I Know This Much Is True Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments. I bid on the inside painting, but Paint Plus came in under me.) In the second photograph, Ma looks about nine or ten.

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    She stands beside her lanky father on the front porch of the house on Hollyhock Avenue, wearing a sacklike dress and a sober look that matches Papa’s. In both of these photos, my mother holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth.
    It was a gesture she had apparently learned early and practiced all her life: the hiding of her cleft lip with her right fist—her perpet-ual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she’d had no control. The lip, split just to the left of her front teeth, exposed a half-inch gash of gum and gave the illusion that she was sneering.
    But Ma never sneered. She apologized. She put her fist to her mouth for store clerks and door-to-door salesmen, for mailmen and teachers on parents’ visiting day, for neighbors, for her husband, and even, sometimes, for herself when she sat in the parlor watching TV, her image reflected on the screen.
    She had made reference to her harelip only once, a day in 1964
    when she sat across from me in an optometrist’s office. A month earlier, my ninth-grade algebra teacher had caught me squinting at the blackboard and called to advise my mother to get my eyes tested. But I’d balked. Glasses were for brains, for losers and finky kids. I was furious because Thomas had developed no twin case of myopia—no identical need to wear stupid faggy glasses like me. He was the jerk, the brownnoser at school. He should be the nearsighted one. If she made me get glasses, I told her, I just wouldn’t wear them.
    But Ma had talked to Ray, and Ray had issued one of his supper table ultimatums. So I’d gone to Dr. Wisdo’s office, acted my surli-est, and flunked the freaking wall chart. Now, two weeks later, my black plastic frames were being fitted to my face in a fluorescent-lit room with too many mirrors.
    “Well, I think they make you look handsome, Dominick,” Ma offered. “Distinguished. He looks like a young Ray Milland. Doesn’t he, Doctor?”
    Dr. Wisdo didn’t like me because of my bad attitude during the first visit. “Well,” he mumbled reluctantly, “now that you mention it.”

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    WALLY LAMB
    This all occurred during the fever of puberty and Beatlemania.
    The summer before, at the basketball courts at Fitz Field, a kid named Billy Grillo had shown me and Marty Overturf a stack of rain-wrinkled paperbacks he’d found out in the woods in a plastic bag: Sensuous Sisters , Lusty Days & Lusty Nights , The Technician of Ecstasy . I’d swiped a couple of those mildewed books and taken them out past the picnic tables where I read page after faded page, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the things men did to women, the things women did to themselves and each other. It flabbergasted me, for instance, that a man might put his dick inside a woman’s mouth and have her “hungrily gulp down his creamy nectar.” That a woman might cram a glass bottle up between another woman’s legs and that this would make both “scream and undulate with pleasure.” I’d gone home from basketball that day, flopped onto my bed and fallen asleep, awakening in the middle of my first wet dream. Shortly after that, the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan .
    Behind the locked bathroom door, I began combing my bangs forward and beating off to my dirty fantasies about all those girls who screamed for the Beatles—what those same