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

clarity rushed him—but it didn’t matter because my mother spun around, walked back to the bedroom, and began to collect the odds and ends that would compose our survival kit: a hairbrush, a silver baby spoon, a Sears and Roebuck catalog, talcum powder, an eyebrow pencil, diapers. She threw them into a water-stained overnight case and she did it loudly so that my father could hear in the next room, but he didn’t budge. They were at one of those impasses where husbands and wives sometimes find themselves—exhausted, speechless, the reckless fear that things will never be the same growing larger and more distinct by the second.
    My mother didn’t say good-bye. She just walked out into the kitchen with me on her hip and we stood there like a last photograph for my father. He never looked away from the green and white wallpaper checks on the kitchen wall. I drooled and gurgled and reached for him, my mother tells me, my hands round and fat as little pincushions, but he didn’t move. He had a point to make and he was serious about it, the chair tipped back, his silence stretching beyond the movies, beyond all the dark-haired leading men into our early morning reality.
    My mother was in every way his match. She gathered our things like the slender tornado she could be. Gracefully she walked down the front steps of the house with all the future she could carry—me and an overloaded suitcase and a wobbly baby stroller—and when we were out in the yard she put the suitcase down, wrestled the stroller with one hand, locked the legs into place, and slipped me in.
    I was a year old, just a small flowing river of sounds, words that spun unrecognizable, but my mother and I had complete conversations anyway. She says that she had been waiting her whole life for me. When I arrived, there was a lot for us to talk about.
    With the suitcase in one hand and the stroller handle in the other, she pushed and explained. “Everything is going to be all right, sweetheart. These things just happen. Your dad has some silly idea stuck in his head and he can’t get rid of it.”
    I reached up with one hand and batted the endless blue sky and jabbered a hundred things back to my mother, and she listened and sorted it out and understood.
    â€œI know. I know,” she said. “He’s immature. More looks than brains.”
    I took hold of the plastic stroller tray in front of me and shook it and it seemed to be just the advice my mother was looking for.
    â€œYou’re right,” she said. “I’ve gone weak and one-minded every time he turned those big blues on me. Putty in his hands. But no more. It’s time to get things rolling.” As if it were a pact we were keeping, she stopped and reached down and touched my head—a mass of curls that kept me prisoner until I was old enough to find the scissors and cut it myself. “Okay,” she said, “it’s agreed upon, love pie,” and when she started pushing the stroller again, the wheels went straighter and we moved faster, though on a rutted dirt road that even the county wouldn’t claim there was no such thing as speed.
    Months before I was born, my mother had mail-ordered that stroller and x’ed off the days on Hinkley’s Feed and Grain calendar until it arrived. “You won’t be able to use it out here,” my father had told her,but my mother was determined to do things right, to push me in a stroller like any other baby, despite the fact that the nearest sidewalk or park was a rough forty miles away. She used to tell people that we lived an hour and a half from nowhere, on a rocky ranch headed for no good, and she was just about right. In the southwest corner of Utah, amidst backcountry that was hallucinogenic in its loneliness and landscape, my father’s family had slowly carved out a ranch.
    The stroller proved difficult but not unmanageable out there, though my mother that morning had