Too Much Happiness

In winter we were allowed the whole property, where we built snow forts furnished with sticks of firewood and provided with arsenals of snowballs to fling at anyone who came along. Which few did, this being a dead-end street. We had to make a snowman, so that we could pummel him.

If a major storm kept us inside, at my house, my mother presided. We had to be kept quiet if my father was home in bed with a headache, so she would read us stories. Alice in Wonderland, I remember. We were both upset when Alice drinks the potion that makes her grow so large she gets stuck in the rabbit hole.

What about sex games, you may wonder. And yes, we had those too. I recall our hiding, one extremely hot day, in a tent that had been pitched-I have no idea why-behind the cottage. We had crawled in there on purpose to explore each other. The canvas had a certain erotic but infantile smell, like the underclothes that we removed. Various ticklings excited but shortly made us cross, and we were drenched in sweat, itchy, and soon ashamed. When we got ourselves out of there we felt more separate than usual and oddly wary of each other. I don’t remember if the same thing happened again with the same result, but I would not be surprised if it did.

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In my house, it goes without saying, all rooms except those specified to us were forbidden. We would not dream of going upstairs or down into the cellar or into the front parlor or the dining room. But in the cottage everywhere was allowed, except wherever Nancy’s mother was trying to get some peace or Mrs. Codd was glued to the radio. The cellar was a good place to go when even we tired of the heat in the afternoons. There was no railing alongside the steps and we could take more and more and more daring jumps to land on the hard dirt floor. And when we tired of that we could climb onto an old cot and bounce up and down, whipping an imaginary horse. Once we tried to smoke a cigarette filched from Nancy’s mother’s pack. (We would not have dared take more than one.) Nancy managed better with it than I did, having had more practice.

There was also in the cellar an old wooden dresser, on which sat several tins of mostly dried-up paint and varnish, an assortment of stiffened paintbrushes, stirring sticks, and boards on which colors had been tried or brushes wiped. A few tins had their lids still on tight, and these we pried open with some difficulty and discovered paint that could be stirred to an active thickness. Then we spent time trying to loosen up the brushes by pushing them down into the paint and then hitting them against the boards of the dresser, making a mess but not getting much of a result. One of the tins, however, proved to contain turpentine, which worked much better. Now we began to paint with those bristles that had become usable. I could read and spell to some extent, thanks to my mother, and Nancy could too, because she had finished the second grade.

“Don’t look till I’m finished,” I said to her, and pushed her slightly out of the way. I had thought of something to paint. She was busy anyway, smashing her own brush around in a can of red paint.

I wrote NAZI WAS IN THIS SELLER.

“Now look,” I said.

She had turned her back on me but was wielding the paintbrush on herself.

She said, “I’m busy.”

When she turned her face to me it was generously smeared all over with red paint.

“Now I look like you,” she said, drawing the brush down on her neck. “Now I look like you.” She sounded very excited and I thought she was taunting me, but in fact her voice was bursting with satisfaction, as if this was what she had been aiming for her whole life.

Now I must try to explain what happened in the next several minutes.

In the first place, I thought she looked horrible.

I did not believe that any part of my face was red. And in fact it wasn’t. The half of it that was colored was the usual mulberry birthmark color, which, as I believe I have said, has faded somewhat as I have aged.

But this was not how I saw it in my mind. I believed my birthmark to be a soft brown color, like the fur of a mouse.

My mother had not done anything so foolish, so dramatic, as to ban mirrors from our house. But mirrors can be hung too high for a young child to see himself in them. That was certainly so in the bathroom. The only one in which I saw my reflection readily hung in the front hall, which was dim in the daytime and weakly lit at night. That must have been where I got the idea that half my face was this dull mild sort of color, a furry shadow.

This was the idea I had got used to, and that made Nancy’s paint such an insult, a leering joke. I pushed her against the dresser as hard as I could and ran away from her, up the stairs. I think I was ru

I ran through the cottage-Nancy’s mother was not anywhere to be seen, though it was Saturday-and I slammed its screened door. I ran on the gravel, then on the flagstone path between stalwart rows of gladioli. I saw my mother rise from the wicker chair where she sat reading, on our back verandah.

“Not red,” I shouted with gulps of angry tears. “I’m not red.” She came down the steps with a shocked face but so far no understanding. Then Nancy ran out of the cottage behind me all amazed, with her garish face.

My mother understood.

“You nasty little beast,” she cried at Nancy, in a voice that I had never heard. A loud, wild, shaking voice.

“Don’t you come near us. Don’t you dare. You are a bad bad girl. You have no decent human kindness in you, do you? You never have been taught-”

Nancy’s mother came out of the cottage, with streaming wet hair in her eyes. She was holding a towel.

“Jeez can’t I even wash my hair around here-”

My mother screamed at her too.

“Don’t you dare use that language in front of my son and me-”

“Oh blah blah,” said Nancy’s mother immediately. “Just listen to you yelling your head off-”

My mother took a deep breath.

“I am-not-yelling-my-head off. I just want to tell your cruel child she will never be welcome in our house again. She is a cruel spiteful child to mock my little boy for what he ca

All this poured out of my mother as if there was a torrent of rage, of pain, of absurdity in her that would never stop. Even though by now I was pulling at her dress and saying, “Don’t, don’t.”

Then things got even worse as tears rose and swallowed her words and she choked and shook.

Nancy’s mother had pushed the wet hair out of her eyes and stood there observing.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You carry on like this and they’re going to take you to the loony bin. Can I help it if your husband hates you and you got a kid with a messed-up face?”

My mother held her head in both hands. She cried, “Oh-oh,” as if pains were devouring her. The woman who worked for us at that time-Velma-had come out on the verandah and was saying, “Missus. Come on, missus.” Then she raised her voice and called to Nancy’s mother.

“You go on. You go in your house. You scat.”

“Oh I will. Don’t worry, I will. Who do you think you are telling me what to do? And how do you like working for an ole witch with bats in the belfry?” Then she turned on Nancy.