Devils in the Sugar Shop. Timothy Schaffert

Naomi giggled, but Deedee knew not to play along. She didn’t want to be the unwitting audience member dragged up on stage for Mrs. Bloom, who’d once been an honest-to-god birthday clown, to pull a bouquet of paper poppies from her nose or to release a barn swallow from her beehive. Mrs. Bloom, before becoming a publisher, had been many things over the years, including the reverend of a nondenominational church, an art therapist at the prison, and an organizer of poetry slams for cancer survivors.

      “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” and Mrs. Bloom looked back up to the ceiling. “FUCK me SENSELESS!” she said, slapping her knee. “Yes. Fuck me senseless, that’s what it says.” She gave Naomi the box of candy, then winked and leaned over to do a little magic trick, pulling a conversation heart from behind Deedee’s ear. “Dream,” it said.

      Naomi seemed to be genuinely amused by the dirty joke, leaning forward, covering her mouth to laugh. Deedee only smiled politely and returned to her drawing. Her eyes wandered from the model to Zeke, and she found herself scribbling his cowboy boots, with their leather-stamped yellow roses, onto the feet of the naked woman.

      “I’m going to ask Hole-in-the-Knee out on a date,” Deedee whispered to Naomi, referring to the disheveled fortysomething sitting near Zeke. She took another heart from Naomi. Tickle me. “He’s easy on the eyes.”

      In the two years since her divorce from Naomi’s father, Deedee had had sex exactly once, with a farm insurance agent she’d met on the Internet. One night in a chat room, without even seeing the man’s picture or hearing his voice, Deedee had decided she’d fallen in love in a way she hadn’t since college. They had made arrangements to meet later that week, at a restaurant in a town that was halfway between them, and she’d driven to the aptly named Chances “R” steakhouse with her heart pounding, her sweat soaking the underarms of a silky red dress with Asian embroidery that she’d bought at full retail from a snooty boutique.

      But five minutes into dinner conversation, or maybe even minutes before that, maybe the second she’d seen his gin-blossomy nose and outdated rooster-knit necktie, the love she’d so quickly fallen into, she’d just as quickly fallen out of. The most troubling part was seeing that he was disappointed too. I had my hair done at T’eez for no small amount, she’d imagined herself telling him. My girlfriend who did my makeup works at the Estée Lauder counter at Dillard’s. I’m at least ten times more stunning than you deserve. But they had sex that night in a motel at the top of the exit off I-80, then never even e-mailed each other again.

      “You can’t fool me, Mom,” Naomi said. “Your only real interest in Hole-in-the-Knee is the fact that he’s chummy with Dad. You just want to create a little classroom scandale.” She put a Frenchy drawl on the end of the word, mimicking a motivational speaker they’d become infatuated with in the Bahamas, a woman known as Sybil the Guru who’d evangelized to roomfuls of unfortunates, of rode-hards-and-put-away-wets. With the mild tropical storm confining them to their hotel, Deedee and Naomi had made the rounds of the ballrooms, stealing name tags and sneaking into other conventions. “You don’t have a shot at happiness at all,” Sybil the Guru had told one crowd, provoking a mixture of giggles and shocked silence and approving clucks of the tongue. “It’s as simple as that. The women for whom happiness is a possibility are happy already. I don’t have any solutions to offer you, but it doesn’t matter, does it, gals? You just want the problem identified. As a matter of fact, you luxuriate in the problem. Any solution would only muddy things.” The crowd went wild.

      Deedee glanced around at the other women in the art class and gauged their ages, estimating that most of them were much older than she was. Then she remembered she was nearly forty, probably the same age as the nude model, who had a lazy slouch inching close to permanent hunchback.

      Do I look so old? she wondered. Only a few years before, people had often thought she was in her late twenties. But no one had made that mistake lately. And, really, wasn’t that somewhat of a relief? To not have to care so much if your hair was just right? To fret that she was too thin in some parts and too fat in others? There was only so much, at this point, that she could do.

      God, she thought, thinking how long it had been since she’d first seen Fatal Attraction, that movie that Naomi had barely even heard of. Twenty years, probably, had passed since she’d pictured her future in the picture-perfect Manhattan apartment of Anne Archer and Michael Douglas, with its carefully positioned clutter, its dinner parties where sophisticated people got soused on good wine and laughed their asses off and used filthy language. But now that she thought about it, as much as she’d coveted all the domestic tranquillity, what she’d really wanted was Glenn Close’s dirty frizz and toxic sense of style, those hideous black circles all around and around her eyes.

      “That’s all for today,” Viv said, stepping up from the back of the room, rushing to the model to cover her up with a velour robe as if suddenly distressed by her nudity. Viv rubbed the model’s shoulders as if consoling a victim, a woman exposed. Deedee had known Viv since college, and she’d always appeared scrappy and unflappable, all her anxiety funneled into her artwork. Deedee glanced over at Viv’s own easel, the model depicted in pieces, the arms, the legs, the hands disconnected, floating as if in a bottle of formaldehyde.

      “Viv’s off,” Deedee said. “These last few weeks she’s seemed so nervous.”

      “She has a stalker, Mom,” Naomi said, packing up her pastels and paper to store in the cabinets that lined the wall. “You’d be a little on edge too.”