Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet,” he said.

I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.

As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, “Helen, we’re ready for you.” But I stood in my mother’s slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie’s living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.

Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.

I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless mini-lecture. I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.

“Helen, we’re ready for you.”

I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry in horror, but I didn’t. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother’s slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.

I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.

“I’m good,” I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.

“We’ll cycle then,” he said. “Give them a three-minute pose. Ten, Nine, Seven, Four, and ending on Two, which you can hold a bit longer if you like. You know the plates?”

“I do,” I said. Ordinarily I would have shot back their names in the order he’d asked me to do them, but I was not paying attention to him anymore. Instead, I set my energy toward Dorothy, the best student in the room. I decided that for Dorothy, I would wear my mother’s murder on my skin.

For my first pose, my back would be turned almost all the way to the classroom, so I pivoted around as Tanner stepped away from the platform. I saw the picture of the tub pinned to the curtain behind me, peeled back my robe and placed it in my right hand to pretend it was the towel in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself. I leaned, as she did, to the side and tilted my head down to a half profile. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of furious undergraduate sketching, as if they were cameras and I a subject to be caught in flight. Very few, like Dorothy, had the skill of consideration.

Three minutes was a concession to the students. Eventually, by the end of the semester, they would be working in two. But I was fine with much longer poses, and always had been. Staying completely still was something I’d taken to from the start.

“It’s like you were born to do this,” Jake once said.

He was my teacher then. He was my Tanner Haku, and for all I knew, I was his Dorothy. But I did not have Dorothy’s talent.

“You have such lovely skin,” Jake had said.

And I clung to it. Almost as if, if he said it again, something would break inside me. And he did. He said it when he noticed I had grown so cold that I was almost shivering. He’d come over to me-I had been lying down and had a cramp in my side-and had stood, watching me. I worried every moment that he was going to say, “You know, I was wrong. You’re hideous. This was all a mistake.”

“You’re turning blue with cold,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping the chatter out of my teeth as best I could. I was eighteen and had never seen a man nude, much less been nude in front of one.

“Relax,” he said.

He went behind the screen in the studio and threw a blanket over the top of it. It landed on me. The scratchy wool was like an assault, but I was too cold to complain.

“I’ve turned the kettle on,” he said. “I’ll make tea. I’ve got some ramen noodles if you want.”

Ramen noodles as aphrodisiac. I had asked Jake later if he had known he would make love to me.

“I had no idea. When you walked in in that silly pink suit, I almost laughed at you.”

“It was coral,” I corrected him. It had taken all the money I had.

“When you took it off,” he said, “I fell in love.”

“So it was a good outfit?”

“When it hit the floor,” he said.

I was huddled in the scratchy blanket when he returned with two mugs of tea.

“Thank you, Helen,” he said, and placed the mug by me. I remember I was still too cold to even reach for it. “You did an extraordinary job today.”

I was silent.

“And your skin,” he said. “It’s lovely, really.”

I started crying. Something about how cold I was and how much snow there was piling up outside and how far away I was from home and from my mother. He put down his tea and asked if he could hold me.

“Um-hmm,” I said.

He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I was still crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

How could I say what seemed ludicrous even to me? After having dreamed of getting away from her, I missed my mother. It haunted me during that first semester like an ache.

“I’m just so cold,” I said.

“Change!” Haku barked.

The students put their final touches to what was most obvious in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself but not to what many of them were still too self-conscious to sketch-my ass. Whenever I looked at the drawings from freshman classes, the attention to detail was always focused on the props. On the one occasion I modeled for the Senior Center, there was no such fear. Both the women and the men dove right in, knowing time was limited.

“Woman at Her Toilet!” Tanner announced proudly. There was no laughter now. The students were serious, and I, dropping the towel née robe onto the platform, leaned over the metal basin that had been left upon a chair and took the sea sponge in my right hand. I pivoted now toward the classroom and cupped my breasts in my right arm as I reached the sponge up under my left armpit, as if I were washing myself.