ounce can of green beans.

Tony Ramirez, my karate instructor, would have given Mom this advice: "The goal is not to look where you're going, but to see." In the first weeks of cla.s.s I had no idea what he meant by that, and he never gave any explanations, just told me to repeat the basic forms again and again. I'd stand over at the side of the bare cla.s.sroom and complete twenty high blocks, then twenty low ones, and then I'd combine them. If I was lucky, he would nod his head at me and tell me to give it another round. There was no sport or art to Ramirez's way of thinking; it was all discipline. Once he made me stand in a corner of the cla.s.sroom and practice my karate shout, the kiai. "Listen to yourself," he said. "Get used to that sound." At first I was somewhat embarra.s.sed to stand in the corner and yell at myself-the "uts" and "huhs" supposedly coming up from the diaphragm-but finally some layer of self-consciousness fell away and the shouting felt good, invigorating.

Dixon was never embarra.s.sed by anything that I knew of, though maybe he should have been. Standing up in front of the church as best man at his friend's wedding, Dixon-after too much preceremony champagne-let out a horrendous belch, and then he just looked up at the ceiling, like maybe the rafters were slightly shifting or a thunderstorm was threatening the day.

My brother did not, I repeat, did not moon the bride's mother later during the reception, and whatever charges were filed for indecent exposure at that celebration had nothing to do with Dixon. All I will say about that incident was that the bride's mother was a Joan Crawford look-alike who presided like an old witch over the hot hors d'oeuvre table, but quite honestly Dixon was pa.s.sed out in the coat room by then, peaceful with a couple of big synthetic fur coats wrapped around him.

I would have been a lot more comfortable at Dixon's funeral if someone had laid a couple of those fur coats around him in his coffin, made him look like he was just sleeping through another party. I think everybody we ever knew was at that funeral. Misty Waters was there, poured into a little black dress no bigger than a glove. If she would have had to bend over for anything, I guarantee that no seam in that dress could have possibly survived. Dixon would have enjoyed that kind of spectacle-a flash of surprise and then a lot of bare skin. I asked him once if Misty Waters was her real name, and he said he didn't know, but he thought it fit her perfectly. Names didn't mean much to him.

They didn't mean much to Tony Ramirez either, who walked slowly around the cla.s.sroom and observed his students with a cold trigger eye. He addressed all individuals as "you," and though it sounds as if he was distant and intimidating, that impression of him instantly vanished when he demonstrated his tournament style. Ramirez moved with nothing but pure love of each moment: the cat stance, the shoulder grab, a rousing roundhouse kick. Ramirez didn't fight; he stalked. His balance and speed were hypnotic. He could kick and pivot like a dancer, the only difference being that his kick could and would break your ribs. When he showed us his Heaven and Earth, a series of blocks and punches punctuated by shouts, I knew that I had come to the right place. I could see then that what Gordon Jenner needed more than anything else was to feel Heaven and Earth descending on him.

The one I heard the other night-it came to me in pieces, a little from Pete Myers and some from Dorothy Carter-is how Dixon crawled all the way from Pioneer Park down to Preston High School, baying like a moon-crazed dog and s...o...b..ring all down his shirt, dark frothy spit that looked like he'd been eating dirt. That's a real Jenner touch-the dirt-something to get you gagging.

You use your head, though-step off the distance from the park to the high school and see if it isn't d.a.m.n near impossible to do on your hands and knees. All that gravel and rotten pavement. Dixon would have been hamburger. Supposedly Jenner saw him on the side of the road, stopped and tried to get him into the car, but Dixon's eyes were glazed over, he stunk like catfish bait, and he was not to be reasoned with.

Funny how the truth gets twisted, because the fact is, Dixon was a supremely reasonable man. He thought things out. He would look at a broken vacuum cleaner and step by step he would take it apart, clean it up, and make it work again, the suction so strong you'd best not get it near your feet. When Hawk Lewis was determined to cut down a hundred-year-old oak on his side property and all the neighbors had given up convincing him otherwise, it was Dixon who walked down to his house one night with a couple of root beers and somehow got him to fall in love with that tree again. It was a huge, beautiful oak loaded with magpies and starlings, and the one thing Dixon said he told Hawk was that trees could indeed feel pain, and how would Hawk like a chain saw in his side?

The crazy thing is, Dixon did have a twin, an unnamed baby boy who never even went home from the hospital. In fact, he was never named because he lived less than two hours. "He just wasn't ready to breathe" is what my mother told us.

Someone has to be pretty bored to take that little sadness from so long ago, mix it up, and throw in a baby killer like Gordon Jenner has done. A smart guy would have chosen somebody else to tell that story about, because if you traced Dixon back to a kid you'd see someone with the little teaspoon face of an angel, and you'd know that Dixon's instincts and nature were as clear and harmless as water from his very start.

I'm not saying he was perfect, but right down to his bones Dixon was good. Once, as kids, I tried to get him to steal candy with me, and as soon as I'd told him the plan, his hands were paralyzed-he said he felt ice all through his fingers. Years later, when Francine Johnson put the moves on him one night, he just didn't have the heart to tell her to go bark at someone else. All the bad genes of three generations of Johnsons had settled in Francine-in her face, to be exact. Dixon took her home that night, which amazed me because he had an epic appeal to women-he could be wearing a baseball cap and dirty levis and in ten minutes he'd have some exotic female rooted deep as a mulberry right next to him. "So why Francine Johnson?" I asked him.

He shrugged and put his feet up on the dashboard of my car. "In the dark," he said, "with the lights off, everything evens out."

Some people don't know when to shut up. "Diarrhea of the mouth," my mother calls it, but I think it can signal something much worse-a bitter heart no bigger or better than a turnip.

What Jenner has to be bitter about, I don't know. There are no easy windows by which to look into another person's life, so I judge it from the outside-what he does and says, if he has a dog and feeds it, how he treats his mate.

I was good to my ex-husband, but good doesn't necessarily mean close or bonded, it doesn't mean you sleep cradled like two spoons at night, or that your future can stretch scary as h.e.l.l like a suspension bridge out in front of you and as long as the two of you are together it doesn't matter. Although he never settled to just one woman, Dixon knew all about couples and he warned me about Armand. "Love him or lose him," he said, and he was right.

If I had a dollar for every time Dixon was right . . . well. The one time he was wrong, though, he was seriously wrong. That was when he took off for Santa Fe, thinking his life here had stalled. He could walk it, he said-h.e.l.l, cancer patients and paraplegics were crisscrossing the continent and he could do it, too. Adventure and bullheadedness always flowed together in Dixon like one muddy river. The fact that he started out on that trip with only a few dollars didn't scare him. Dixon believed you could build your life up out of nothing-just like a fence-a brick at a time.

On an Oklahoma two-way road in the oil-colored twilight is where it ended for my brother when a semi came up over a rise and could not distinguish Dixon from the shadows. His hair was dark. He wore an old brown corduroy jacket that became even browner after he rolled more than fifty feet in the dirt. I went down there to identify him, which after an accident like that is just a loose term, because the person I saw only vaguely resembled my brother.

Dixon robbed the bank when he got his looks. He was big and lean, had a square jaw and a natural kind of abandoned grace when he moved. I'll admit that I got the deep-water eyes in the family, but Dixon got the hair-thick and wavy, the kind you want to run your hand through for good luck. More than once, he was mistaken for the Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, and sometimes, good-naturedly, he'd play along and say that going for the gold isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It was only natural that people at his funeral were shocked when they saw Dixon. For a while I heard the stuff about the whole top of his head having to be sewn back on, but the worst was about his ears-plastic imitations that would surely outlast the rest of him. I know how it went on from there-how he was flying on LSD and ran straight toward the lights of that truck-you know, the old moth to the flame. How my mother tried to climb into the coffin with her only son when she first walked into the memorial service. How the big heart-shaped arrangement of tulips was secretly from the fire chief's wife. The problem is, if you were mining any of that for the truth, you'd be digging all the way to China.

Tony Ramirez told us one day that it is an endless path, this karate. I didn't have forever, though, so I asked him if I could double up on cla.s.ses-take two a week. He shrugged and said, "Take three a week, but it may not happen any faster."

I had been his student for several months, and I knew his whole lecture about the most formidable opponent being ourselves, but that did not change what happened in Kentucky Fried Chicken last Friday night. I was waiting for a 15-piece bucket when Jenner walked in-a pair of dusty Dingo boots and a big moth-eaten suede hat-that's how I saw him. He didn't acknowledge me in any way, just kept looking at the menu board as if this was the biggest decision of his life. I hated that he wouldn't look at me.

People don't get to choose when things happen, and if you ask me, real talent is taking events as they occur and making them count. Luck would have had me running into Jenner in a couple of months, but happenstance put the two of us right there that night with a big black and red picture of the Colonel smiling down at us. The counter girl delivered my bucket of chicken, and as I turned to head toward the door I said "hey" to Jenner. He looked down, kind of startled, and what I did next surprised even me. I walked over to the straw dispenser, not much more than a wooden box, and I gave it an edge-of-hand strike and the box splintered and a few straws rolled down onto the floor. Just a few plastic straws, but G.o.d, they were beautiful to me. I stared over at Jenner, didn't say a word, actually couldn't. I was gritting my teeth against the white hot pain in my hand, but he didn't know that. All he knew-and I could tell this from his big fool blue eyes-was that Heaven and Earth were on their way.

Tony Ramirez looked at my hand and this week he's making me practice with the twelve- and thirteen-year-old beginners, but I don't care. There is a certain satisfaction I get in towering over all of my cla.s.smates. And my karate shout is the strongest one in this cla.s.s.

I'm not like some of the people in this town who have grown radar ears, but I do hear things. Eleanor Goodway, one of my mother's oldest friends, came into my insurance office the other day. I was surprised because she has both term and whole life policies up to her ears, but she was there for a different reason. "Hillary," she said, bending over my desk, lowering her voice as if this was privileged information, "chicken is nothing to lose your head over. I know these fast food places gyp you every once in a while-more legs than b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or the biscuits are a day old-but to break a plate-gla.s.s window over ten dollars worth of food . . ." She shook her head at me the way she's been shaking her head at this whole town for the last fifty years. She took a handkerchief out and dabbed at her nose and the smell of her lilac water drifted through the State Farm office. I didn't have to ask her who she had been talking to.

Jenner is one thing; he's in the category of fleas and ticks. Dixon is another. If he had been in Vietnam, as the story goes, I'm sure he would have been a hero. He would have somehow saved a child or woman in that junkyard jungle or at a point when everything was blown bare he would have stooped down and cradled a man's cantalouped head in a dying moment.

Dixon left me with all these what-if's, and for the most part, I'll warn you, brothers are like that. They'll live and laugh and make it so dreams won't come near your house, won't even park on your street.

Simple Yellow Cloth.

My eyes open and quickly the water of my sleep clears. It's Thursday night. At first I'm angry because it's past one and I have to go to work the next day. Daria is out there in the hallway and she's humming something that I can't name, and maybe it's because I've just been awakened suddenly, but the vague familiarity of that song is driving me crazy. There's a formula for remembering things; it's like walking backwards. It's based on the premise that every movement and thought is connected, and that by being methodical we can find anything: our shoes, our keys, our very lives. At night, however, I am not p.r.o.ne to reason or formula, though if there were an easy way to get my daughter back into bed right now, I'd use it.

"Daria," I call, and I know she hears me but she doesn't answer, which is a kind of formula itself: a tiny fist that opens with nothing in it. I move to the other side of the bed and sit up. From there, I can see her sitting by the night light, her legs crossed, her arms folded, a winter child who is completely of my own making. Not that I brag about it. It's something I usually keep to myself. And mind you, it has no religious significance. Daria is a child created purely from my own desire, the repet.i.tion of my dreams, and the leftover Christmas candles I burned every night. Not magic, but will.

Don't misunderstand. I like men. I like how they puff their cheeks out when they shave, and how they walk, and how they are really unable to lie effectively. In a given room on a given night I can turn and be totally undone by the sight of a man as he reaches for a drink. For me, the line that his arm makes as he reaches out is the very line between all pa.s.sion and restraint. I've been in love twice and either of those men could have been Daria's father, but neither is.

"Daria," I call again, and this time she looks up, and I swear, being childless was a curse. The first time I held her, there was a stone thrown into a pool and I knelt in the cattail and reeds, alive, attentive. Between us, a life exists on its own, something with heart and claws, a thing still kneeling at the pool. "Please go back to bed," I tell her, at which point she increases the volume of her song and turns away from me. That's what she's like. That's how calm and undisturbed she is in the middle of the night. It makes me flinch a little, for my daughter in the hallway has a voice that unfolds like paper, words that make sense only because she says them with such confidence. I'm sleepy and yet I marvel at her.

Don't think this has all been a joy, though. My pregnancy was long and troublesome, which I attribute to the fact that Daria's conception was a bit out of the ordinary. For over two months I worked at it. The concentration it took was intense and I started losing weight. My mother would come by and ask what was up, I looked so pale, was that jerk David bothering me again?

I had to think of objects repeatedly, things that have meaning: Chopin's back at the piano as the rain slowly destroyed the midsummer holiday. The glow-in-the-dark stars I pasted on my ceiling above the bed like a piece of the night sky Lo Fen-Lang had bought for a concubine before his dynasty crumbled. At my bedside, the Christmas candles burned hot and true. By the twelfth of May I knew I was pregnant.

I'm determined to wait her out tonight. "Children learn by watching you," my mother has explained. "Be calm and let her see what you want her to do."

Daria knows I don't allow her to sleep with me, so she's been making her way to the hall in the middle of the night where she sings and plays until she gets sleepy again. She always wakes me up when she's out there, and sometimes I feel guilty letting her fall asleep on the floor, but I think the alternatives are worse.

I tell her good night and lie back down, but if I move my feet to the side I can still see her: yellow nightgown, hair loose and wild from the braid she wore today.

Sitting there in the hallway, Daria is the promise that the world will be all right. When she plays store, she uses Milk Duds for money. I hear her counting "eight, twenty, one hundred" to her customers. I tell her to stay off the sofa, chocolate makes a mess, and she listens to me. Already there is such possibility in our lives.

That Daria has no father is a fact that should engage us in an interesting conversation some day. I'll simply tell her what I know: that any law can be bent, that what is certainly freakish to some has been a moment of confounding beauty to another. I'll cook something like a salmon and have it open on the table, red and inviting, with cut lemon and mint.

And slowly Daria's song wavers. For a minute I almost think I can make out "The Twelve Days of Christmas," but then I realize she couldn't possibly know all of that song with its web of verses. Daria stretches out and becomes simple yellow cloth or the yellow birds on my grandmother's clothesline in the fall when the afternoon sun subdues everything in its warmth. When I'm sure she's asleep, I carry her into her own bed.

I check the time when I come back to my room. It's almost two. Sometimes I get too worried about sleep, how I'll feel the next day. Some people do fine on four or five hours, but I need seven or eight if I'm going to think. I start to get into bed, then stand back up and pull my nightshirt off. I walk around to the right side of the bed, the side that usually stays perfectly made, and I draw the covers back and get in. I look up at Lo Fen-Lang's stars that in the desert sky must seem like cut foil or nickel, a blister's flame. When I close my eyes, there is only darkness, which, in itself, is a concert of sleep and dreams. This time I'm working on a boy.

Wintercourse.

Lorna came to us in the first big snow at the end of November, flushed up as strays often are in the sudden cold. Dogs, cats-anything old, nearsighted, or temporarily lame. They look for a garage or a warm light or even a fleece-lined boot that's been left out overnight. Under our back deck near the steamy underside of our hot tub, Bruce and I found a small, sickly bear eating scavenged pizza from a half-crushed box early one morning, the peppery smell of sausage drifting up from beneath the wood planks. In no time, Fish and Game was here-eight men in heavy coats trying to decide what to do, while the bear simply rolled over, stretched out like an old s.h.a.ggy rug, and fell into the depths of a garlicky sleep.

Like most of those storms, the big one that November began as ordinary gray sky settling in just above the treetops and then letting loose with the clean, white powder that this stretch of Colorado is known for-Hermosa north to Silverton, with Purgatory looming between, a place we try to stay away from. Everything outside was silent, frozen-postcard pretty but raw and staggering when the wind came up.

The snow, already up to the windowsills, had finally slowed when Lorna rang our doorbell and stood out there trembling, the Sysco truck and grinning driver she had hitched a ride with creeping backward down our long drive. Slouched and unperturbed, she looked like someone who intimately knows the in's and out's of bus depots everywhere. There were dark circles around her eyes: either twoday-old mascara or late nights and tension. In one of the packs she carried-though we didn't find this out for a while-was a midnight special, so cold and gray and unreal looking that when I finally saw it I thought it was a toy or one of those crazy cigarette lighters. Her hair had been cut close to the scalp, and from the looks of her bony figure she had almost used herself up in El Paso. Before that, it had been Atlanta, and before that, an unsuccessful stay at the University of Florida where two security guards had removed her bodily from a chemistry lab.

At first when Bruce, her father, saw her standing on our doorstep-a thin, smiling savage with the snow lightly whirling around her-he went momentarily blank. "All of a sudden she was standing there looking like she'd been living on the streets and I couldn't get my breath, Eileen," he told me later, running his hand through his hair, which is what he does when things just don't add up or make him nervous.

Unfortunately I missed that moment-the long-lost daughter greeting her weak-kneed dad. Actually I was upstairs on a ladder painting mine and Bruce's bedroom a soft erotic blue-two shades lighter than the color of water. I had the salesman at the paint store mix it special for me. The woman behind me in the checkout line-a Broncos cap and a very thin cigarette is what I remember of her-asked what I was painting, and when I told her my bedroom and she saw the sample color on the lid, she understood. She winked at me and blew on her fingernails. "Whoa. Watch out," she told me, and we smiled, not knowing each other, but knowing the same things about how the world works, what colors lead to love and beyond.

I had left the store happy that day with two gallons of flat acrylic, navigating the ice and slush and cars of the busy parking lot. To my left, the pa.s.senger door of a station wagon tolerated the weight of a woman's dangling body, her feet flying back and forth, crablike, as she tried to find a foothold on the glazed asphalt. The knife-edged north wind had caught the hem of her long skirt and ballooned it into a colorful awning, revealing, beneath, a chewed-up black slip and mismatched socks. A heavy man scurried from the other side of the car to help her. He bent and offered her his arm and the thick ham of his shoulder. "Come on," he yelled, "get up," while she scrambled and groaned. I held my breath for her.

Frustration runs high in this weather. Our friend Noah Raye, for instance, found a tire iron in his hands and his windshield splintered into oblivion. He did the job himself when his Jeep stalled and left him stranded down on Highway 160 while Jim Littlefoot's bachelor party went right on without him-two kegs, a cake, and the dancing Ramos twins.

In the midst of November and cold and all this tension, however, I found the smell of paint calming-deep and ethery, the smell of s.e.x chemicalized. I opened our bedroom windows and cranked up the heat. I threw an old blanket over the bedroom floor as a drop cloth, and I already had one wall painted-cool blue and misty, as if there was no wall there, but only our bed and dresser and then the sky veering upward-and I had started on the ceiling when I heard Bruce calling me from downstairs. I had a bandana tied over my hair and a swipe of blue paint under my nostrils. I was wearing the mechanic's jump suit that Bruce uses when he works on the truck-actually fiddles with it and cusses and then throws his hands up and finally takes it to the Chevron station. I waited, and when he called me again I plodded down the stairs, holding the paint roller like a flag and wanting to know what was so d.a.m.n important.

Lorna was standing there; I guess you could say my stepdaughter, since I am Bruce's wife now and my life seems to be quickly moving outward from me like rings of water: woman, wife, stepmother. I'd never met Lorna before; Bruce hadn't seen her in over two years. We stood in the entryway and offered simple introductions, and in minutes it felt as if we had used up all the air and were teetering on the dangerous edge of nothing left to say. Bruce coughed, thank G.o.d, and took several steps back and invited Lorna into the living room, where she began to unlayer herself.

She took off a large black denim jacket, an aged wool m.u.f.fler, and two khaki military sweaters, and beneath all the Army-Navy Surplus attire Lorna turned out to be pale and shopworn and incredibly beyond her twenty-two years. Too many lines in her forehead already. The rough lamenting cough of an old woman. What stabbed me deeply, though, in a place I didn't even know I had, was how much she was Bruce's daughter-the same deep-set brown eyes, the way she c.o.c.ked her head when she was listening.

"Now don't get any ideas," she warned Bruce within the first five minutes of her arrival. "I'm just here visiting-that is, if you all are up to having a visitor."

"Of course, honey. Any time. You know that," Bruce told her.

It was true-her luggage did appear to suggest only a short visit. She had a small Nike duffel bag, a green backpack, and a ragged blue canvas tote that said Read: Get Carried Away with a Book.

"Still traveling light, huh?" Bruce asked her, and all of us knew that he was commenting on more than her luggage.

"Well, you know me," she said, "pack small, think big," then took off her shoes and went upstairs to use the bathroom.

When she was safely out of range, Bruce looked at me, sighed, ran his hand through his hair which is grazed with silver but still as thick as a teenager's, and said, "Here we go, Eileen. Hold on."

Naturally, I thought that we was just a manner of speaking, because Lorna, it seemed to me, was Bruce's unfinished business, but that's what is oftentimes so surprising. What at first seems to be someone else's story can suddenly twist and become your own.

This rocky, ponderosa stretch of the West is actually my third home. First there was Santa Barbara, then Tucson, and after I met Bruce and the flame we created wouldn't die, he moved me here to Colorado with him-long story made short. Instantly, these mountains got all of my respect, but it was the winter-the snow-that thrilled me. I remember my first year here, walking out of Food Warehouse into the first good snow of the season, and after I'd put the groceries in my trunk I sat out on the hood of the car like a crazy woman and let the huge flakes drop softly around me. For years my mother had tried to make me a Catholic, and if Catholics had prayed to snow, in that moment she might have succeeded.