Lion's Share by Rochelle Rattner Page A

neck as she stared out the window at a half-moon. The night air helped her concentrate. “I want loving,” she used to demand. And her mother would stop whatever she was doing and take Jana in her arms. Jana reached her hand in at the neck of her sweatshirt, found the open collar of her blouse, reached down farther, and clutched her breast. But her hand was smaller than Ed’s, too small to contain it all.
    She shivered in the cold night air. That dream she’d had the first week at Yaddo flashed through her mind again, only finally she called it by its proper name: a dream and not a nightmare. That pain in her crotch wasn’t nearly as strange, or as frightening, as it had been at first. Touching herself right this moment, she could almost, but not quite, duplicate it. As hard as she might try to think of herself as a child, enjoying being cuddled in Ed’s arms the way she recalled being cuddled by her mother, there was no denying the fact that she’d become a woman.
    She leaned out the window to get a better look at the moon’s rays bouncing off the pond and felt her shoulders stiffen again. Love seemed to be having a field day with her body.
    No, this wasn’t love. “Obviously I love you right now, but I’m not going to say how I’ll feel tomorrow or the next day,” Ed had said. She wasn’t sure what this feeling was, but she had to be careful not to call it “love.”
    The chilly nights evolved slowly into days that lost the penetrating intensity of their heat, and Jana noticed other changes. Clad in shorts and a man’s dyed shirt, she lay in a hammock out near where Yaddo bordered on the harness track, lazily drawing flowers. The hammock rocked every time she drew a line on her sketch pad; her body rocked the way Ed had rocked it in his arms. Over the weekend Ed had driven to Connecticut for his cousin’s wedding, and when they’d spoken Monday he’d gone on and on about the flowers he’d seen: violets, brightly colored zinnias, a patch of roses. “I’ve been in the city so long I’d forgotten what it was like to see flowers cultivated on lawns,” he said. “They seemed the image of health.” She thought about how often this past week she’d walked the grounds, picking daisies and pulling off their petals: he loves me, he loves me not. Or on alternate days: I love him, I love him not. But no, she couldn’t tell Ed that quite yet.
    Jana sketched herself as a healthy flower. It was only a matter of time now. There was an urge in her body that cuddling could no longer satisfy. They would take it slow. For the first few nights, she would ask Ed to take precautions. She was sure now that he cared enough for her that he wouldn’t object. The free-sex craze had passed—people worried about AIDS and herpes—asking a man to take precautions was no longer an unusual request, Marilyn had explained. After she lost her virginity, Jana would make an appointment with a gynecologist. Maybe she would get pills, maybe a diaphragm; she didn’t have to decide at the moment.
    Various portraits of women played themselves in her mind, but her thoughts came to rest on the famous surrealist photograph of Duchamp as Rrose Selavey. How easy it had been for him to dress in drag and take on the woman’s identity. The finished image was nothing but a trick, a mental game which lent itself to photography. The distancing of that final print would be more difficult for a woman to attain, Jana realized now. Regardless what Marilyn said about frigidity, Jana knew no woman would want to be that out of touch with her emotions. She could no longer paint as she’d been painting for years—holding herself back, not letting her vision stray from the external object. She wanted to paint the portrait of herself as a woman, not a woman in some flower mask.
    She made a dash for her studio, grabbed a stubby piece of charcoal, and