Degrees of Nakedness Read Free Page A

held out a chicken bone. Buying precious time. It made me think that love is made of isolated flashes and they are what we crave. It was getting dark outside Volker’s studio and Cy’s thumb glowed like something precious, timeless.

Sea Urchin
    W e were alone on the island, at your parents’ cottage. Oil lamps at night, the darkness collapsing like a tent. The day before I left, during supper, my mother and I couldn’t look each other in the eye. I watched her try to jerk a speared beet off her fork. A hard cube, brilliant magenta drops splatting the white plate. Shortly after my father died I left her to go to art school. I had been home two weeks and I was leaving again for Georgian Bay. But she let me go.
    An island in Georgian Bay. Forty-five minutes in a speedboat away from the next community. Hundreds of islands. We flew stand-by from Newfoundland and in between flights I went into the airport washroom and stood looking at my face. Looking to see if I was pretty. Mesmerized. Was I pretty at all? When I came out we had missed the connecting flight.
    What were you doing? you said. What were you doing in the bathroom?
    You were chopping wood. I drank six beers, fast, then ate a bowl of popcorn coated with half a block of melted cheddar. I stumbled out of the cottage. Fell onto the sand at the beach and screamed your name. Over and over. It was just us on the island. Nude half the time. Shouting your name, sending it lurching through the pines.
    You took me to a cliff and told me to jump. It was a long way down. I took off my glasses, and handed them to you. The water was a hard bed of shiny dimes. It hurt the bottoms of my feet. Under the surface, the cliff was gouged away, a dark mouth. I imagined it was dense with eels.
    My father died just before I met you. His hair had turned grey when he was about your age, eighteen. It had been blondish-red before that, he told me. All the photographs of him before eighteen are hand-tinted, so I don’t know what shade of red, but he had the complexion of a redhead. He sunburned easily and when he drank or became emotional, his skin would break out in red blotches, quickly, like the wind blowing a field of poppies all in the same direction. I imagine his hair turning grey overnight. He might have gotten out of bed, looked in the mirror and been startled out of his wits. Wondered what it could possibly mean. Maybe I imagine that his hair turned grey overnight rather than gradually, because he died overnight, without any symptom or warning.
    My father’s brother, Uncle Lloyd, died this year.
    My mother and I gripped each other in the parking lot of the funeral home. It was icy and for several minutes we couldn’t gain any ground. We just clung to each other. She said, Whywould a man like Lloyd get to live so much longer than your father?
    There was one wreath from the Salvation Army on the coffin. The metal trees with shelves for flowers at the head and foot were empty. A man slept in the armchair. The bottoms of his brown creased pants were salt crusted, his legs crossed. He wore sneakers, one of the Velcro flaps hanging loose, and one foot nodding, stroking time.
    Mom and I went close to the casket. Uncle Lloyd didn’t look the way I remembered him. I thought I’d see my father’s face, because the brothers all looked alike, but I was disappointed. There was nothing familiar. His nose was slightly squashed to one side, as if they’d closed the lid on it. I checked inside the satin roof to see if there might be a smudge of face powder, but the frills were clean and white. I almost touched the nose to push it back into place. Lloyd’s eyelashes were light and in this way, at least, he resembled my father. For an instant I was overcome by the belief that a nerve in his eyelid had twitched.
    The last time I saw Lloyd was in Barbados, when I was a child. He’d come on vacation with us. That was before he’d begun drinking. Dad stepped on a sea urchin. The long needles were