I Know This Much Is True Read Online Free PDF

girls would do to me, what they’d let me do to them. So the last person I wanted to look like was Ray Milland, one of my mother’s old fart movie stars.
    “Could you just shut up, please?” I told Ma, right in front of Dr.
    Wisdo.
    “Hey, hey, hey, come on now. Enough is enough,” Dr. Wisdo protested. “What kind of boy says ‘Shut up’ to his own mother?”
    Ma put her fist to her mouth and told the doctor it was all right.
    I was just upset. This wasn’t the way I really was.
    As if she knew the way I really was, I thought to myself, smiling inwardly.
    Dr. Wisdo told me he had to leave the room for a few minutes, and by the time he got back, he hoped I would have apologized to my poor mother.
    Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. I just sat there, smirking defiantly at her, triumphant and miserable. Then Ma took I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 21
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    me by complete surprise. “You think glasses are bad,” she said. “You should try having what I have. At least you can take your glasses off.”
    I knew immediately what she meant—her harelip—but her abrupt reference to it hit me like a snowball in the eye. Of all the forbidden subjects in our house, the two most forbidden were the identification of Thomas’s and my biological father and our mother’s disfigurement.
    We had never asked about either—had somehow been raised not to ask and had honored the near-sacredness of the silence. Now Ma herself was breaking one of the two cardinal rules. I looked away, shocked, embarrassed, but Ma wouldn’t stop talking.
    “One time,” she said, “a boy in my class, a mean boy named Harold Kettlety, started calling me ‘Rabbit Face.’ I hadn’t done anything to him. Not a thing. I never bothered anyone at all—I was scared of my own shadow. He just thought up that name one day and decided it was funny. ‘Hello there, Rabbit Face,’ he used to whisper to me across the aisle. After a while, some of the other boys took it up, too. They used to chase me at recess and call me ‘Rabbit Face.’ ”
    I sat there, pumping my leg up and down, wanting her to stop—wanting Harold Kettlety to still be a kid so I could find him and rip his fucking face off for him.
    “And so I told the teacher, and she sent me to the principal.
    Mother Agnes, her name was. She was a stern thing.” Ma’s fingers twisted her pocketbook strap as she spoke. “She told me to stop making a mountain out of a molehill. I was making things worse, she said, by calling it to everyone’s attention. I should just ignore it.
    . . . Then more boys got on the bandwagon, even boys from other grades. It got so bad, I used to get the dry heaves before school every morning. You didn’t stay home sick in our house unless you had something like the measles or the chicken pox. That’s the last thing Papa would have stood for—me home all day long just because some stinker was calling me a name.”
    I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice—to see the way she was twisting that pocketbook strap. If she kept I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 22
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    talking, she might break down and tell me everything. “I don’t see how any of this sob story stuff has anything to do with me,” I said.
    “Are you planning to get to the point before I die of old age?”
    She shut up after that, silenced, I guess, by the fact that her own son had joined forces with Harold Kettlety. On the drive home from the optometrist’s, I chose to sit in the backseat and not speak to her.
    Somewhere en route, I drew my new glasses from their brown plastic clip-to-your-pocket case, rubbed the lenses with the silicone-impregnated cleaning cloth, and slipped them on. I looked out the window, privately dazzled by a world more sharp and clear than I remembered. I said nothing about this, spoke no apologies, offered no concessions.
    “Ma’s crying downstairs,” Thomas informed me later, up in our