A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly Page A

walking downtown and smelling rain, to be taut and wingless and waiting in a crowd for the bus with this bag of tricks, with this body, with wet hair.
    St. Louis is an old place, but it had attempted to modernize itself. There was a pretty successful renovation project downtown, though there were still the rattraps and walk-ups that could be had cheap. It was a city that didn’t demand much. It could be traversed easily, the neighborhood sidewalks were wide, and its economy was moderate but growing. I wouldn’t consider going back there, though it’s a place that I’m glad I lived in for a while.
    In St. Louis on my thirtieth birthday Prentice gave me a ring, a garnet: a black-red stone set in a gold band. I couldn’t ask him what it meant. Anyway, what could he have said? There were twenty-seven bones in Prentice’s hand when he touched me, when he laid back the flesh, there and there, and found only a sparrow’s black-red heart.

    After all of that, after eight years in St. Louis, I ended up going to Boulder, though I warned my mother that medical school was out. No questions. I took my time getting there: three days during which I often stopped to read the map, checking the way Interstate 40 bulldozed through Illinois and Missouri and Kansas, then, outside of Denver, how it burst into spider lines going everywhere. On the third day I had to stop to repack something I’d hastily arranged in the back seat. The ironing board was hitting the TV screen every time I braked. It was just past Salina, a rest stop from which the great American prairie rolled westward, not exactly as the fifth graders had made itout to be, but lonely all the same. The wind was blowing as it usually does there, cool and unpredictable. If you could have stood there by my car and felt it, you’d know why California is such a happy place and why the settlers cried into the soil, feeling the full weight of their bodies.

In the Shadows of Upshot-Knothole
    M y mother and I ran away only one time, on a sunny May morning when the world was about to end. She didn’t know where we were running to, but my mother Lorraine was smart and she would have figured something out, a place for us to go—Cedar City or Tonopah. For a while after she met my father and married him, my mother said that she only thought between her legs, but time had passed and I’d come along and life had resumed its normal colors and she was trying to think with her head again. Lewis and Elly Barlow, our nearest neighbors, lived almost four miles away on a dirt road that cut through sagebrush and scruffy cedar, and since my mother was on foot and I was in a stroller, their house was the first stop on our way to somewhere, to any place without movie stars.
    We had left my father back at the house sitting sullenly on a kitchen chair, and even then he looked a little too much like Tony Curtis to my mother’s way of thinking. Black slick hair, a face that you remembered as cheekbones and clear eyes. He was all shoulders and tightwaist and he had a raw sleepy sexiness that he knew nothing about. That morning, though, his arms were folded over his chest and he sat in the chair tipped back on its two legs and he was staring at the wall, tired and angry. He said my mother didn’t understand him.
    The breakfast dishes had just been washed—cups and bowls and plates stacked into the small artful piles that women can make of ordinary things. My mother had dried her hands, stepped over me on the floor where I had balled the rug up around me, and gone to my father’s side. “This is what I understand,” she said, her voice rising, straining, finally sending Lowry, our big nearsighted collie, slinking from the room. “You’d rather go off and play than stay here with your wife and daughter.”
    My father had no response to that—sometimes he was tongue-tied; sometimes he needed to filter things and kick some dirt before