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

other door for us. They didn’t say a word, didn’t give each other the cool slender glance of people still carrying grudges. With me held closer than ever to her chest, my mother skip-hopped onto the running board and then up onto the seat, looked straight ahead, and waited for my father to slam the door.
    My father, of course, thought she was coming back for him. He couldn’t stand two hours without her and he thought she felt the same, and in a while she did. But at the moment when she had jumped into the truck, she was all mother, all pounding heart, and she didn’t for one second analyze our escape.
    We drove back to the house while behind us, in the valley to the west, in the very spot where
The Conqueror
would be filmed the next year, the cloud unloaded sheer white dust and here and there glassy particles that would end up driving the cameramen wild, sudden glints and glarings appearing in the uncut footage. Sitting in the truck that day, we didn’t know it, but my father would be there at that filming, too, maybe not a star but at least an extra. For weeks, dressed in blousy pants and wearing snow boots, he was destined to ride a skittish buckskin a hundred times across the same stretch of red sand until someone finally yelled that they had a take.
    My father, glad to have his wife and daughter back that day, drove carefully and watched in his rearview mirror; my mother kept turning around. They didn’t know exactly what they were seeing back there, but they were spooked, and in no time she had slid across the seat and partnered back up with him. The cloud hung low for a while and didn’t seem to move. Beneath it, wind and dust and fallout created a turbulent hothouse that we could see and would hear about on the radio the next day.
    Maybe to calm herself, my mother started—right there in the truck—by kissing my father’s cheek, even though it was a little too smooth for her taste, a little too much like a young James Stewart’s. Then things fell into place: a kiss, a hug, my mother’s skirt coming up over her legs.
    As my father was trying to drive with one hand, trying to sneak quick views of the road ahead, I told him, in the only way that I could—with grunts and aaahs and jibberish—that I loved him, whatever he was going to be.
    In the months and years that followed after we safely arrived home, Telsa was exploded, Priscilla, Diablo, and Hood. There were others we didn’t learn the names of. They drifted overhead, engraving a darkness in the sky, but they only appeared to pass and move into the shimmering distance.

Nature’s Way
    C lose to midnight, they finally broke the lock and convinced her to get out of the bathtub, that she needed to see a doctor. She was Navajo and had been sitting in the steaming water for hours. She’d miscarried and all that stuff was floating in the water, too. After that, nobody in the dorm would use the bathtub. It was like voodoo or filth, something that could be picked up, or simply something that reminded us how death bloomed from our own clear bodies, too.
    They lifted her up gently, but even so, I could tell it hurt. Her face was pinched in pain or weariness. She was smooth and heavy, and her wet hair stuck lifelessly to her back. Someone had brought a robe for her. It was winter and the cold of the dorm penetrated with a needle-like precision. You wouldn’t believe how white a Navajo can turn, standing in that cold, bleeding.
    They led her down the hallway, and I guess to Gloria’s car, then on to the hospital. I really didn’t know this girl, but when she steppedfrom the tub she did a curious thing that has made me think of her again and again. She closed her eyes, deliberately closed her eyes. She kept them closed down the hallway and perhaps even in Gloria’s 72 Valiant as it reduced Flagstaff Highway to nothing but a cold, black line. I don’t know why she closed her eyes and kept