In the hot summers, where I grew up, near the ocean, though I couldn't hear its roar unless my father or someone else drove me close to it, on some of those sultry, long nights, even at some distance, I believed I smelled its green, roiling, salty odor. The sun and heat were fierce, the humidity terrible, and when I wasn't in camp, settled in the mountains' coolness, when I was instead at home, my skin erupted into prickly rashes on the insides of my thighs and on my chest. Also I was bitten and eaten by mosquitoes that, after I'd killed them, if I was able to kill them, would leave blotches of my own warm, salty blood on my arm, neck, or thigh, but my own blood sickened me, though sometimes I licked the blood off my fingers, the way I drink tomato juice, to taste it. I wish they wouldn't serve so much tomato juice and soup, because warm tomato juice especially tastes like blood. During the summers, our family cat, who was later given away and killed, because my brother and I were too attached to her, my mother explained, though it was no explanation, and she never said it again, because by then I couldn't discuss the miserable fates of our cat and my dog, would have her litters of kittens, usually three and sometimes four. The first dead thing I ever saw was one of her kittens, the fourth, whom she couldn't feed, or which didn't get fed because of its innate failure to thrive, its incapacity for life, an idea that has stayed with me ever since. The dead kitten was wrapped in a piece of plain black woolen cloth, my father's fabric, and lay near its mother's body, the mother who didn't want to or couldn't feed it. It was a black kitten, so tiny it could have fit into my six-year-old's palm, whose dead body I didn't pick up and hold, but instead from which I recoiled, frightened of the inert black bulge near the mother and her living kittens. They nursed at her succulent, sustaining nipples, unaware of or indifferent to their dead sister or brother, and the mother cat was also indifferent or unaware, but in nature such cruelty goes on every day, because the will to live governs, and survival depends on certain cruelties, which most consider necessary for the various species, although animals sometimes act, like human beings, against mere survival, to protect their young. A mother elephant and her one-year-old daughter stayed with an infant son and brother, who, after its birth, couldn't stand, while the pack strode away, and even though an elephant's survival depends upon staying with the pack, the two wouldn't leave the infant who struggled to get up. Born prematurely, the baby couldn't stand because the skin on its legs didn't stretch as much as was required for it to stand up, and, when finally it could, the baby rose on its legs and took its first unsteady steps, and the three elephants marched off to join the pack. The dead kitten has stayed with me, its perfect or imperfect mother by its side, because imperfection and failure are intriguing and devastating, and often I recall entering the garage where I had hoped to raise a Shetland pony and where the mother cat and her newborn kittens lay, protected from the outside world, which might hurt them, especially dogs and tomcats, and I was thrilled by the kittens, soft as balls of angora yarn, and by new life. They were blind, the mother sleeping, and then I noticed a piece of black cloth wrapped around a bulge lying in the corner of the box. Black is for mourning, white can be, also, though that may not have been why the cloth was chosen, my father may simply have had some black fabric nearby, a remnant stored in the garage, and while life progressed and vibrated alongside the dead kitten, its mother wholly absorbed in the three healthy kittens who suckled her, I stayed in the garage, entranced by the horror of death, with its egregious untimeliness that soon came again to shock, when I was very young, but which I never accept, no matter how often it strikes.
The transvestite's badly scarred face, her naugahyde-like skin pulled over lumpy bones, when I have seen it in passing, entranced me. She is not a female, I sometimes think, but a male in out-of-fashion women's clothes and make-up, a contemporary antique, who has many friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes I think she's not male but female, a girl who may have been burned in a fire at an early age, whose entire existence has been tendered strange by disfigurement. An ordinary sunburn is a first degree burn. Both first and second degree burns will have complete recoveries, without scars forming or other blemishes. But if the heat is extreme, underlying skin tissue can be destroyed, which happens with third and fourth degree burns, when in the third there is an actual loss of tissue of the full thickness of the skin and even some of the subcutaneous tissues. The skin appendages are also destroyed so that there is no epithelium available for regeneration of the skin. An ulcerating wound-skin ulcers are rounded or irregularly shaped excavations that result from a lack of substance due to gradual necrosis-is produced and in healing leaves a scar. A fourth-degree burn is the destruction of the entire skin with all of the subcutaneous fat and the underlying tendons, and this may have happened to the transvestite, she or he. The pain would have been unimaginable. Both third and fourth degree burns require grafting for closure and are followed by constitutional symptoms of varied gravity, their severity depending upon the size of the surface, the depth of the burn, and, particularly, of its location. The more vascular the involved area, the more blood vessels affected, the worse it is, and the greater the symptoms: Shock, toxemia caused by the absorption of destroyed tissue on the surface of the wound, and symptoms from wound infection. The prognosis is poor for any patient, my dermatologist told me, as I reported to him on the so-called transvestite, while he listened thoughtfully, perhaps wondering at my interest, checking my bare back for irregularly shaped nevi or moles, and especially poor, he went on, if the majority of the body surface is involved. But I haven't seen her naked and don't know if just her face was subject to extreme heat, though I figure more was, that she ran from an engulfing fire, her hair ablaze, the skin on her face, her limbs, and her clothes on fire. I expect she'd been asleep and was in flannel pajamas. I nurture this fantasy each time I see her, and it is how I fit her or him into my categories of experience, which is what I have and that are also historical, specific to my time and place and its antecedents. I can't fail to notice her skin deformities and surface imperfections and not just them, but also how she marches past people, as if they were not there, head high, bun toppling and falling forward, to spare herself the embarrassment of others' brazenly curious gazes. People who glance or stare at her or him never believe they're being noticed, a contradictory condition for self-conscious beings; it may in some way be necessary, this blindness or sightlessness, but I know I do stare, I catch myself, vigilant, but I can't stop myself.
My father, his brother, who was his partner, or junior, the stockboy, would unroll a bolt of their cloth on a long table, the fabric's unfurling like an exhalation of breath, accompanied by a whooshing sound, and then one of them would search for minute imperfections, humps or lumps in the weave, discolorations, since so much could be wrong. Briskly, my father would have taken out his magnifying glass, a golden instrument, shiny and compact, and carefully scrolled it down the length and width of the cloth, the fabric of his and his brother's design, to ascertain the cloth's status, its condition for selling. Watching him read the cloth, I saw that his face was calm, in repose, when mostly he wasn't, but his concentration assured me of its possibility, and one day I wanted to be absorbed, too. I have a bolt of his fabric, and, in small boxes and cartons here, swatches of fabric and some yards of cloth I've saved and that I won't sew into clothes or curtains, because I don't know how. I possess them because I like the material and the touch of them reminds me of places and times I can't visit. My mother sewed, as well as knitted, but after several procedures on her brain, she forgot how, but then was retrained by the patient ministrations of an instructor, though now she's forgetting again, her brain is tired, but having the swatches and cloth remind me of the bolts in my father's stockroom, the intimacy and care with which he looked at material, as well as the stockboy, junior, his forthright helpfulness to my father who fired him later because business was bad, so usually I don't want to remember junior or consider his fate.