Too Much Happiness

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.
    I cannot bring Nancy’s face to mind so clearly as I can her mother’s. I think her coloring was, or would in time be, much the same. Fair hair naturally going brown, but now bleached by so much time in the sun. Very rosy, even reddish skin. Yes. I see her cheeks red, almost as if crayoned. That too owing to so much time outdoors in summer, and such decisive energy.
    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