donnylaja heroine, Kenosha edition

“I can’t believe this is going to go over well,” Mitzi says, as Mordecai paints another flower onto her concave tummy.

        “This film will be the backdrop to my multimedia presentation.”

        “Ha!” Saul harrumphs.  “Suns on her boobs, planets on her butt, stars on her toes.  Now flowers.  You and your beatnik friends.”

        “If I can get that old 8 millimeter to work, it will be ‘out there, man’.  We don’t have to use those bright overhead lights any more.”

        Ephraim watches silently, as usual.  He has just arrived and is wearing his “going to court” suit.

        Leah says, “It is pretty.  A sunflower?”  Indeed it is, centered around Mitzi’s navel.

        They’re standing in a circle around her, in Mordecai’s studio, a converted barn.  Their always-nude friend is posed in front of a white screen.  Because she’s a lot shorter than Mordecai, she’s on a pedestal.

        “Sorry!” he says.  A little glob of yellow paint has fallen, separating into three pieces on curly black pubic hairs.  “That won’t come out soon,” Mitzi says, a little peeved.  “People look down there, you know.”  As she cranes her neck forward to look down past her breasts, she says, “I should take better care of it.”

        “What can you do?” Leah says.

        “Maybe have it trimmed?”

        This makes Saul laugh, and also Leah and Isaac and Naava.

        “Not so funny.  I feel like I’m . . . like a gorilla down there.”  Which is not quite true, although Mitzi does have an unusually luxuriant forest, going halfway up to her navel and spilling over a bit onto the insides of her thighs.  It is as jet black as the hair above.

        “Women do trim down there,” Mordecai says.  “It’s called Brazilian waxing. . . . There: finished.  Now to film.”

        Half an hour later, after he is done with his camera, which took in her whole body except for her face, Mitzi runs outside.  “I can take it any more!  This dried paint is icky!”  Ephraim has the honor of squirting the cold jets of the garden hose at his wife, as she in a methodical way offers every part of her body to the cleansing water, beginning with her shoulders and turning and twisting bit by bit until down to spreading her toes and the stars get washed off.