Oola. Brittany Newell

what do you think you’re doing, mister? And he looked up and said, Feeding the moles. The moles need food too, Mom. It would’ve been sweet if I wasn’t afraid he’d pass out. Honestly, he could’ve worn one of my bangles as a garter belt.”

      “Mom—”

      “I’m not saying you did. But you could’ve, if you wanted. I’m not telling the bra story, don’t worry.” She winks over her brimming glass. “I’ll save that gem for Christmas.”

      The bra story: yet another example of me wanting more than was possible, more of the silky-smooth substance I associated with women, more robust of an answer to the question I eventually became fixated on—Who are you?—something more believable than her blithe I’m your mommy! which sounded as cryptic to my third-grader’s ears as I’m your first dose of the Other or I’m the sack of flesh from whence you came.

      Perhaps my obsession with being a drain, my conviction that there was some funnel inside me that could never be quenched, not by good deeds or ice cream or, later, by ketamine, was due in small part to having so frail a mother. I would never dare to suggest that her struggles with weight, with depression, with the little pink pills she called Good Guys, had anything truly to do with me or that she is to blame for how I ended up: Just like Nurse told me, wiping my tears with patchouli-stained fingers, some babies are born breech, others brokenhearted. But it can’t have helped my doughy heart, still in the process of rising and taking on shape (braided? Bundt?), to watch my mother wax and wane, her chic black slacks tailored in vain. Before I had even the faintest notion of fleshiness as a personal preference (d’ya like em knobby or plush? the older boys cackled), I hugged her leg and wanted more, if only to know that she would still be there the next morning, shaking her head to the story read aloud on the radio and scrambling my eggs without ever touching the yolk.

      On the afternoon in question, her underwear fit me surprisingly well, the panties puckering only slightly in the back and the bra like two yarmulkes glued to my chest. I was a nine-year-old bombshell. What I remember with the most pain is not the embarrassment of my parents discovering me (doing jumping jacks in front of the mirror) and laughing until they cried, my father practically killing the cat in his haste to get the camera, but rather the fine lace trim of my mother’s underwear and the print: pomegranates on one, Swiss dots on another, a bow the size of my pinky nail on the pair that I, after much deliberation, wriggled into. Just like a girl’s, in style and size. At the time, I was astonished. I hadn’t been privy to this sense of humor, reflected in a pair of panties with two kitty paw prints on the back, or ever considered that amid my hand-wringing and eye-rubbing, my mother, despite her modest black garb, might be wanting something too.

      This is no Oedipal sob story. Now I only feel sad for my mother, an unbearable tenderness when I picture her getting ready for bed, steadying herself on the bedpost. She is still a private person. I’m not supposed to be in the bedroom with her, even via my eunuch’s imagination, and yet I long to offer her a hand. Thinking of her handwashing the peach lace bra she barely needed, laying out each intimate, it strikes me that by having the numbers on her scale go down (99, 97 …) she was also trying to go backward. Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong: Maybe she didn’t want to get any lower or younger or less than she was but just to hold tight to the scraps that she had, pause her life on an approximation of perfect, like someone playing poker while their toddler waited in the too-hot car some hundred feet away. If she kept playing, she could get more, could hit jackpot, but she could also lose big time or lose a little more every round, so why trouble the waters? That is a difference between us, I think. I would play until dawn, until my desire supinated me. If she were the one in the parking lot, waiting in Nevadan silence, I’d play until the car reached boiling and she nodded off with her head on the dashboard.

      Staring at my dorm room ceiling, I thought about my mother, my childhood, and I thought about Beth, the girl made a celebrity because she’d been so plain, doomed to lisp a class of boys to sleep each autumn night. So lava-hot were our desires, her puberty had been Pompeii’d: We combed the ash from her erogenous zones with hushed, professorial care. Lying awake at 3:30 a.m., I was both a budding writer and an archaeologist. Well, really, I was neither; I was just a kid, undressed, with my bare legs splayed and ideals, like knickknacks, lined up on the little ledge that overlooked my bed. Was it on these sleepless nights that I first realized how at risk I was of being exactly like everyone else? I thought of the other boys in my class, deep-feeling, big-talking, rosacea’d with passion: Did we share the same bookshelf, same background, same visions of love, and thus the same trauma of suddenly finding ourselves, for the very first time, disadvantaged, in the face of flavored ChapStick, of unbearably soft breasts? Our imaginations were tragically tidy, like a cartoon drawing of said breasts (circle and dot). If Beth didn’t trim, we’d do it ourselves, quoting Barthes, saying baby. As I tossed and turned, one thing became clear to me: I had to find a hot new way to love, or risk obliteration.

      I listened to my roommate breathe. I felt a nonsexual tingle when he turned over and sighed—a long, hard fwuhhh. They soothed me immensely, these human sounds. When he coughed, I could’ve kissed him. During the day I tried to fit the mold of the acerbic student, marked by tatty sweaters and a monolithic brow; but for all the books I waded through, my academic distaste for society was diluted the instant I stepped out of the library and realized it was dusk, that slow disaster, when one more day wicks down and all the world can’t help but sigh and let their shoulders slump. I shared this daily tragedy with the joggers and the elderly as we moseyed through the lilaced air, dinner on our minds. The sight of someone’s shoulders slumping, at this haunted hour or on the bus or one nook over in the library, meant more to me than sex (I swear), because it was the body at its purest: not the blank-brained thrall of sex or selflessness of books, but the quiet click of resignation as one slips into herself. This is why, much later, in our various house-sits, I loved to watch Oola in the shower. Even with the curtain drawn, I found myself enthralled by the long blur of her body as she went about its tasks, moving her hands in varying circles as she rinsed, washed, and repeated.