Chapter 2

Mother constantly lived in crisis mode. She might have been channeling Ayn Rand, although she didn’t understand Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead but that’s what she thought the 20th century actually was like, or was supposed to be like and that’s the same thing. Like there’s a king that lives inside your head even if your a girl or a woman its still a man, the boss, god maybe. Up until I was 9 or so I thought she was the best person on earth, and my champion. That changed after Bill Williams in 4th grade.

What kind of parents name their child William Williams? Anonymity that important?

Set out to hurt him? Did he believe John Galt was the main character? I’m sure mother did. That was a big part of their problem, that they read books they did not understand. Like None Dare Call it Treason. And later Portnoy’s Complaint.

He and my mother both taught 4th grade. Mother taught 4th before I’d even started kindergarten. That summer before my 4th grade was to begin, Billy Williams had gone to Europe, returning with a statuette for her of David, from Rome, fig leaf missing. This may have made her angry, but I’m not certain. She seemed so unhappy with it. It was an unnatural shade of white, cold and chalky. It sat on a shelf in our rented living room with Italian provincial furniture in olive green and turquoise upholstery. She expected perfection. I wasn’t yet sure what that entailed.

I wasn’t placed in her classroom, but his. The rooms were adjacent in Center school building that had weathered a catastrophic flood just 10 years prior. I didn’t really know about their affair until mother called me into the vast hall one morning to tell Mr. Williams that she was getting married to Roland Emond. She prompted me to tell him the good news. The look that appeared on his face still hurts me to this day. As my day unfolded I began to understand why she didn’t want to go to his wedding to a girl named Marsha Manculix, and it was not because she was already pregnant. “He’s doing the right thing; he always told me he would marry her if she was pregnant”. Her face with that disapproving sour look I was seeing more and more often. I wished she talked to her friends and not her 9 year old daughter about her unsolvable problems. Scheming and insincere, she was full of braggadocio and a great fear of being judged as inadequate, especially since she wore glasses. But it is 1965 and things were changing in my American childhood. The cardinal sign were all there.