Summer of Love, a Time Travel by Lisa Mason Page A

onstage. A white-blond girl, bone-thin in expensive jeans, stands
beside him, laughing.
    Susan
taps his shoulder and hands him Stovepipe’s package.
    “Groovy,
Starbright,” he says. His eyes are painfully bloodshot. He’s had more than a
few hits of Professor Zoom’s Gold. He cups a smoking roach beneath the palm of
his hand. “Everything was cool?”
    “Sure.”
Her pitch for a share of the profits vanishes in thin air.
    The
girl turns to glance at her. She’s got a long bony face and limbs like twigs.
She must be eighteen, the ideal of beauty everyone adores.
    “Starbright,
this is Marylou,” Stan says. “Her daddy owns half of Mill Valley.”
    “I’m
Marilyn.” The girl laughs and punches his shoulder. “Isn’t he a pig,
Starbright?” Her eyes assess Susan and dismiss her. The difference in their
ages isn’t four years, it’s more like four centuries. “Give me some,” she says
and pries the roach from his fingers.
    “I’ll
give you some,” Stan growls in her ear.
    Susan
wonders if she can stop the trembling of her lip.
    *  
*   *
    Give
me some. Back at the Double Barrel house, this is Marilyn’s big
line. She says it over and over. She provokes the guys into screaming laughter.
Give me some. Marilyn is so enticing, she even upstages Lady May, who pouts and
frets.
    Susan
huddles on the swaybacked sofa. She’s so sick to her stomach, she’s afraid
she’s going to puke all over the floor. Has she got a fever? The neverending
party swirls all around her. People pour in the door, laughing, toking,
swigging pints of Wild Turkey.
    Give
me some.
    Stella
leaps onto the coffee table and begins to dance. She stretches out her arms in
a beckoning gesture.
    Susan
recognizes that gesture. Stella reminds her of Juno, the Transparent Woman.
    *  
*   *
    Only
girls and their mothers were allowed in the auditorium at the Cleveland Health
Education Museum. Juno, the Transparent Woman, stood eight feet tall on her dais,
her clear plastic arms beckoning. The auditorium dimmed and a don’t-be-afraid
voice spoke on the PA system. The Transparent Woman lit up her internal organs.
Her heart beat bright purple. Her arteries pulsed neon-red blood, while her
veins pulsed cool blue. Her yellow lungs billowed, inhaling and exhaling. Her
green stomach showed where food went, her pink bowls showed how waste products
came out.
    Then
the Transparent Woman lit up her reproductive organs. The girls stared in
silence as their mothers coughed discreetly. Juno’s ovaries sent tiny turquoise
eggs down her graceful fallopian tubes to the uterus, which glowed redder and redder.
Red light flowed through the cervix and down the vagina. The voice said the
vagina was the birth canal. Like the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal? The birth
canal was where the baby came out.
    But
how did the baby get in? The Transparent Woman turned dark. The man,
said the voice, planted his sperm—like seeds—in the woman. The Transparent
Woman lit up again. Here is where the man planted his seeds, the voice said. In
the birth canal. Juno stood stiffly on her dais, smiling her transparent smile,
giving no hint of the task at hand.
    “Well,
that’s that,” said Susan’s mother as they drove home through the dark. She
never spoke about the Transparent Woman again.
    Susan’s
first period came soon after Juno lit up her reproductive organs. She likes to
imagine her uterus glowing redder and redder until red light flows out of her
birth canal. For the past year, the red light has flowed as regular as
clockwork. Every twenty-two days, exactly, between noon and one o’clock, the
red light traces its path.
    Well.
Susan sure knows how the seeds get planted now. Losing her virginity and
sleeping with Stan every night has been as powerful a revelation as her trip.
Sex is a lot like tripping. There are people who know and people who don’t.
    Sex
is also a lot like a drug. In her eighth-grade science class, the teacher told
them a story about how goslings