Naked Read Free

by the neighboring dirt mound.
    “Our own little corner of hell,” my mother said, fanning herself with one of the shingles littering the front yard.
    Depressing as it was, arriving at the front stoop of the house meant that I had completed the first leg of that bitter-tasting
     journey to my bedroom. Once home I would touch the front door seven times with each elbow, a task made more difficult if there
     was someone else around. “Why don’t you try the knob,” my sister Lisa would say. “That’s what the rest of us do, and it seems
     to work for us.” Inside the house there were switches and doorstops to be acknowledged. My bedroom was right there off the
     hallway, but first I had business to tend to. After kissing the fourth, eighth, and twelfth carpeted stair, I wiped the cat
     hair off my lips and proceeded to the kitchen, where I was commanded to stroke the burners of the stove, press my nose against
     the refrigerator door, and arrange the percolator, toaster, and blender into a straight row. After making my rounds of the
     living room, it was time to kneel beside the banister and blindly jab a butter knife in the direction of my favorite electrical
     socket. There were bulbs to lick and bathroom faucets to test before finally I was free to enter my bedroom, where I would
     carefully align the objects on my dresser, lick the corners of my metal desk, and lie upon my bed, rocking back and forth
     and thinking of what an odd woman she was, my third-grade teacher, Miss Chestnut. Why come here and lick my switches when
     she never used the one she had? Maybe she was drunk.
    Her note had asked if she might visit our home in order to discuss what she referred to as my “special problems.”
    “Have you been leaving your seat to lick the light switch?” my mother asked. She placed the letter upon the table and lit
     a cigarette.
    “Once or twice,” I said.
    “Once or twice what? Every half hour? Every ten minutes?”
    “I don’t know,” I lied. “Who’s counting?”
    “Well, your goddamned math teacher, for one. That’s her
job,
to count. What, do you think she’s not going to notice?”
    “Notice what?” It never failed to amaze me that people might notice these things. Because my actions were so intensely private,
     I had always assumed they were somehow invisible. When cornered, I demanded that the witness had been mistaken.
    “What do you mean, ‘notice what?’ I got a phone call just this afternoon from that lady up the street, that Mrs. Keening,
     the one with the twins. She says she caught you in her front yard, down on your hands and knees kissing the evening edition
     of her newspaper.”
    “I wasn’t kissing it. I was just trying to read the headline.”
    “And you had to get that close? Maybe we need to get you some stronger glasses.”
    “Well, maybe we do,” I said.
    “And I suppose this Miss…” My mother unfolded the letter and studied the signature. “This Miss Chestnut is mistaken, too?
     Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Maybe she has you confused with the other boy who leaves his seat to lick the pencil
     sharpener or touch the flag or whatever the hell it is you do the moment her back is turned?”
    “That’s very likely,” I said. “She’s old. There are spots on her hands.”
    “How many?” my mother asked.
    On the afternoon that Miss Chestnut arrived for her visit, I was in my bedroom, rocking. Unlike the obsessive counting and
     touching, rocking was not a mandatory duty but a voluntary and highly pleasurable exercise. It was my hobby, and there was
     nothing else I would rather do. The point was not to rock oneself to sleep: This was not a step toward some greater goal.
     It was the goal itself. The perpetual movement freed my mind, allowing me to mull things over and construct elaborately detailed
     fantasies. Toss in a radio, and I was content to rock until three or four o’clock in the morning, listening to the hit parade
     and discovering that