except for traces along the hairline which I let my hair fall forward to cover,my face was clear. Also my hands, except for an unnoticeable stippling of the fingernails. Whereas some of my mother’s fingernails were eaten down to the quick by what looked like yellow rot.
Flames of cold flickered across my skin; the little proofs of my sex were contracted into a tense cluster. Whatever in me was normally animal reassured me; I loved the pubic hairs that had at last appeared. Reddish-black, metallic, they curled, too few to make a bush, tight as springs in the lemon-tinted cold. I hated being hairless; I felt defenseless in the locker room when, scurrying to hide my mantle of spots, I saw that my classmates had already donned an armor of fur.
Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis—delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose uneven spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion—privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a fingernail must be experienced to be forgiven.
Only the medallions watched. I went to the bureau and found a pair of Jockey shorts that still had life in the elastic. I put on a T shirt backwards. “You’ll outlive me, Pop,” my father downstairs said loudly. “I’m carrying death in my bowels.” His saying this so bluntly affected my own innards, made them feel slippery and urgent.
“The boy’s up, George,” my mother said. “You can stop the performance any time.” Her voice had left the bottom of the stairs.
“Huh? You think I’ll upset the kid?”
My father had turned fifty just before Christmas; he had always said he would never live to be fifty. Breaking the barrier had unbridled his tongue, as if, being in mathematical fact dead, nothing he said mattered. His ghostly freedom at times did frighten me.
I stood before the closet deliberating. Perhaps I foresaw that I would be wearing for a long time the clothes I chose. Perhaps the weight of the coming ordeal made me slow. Scolding my hesitation, a sneeze gathered in the bridge of my nose and itched. My bladder ached sweetly. I took from their hanger the gray flannel slacks, though their crease was poor. I had three pairs of slacks; the brown were at the cleaners and the blue were disgraced by a faint pallor at the bottom of the fly. It was a mystery to me, and I always felt unfairly condemned when they came back from the cleaners with an insulting printed slip about No Responsibility For Ineradicable Spots.
As for shirts, today the red seemed the one. I rarely wore it because its bright shoulders pointed up the white specks that showered from my scalp like a snow of dandruff. It was
not
dandruff, I wanted to tell everybody, as if this exonerated me. But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed emblem of heat. Its wool sleeves felt grateful sliding onto my arms. It was an eight-dollar shirt; my mother couldn’t understand why I never wore it. She rarely seemed conscious of my “handicap,” and when she was, it was with a too-bold solicitude, as if it were a piece of her. Her own case, except for her fingernails and scalp, hardly existed in comparison with mine. I did not resent this; she suffered in other ways.
My father was saying, “No, Cassie, Pop
should
outlive me. He’s led a good life. Pop Kramer deserves to live forever.”
Without listening for her reply, I knew how my mother would take this—as a jab at her father for living so long, for continuing, year after year, to be a dependent burden. She believed that
Flames of cold flickered across my skin; the little proofs of my sex were contracted into a tense cluster. Whatever in me was normally animal reassured me; I loved the pubic hairs that had at last appeared. Reddish-black, metallic, they curled, too few to make a bush, tight as springs in the lemon-tinted cold. I hated being hairless; I felt defenseless in the locker room when, scurrying to hide my mantle of spots, I saw that my classmates had already donned an armor of fur.
Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis—delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose uneven spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion—privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a fingernail must be experienced to be forgiven.
Only the medallions watched. I went to the bureau and found a pair of Jockey shorts that still had life in the elastic. I put on a T shirt backwards. “You’ll outlive me, Pop,” my father downstairs said loudly. “I’m carrying death in my bowels.” His saying this so bluntly affected my own innards, made them feel slippery and urgent.
“The boy’s up, George,” my mother said. “You can stop the performance any time.” Her voice had left the bottom of the stairs.
“Huh? You think I’ll upset the kid?”
My father had turned fifty just before Christmas; he had always said he would never live to be fifty. Breaking the barrier had unbridled his tongue, as if, being in mathematical fact dead, nothing he said mattered. His ghostly freedom at times did frighten me.
I stood before the closet deliberating. Perhaps I foresaw that I would be wearing for a long time the clothes I chose. Perhaps the weight of the coming ordeal made me slow. Scolding my hesitation, a sneeze gathered in the bridge of my nose and itched. My bladder ached sweetly. I took from their hanger the gray flannel slacks, though their crease was poor. I had three pairs of slacks; the brown were at the cleaners and the blue were disgraced by a faint pallor at the bottom of the fly. It was a mystery to me, and I always felt unfairly condemned when they came back from the cleaners with an insulting printed slip about No Responsibility For Ineradicable Spots.
As for shirts, today the red seemed the one. I rarely wore it because its bright shoulders pointed up the white specks that showered from my scalp like a snow of dandruff. It was
not
dandruff, I wanted to tell everybody, as if this exonerated me. But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed emblem of heat. Its wool sleeves felt grateful sliding onto my arms. It was an eight-dollar shirt; my mother couldn’t understand why I never wore it. She rarely seemed conscious of my “handicap,” and when she was, it was with a too-bold solicitude, as if it were a piece of her. Her own case, except for her fingernails and scalp, hardly existed in comparison with mine. I did not resent this; she suffered in other ways.
My father was saying, “No, Cassie, Pop
should
outlive me. He’s led a good life. Pop Kramer deserves to live forever.”
Without listening for her reply, I knew how my mother would take this—as a jab at her father for living so long, for continuing, year after year, to be a dependent burden. She believed that
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