Read Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) for Free Online Page A

away at her legs like that would leave scars, Nina said she knew, and then she scratched them anyway, grating her shins with her fingernails and sighing in pleasure. She scratched with such gusto that she made my legs itch, too, but I sat on my hands, remembering what I’d been taught. Nina further fascinated me in the first hours after her arrival by singing Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” over and over like her very own theme song. When she sang it, she shimmied her hips from side to side and smiled a smile that told me she was being deliberately provocative. If it was a stunt, it worked. I watched in breathless disbelief, timid and stunned, hotly curious about what else she was capable of.
    The next morning, I looked on in wonder as Nina stirred a slice of American cheese into a bowl of piping hot grits. She didn’t want the eggs my mother offered her, or the toast, and it had been her idea to ask for the cheese, which turned the white grits pale orange.
    “Try it!” she urged me, lifting a forkful up to her mouth. The melted cheese dangled over the bowl like ticker tape.
    At first I hesitated asking for my own slice of cheese—I liked putting the scrambled eggs and the grits side by side on a plate and then mixing the two discrete mounds together until they formed one lumpy porridge, just like my dad—but Nina’s conviction intrigued me. I unwrapped a sheet of cheese from the pack of singles and lay it atop the grits, watching it wilt and wrinkle in surrender to the heat. It didn’t quite look right to me, but it sure tasted right, especially once I’d shoveled my eggs onto the heap, and I wondered why I’d never been taught to do that before.
    When my plate was empty, I stood up and called to my mom, “I enjoyed my breakfast,” laying my napkin on the table and pushing in my chair, just like my dad always did.
    “Thank you, Aunt Kathy,” Nina chimed as she carried her own bowl all the way over to the sink.
    That wasn’t how we usually did things, but it struck me as polite, so I picked up my plate and utensils and followed suit. Then the two of us excused ourselves to the front yard to play.
    When we got outside, after she had made certain that no one was watching, Nina licked her index finger and wrote MOTHERFUCK on the dirty window of my mom’s car. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and my initial reaction was silence—the kind of silence a child feels when some new gear in the world begins to turn for the first time. MOTHERFUCK revolved slowly in my stomach and my head and my heart, pushing every other thing away.
    There were kids who whispered or occasionally even yelled the word fuck on the playground at school, bigger kids who seemed to relish the shock and the weight of it. Fuck was mostly just that, a shock and a weight, pure inflection, a word without precise meaning. It signified something bad, worse than bad. The kind of thing that would cause a teacher to march out to whomever had launched it into the airspace and yank him (it was always a him) off the playground by his elbow or the neck of his shirt. Those boys wore happy, wicked smiles all the way to the principal’s office, reveling in the thrill a word like that leaves in its wake. Still, no matter how much I’d thought I knew about fuck , I had never witnessed it buttressed against a word like mother . Was MOTHERFUCK a noun or a verb? Whatever it was asking me to imagine tugged me into an alien zone.
    “That’s not a word,” I tried to insist.
    “Yes it is,” Nina countered, though she didn’t need to; I knew in my heart she was probably right. She had picked up the word inbarbarous New York and carried it with her all the way to sunny California. She wouldn’t have done that if it had no value.
    I must have struck my cousin as so traumatically perplexed—were my eyes really beginning to well up with tears?—that she felt obliged to lick her whole palm and wipe the word from view. It