Growing up on a farm, Cora had seen the act of sex many times. Her introduction to sex had been when she was six. While she was in the barn filling the water trough for the pigs, her dad sat down on the shoulders of a sow that was in season, jouncing up and down and kicking her ribs to get her in the mood, before reaching behind to insert the turkey baster of boar sperm. The radio was on playing the news, his expression bored. When she’d asked what he was doing, he said this was how you made baby pigs. It was two years before she was sure the piglets were not related to her in some way.

On a farm there is no secrecy around sex, no romance, no taboos. It was just what happened. The dogs on the front porch, the chickens in the yard. The cows in the field mounting each other, no bull in sight. Once she started working at Beach Ride Bobby’s, she would tether the mare to the rail while Mr. Pebbles, the stallion, was led closer, wrinkling his upper lip and drooling.

Bernie and Mother circled the lagoon at high speed, dancing and screaming, fighting. Mother had not been able to get to the surface to breathe for at least three minutes now. Underwater, the noise was overwhelming, vibrating in Cora’s fingers and face and skull.

Her mom’s responsibilities were the kids, the kitchen and the woodpile. She could be found most days, standing by the stove, stirring food and reading a romance book with a title like Summer Love or Double Wedding. Cora tried not to imagine her parents mating. Her mom tethered to a fence and reading The Preacher’s Son, her dad drooling, white in his eyes, approaching from behind.

At eighteen, Cora had experimented with sex herself, first with the son of a neighbor. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but had not been impressed. The three times she’d let him, the boy had not touched her with emotion, or humor, or even respect. More he’d acted like this was something that needed to be accomplished quickly and in secret, a little like he was going to the bathroom. So she experimented instead with the town pharmacist; an older man whom she figured might know more. With him, there were some plusses. She could lie down in a bed, instead of in a backseat, and he seemed so grateful. Still the act itself took under ten minutes. Around the time she was beginning to get interested, he was done.

One time when he was lying on top of her, just afterward, breathing heavily, she asked him if he could continue for a while with his hand. He’d drawn back from her, looking shocked.

In the two years since then, she’d tried two other men and had fairly similar experiences. Perhaps she’d chosen the wrong men. Or perhaps, in the same way that different eras engendered different types of dancing (slower or faster; rules and roles changing), sex also had styles. Perhaps at the moment, sex tended to take less time and involve more pumping. She didn’t know. She assumed she could just be built wrong. Given her hearing, she was used to feeling defective.