young man. Now.”
I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her, she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had goneunder to wood without a word. And there was that in Penny, which now the dream made vivid to me, what I had hardly felt before, a sheltering love, young as she was, recent as our touching was, little as I gave her; she would sacrifice for me. And I exulted through my length even as I wondered why. This was a fresh patch of paint in my life.
“Rise and shine, my little sunbeam!”
My mother had reverted to a cozy approach. I knew the shiny gray paint of my windowsill would be cold as ice if I reached out my hand and touched it. The sun had fractionally climbed higher. The dirt road had become a band of glowing salmon. On this side of the road, our side lawn was a sheet of old sandpaper that had rubbed green paint. It had not snowed yet this winter. Maybe this would be the winter when it would not snow. Was there ever such a one?
“Peter!”
My mother’s voice had the true tiger in it, and without thinking I leaped from bed. Careful to keep my skin from touching anything hard, using just my fingertips to pull the glass bureau knobs like faceted crystals of frozen ammonia, I set about dressing. The house was a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated. I stripped out of my pajamas and stood a moment relishing my martyrdom of nakedness: it seemed a smarting criticism of our moving to this primitive place. It had been my mother’s idea. She loved Nature. I stood naked, as if exposing her folly to the world.
Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. “Humiliation,” “allergy”—I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because Igenerated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate—allergic, in fact, to life itself. My mother, from whom I had inherited it, sometimes called it a “handicap.” I found this insulting. After all, it was her fault; only females transmitted it to their children. Had my father, whose tall body sagged in folds of pure white, been my mother, my skin would have been blameless. “Handicap” savored of subtraction, and this was an addition, something extra added to me. I enjoyed at this age a strange innocence about suffering; I believed it was necessary to men. It seemed to be all about me and there was something menacing in my apparent exception. I had never broken a bone, I was bright, my parents openly loved me. In my conceit I believed myself to be wickedly lucky. So I had come to this conclusion about my psoriasis: it was a curse. God, to make me a man, had blessed me with a rhythmic curse that breathed in and out with His seasons. The summer sun melted my scabs; by September my chest and legs were clear but for a very faint dappling, invisibly pale seeds which the long dry shadow of the fall and winter would bring again to bloom. The curse reached its climax of flower in the spring; but then the strengthening sun promised cure. January was a hopeless time. My elbows and knees, pressure areas of skin, were capped with crust; on my ankles, where the embrace of my socks encouraged the scabs, they angrily ran together in a kind of pink bark. My forearms were mottled enough so that I could not turn my shirt cuffs back, in two natty folds, like other boys. Otherwise, when I was in clothes, my disguise as a normal human being was good. On my face, God had relented;
I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her, she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had goneunder to wood without a word. And there was that in Penny, which now the dream made vivid to me, what I had hardly felt before, a sheltering love, young as she was, recent as our touching was, little as I gave her; she would sacrifice for me. And I exulted through my length even as I wondered why. This was a fresh patch of paint in my life.
“Rise and shine, my little sunbeam!”
My mother had reverted to a cozy approach. I knew the shiny gray paint of my windowsill would be cold as ice if I reached out my hand and touched it. The sun had fractionally climbed higher. The dirt road had become a band of glowing salmon. On this side of the road, our side lawn was a sheet of old sandpaper that had rubbed green paint. It had not snowed yet this winter. Maybe this would be the winter when it would not snow. Was there ever such a one?
“Peter!”
My mother’s voice had the true tiger in it, and without thinking I leaped from bed. Careful to keep my skin from touching anything hard, using just my fingertips to pull the glass bureau knobs like faceted crystals of frozen ammonia, I set about dressing. The house was a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated. I stripped out of my pajamas and stood a moment relishing my martyrdom of nakedness: it seemed a smarting criticism of our moving to this primitive place. It had been my mother’s idea. She loved Nature. I stood naked, as if exposing her folly to the world.
Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. “Humiliation,” “allergy”—I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because Igenerated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate—allergic, in fact, to life itself. My mother, from whom I had inherited it, sometimes called it a “handicap.” I found this insulting. After all, it was her fault; only females transmitted it to their children. Had my father, whose tall body sagged in folds of pure white, been my mother, my skin would have been blameless. “Handicap” savored of subtraction, and this was an addition, something extra added to me. I enjoyed at this age a strange innocence about suffering; I believed it was necessary to men. It seemed to be all about me and there was something menacing in my apparent exception. I had never broken a bone, I was bright, my parents openly loved me. In my conceit I believed myself to be wickedly lucky. So I had come to this conclusion about my psoriasis: it was a curse. God, to make me a man, had blessed me with a rhythmic curse that breathed in and out with His seasons. The summer sun melted my scabs; by September my chest and legs were clear but for a very faint dappling, invisibly pale seeds which the long dry shadow of the fall and winter would bring again to bloom. The curse reached its climax of flower in the spring; but then the strengthening sun promised cure. January was a hopeless time. My elbows and knees, pressure areas of skin, were capped with crust; on my ankles, where the embrace of my socks encouraged the scabs, they angrily ran together in a kind of pink bark. My forearms were mottled enough so that I could not turn my shirt cuffs back, in two natty folds, like other boys. Otherwise, when I was in clothes, my disguise as a normal human being was good. On my face, God had relented;
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