The Dream of Doctor Bantam by Jeanne Thornton Page A

the couch and her clothes were rumpled. She had always wondered if you could tell a sexual deviant by her facial expression, and now she knew.
    If she was a sexual deviant anyway, she decided, it didn’t matter how far she went with it.
    That was how she justified taking off all her clothes and drawing the hot bath for herself. The tub was still full of scum and old cinnamon oils from this afternoon. She filled the bathtub slowly, so that the water would make as little sound as possible, and she crouched on the linoleum to the side of the bathtub and kept her right hand on the knob to regulate the water’s temperature and pressure and she kept her left hand stroking gently between her legs.
    This is what she was doing when Patrice walked in without knocking, the T-shirt hanging to her knees and eyes blinking away sleep. Julie quickly dropped to the floor and crossed her legs and bent over herself as far as she could.
    What are you doing? mumbled Patrice, sleepily.
    Oh you know taking a night bath ha ha, said Julie.
    Patrice nodded, strolled in, and looked at herself in the mirror.
    I had the strangest dreams, she said. I was caught in a spider’s web, but there was only one strand in the web, wrapped around my ribs, and when I touched the strand it was sticky. And I kept undoing the strands of web from around my waist, but then another spider would come along and quickly put another strand of web around me. It kept happening all night.
    What a crazy dream, said Julie, cheeks completely red and face buried in her bare knees. I wonder how it ends!
    Yes, agreed Patrice, and she turned around and walked back to the door. Good night, she mumbled as she turned out the light.
    Julie let her eyes adjust to the darkness and she turned off the water. In silence she stood up and let herself get in, inch by inch.
    She tried not to move or make a single ripple as she lay in the warm water in the dark bathroom and told herself how disgusting she was being—a six-year-old, eating bowls of whipped cream uninterrupted by pie—and she bit her lips and lusted for a cigarette, and she was seventeen and her entire life would stretch before her like this, full like this, and every inch of her skin was warm in the darkness. She lay in the water and she allowed herself, with the memory of the light against her retinas, to think about the cult girl who frowned like Tabitha.

5
    Her hair was still wet and reeked of bath oils when she crept downstairs and picked up the bike from the porch. She had ridden it halfway up Guadalupe before she realized that she hadn’t come on Tabitha’s bike the previous day; this wasn’t her bike. She began to pedal faster.
    Michael’s swing was creaking on the branch of the tree in her yard; Michael’s car was in her mother’s garage. She leaned the bike up against his paint, unlocked the back door, and stepped into her kitchen.
    When you step into a room you drop skin cells: some of your color and some of your weight. Eventually they stain all the walls, hang like stalactites from the ceiling. The kitchen was seething around her—the same dead plants in the window, the same glasses in the cupboard, the same scorch marks Tabitha had made on the potholders that hung under the stove. Jungle vapors of Tabitha against her skin. She hadn’t felt like this for weeks—her eyes stung; the Machine had cracked something open in her. She stepped back into the garage and closed the door and squeezed her eyes shut against the blue hour before morning.
    In the yard she sat on the swing Michael had made for her and she kicked herself back and forth over the lawn as the dew collected and the sun came up. She was still there, passed out in the grass, when Michael came out to his car, work papers gathered in a binder-clipped heap at his side.
    I worry about you, he said after he’d woken her up.
    I worry about fire ants, said Julie.
    He drove away and she saw that he’d lifted the bike, gently, and rested it against