Degrees of Nakedness Read Online Free Page B

irreparable it was, and the shock of it made him drop the plate.
    I dreamt last night that Mom and I were sitting naked on my bedroom floor. She had a tin filled with beeswax or shoe polish. She said if I smeared the stuff in my vagina it would make me pregnant. This way I could avoid the risk of having the father die after the child was born. There’d never be a father to die. My child wouldn’t have anything to lose. I had agreed to get pregnant this way, but at the last minute I was backing out. I knew I wanted my child to have a father, no matter how much pain it would cause to lose him.
    The first time you kissed me, the whole town was buried in snow. Some drifts went to the tops of the telephone poles. It was like walking on the moon. Everything curved, everything buried, deceptive, muted. We were coming back from a movie and you leaned me against the orange bricks of the dorm. A drift came to our waists and snow blew off the lip of it, swirled around us, hissing on the back of your nylon parka.
    You sucked my tongue. Our hands were linked loosely, two or three fingers twined. It was as though you were pulling my whole self, all the pain from my father’s death, all the lonelinessof being separated from my mother, all my loud babbling, siphoning it up through my body into my tongue, and taking it into your mouth, until my tongue felt swollen. Until I wasn’t even thinking of who you were any more. Just the sucking that seemed to be drawing out the sadness. Heat, like the needles being drawn from my father’s foot with melted wax. I was trembling. When you stopped kissing me I had nothing to say. My lips cracked when I smiled. I ran my tongue over them and they stung.
    Do you remember Joyce, my roommate in the dorm? She slept on the other side of a half-wall that divided the room. She told me when I first met her that she was asthmatic, and showed me where she kept her respirator. I woke one night to the sound of choked spasmodic breathing. I thought she was dying. I filled up with that quicksand of sleep and fear, so heavy I couldn’t move, not even my mouth, to scream for help, but in that same second I had flung off the sheets and jumped out of bed, my skin already clammy, and I called her name.
    Two things went through my head simultaneously. Death was coming again, and it had missed me. It had skipped over my bed because I was waiting for it; even in my sleep I had outwitted it. Not only that but I would save Joyce from it too. The second thing came in the voice of a nun who taught me math in grade eleven and failed me. A nun with pasty skin, someone I hated. But she had showed up at my father’s funeral and gripped my shoulders so tightly it hurt, and that pain seemed to keep me from passing out. Her voice came into my head at that exact moment and said, Don’t take another step, she’s having sex.
    Then a male voice said, Your roommate.
    Joyce said, She’s asleep, she talks in her sleep, she’s always yelling stuff.
    It took me a full two minutes to get back in the bed without a creak. Then I lay there listening. Frightened they would figure out I was awake, my heart pounding so hard I felt short of breath, and at the same time conscious that I had to make my breath sound deep, the way it is when you’re asleep. The more I tried to breathe evenly, the more erratic my breathing, until I had the bed sheet stuffed in my mouth. It was the first time I had ever heard what sex sounds like, the bed creaking, the moans. It stopped suddenly and Joyce asked him to pass her a Kleenex off the desk. I fell asleep deeply, for the first time since my father died, without dreams, as if I had been given an injection.

Wisdom Teeth
    T hey call it a state of emergency. White dervishes scour Stephenville, the blue arm of the plough impotently slashes through the snow. In St. John’s where my mother is, the wires are frozen with sleet and the electricity is out. She’s in the plaid chair, I know, one emergency candle and