| OCR Text |
Show The beginning? I can't remember, of course, but my mother says I had it, it was there, right from the first moment she laid eyes on me. She says my bottom was pinker than those of other babies, and it was the wrong kind of pink. More like red, burnt. At first the doctors weren't concerned and told my mother she shouldn't be either. I was healthy, they said. An unusually bad case of diaper rash, yes, but healthy. Nothing to worry about. It would go away. They recommended ointments and salves that could be bought over the counter. It didn't go away, it spread. This is the way my mother tells it: like a smoldering fire it crept up my dimpled back and down my fat little legs, claiming one dark red handful of me after another. Pausing from time to time but never retreating, it slowly moved over my body, consuming my flesh like so much firewood until it reached my ankles and wrists and neck. Then, there, out of some perverse last-minute kindness, it stopped. I was two by then and my mother was twenty-two. And she was alone. She says my father never came back from Vietnam but I know better. He just left and didn't come back period. He couldn't handle my disease. Oh, my mother suffered with me, there's no doubt about that. Because of me, Dublonsky would like to say. I know this, too: when it became apparent that the doctors had no answers, and for that very reason were extremely interested in my body, she bundled me up and brought me across New York City by bus to this place, the Downstate Medical Research Center. Here, I imagine her saying to the resident dermatologists, take my child. |
