I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.

“I’m good,” I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.

“We’ll cycle then,” he said. “Give them a three-minute pose. Ten, Nine, Seven, Four, and ending on Two, which you can hold a bit longer if you like. You know the plates?”

“I do,” I said. Ordinarily I would have shot back their names in the order he’d asked me to do them, but I was not paying attention to him anymore. Instead, I set my energy toward Dorothy, the best student in the room. I decided that for Dorothy, I would wear my mother’s murder on my skin.

For my first pose, my back would be turned almost all the way to the classroom, so I pivoted around as Tanner stepped away from the platform. I saw the picture of the tub pinned to the curtain behind me, peeled back my robe and placed it in my right hand to pretend it was the towel in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself. I leaned, as she did, to the side and tilted my head down to a half profile. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of furious undergraduate sketching, as if they were cameras and I a subject to be caught in flight. Very few, like Dorothy, had the skill of consideration.

Three minutes was a concession to the students. Eventually, by the end of the semester, they would be working in two. But I was fine with much longer poses, and always had been. Staying completely still was something I’d taken to from the start.

“It’s like you were born to do this,” Jake once said.

He was my teacher then. He was my Tanner Haku, and for all I knew, I was his Dorothy. But I did not have Dorothy’s talent.

“You have such lovely skin,” Jake had said.

And I clung to it. Almost as if, if he said it again, something would break inside me. And he did. He said it when he noticed I had grown so cold that I was almost shivering. He’d come over to me-I had been lying down and had a cramp in my side-and had stood, watching me. I worried every moment that he was going to say, “You know, I was wrong. You’re hideous. This was all a mistake.”

“You’re turning blue with cold,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping the chatter out of my teeth as best I could. I was eighteen and had never seen a man nude, much less been nude in front of one.

“Relax,” he said.

He went behind the screen in the studio and threw a blanket over the top of it. It landed on me. The scratchy wool was like an assault, but I was too cold to complain.

“I’ve turned the kettle on,” he said. “I’ll make tea. I’ve got some ramen noodles if you want.”

Ramen noodles as aphrodisiac. I had asked Jake later if he had known he would make love to me.

“I had no idea. When you walked in in that silly pink suit, I almost laughed at you.”

“It was coral,” I corrected him. It had taken all the money I had.

“When you took it off,” he said, “I fell in love.”

“So it was a good outfit?”

“When it hit the floor,” he said.

I was huddled in the scratchy blanket when he returned with two mugs of tea.

“Thank you, Helen,” he said, and placed the mug by me. I remember I was still too cold to even reach for it. “You did an extraordinary job today.”

I was silent.

“And your skin,” he said. “It’s lovely, really.”

I started crying. Something about how cold I was and how much snow there was piling up outside and how far away I was from home and from my mother. He put down his tea and asked if he could hold me.

“Um-hmm,” I said.

He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I was still crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

How could I say what seemed ludicrous even to me? After having dreamed of getting away from her, I missed my mother. It haunted me during that first semester like an ache.

“I’m just so cold,” I said.

“Change!” Haku barked.

The students put their final touches to what was most obvious in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself but not to what many of them were still too self-conscious to sketch-my ass. Whenever I looked at the drawings from freshman classes, the attention to detail was always focused on the props. On the one occasion I modeled for the Senior Center, there was no such fear. Both the women and the men dove right in, knowing time was limited.

“Woman at Her Toilet!” Tanner announced proudly. There was no laughter now. The students were serious, and I, dropping the towel née robe onto the platform, leaned over the metal basin that had been left upon a chair and took the sea sponge in my right hand. I pivoted now toward the classroom and cupped my breasts in my right arm as I reached the sponge up under my left armpit, as if I were washing myself.

I had always found this pose awkward. It forced me to look toward my armpit and made me all too aware of my own body. As the years went by, I could see more sunspots on my chest and shoulders, and the resilient skin with which I had been blessed had slackened no matter what inverted poses I was able to do in yoga. Flexibility did not, in the end, trump gravity. I lived on the borderline between a Venus just holding it together and Whistler’s mother in the buff. I thought suddenly, as the dry sea sponge scraped against the tender skin of my armpit, that if I were less flexible, less in shape, I would not have been able to commit either of the crimes of which I now stood guilty. Lifting and hauling my mother would not have been possible. Being attractive to Hamish, unthinkable.

“Helen?” I heard Tanner say. He stood close to the platform. I could smell the garlic capsules he took every day.

“Yes?” I did not break my pose.

“You seem to be shaking. Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Focus,” he said. “Two more on this one,” he announced to the class.

Five years ago and very late at night, Tanner had wanted to draw the skeleton of a rabbit he’d seen in a dusty showcase of the old Krause Biology Building. He had taken me to an art opening, and the evening had ended with us stumbling around without a flashlight in a building that had yet to be renovated. We found many a display case but not the right one, and we had frozen like misbehaving children when we heard the creak of the exit door below us, and Cecil, the elderly security guard, calling into the darkness, “Is anyone there?”

During the renovation of Krause the following year, I walked by and saw bones sticking up out of a Dumpster. Not caring who might see me, I hiked my skirt up and climbed onto some cinder blocks that had been lowered by crane and were still bundled in steel ribbons, so I could see inside the Dumpster. There lay the rabbit skeleton on its side.

It sat now, as pristine as I could have hoped, as the centerpiece of a collection of found objects that Tanner had placed on the long, high windowsill that ran the length of the room. It was the first thing I saw sometimes when I entered the space-the delicate bones of the rabbit next to rocks of various shapes and sizes, a God’s eye made by a student’s child, and an endless collection of sea glass he picked up on his solo journeys to the Jersey Shore.

Now I felt the menacing bones of this rabbit behind me and could not strike the image of my mother rotting in layers until she too was bone. There was something in the idea of it, this slow molting toward yellowed calcium that must be pinned together to prevent collapse, that I found both frightening and comforting. The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one’s whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged? I had made her laugh by playing the fool. I told her stories. I paraded around as a fool at the mercy of other fools, and by doing this I guaranteed that she did not miss anything by choosing to turn her back on the outside world.