Melanie masturbates every other day. It’s not an item on her calendar, and she’ll often let it slide for half a week, but she considers self-love to be necessary maintenance.

It doesn’t matter whether she’s in a sexual relationship or not. Phil is a wonderful lover, sometimes too considerate, and his lovemaking is always complete, but still Melanie strokes herself at least twice a week, and she expects she always will. It’s a way to check in.

She’s done it in bed, with her husband or significant other asleep beside her. She’s done it on a dark commuter bus, alone on the wide rear bench. She’s even done it in the back row of a concert, Chicago it was (the band, not the place), under her London Fog raincoat.

She loves the risk a little. That probably stems from when she was five years old and her mother caught her fondling herself behind the living room chair; she can’t remember her mom’s words but the shocked reaction excited her. Or the time their mother caught nine-year-old Melanie and her six-year-old brother Will, standing naked on their parents’ big bed, comparing crotches in the mirror that hung above the wide bureau; her mom doesn’t remember that event either, but Melanie does. She’s not an exhibitionist – no way – but she fantasizes about it.

Maybe Melanie and most of her class are destined to frisk away their futures with the naughtinesses of their youths. Nostalgically. She’s a white middle-class post-war baby. She’s a suburbanite. She snuck whiskey from her father’s cabinet and now she sneaks cognac so her kids won’t know. She swiped her mother’s Bel-Air cigarettes and now rolls her own by the hot tub, where the kids won’t see. She’s into the sneaking more than the snooked (?) And then there’s the pot.

She first smoked marijuana in 1967, when she was sixteen. She liked it. It made peanut butter and TV better, and it wasn’t as scary as LSD or PCP or the other affordable substances for sale all around. Her main supplier was her good friend and future first husband Kent.

In time, substances became more expensive. Everything did. Kent got to where he could take or leave the regular joints as long as he had his Jack Daniels, but marijuana was the drug of choice for Melanie, and keeping Melanie content was Kent’s first priority. He took to casual dealing as a way to increase supply and defray expense, but after losing a friend’s money on a stupid bad deal, he gave that up. Melanie was so embarrassed by the burn that she despised Kent a little. That was when she started to fall out of love with him. She proposed they grow their own.

They cleared a six by twelve foot patch in their small back yard. They germinated seeds in moist plastic-wrapped paper towels, and they planted them when the wormy white roots had burst the seed pods apart and begun to tangle like bad embroidery in the fibers of the towel.

By the time the plants had been topped and the males began to exhibit their sex, Melanie was pregnant. She became a queen of fertility; she hates to get dirt under her fingernails and she left most of the work to Kent, but she felt like she helped the plants thrive simply by being with them. Maybe she was right. That first crop was far and away the finest they grew. But it was also the crop that went longest; the fact is that ripe marijuana plans become very obvious and sticky, and after that first season, Melanie’s paranoia overrode their lust for maximum buds.

They also took their agriculture inside. When Brian was two and insistently curious about everything, Kent and Melanie agreed that their days of outdoor cultivation were over. Their funky big house had two vacant bedrooms, one with a walk-in closet, so they converted that closet to a lab-like garden. They installed growlux bulbs and layered the walls with aluminum foil. They put the lights on timers. They bought litmus strips to test the soil, and they administered regular feedings of nutrients.

It was harder to grow plants under artificial sunlight, but Melanie enjoyed the project. It was more like lab work than gardening, and she’d always liked science projects. She became the primary cultivator, and she produced reasonable crops for the six years before the divorce. They never compared with the first harvest, but the second indoor year, when she was pregnant with Timothy, wasn’t bad at all.

Kent and Melanie did divorce. It’s never fair for even a participant to generalize about a marriage, but his uxoriousness wore her out. She continued to have sex with him (two to three times a week, as basic marital maintenance) until the end, and she thinks she remained friends with him, but meeting, kissing and screwing Henry convinced her that (a) she wouldn’t be alone after Kent and (b) it was possible to have more than she and Kent had.

Henry moved into Melanie’s house. In time they married. Henry doesn’t smoke marijuana. He didn’t mind Melanie using it, at least at first, but he did not want felony cultivation occurring where he lived. She disagreed but respected his wishes. She reentered the world of “now you have it, now you don’t,” which is insecure territory for an addict.

Of course she kept masturbating. She’s probably addicted to that too. Basic maintenance. Actually, she suspected Henry did the same; they were similar deliberate rational people that way. But she noticed that her orgasms weren’t as good as they used to be. And she simply never had the patience or energy to push herself to a second coming. She had to take a lot of time and use some concentrated fantasies to get it right the first time.

In retrospect, neither she nor Henry were surprised that their relationship-to-end-all-relationships didn’t work. Both of them came to see their union as a way out of their first marriages. And each of them ultimately understood that the guilt carried from abruptly ending those first marriages spoiled any shot they had at something lasting. He went on to a bleak and quietly-desperate third marriage, and she has had a series of marginally interesting affairs.

Melanie didn’t masturbate any more often after Henry left, but she did smoke more pot. Although she and Henry had moved from her old four-bedroom house to a smaller place across town (as far as Melanie can tell, Kent must have pissed in all the corners of the old house, because Henry hated living there), once Henry moved out, she was able to use his lockable small study to start a crop of cannabis sativa (actually, she had two indica plants going that year as well).

Brian was nearly fourteen then, and Timmy-becoming-Tim was ten. They were observant kids but Melanie took care. She managed to eke out a small crop of strong ganja without any suspicion from the boys. She also managed to have a semi-torrid affair with macho Steve without any suspicion from him that she gave herself sex as good as he did (Steve didn’t want her doing herself unless she did so in front of him, and Melanie wasn’t into that).

She grew another scanty crop the next year, the year of Robert, Wayne and then finally Phil. Melanie thinks Phil is a keeper. He’s the first man she has known who lets her feel present in the relationship. The only fly in the ointment for her has been her continued habit of masturbation. In the same way that she had hoped marriage would improve her sexual satisfaction (after all, she reasoned in those early days of is-this-all-there-is-to-it fucking, maybe her mother’s pro-virginity campaign really did manage to disable her ability to achieve satisfying premarital sex), she’s always dreamed that the right partner would render self-love unnecessary.

Two weeks ago, Melanie got busted on both fronts. Phil caught her fooling around alone, and the boys found the plants. In each case, a little bit of greed was her undoing.

It started Saturday morning. She woke at 9:20 and as usual Phil was already out of bed. She heard him moving around in the kitchen downstairs as her right hand found herself. In a short time she brought herself to a disappointing climax. She felt it approach, crest, subside, but none of it brought any thrill to her. This was happening too often. She decided to go for it again.

Phil’s custom was to move from kitchen to back porch on Saturday mornings. He liked his coffee outside, and he loved tending the garden. But he decided he wanted to read an article in the Forbes he’d brought home the night before. The magazine was upstairs. He thought he might as well bring Melanie a mug of coffee; he figured she’d be waking about then.

Melanie’s surprise was not the coffee. There she was straining for it, eyes squeezed, toes clenched, muscle at the right side of her groin threatening to cramp, when Phil opened the bedroom door. She had the covers up but her activity was obvious.

Phil was chill. Surprised but not bothered, he saluted her with the coffee mug, offered assistance, and exited. Melanie laughed then and appreciated him beyond what she believed possible.

The marijuana mishap didn’t go as smoothly. Melanie had continued her indoor cultivation activities but had become dissatisfied with the amount of herb she was able to produce. Phil liked to smoke too, so consumption was up, but the price of indoor had always been scantier growth and weaker bloom. So she decided to try to force two crops.

She only had room for so many plants. Instead of harvesting by chopping and hanging, she pruned, pruned, and pruned again, drying all cuttings until they were smokable. She encouraged the plants to produce a second growth in the same season. And because she could control the light, she pushed the season a couple of extra months.

The problem was the decreasing daylight. Earlier nights made the glow from the plant bulbs noticeable. It took some time for the impression to sink into her sons’ heads, but that Saturday sent them investigating together.

Another problem was that Melanie had hidden her habit from her kids. She lied to them about using drugs when she was younger, and she encouraged Brian when he got involved in the anti-drug and peer counseling programs at school. Brian spoke enough about it to his brother that Tim too became a zealot. They reminded Melanie of her own brothers; Will and Perry had been so against their mother’s smoking that they’d inserted cigar loads into her cigarettes (they laughed like maniacs when the lit end of a Bel-Air sparked into a tiny explosion, but each took up tobacco himself before graduating from high school).

Brian and Tim recognized the plants immediately. They wanted to assume the crop was Phil’s but something about the sight resonated in Brian, and he knew (but knew not how he knew) the situation predated Phil. He was upset. Angry. He almost called the cops.

Tim held him back. The boys decided to involve Phil. They found him in the garage, building a set of shelves for gardening equipment. The result of that conversation was a full-bore sit-down with Melanie. The four of them skipped dinner to hash it out.

Melanie offered to stop smoking. Maybe her sons are co-dependent, but they decided that wasn’t necessary. They all considered giving up the cultivation, but the alternative seemed less palatable and the study wasn’t needed for any other purpose.

Melanie still smokes. She could do it in front of her sons (Tim even asked why she doesn’t), but she’s not comfortable with that. She tells them it’s illegal, after all, and she needs to be discreet. She reminds them of how pungent and conspicuous the odor is. She says she doesn’t want to embarrass them with their friends. But mostly she thinks smoking around or with her kids would be like having sex around them. She’s not into that.

She still masturbates about every other day. The orgasms are generally disappointing but it is a way of checking in with herself. She and Phil don’t discuss it.

For now, Melanie is in the center of her life and loved ones. She’s old enough to understand that things are sure to get worse, get better, be more or less “interesting” than they are at present. It’s not that she’s counting her blessings, but she’s aware that she’s dwelling in the eye of a storm (too dramatic: it’s more like the calm interlude between hassles). Right now, Melanie is enjoying right now.