Degrees of Nakedness Read Online Free Page A

She made a joke and everybody laughed uproariously, the excitement of a free period. Miss, Miss, Miss, and over the noise of my own laughter she mouthed the words, How’s your father? and I mouthed back, Dead.
    Her shock hit me in the stomach. The bell rang and everyonejumped up to leave. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, unable to hold myself up.
    We had sex outdoors a lot for lack of any other location, living as we were in student dorms, no boys on the girls’ floor, and vice versa. Once in the mud and yellow leaves, criss-crossing black branches above us, a crude basket that would catch us if we fell into the sky. The smell of mud. You had a moustache. Not a very full one, mousy, the separate hairs bending like drawn bows against my lips. A wallet with a Velcro hasp, a condom in the billfold. Once we had sex beside a river in the middle of a snowstorm, the water churning brown, headlights sweeping over us, wind blasting, my breasts and stomach exposed to the falling snow. You ripped the Velcro with your lips, the body of the wallet tucked between your chin and shoulder.
    Later, after we’d gotten an apartment of our own, and you decided it wasn’t working, you refused to sleep with me. Once I tried to force you, burst into the spare room while you were in bed, straddling you, kissing you, trying to get at your belt. We struggled and you pushed me off, dragged me to the window and ripped my shirt open. Pressed me against the window, half naked. Two empty parking lots and the fire station. Nobody saw. Once while I was asleep you came into our room and kissed me, kissed my cheeks, kissed my neck, and when I was drawn awake, when I put my arms around your neck, you left the room. You couldn’t explain it, the leaving, except to say if we didn’t break up we would stay together forever.
    This is the sad thing about loving. It’s a skill, like working up a clay pot on a wheel. As though the form is slipping to life by itself, the hands slicked with juicy mud are doing all they can to contain it. Just the tiniest squeezing of muscles in the hands keeps the pot perfect. It’s such a shock to throw a pot for the first time and see how unsimple it is, to have it skew, deform and collapse in seconds, against what you expect.
    I was terrified of dying suddenly, like my father. My skin was a mess. I burst into hysterical laughter for no reason, laughed until I was in tears. I’m only remembering what I did, because I can’t remember how I felt.
    When I was thirteen I developed an ovarian cyst. It was removed and turned out to be benign. After the doctor’s appointment when the cyst was diagnosed, my mother and I stopped at my father’s office. My father said, How’s it going? and my mother said, Our little girl isn’t having a very good day.
    At that moment, having to tell my father I was going to be operated on made me feel infinitely sad for myself, and for him. I felt I was letting him down. I opened my mouth to say something but I couldn’t. My father pressed my face into his chest so hard I could feel the button of his shirt digging into my forehead. My mother told him, and when I looked up at him he was smiling as if an operation wasn’t such a bad thing. But his face had broken out in soft red blotches.
    After the operation, when I was recovering, my father cooked me a fresh trout. He had taken the green canoe out on the lake before sunrise, the water so still the leaping trout startled him. He made twists of lemon and bought some parsleysprigs to decorate it. But on the way through the screen door he dropped the plate. Broken splinters of china covered the fish. My mother told me about it later. She said he cried. For a long time I associated his crying with his death, rather than my illness. I remembered not myself in the hospital, but him and the nurse telling me he would die by morning. As he was coming through the screen door, he must have realized he would be leaving me, how hurt I would be, how