WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN: One Mother

One Mother

        Leroy walked his fluffy white lamb through our neighborhood of tract houses in Reseda. He held a rope tied to a bright red collar around the lamb's neck. Leroy had spent a frustrating day at the plant, testing explosives. The purpose of the explosives was to scatter the napalm in napalm bombs that were being manufactured for use against Vietnamese people. Leroy looked forward to the weekend, when he would spend one night on the boat away from his family. He had bought a cabin cruiser in a marina south of Los Angeles to use as his trysting place for an affair he was having with a topless dancer. Leroy named the boat after his wife.
        The boat was the Timmie II. Shortly after he'd bought it, Leroy mixed some poison to kill Timmie. He wanted the dancer, and he didn't want to pay alimony. The poison would supposedly be undetectable in an autopsy. But he didn't go through with his plan. He experienced what was for him a very unusual feeling: moral compunction. Not poisoning Timmie may have been the great moral act of Leroy's life. Leroy was fearless about going to the edge and even stepping over it. He was a dangerously free man. One might even think of him as an artist.
        And yet it was Timmie who was the artist, painting in oils beautiful strange pictures of beggars, lost girls, seascapes, and abstracts of the Madonna and Child. You would have thought Leroy was just a working guy, a middle-class chemist who mixed powdered explosives all day and came home and fell asleep in front of the TV. But Timmie had her own studio in the house. She studied French. She played piano and guitar. She transformed rooms of their old ranch-style suburban house into luxurious salons. She reupholstered cheap, old furniture and made it regal, put fake bricks on the wall, and painted gold leaf on an almost-antique desk.
        Timmie transformed more than her home; her body was something to shape, manipulate, change, like a sculptor works marble. Her plastic surgeon and her orthodontist were her artist's helpers. Her nose became smaller, her breasts larger, her teeth straighter. She designed and made skirts so short that if she bent down, her panties would show. Her big new breasts bulged out of low-cut blouses. Timmie designed her body to what she thought were the specifications of the wayward Leroy. She lightened her already-blond hair and wore Scotch tape on the wrinkles on her brow while Leroy was at work. Her son, Jerry, was 15 when her physical transformations began. He studied her behavior.

        When Timmie was a child, she was a prodigy, but nobody knew it because her field was philosophy, and she only shared her ideas with her younger sister, Elaine, who didn't understand them. Just as some little girls can play the violin at three, this little girl, born in Nebraska in 1929, could philosophize at age three. At age four, armed with a vocabulary equal to that of most of the adults in her town, she climbed a tree like a little monkey and looked down at her family's small house and yard, and she realized that everything she'd been taught that day in Sunday school was a lie. Everything her mother had told her about God was false. It was a stupid story. Then she almost swooned. She almost fell to the ground when she asked herself: "What was there before there was anything?" When she conceived of nothingness, she almost swooned again, and again when she asked herself how and from what God had made himself.
        Of course her ideas were not new, and though she developed them without academic study, they were not original. What was unusual about her was the intensity with which she thought metaphysical thoughts and the degree to which she felt that her thoughts mattered.
        Later in her life, she became concerned with war, and later, with child abuse. Before she lost the ability to think, she had decided that if one wanted to change the world, the proper rearing of children was the key concept to be dealt with. She put all of the problems of the world on mothers: her favorite quote was, "Give me other mothers, and I'll give you another world."

        Timmie was born in a little house in DuBois, a small farming town in Southeastern Nebraska, right above the Kansas border. The house belonged to her great-grandfather DeWitt. Nellie DeWitt, Timmie's grandmother, helped Agnes, her daughter-in-law, give birth to Timmie. Nellie was addicted to laudanum and was far more exuberant and worldly than other ladies in DuBois. She was plump and her bosoms were full.
        The birth was difficult. Agnes, only 18, was in a lot of pain. Maybe it was going to be a breech birth. Nellie DeWitt waddled downtown and found Doctor Grundig. By the time he got there, Agnes was tired, and the pain was becoming unbearable. George, Timmie's father, walked home from his job at the butcher shop down the street and held Agnes' hands as he had during the births of their other two children. George was the only man in DuBois who stayed with his wife during childbirth. He suffered more than she; Agnes had to hand him the chloroform-soaked rag that the doctor had given her. Old Doctor Grundig, with crooked, gnarled hands like claws, brought Timmie into the world.
        Agnes had trouble nursing Timmie, so she used what the other ladies in the town used: expensive Eagle Brand powdered milk. Agnes added water to the powder to make a thick, sweet, rich liquid, not knowing that it lacked essential vitamins. At six months, Timmie's cheeks became extremely red. The doctor said she was in the early stages of rickets. He instructed Agnes to cook bacon until it was almost black and crumble it up for the baby to eat. He showed her how to boil lean beef in a jar until it became broth. Timmie improved rapidly.
        She grew to be very beautiful, with deep brown eyes and soft blond hair. When Timmie was three, Agnes made clothes for her exactly like the clothes worn by Shirley Temple, the famous child movie star. Timmie was the same age as Shirley Temple and looked almost identical to her.
        Timmie was desperate for attention. Eugene got a lot of attention because he was the oldest, and a boy, and he worked with his father at the butcher shop. When Eugene was home, he ignored the girls, often reading big books with no pictures in them. Evelyn, the first girl, was a dark beauty and the favorite of her father. Then there were Timmie and Elaine. Agnes believed that Ruby Rose, the youngest, was a miracle baby from God, because after Elaine's birth, the doctor had said Agnes would not be able to have any more children, so Ruby Rose was automatically special.
        In the middle of five children born at the rate of one a year, Timmie felt loved only when she sang and danced in the local stage productions put on by her Uncle Louis in the little town hall. It was the only time her father, George, ever seemed to notice her.
        Her Uncle Johnny, however, always noticed her, and bounced her on his knee so hard she would hurt for days. But Timmie never cried. She strived to become "the girl with a twinkle in her eye" and "the cutest girl in town"—lyrics from two popular songs of the time—and she hungered for love from everyone she met.
        Timmie felt frightened of the strange universe she found herself in, a world in which she could not use Sunday school or the Bible for instruction, a place where people were small and alone, and tragic things seemed to happen to them at random. From the time of her epiphany in the tree, Timmie was constantly in awe of the world around her. Perhaps life was a non-stop religious experience for her. "What was there before there was a world?" she'd ask her younger sister, Elaine, and they'd both feel chills down their spines and goose bumps forming on their arms.
        Timmie had only Elaine, who she made her subject, her disciple. She protected and tormented Elaine. She manipulated Elaine to stay with her. She kept Elaine from Evelyn, their older sister, using the threat of leaving Elaine alone. Timmie tested Elaine's love by deserting her in the cornfield or hitting her in the stomach. "There's a bull! A bull's coming!" she'd say to Elaine, suddenly abandoned in the cornfield. She'd bend Elaine's little finger until she'd cry. She once made scratches all down Elaine's arms and legs and then convinced her to tell the teacher that a cat had done it. She made her eat dirt. Elaine was loyal and never told on Timmie.
        Timmie slept with all three of her sisters in a big bed in the living room of Great-Grandad's house, but cuddled only with Elaine. They slept as one, turning one with the other. They depended upon each other for warmth and safety in the Nebraska winters. Timmie would often see things in the dark. "Elaine! Are you asleep?"
        Agnes did piecework, sewing for 10 cents an hour every afternoon until after midnight. In the daytime, she was always tired and often took naps. Timmie thought she was gravely ill. Every night she'd pray that her mother wouldn't die. Her prayers became intense when Agnes and George would argue.
        "Oh Aggie, come on Aggie," she'd hear George begging for sex in the night. Sometimes, after a loud argument with George, Agnes would get up and play songs on the piano to settle the kids down. Her repertoire included a maudlin rendition of "Your Silver-Haired Mother" and a sentimental song with the lyrics: "Baby your mother like she babied you / Back in your baby days."
        Agnes indoctrinated her children to almost worship her. Maybe this was because Agnes had never had a mother. Agnes was the last of 12 children born on a farm to German immigrants. Her mother died shortly after she was born, so mothers were holy, mystical things to her.
        Agnes had to fend for herself at an early age. She was very creative and resourceful. When she was nine, the family got a pump organ, and Agnes, who had never touched a musical instrument, could play it immediately. Even though she was the youngest, she was soon expected to cook and care for her big farmer brothers. She was a tough Nebraska farm girl, and at 20, a tough woman and mother of five children.
        While all of her children were attractive, Timmie was strikingly beautiful. Agnes would painstakingly craft the most lavish stage costumes for her, and Timmie got many chances to perform. Timmie stopped knowing if she was on stage or off. Fantasy and reality began to blend in her mind. Her old grandmother, Nellie DeWitt, probably had what is now called Alzheimer's disease, and her stories to Timmie were getting stranger and stranger. Nellie, still addicted to laudanum, stimulated Timmie's mind with wild stories that Timmie could almost see in her mind for days after she had heard them.
        "Where is Lance?" screamed six-year-old Timmie. She and Elaine were frantic. Lance was a thumbnail-sized head, cut from the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
        "Shh! You're going to wake the baby," said Agnes. "Who is Lance?" she added, looking up from the clothes she was scrubbing on a washboard in the kitchen sink.
        "He's the good little boy who won't let Rollo hurt the cat!"
        "Who is Rollo?"
        "He's the rich boy who hates Lance!"
        "Where do these boys live?"
        "Here!" cried Timmie, holding up an old cigar box. "I think Ruby Rose took him!" For Timmie and Elaine, little Ruby Rose was like a horrible monster, constantly crawling towards the cigar box and threatening its inhabitants.
        "Now Timmie, you know your baby sister hasn't been near your things all day. She's sleeping in her crib. You girls be quiet or you'll wake her up."
        Timmie dumped the contents of the cigar box onto the big bed and looked once again. There was Lance, stuck in the hinge where the paper had begun to crack. She and Elaine laid out their characters, each a little head with a tab of paper extending from its neck. The girls would place clothing for the characters on the paper tabs. Timmie and Elaine searched in the box for appropriate clothes. If they couldn't find what they wanted, they'd cut out a clothed body from the catalog and place it on one of the heads. Timmie would use crayons to make the clothes of poor characters look dirty or she'd make their socks not match. The rich would wear fine, expensive clothes.
        The girls didn't move the characters. Once they were dressed and set in place on the bed, the drama of their lives took place in the girls' imaginations, with Timmie telling most of the stories, and Elaine cautiously making suggestions by asking questions. "Will Lance be able to find the cat that Rollo scared?" Elaine felt the paper characters were real people, real live people. She could feel the weight of the personalities when she opened the cigar box.
        The characters couldn't change instantly, but they could make transformations based on their experiences. All of the stories in the girls' ongoing soap opera had a moral. There were wicked characters, kind ones, evil ones, crippled ones, and sadistic ones. Rollo tormented Lance; Lance helped people and stood up for the crippled boy; Farmer Johnson yelled at children when they came near his property.

        Mabel Ord, the girl with webbed fingers, was crying in the middle of the schoolyard. Some kids stood around her, taunting her. "Look, the duck girl is crying!" they said. Her shoulder hurt badly where Rollo, the banker's son, had burnt her by focusing the sun on her skin with his magnifying glass. "Don't worry," said Lance. It'll be OK pretty soon. Don't let that rich meanie bother you. He just doesn't know how to be nice to people."
        Suddenly, a wind came up from the north and the spring sky filled with dark clouds. A heavy rain began pouring down on the schoolyard, and the teacher called all the children into the schoolhouse. Nobody noticed that little Mabel Ord had stayed out in the rain. She was embarrassed to go inside because the kids had seen her crying. She walked home in the driving rain.
        She walked along the creek, watching it rise. The rain caused a flash flood to roar down the creek and wash away the little trees at its banks. As she walked along the creek behind her neighbors' homes, she saw Rollo's father in his toolshed, frantically removing his tools and loading them into a wheelbarrow. The creek came up almost to the shed. Suddenly, the bank caved in, and the toolshed, with the banker in it, crashed down into the rushing water. The shed broke apart, and the banker flailed his arms wildly, trying to stay above water. He became trapped under a fallen tree, and the water rose above his head.
        Mabel Ord dived into the water to save him. With her webbed fingers, she was a powerful swimmer and could easily keep her head above water. When she got to the fallen tree that trapped the banker, she pushed on it with all her might and moved it just enough to free him. She pulled him to the shore, where he lay gasping for breath.
        The next day in school, Mabel Ord was sitting alone during lunch. Rollo came up to her and said, "Thank you for saving my father. That was a brave thing to do. I'm sorry for hurting you yesterday, and I'll never do it again. Here's my magnifying glass. It's a present for you. And I wondered if you would come to my birthday party tomorrow."
        Mabel Ord got her picture in the town paper, and Rollo's father gave her father money to buy a new tractor. The banker gave her a new bicycle, and she went bike riding with Lance every day after school.

        "Timmie! Elaine! It's time to get washed up for dinner." The girls put the paper people back into the box. When they finally did lose the paper head that was Lance, the girls mourned.
        "We lost his little teeny head, Mama," said Elaine, looking desperately through the house.
        Timmie loved to swing on the school swings. Swinging put her into a meditative state. Her imaginative play with the paper people and her swinging were ways to get into another world. She would swing so high that Elaine was afraid to watch. There was something special for Timmie about looking down at the world from high places. She was a daredevil who would climb the highest trees and stay there for hours.
        One of Timmie's favorite high places was the loft of her neighbor's barn. The first time Timmie saw the little naked babies there, she couldn't believe her eyes. They were little pink naked rat babies hidden in nests in the straw. Their eyes were still closed. She and Elaine sat in the second-story loft and dropped babies down onto the cement below and watched them splat.
        That night, Timmie was terrified of retribution by a hairy cat-sized mother rat. And if the mother rat didn't get her, she feared God (even though she didn't believe in him) would. How could she have killed those innocent, pink babies?
        Although she didn't buy the stories she'd heard in Sunday school about fire and brimstone, she was obsessed with the idea of punishment. Why was Gladys Lukinville born a blue baby? Why did Doug Kershank have a harelip? Why did Mabel Ord (a real person as well as a paper one) have webbed fingers? Why did Dwayne Huffman's left arm stop growing after the sled accident? She felt guilty about doing bad things, about rattling Great-Grandad's doorknob after he had a stroke, about teasing the old gravedigger about the big goiter on his neck, but she couldn't completely suppress her dark side.
        Timmie would spread egg white on her and Elaine's arms and let it dry to simulate skin disease. They'd pretend they were disfigured. They'd draw pictures of some person who was disfigured or who didn't know how to comb his hair. Sometimes the girls would act like they were holding deformed babies, and they'd meet people and feel awkward about it.
        In order to avoid damnation, whether it was some kind of deformity or eternal burning, Timmie went out of her way to be moral. After church, she looked right at Frieda Hoffman and sang, "Baby your mother, like she babied you . . ."
        because Frieda was bad to her mother. Old Mrs. Curl and Grandma Drogge often received food baskets from Timmie and Elaine.
        When Timmie was 12 and Elaine 11, they walked hand in hand down an unpaved farm road, and Timmie said, "It will never be like this again." They were moving to the big city, to Omaha.
        George and some other DuBois men had gotten jobs at a big new packing house in Omaha. George's starting salary was going to be pretty good because he was already a meat cutter, but the family had little money saved. For their first two weeks in the city, they had to stay in a filthy hotel. There was a bad-smelling communal bathroom at the end of a long, scary hallway.
        The city was amazing to the four girls and their older brother, Eugene. It was the first time they had ever seen a streetcar. They looked out the back of the hotel up a dirt bank, and there was an old, ramshackle house. "There are Negro kids crawling in and out of the windows!" exclaimed Timmie. None of the DeWitt kids had ever seen a black person before, and these black kids used windows instead of doors. The black kids were watching the pretty white girls and their weak-looking brother, and the DeWitt kids were watching back. One of the black kids glared at them and yelled: "Poor White Trash, Poor White Trash!"
        These words would echo in Timmie's mind for the rest of her life. She'd always thought that her family was among the best of DuBois. But now a local church in Omaha considered the family so poor that they gave them a Christmas food basket. The children couldn't understand. In DuBois, because their father was a butcher, there was always enough to eat, yet to the Omaha churchwomen, they were objects of pity. There was a scarf for each girl on top of the cans of food in the basket. Agnes made the girls wear the scarfs to church the next Sunday. It was devastatingly humiliating for all of them.
        Timmie was very popular in high school. Schools were just starting to test IQ's, and her IQ test indicated that she was a genius. She could roller-skate backwards with grace and skill, spin in the air, and land on her feet like a professional. She was elected class president and named Queen of Popularity in the school yearbook. She dated boys with foreign-sounding names who liked poetry. She was a gifted artist who could get a perfect likeness of anyone she drew.
        While she was in high school, her brother, Eugene, was fighting on little Japanese islands. At first his letters to Timmie were enthusiastic and patriotic. "The only good Jap is a dead Jap," he wrote. Later letters were more introspective. "My job is to tear open the bodies of boys my own age with my Browning automatic rifle." From Eugene, she'd learned to love literature, and she read avidly while he was away, trying to be the perfect sister. Eugene was left for dead on a jungle trail, and a whole platoon of Japanese soldiers marched over his body. A medic found him just as the last of the Marines were being withdrawn from the island, and saved his life. He recuperated at a U.S. military hospital on Maui.
        While on Maui, Eugene found a Japanese man to translate the writing on a Japanese flag he'd taken from the body of a man he'd killed. The writing turned out to be autographs and short messages of good luck from the friends and neighbors of the unfortunate young Japanese. Eugene was touched deeply by this, and he transmitted his abhorrence of war by letter to his worshipful sister, Timmie.
        Timmie became kind of a beatnik; she responded to the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan by dropping out of high school and going to New York to study art. She moved into an old apartment building in Brooklyn and began looking for work. The day after she moved in, a handsome young man who had just come home from the army moved in to his mother's apartment next door. Johnny Alex had already lined up a job with IBM—at the beginning of the computer age. He asked Timmie out the first time he saw her, and she accepted. They began dating almost every night, roller-skating together and going to movies. Johnny paid for everything. Timmie put off looking for work. She painted in the daytime and went out with Johnny at night. He was a good photographer and showed interest in Timmie's painting. They got married two weeks after they met.
        Because he was the man and she was the woman, she stayed home all day while he worked. They lived with Johnny Alex's old mother in her musty apartment. Also living in the apartment was Johnny's slightly-deformed younger sister, Rhonda. The mother abused Rhonda mercilessly. Timmie was alone all day in a small upstairs room, and she could hear the mother shouting at Rhonda and slapping her, burning her hands with matches, and belittling her. Timmie was sickened by this, and stayed away as much as possible. She often walked to the beach. Her feet were so tough that she could walk over rocks and broken shells on the scorching sand without feeling it.
        Rhonda's legs were bumpy from some kind of strange punishment Mrs. Alex had administered. Johnny and Mrs. Alex refused to discuss her with Timmie. Johnny would defend his mother and refuse to even talk with Timmie for days if she mentioned Rhonda's treatment. He'd ignore her in bed. He became even more furious when Timmie asked him why they couldn't get a G.I. loan like the other veterans did and buy their own house right away. "Why do we have to live with your mother and your sad sister?" Timmie felt more alone than ever. She wanted Elaine to hold her and listen to her ideas about politics and child rearing. But all she could do was read in her room or walk to the beach and read.
        It was difficult to paint because she was too depressed to motivate herself to get her materials out and begin a painting. She stayed in a cocoon of reading. Reading Malamud, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka took her deeper into a serious, dark sense of foreboding, a heavy seriousness about the human condition.
        Timmie was as beautiful as any movie star. Johnny was enraptured by her beauty. One of Johnny's favorite pastimes was to photograph Timmie in sexy negligee. Timmie would forget her troubles when she was in front of the camera. The old rush of being the Shirley Temple of Dubois would come back to her, and she learned to pose like a professional. Johnny gradually enticed her to take off everything and even to allow him to make sexually explicit photos, always assuring her he would destroy the negatives. She saw him destroy negatives, but she didn't know he had others that he didn't destroy. If a picture was too graphic, she'd tear it up, secure in the knowledge that it couldn't be reprinted. Later, she was shocked when she sneaked into his darkroom and saw the same pictures drying on the line.
        After six years of childless marriage, Timmie began studying Christian Science. She believed in the power of the mind to heal, and she realized that she was creating her sad reality with her mind. She suddenly decided to leave. She took a train to Las Vegas, Nevada, to get a quick divorce. It's fortunate that she left when she did. Johnny was becoming increasingly sadistic in bed. He remarried quickly, and later was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for cutting his wife's breasts off.
        It was in Las Vegas that Timmie met Truman Smothers. He'd recently quit his job as a newspaper reporter. He was bored with it. Since he was low on money, he decided to take a job at one of his father's banks. Truman became a teller. His father could have given him a high position, but old G.T. Smothers believed in making him work his way up. Timmie met Truman at the bank.
        "Can you cash this check?" she asked him sweetly. He, like most men who saw her, wanted to marry her. The check was for $75 dollars.
        "No, I'm sorry, I can't. It's from out of state. I sure wish I could help you." Realizing that he couldn't really be fired from this job and that he could make up the amount if necessary, he added, "Do you have any ID?" She showed him a New York driver's license and a library card.
        "Are you Nellie Eileen Alex?"
        "I'm Timmie DeWitt."
        "Well this picture looks like you, and it sure is a pretty picture."
        Timmie smiled, or posed, and said, "Thank you. It's me, only I never use 'Nellie' and I'm never going to use 'Alex' again."
        Truman, feeling brave, said, "Are you married or single?"
        "Both."
        "How can you be both?"
        "I'm here in Las Vegas to get a divorce." She colored. Divorce was a sin; in DuBois it was something to hide.
        "Well, I guess I can cash this check . . . under one condition."
        Timmie smiled at him sweetly but didn't ask what the condition was.
        "Don't you want to know what the condition is?"
        "Tell me."
        "That you go out to lunch with me 25 minutes from now."
        "Oh, I couldn't do that. I'm too busy."
        Truman looked crushed, like a child who'd just had his favorite toy taken from him.
        "But if that's the condition," Timmie added, "I suppose I'll have to make room for you in my busy schedule."
        Truman brightened, and then, flustered by his success, stamped the check and counted out the money.
        Timmie was broke and had nowhere to go, and Truman became interesting to her at once when she learned how rich his father was. She was touched when, during their lunch, she saw Truman comfort a little boy crying in the next booth and give him a nickel. Truman was sweet and romantic, and their courtship was like something out of a storybook. They were married one month after they met.
        They had their honeymoon at the Grand Canyon. A photograph of Timmie feeding a deer appeared in the local newspaper.
        Their wedding presents included a new home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Truman had gotten a job as a reporter, and a new '53 Buick. Truman made pretty good money for a reporter, and again, Timmie, because she was the wife, stayed home. Her painting stopped and her reading was lighter. Nine months later, Timmie had her first child, Gerald Truman Smothers III, who she called Jerry.
        Shortly after she became pregnant, Timmie felt Truman's behavior change. He seemed to be obsessed with her safety, as if she were a child. Timmie thought that the childish one was Truman. He made rules for her and became petulant when she failed to follow them. He prescribed a diet and exercise regime for her and forbade her to read in bed at night. She had to wash fruit and vegetables carefully in water as hot as she could stand and follow his careful system for washing and rinsing dishes. He started shaking and seemed to stop breathing when he saw her rinse off an apple in cold water and take a bite out of it. "Do you want your unborn baby to eat DDT?"
        Truman hated the long hours in the dreary, noisy newsroom of the Albuquerque Sentinel. He had no interest in state and local politics, and the fires and accidents he was sent to report on were upsetting and seemed unimportant. But he wanted to stay with a job just this once to prove to his father that he could. He would come home desperate for perfect domestic happiness with his wife, yet he would always feel disappointed. Timmie was no longer attractive to him. When Timmie was six months pregnant, her body repulsed Truman. "You look like a fat cow," he told her.
        If she broke one of his rules, he would feel like getting revenge, even though he wouldn't admit this to himself. He was cruel in weird, creative ways. One morning, when Timmie woke up bleary-eyed and went to the kitchen as she always did to make some coffee for them, she looked up to see a double-page photograph from Life Magazine of a huge, hairy rat that Truman had taped on the kitchen window, and she fainted to the floor, striking her head on the counter.
        After Jerry was born, Truman made rules that were absolute. Timmie was not allowed to get up from the dinner table until the meal was finished, no matter how much Jerry cried. Jerry's cries would tear at her, but Truman would reason with her: "The baby is fed, he has on a dry diaper, and there's nothing wrong with him. We have to train him to tolerate being alone for the short time we're able to be together in the evening."
        Timmie was pregnant again. Truman was frantic. They had just moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he was studying to be a chiropractor, and the study was intense. His father wasn't sending him much money, and the chiropractic college was more expensive than he'd thought it would be.
        When their second son, Tim, was born, Truman seemed to be completely disinterested in him. He never held or talked to Jerry, either, but he continued to watch over him nervously, and he maintained his rules about his care. One day, while Truman was at the chiropractic school, Timmie broke Truman's rule about Jerry handling small objects and allowed him to play with a box of plastic and metal trinkets that she'd saved from her girlhood in Nebraska. Jerry was not quite two. He swallowed a little plastic charm shaped like a loaf of bread. Timmie sheepishly confessed this to Truman when he got home that evening. Truman became livid. They took their new baby, Tim, to the neighbors next door and put Jerry in a little car seat that hung between them, suspended by two flimsy brackets, on the front seat of their Buick.
        Timmie wasn't very worried. The plastic charm Jerry had swallowed was small. But Truman was terrified. He face was white as he drove to the hospital.
        "You stupid bitch. Can't you think? How could you let a two-year-old play with those little things? Do you know our son could have died because of your negligence? Haven't I told you many times to keep small things away from Jerry? You know a baby can choke on anything, can choke to death, God damn you! And do you know they might have to cut open his intestines now? How do you like that?"
        Jerry, between the two adults, nervously ran his fingers over the plastic coating on the frame of the car seat where it bunched up in the corners.
        "Truman, it's just a little thing. It'll go right through him. I was watching him the whole time; that's how I knew he swallowed one. Jerry was too fast for me. I'm sorry. He loves those trinkets. I'll be more careful."
        Jerry was fine. The doctor told Timmie to watch his stool until she found the trinket.
        Truman was very strict with Jerry. He'd put a small wooden chair in a doorway to symbolize a boundary that the little boy wasn't allowed to cross. Jerry would simply crawl around the chair and pass through the doorway, only to be spanked and thrown like a football into his crib.
        Truman was strict with himself, too. He tried to do everything as well with his left hand as he could with his right. He forced himself to write left-handed and put on his shoes in opposite order every day. He read the Bible every morning in the bathroom while having bowel movements, and when he got all the way through it, began again with the first chapter.
        "I'm leaving this bastard," Timmie decided one morning. "I can't stand to hear his voice again." As soon as she saw his car head off towards the chiropractic college, she called a taxi. She took her two boys and caught a train to Los Angeles to stay with her brother, Eugene. He was just finishing his master's degree in English on the G.I. Bill at U.C.L.A., and he was drinking heavily. He spoke in a raspy voice because his vocal cords had been damaged when the Japanese troops had marched over his body.
        Timmie got the first job she applied for as a secretary, even though she could hardly type. She worked for Lee LaPort, a real-estate tycoon. He was a handsome but rather effeminate man who lived with his mother in a mansion with an electronic stair lift. They were soon engaged to be married.
        Then Eugene's friend, Leroy, a chemistry major working during the summer as a lifeguard at a local pool, came over to drink with Eugene. It was a very hot day. Leroy's first impression of Timmie was that he wanted to marry her. Eugene fell asleep and Leroy went outside where Timmie, wearing shorts and a man's white shirt tied at the waist, was washing Eugene's car. Timmie's two little boys were running through the sprinklers on the dead grass in front of the apartment building. Leroy asked her out, and she refused, telling him she was engaged. He kept the conversation going, though, and within a short time, knew her favorite candy bar, her favorite authors, and even what size clothes she wore. Leroy was a good listener. He could tell she was attracted to him.
        Leroy, of Jewish Hungarian stock, was not tall and handsome like Lee LaPort. He was short and heavyset, and his black hair was curly. Timmie thought he didn't look American at all. But Timmie thought Jewish people were intelligent and exotic, and she knew that Leroy would be rich some day. Still, Lee LaPort was already rich, and she was already engaged to him.
        Although she didn't love Lee LaPort, life was starting to look good for Timmie. She loved being near her brother, and now her sister Elaine lived just a few miles away. Elaine, who was almost as beautiful as Timmie, had married a successful mortgage banker, a college-boy jazz musician who had been a fighter pilot in the war. Elaine had a baby boy.
        Timmie was happy to be around her sister once again, but Elaine had changed. She drank Scotch all day and chain-smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. Timmie felt that Elaine was trying to keep her a secret from her husband. It seemed that on weekends when Timmie had a chance to see her, she was always busy.
        Leroy stole somebody's lawn in a rich neighborhood in Long Beach. He rented a machine that cut and rolled up grass and the sod below it so that it could be transplanted. In the middle of the night, he rolled out the new lawn in front of Eugene's apartment so Timmie could see it when she looked out of her bedroom window in the morning. He printed the words "Leroy loves Timmie" on a pink heart and taped it on her window. The next day, after Timmie had dropped the kids at the baby-sitter and had gone to work, and after Eugene had gone to school, Leroy got into the apartment through an unlocked window and washed all the dishes. He left a Cherry Mash candy bar for Timmie with a note: "I would give the world to you. With all my love, Leroy." A few days later, she received a letter containing beautiful poetry that Leroy had copied out of books by obscure poets and signed his own name to.
        Probably what won Timmie's heart was when Leroy took little Jerry fishing. He and Jerry came back with some big trout, and Jerry was acting like a little man. Jerry couldn't stand Lee LaPort.
        Eugene finished his master's degree and drove to Nebraska to visit his mother and father, George and Agnes. Timmie had the apartment to herself. Leroy called every evening when Timmie got off work and asked her out. He had charmed her by his unwavering, energetic pursuit of her, and she finally relented. She loaded her boys into her old Dodge and left them with Elaine.
        After going out for dinner and a movie, Timmie and Leroy returned to Eugene's apartment for ice cream sundaes. They were alone in the apartment, and Leroy was fearless about trying to seduce Timmie. While their ice cream melted, they kissed passionately. Timmie excused herself and returned momentarily in a beautiful black negligee, and they made love.
        Leroy's body was strong and dark and hairy. He seemed like a wild animal to Timmie. He did things that Johnny Alex and Truman would have never dreamed of doing to her, and she had her first orgasm.
        A week later, she told Leroy that she'd marry him under one condition: that he get a vasectomy before they married. He agreed. Leroy drove up to Northern California the next day to get his things. He broke into the administration office at U.C. Berkeley at night and found his records. He skillfully doctored them with an exacto knife and glue. He used the office typewriter to insert erroneous information to make it appear that he'd already graduated. When he returned to Los Angeles, he lied, telling Timmie that he'd had the vasectomy. The next weekend, they had a small wedding in Las Vegas.
        Although Leroy was poor when she married him, Timmie knew that because he was Jewish and had graduated from Berkeley, someday he'd be wealthy. She was right about him becoming wealthy, if not about the reasons for it. The Cold War was going strong, and the defense industry in Southern California was booming. The companies he worked for—Rocketdyne, Aerojet, Hughes—checked his references and called U.C. Berkeley and found that he'd graduated with honors. Chemists were in demand, and once Leroy established his expertise in explosives, he never had any trouble finding work.
        While Leroy went to work and tested rocket fuel or designed explosives for land mines, Timmie stayed home. But now she was beginning to feel her age; she was running out of time to distinguish herself as an artist. She disciplined herself to paint more, and she made reading lists and tried to check off at least one novel a week.
        Shortly after they were married, Timmie felt morning sickness. She was pregnant with her third son. She tried to believe Leroy when he told her that a small percentage of vasectomies were not successful.
        Timmie named her new son after her father: George.
        She felt awe in the presence of each of her sons. They were miraculous, cosmic beings to her. It was inconceivable to her how other parents could ignore or hit a child. Because she was attuned to her children, they were well behaved even though she wasn't strict. Little George was weak and clung to her; Tim was strong and always outside. Jerry, the oldest, was her protege. She saw signs in him that he was a philosopher, and she tried to nurture his thought.
        Timmie never read to the children as they were growing up; she told them original stories. Sometimes she used a flannel board, on which she placed cut-out paper figures of people she'd painted expertly in watercolors and backed with flannel so they'd stick to the board. There was the crippled boy, his sister, the bad boy, the old couple, the nice boy who built a special wagon for the crippled boy, and the wagon itself, a technical masterpiece that she surprised her kids with at the end of one of her stories. The crippled boy could actually sit in it; the wagon was designed to accommodate his stiff, polio-braced leg. At night, she told installments of "The Secret Star," about aliens who helped the ugly and the crippled, and transformed situations in their favor. They would triumph over the bad kid who stole or lied. Timmie was as excited about the stories as the children were, because she didn't know how they were going to end, either.
        Her days of teaching Sunday school in Nebraska made it natural for her to talk about Jesus, whom she loved. She tried to show her children how to put his teachings into practice. Heaven, hell, Mary's virginity, the idea of being born in sin, and the creation of the world were never mentioned.
        As the children got older, Timmie painted more and read more. She felt frustrated by her role as mother and homemaker. Their house was large and took a long time to clean, but Leroy said they couldn't afford a housekeeper. Despite her duties at home, she took her kids and their friends to the beach almost every summer day in her big old Plymouth station wagon. She'd race home a half-hour before Leroy would return from work, and make the house appear to be clean by pushing things under beds and into closets and hiding the dirty dishes under the sink. She'd replace her old Levi's and her white shirt tied at the midriff with more conservative clothes. By taking TV dinners out of their aluminum trays and adding some frozen vegetables, she'd make it appear that she'd cooked dinner from scratch.
        After coming home late from the beach, she asked, "Jerry, do you know where the fly swatter is?"
        "Yeah. It's hanging next to the refrigerator."
        "Could you get it?"
        "Sure. What do you want me to do with it?"
        "Let's play Slave and Master. You give me exactly five minutes to finish cleaning up the kitchen and to vacuum the den, and if I don't finish in time, you get to beat me."
        The three boys loved this game; they loved having parental authority turned around. The most fun part was when she'd fail to finish in time and she'd plead for a few more minutes.
        Timmie discussed philosophy and politics with her children almost from the time they could talk. She emphasized simplicity. "I'd be happy to just live in a tent and read," she'd often say. She practiced yoga and often stood on her head. She made her kids eat whole wheat bread, and they were not allowed much sugar.
        Jerry, at age 11, was old enough to understand and believe her philosophies, yet young enough not to see the hypocrisy of her actions. She manipulated Leroy into buying her a beautiful white Cadillac and a wardrobe to match it. Leroy had to moonlight as a parking lot attendant to make the loan payments on the house, the cars, the motorboat in the driveway, and to pay for their new swimming pool. She prodded and manipulated him just as she had her younger sister, Elaine, when they were children. Short, overweight Leroy could never quite believe that he could have a woman who looked like a movie star. He was insecure enough to try to keep her love by giving her material things. She played on his insecurities, reporting to him her daily adventures: a cop stopping her just to ask her for a date, the jeweler giving her free earrings, a bag boy running out to the car to help her load her groceries. Leroy, who had grown up poor in the Bronx, New York, wanted to live the American dream, just like Timmie did, and it was easy for her to push him.
        They were the only family on the street that had a telephone answering machine. It was a large, bulky thing that whirred and clicked as the big reels of tape played the outgoing message and then recorded incoming calls. "You have reached Polynitro Incorporated. Jess Simon is not in right now. Please leave a message after the tone and he will call you as soon as he returns," would broadcast through the house at all hours of the day. Jerry knew that there was no such person as "Jess Simon." Leroy Steiner was using a pseudonym to conduct his illegal business. Leroy stole explosives from his employer, an explosives company in Saugus, and resold them in his own packaging under a false corporate name. Jerry learned to type by typing invoices for him. Timmie was the moral guidepost for the family, and since she didn't seem to mind when the answering machine switched on, Jerry didn't mind either.
        The first real intellectual conflict Jerry felt was in the sixth grade. His strong, handsome teacher, Mr. Plant (who had lost one of his lungs in the Korean War), spent a large percentage of class time reading gory, glorious stories to the class about the Green Berets fighting in Vietnam. Jerry knew that his mother didn't approve of the war, but he would come home excited about it, thinking that it was right to save those people from Communism.
        After school one day, he discussed it with Timmie while she made something for him to eat in the kitchen. She led him into the living room, a place where he was usually not allowed to set foot. She sat him down beside her in a big easy chair and put her arm around him.
        "Mom, if we don't stop the Communists, they'll take over the whole world. We should go there and protect those people. If I were old enough, I'd go and fight."
        "But what about the people you'd be killing? Do they have feelings? Do they have pictures in their wallets of their mothers and their brothers and sisters and sweethearts?"
        "Well . . . but I don't care about them."
        Timmie told Jerry about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, comparing them to Jesus. "Why did Gandhi love his enemies?" Jerry asked.
        "Because he could feel their pain just like he could feel the pain of his own people. He could feel the pain of every hungry child."
        "How could he feel their pain? If I stick a needle in you, I don't feel it."
        "Gandhi could feel everyone's pain. To protest England's occupation of India, he let the English police catch him and imprison him. He went without food until the police got scared and let him out. They knew his followers would get mad and riot if he died."
        "But how can someone feel someone else's pain?" Jerry insisted. Timmie held him tighter and didn't answer.
        The next day Timmie joined Every Mother for Peace and began protesting the Vietnam war by passing out literature at the draft boards. Some of the young men entering the draft boards would listen to her tell about the horror, the sadness, the cruelty they were letting themselves in for. One answered her: "I'm gonna cut a mark in the stock of my rifle for every gook I kill, and by the time I get home from Vietnam, my rifle'll be covered with marks!"

        Almost every day the cry "God damn it, Timmie, where's my black socks!" would echo through the house. Leroy was increasingly frustrated about all of Timmie's causes. Besides talking to the boys at the draft boards, she was doing volunteer work with autistic and retarded children and studying anthropology at UCLA. She brought one boy, Carl, home with her several times a week. He walked sideways and knew the Latin names of every crustacean. He had started to believe that he was a lobster after his parents brought home a live lobster and allowed him to play with it for a couple of hours before they plunged it alive into boiling water. Leroy was jealous of Timmie's college friends. He was sick of Elaine's kids coming over to swim in the pool or to sleep over. The house was getting messier. It seemed to Leroy that everyone was having an interesting and fun time but him.
        Now, Timmie had her own studio, built into the garage. When she was working in her studio, she couldn't even hear Leroy's black socks battle cry. Sometimes when Leroy would come home from work a little early to take a nap before going to his second job at the parking lot, he'd see Timmie's handsome young French teacher, a 17-year-old foreign-exchange student who lived nearby, lounging by the pool. Or Carl, the lobster boy, would walk up to him sideways and ask him if he had ever seen a Crustacea homarus. Jerry, now 15, would be in his room with his friends, playing insane, never-ending, improvisational rock music on stacks of expensive amplifiers and speakers that rocked the whole house. By this time, Jerry had discovered marijuana.

        Timmie interested Jerry in difficult books. "Do you want to read a book about a guy who turns into a roach?" she asked. He read Kafka's Metamorphosis thinking that it was some kind of science fiction. Reading existentialist and metaphysical literature recommended by Timmie was making Jerry overly serious. He felt very depressed but didn't know what depression was; he couldn't identify it.
        It broke his heart to see Timmie crying more and more. His parents' marriage was in serious trouble. Timmie was sleeping with her young French teacher, something Leroy never suspected. Although Timmie enjoyed her Cadillac, bought with Leroy's ill-gotten money, she still talked like a Sunday school teacher, and Leroy fell for it. Leroy thought that he was the bad one, especially now that he was having an affair with a cute, young secretary at the explosives plant.
        Timmie found out because the woman's black hair showed up well on the light beige seats of Leroy's new white Volkswagen. She was disconsolate. She used her oil paints to paint an incredibly realistic jagged cut on her wrist, and she put white powder on her face to make it pale. When Leroy saw her lying on the bed with her bloody arm outstretched, he realized that she was the only woman he could ever love, and he felt full of remorse. He cried and promised, "I'll change, I'll change."
        Now Leroy came home from work on time and tried to be more involved with the family. He built a diving platform for the pool and tried to teach Jerry how to hit a baseball.
        Every morning, Leroy drove through farm and pasture land to get to the isolated explosives plant. He didn't know why, but he loved to see lambs grazing in the fields. On the way home from work one evening, he pulled his car off the road and went to a farmhouse to buy a lamb. A few days later, he bought five chickens. The three boys were thrilled to have their small ribbon of a backyard, bounded by the high freeway behind their house, become a farmyard.
        Months later, when the lamb was almost a sheep, Jerry and his brothers looked on sadly as Leroy desperately sprayed Raid insect spray on its stomach, trying to kill the maggots that were crawling out of its skin. Leroy, crying, lifted the lamb into the trunk of the Cadillac and rushed to the veterinarian. He came home later with the dead lamb still in the trunk.
        Jerry watched films in junior high school about how marijuana could turn young people into fiends and drug addicts. Parents were supposed to watch for changes in their children's behavior. Jerry watched Leroy's behavior change and suspected he was on pot. Leroy grew his hair long and styled it somewhere between a Mexican lowrider's pompadour and a hippy's mane. He wore ridiculous glass beads, and his eyes were often red. Jerry knew right where to look for Leroy's stash. Leroy's brother, Glenn, stationed in Vietnam, was sending potent marijuana home in the spouts of Vietnamese teapots. Jerry found some in Leroy's closet and smoked it. He felt his arms falling off; he felt undreamed-of levels of paranoia. Walking outside, he was suddenly surprised by a helicopter overhead and went shrieking down the street. He hid in a horse stall in a large lot behind his neighbor's house across the street and curled up in the fetal position, feeling like he was doing back flips through the universe.
        Timmie was changing, too. She asked Jerry to come into her bedroom and use the new Polaroid camera to photograph her. She was wearing nothing but a very revealing baby-doll nightie. She wanted Leroy to have some nice wallet photos to remind him not to stray. A few weeks later, she had silicone bags implanted in her breasts, and she bought a new wardrobe to emphasize them. Jerry was extremely embarrassed by his mother's appearance. Some of his friends were more interested in hanging out with her than with him. She was the sexiest woman many of them had ever seen in person.
        Jerry couldn't understand how a person could be such a dichotomy. Now, the lady who wanted to live in a tent and read was working on Leroy for a newer Cadillac.
        But unbeknownst to Jerry, Leroy was working on Timmie, too. Having two instant kids plus a third one on the way immediately after marriage had made Leroy feel robbed of his youth, and now, experiencing his mid-life crisis, he was trying to make up for it. A strange, attractive secretary at the plant was eager, he knew, to sleep with him, and she was also attracted to Timmie, who she'd met at a company picnic. Leroy agreed to buy Timmie the new car if she'd have sex with him and Marian.
        Marian was a strange lady who lived in an old barn on several acres of desert land near the explosives plant. She'd saved thousands of dollars to buy this place, where she lived with her little two-month-old daughter, named after the seven wise men in the Bible. The little girl slept in a dresser drawer and was not allowed to wear clothes.
        Timmie was intensely embarrassed by the proposition, but Leroy was obsessed by the prospect of having a menage a trois and wouldn't stop mentioning it. She wanted the Cadillac, so she agreed.
        The three boys were sent to Elaine's for the weekend, and the three adults went to a hotel in San Diego, where they smoked marijuana and fulfilled Leroy and Marian's sexual fantasies.
        Timmie felt very degraded, and she never looked the same after that. Leroy did not change. He had other girlfriends, and Timmie had other men. Timmie became pregnant by one of Leroy's friends, and told Leroy that she had been raped in the front seat of her Cadillac. "It was a Negro man. My head hit the steering wheel and I was unconscious. I don't even know what he looked like."
        Leroy had no choice but to buy it, since he wasn't being faithful himself. It was 1967 and abortions were still illegal, so they drove to a clinic in Tijuana. He had to stifle his rage when he learned from the doctor that she was almost through her second trimester, making the timing of the so-called rape impossible. Leroy asked the doctor, who spoke English very well, if the fetus had been fathered by a black man. The doctor said it would be impossible to tell by looking. Leroy reasoned to himself that if the rape story was a lie, then the father was probably white and possibly someone he knew. He had wondered why he had sometimes smelled his friend's tobacco in the house when he came home from work. Timmie hemorrhaged on the way home from Tijuana and had to go to a hospital in San Diego for a transfusion.
        Leroy bought the Timmie II to have a place to sleep with his girlfriends. Timmie graduated from Miltowns to Valiums. All of their children were failing their classes. Timmie suspected that Jerry was on drugs.
        "Do you feel alright, honey?" she asked Jerry, who had come home on Mother's Day just in time to join the family for a drive to Leroy's mother's house.
        "I'm OK. I just feel tired. I was reading until three in the morning," he lied. Timmie left the room to get ready. Jerry tried to make his eyes focus on the Sunday comics, but he was seeing double and triple.
        When Timmie returned to the TV room, she saw Jerry lying on the floor; he was drooling on the carpet. Jerry opened his eyes just long enough to notice Timmie's expression. It was as if a project, a painting, of hers had been damaged. At that moment, she cared more about the inconvenience, the loss of face to herself than she cared about the painting. She looked at it—Jerry—like it was a piece of shit.
        "Don't hit me!" said Jerry. Leroy hit him in a muscle on his thigh when he looked like he was going to fall back into sleep, and Timmie, just off the phone with the family pediatrician, was trying to get him to drink milk. Every time Jerry talked in his mealy, drugged voice, she slapped his face mightily.
        It took Jerry three days to recover from his overdose of Timmie's Valium. His body smelled of poison, and his skin was covered with red pimples. He couldn't get Timmie's look of disgust out of his mind. He started to realize that he was supposed to be what she couldn't be, and that she had been living through him. He was supposed to live the philosophy that she hadn't been able to live, and now he had taken one of her last hopes away.
        It was about this time that Brad, a friend of Leroy's, sat down with Timmie and Leroy at their kitchen table to take the Mensa test. Brad had gotten copies of the test from the Mensa Society, a worldwide club of people who considered themselves among humanity's top two percent in intelligence. Quite intelligent himself, Brad was a physicist who had worked on developing the first atom bomb. Brad was curious how they would all do. For Timmie, it was a game. Like an IQ test, many of the questions required visualization. She finished in half the time that it took Leroy and Brad, and got 100 percent of the questions correct. Brad and Leroy missed several questions, but managed to score high enough to qualify for Mensa membership, had they actually been trying to join. Leroy and Brad went out in Leroy's VW and smoked a joint while Timmie vacuumed and prepared dinner for them.

        Leroy got a new job in Northern California, making a propellant for a fléchette land mine that would scatter metal darts in all directions at the level of Vietnamese men's genitals. He received a substantial raise in pay. Now the family was truly upper-middle-class.
        They lived in a small Marin County town across from a country club and golf course in a stately white two-story house. It was at a country-club party that Timmie met Richard Dunham, a rich Chevrolet dealer who lived up the hill. He wore cowboy boots and a white hat. "Are those real?" were the first words he said to her, referring to her breasts.
        Leroy was no longer trying to hide his infidelity. Now Timmie had vaginal warts from him, and she was furious. Her doctor said the warts might be incurable. One of Leroy's girlfriends, the one with the warts, called him at home and said she needed to talk to him. Hearing a faint click and realizing Timmie was listening on the other line, Leroy refused. In the morning paper, he read that his girlfriend was the 501st person to commit suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge.
        Leroy was going to a Mill Valley therapist and doing LSD therapy. On one mental trip he made with his therapist at an expensive crab restaurant in Sausalito, he went through space on a flying carpet. Timmie still felt a sense of metaphysical wonder at life and existence and couldn't imagine needing to use drugs to enjoy a sunset or a meal. (She considered the Valium her doctor prescribed a relaxant, not a drug.) And Leroy was starting to get violent.
        Timmie had turned their extra bedroom into "The Persian Room." It had Persian carpets on the walls, tapestries on the ceilings, and brass lamps from Iran. In the middle was a large waterbed. This room was Leroy's den of sex and drugs.
        It was a Friday night and Leroy wanted Timmie to go into the Persian Room with him and smoke a joint. She was folding some clothes in their regular bedroom.
        "Come on, Timmie. Just take one hit."
        "I don't want to smoke any. Then you'll just want to have sex."
        "So, what's wrong with sex?"
        "Nothing, if it's with you and not you on some drug, if it's with your husband who is faithful to you and isn't carrying some kind of hippy disease."
        "You should talk about being faithful. Come on, Timmie."
        "I said no."
        "You loved it the last time we smoked pot and made love."
        "I don't care. I didn't feel any love from you. I felt like I could have been anybody and you were just tripping out on your drug. And I know that you brought a woman in there while I was at Elaine's last weekend. Do you think I'm stupid?"
        "You are stupid," he said in a penetrating, angry voice.
        Timmie, trying to settle him down, joked, "It takes one to know one."
        But Leroy was already furious. "You're a stupid, cold bitch. No one in this family cares about anybody but themselves. Nobody gives a damn about my feelings," he shouted.
        "Stop shouting, Leroy. The kids can hear you."
        "I don't give a fuck who hears me." He shoved her against the wall of their bedroom and slapped her face. The retainer for her orthodontic work flew out of her mouth. She slumped to the floor and picked up the retainer. She held the bent retainer and cried. She decided right there that the kids were old enough that they could do without a father. Timmie filed for divorce against Leroy the next Monday.
        At first, he didn't care. He had recently lost his job, when his new employers discovered that Leroy had tricked them: the exotic explosives they hired him to make had already been patented by his old employer. Leroy couldn't make the house payments, and his financial situation seemed so desperate that he was starting to plan out logical, foolproof ways to rob a bank. Now he didn't have to worry. He signed the house over to Timmie, took the last of their money, and flew to Tahiti with a 21-year-old woman.
        Richard, the cowboy Chevrolet dealer, had been harassing Timmie on the phone for weeks, asking her for a date. And now, desperate to keep her house, she called him.
        "OK, Richard. Let's go flying."
        Timmie had never been in a private airplane before. It was remarkably like a car, like a noisy, bumpy car. She was terrified, but stifled her feelings. She drank some good Scotch from a flask she'd borrowed from Elaine. At cruising altitude, Richard put the double-engined Beechcraft on autopilot and started to kiss Timmie and put his hands all over her breasts and legs. Timmie didn't know that Richard was an inept flyer and that he only vaguely knew how to use the autopilot instruments. They had sex in the back seat of the airplane.
        She created a fantasy about herself, almost as if she were one of her childhood paper dolls, and told Richard that she was from a wealthy family in Nebraska and that she was 10 years younger than he was. Actually, she was about the same age. Timmie had a professional photographer do a layout of her posing in a sexy black velvet dress, with a bottle of Black Velvet Scotch whiskey in the foreground and the Black Velvet logo above her body. She left the photos in a place in her home where she knew Richard would discover them when he came over. When she could tell he was getting serious about her, she suddenly disappeared for a couple of weeks, hiding out at Elaine's house in L.A. Richard was challenged and excited by this beautiful woman, who was from a refined family and who had been, he thought, a model. He decided to leave his wife and marry Timmie.
        After they married, they moved to San Mateo, California, a nice community south of San Francisco, and bought Silver Springs Chevrolet. He and Timmie designed a house and had it built high in the green hills of the peninsula. There were so many mirrors in the house that wherever you stood, you could always see your reflection. Timmie became the Silver Springs Chevrolet TV girl.
        "Wanna buy a Chevy for just eight dollars?" she said brightly in front of the camera for the twentieth time. For some reason, the words and melody of an old Shirley Temple song—"On the Good Ship Lollipop"—kept going through her head as she waited for the cameraman to prepare his equipment for another take. "For just eight dollars down, you can drive away in any new Chevy on our lot . . ."
        There was a history of heart attacks in Richard's family, and Timmie, although never afraid of high places, felt terrified that Richard would have a heart attack while they were up in his plane. She didn't have her pilot's license yet, but she had taken a few flying lessons. She had almost passed the instruments class she took with Richard—which would have certified Richard and her to fly at night or in conditions of poor visibility—before dropping out to protect Richard's ego, when she realized he was failing the class. Now Timmie flew their double-engined private airplane over their San Mateo estate while Richard tried to make a good aerial photograph of it with his new Hasselblad camera. As she flew the plane and looked down on her stately home, she did not recall her childhood experience of looking down from a tree at her little house in DuBois, Nebraska, and thinking of God or the origins of the universe. She thought of how to get the most advantageous shot of their new house and what the enlarged picture would look like on the mantel of one of their fireplaces. They'd be the only ones in the neighborhood displaying an aerial picture of their home.
        At first Jerry enjoyed the rich life. The girls at his new high school were beautiful, and they liked him, once he started playing guitar for a popular school rock band. He had a sexy girlfriend named Bonnie. While Timmie and Richard were traveling in Africa on points that Richard had won from General Motors for selling a lot of cars, Jerry got to stay home and take care of his brothers and make sure they made it to school on time. Once Tim and George were safely on the school bus, he called up Bonnie, and she came over for an afternoon of sex. They went into the master bedroom, where Bonnie tried on all of Timmie's costly, sexy negligees, and they had sex in all of them. Then Jerry found the extra key to Timmie's Corvette, and they raced through the mountain roads to a place where he and Bonnie could smoke a joint and view the whole Bay Area. They made it home just in time to be there when Tim and George came home from school.
        But Jerry was beginning to feel seriously bored. His therapist had pronounced him clinically depressed and suggested that he take Lithium.
        "No way am I doing the Lithium shuffle," said Jerry. "My pain is healthy. It means I can sense the reality of this sick society. Maybe the people who aren't depressed are the ones who are insane."
        Richard and Timmie returned home exhilarated from their exciting experiences in Africa, only to have their mood soured by Jerry, now 17.
        "Mom, Richard, I know you're not going to understand this, but I'm quitting high school. I'm failing anyway. I'm going to L.A. to work for while and just to live on my own. After I take some time off from school, I promise you I'll go to junior college."
        Richard didn't care. He hadn't finished high school, and he'd been a millionaire since he was in his late 20s. Timmie was heart sick about Jerry's decision, but she didn't have the energy to protest. She was too caught up in maintaining the web of lies she'd told Richard. Timmie was busy. She had to constantly look her best so Richard wouldn't guess her age, and she had to see her C.P.A. and her real estate in order to sell the country-club house she and Leroy had lived in and to undo the mess Leroy had made of their finances—she couldn't let Richard know how poor she really was when he married her. She also had a lot of self adjusting to do. She had to practice her face in the mirror so as not to appear offended when Richard made degrading remarks about her while he showed her off like property in front of the other Chevy dealers.
        "There's only one real report card in life," said Richard to Jerry at his going-away dinner at a local Denny's, "and that's how much money you make." Jerry's brothers looked bored. Jerry feigned interest, hoping Richard would palm him a fifty before he took off in his old Camaro for L.A. "Do you think I care about selling Chevrolets?" Richard continued. "To me they're just a bunch of steel; they're just game pieces. Everything is a game piece, even your mother—"
        "Oh, Richard, how dare you call me a game piece," gushed Timmie, acting cutely offended. Jerry marveled at how Timmie's vocabulary went down a few notches whenever she was around Richard, who had never read a book, and how when he wasn't around, she spoke the way he imagined a college professor would speak.
        Richard waited for her to finish and then resumed talking: "Did I ever tell you about the time me and my dad was out lookin' for copper radiators in the desert . . ."

        Timmie's sons no longer needed her. Tim left home soon after Jerry, to work on the Alaska Pipeline, and George was always at the dealership working for Richard. Timmie had no friends; nobody interesting to her would have liked her husband, and Richard was very possessive about her. He discouraged her from having a life outside of their life together.
        However, Timmie was happy. Richard and Timmie traveled the world on month-long vacations twice a year. They went on long cruises and flew to every continent. They made an attractive couple on the dance floors of cruise ships. Their home movies were animated and joyful: Timmie hugging a pyramid in Egypt, Timmie on a canoe ride in the Amazon, Timmie sitting with children in a daycare center in China. Timmie enjoyed being wealthy and felt comfortable in her marriage.
        Between vacations, Timmie made lavish scrapbooks, adding her commentary and illustrations to their travel photographs. Playing her new grand piano thrilled her. She felt fortunate that she was able to send a little money to Jerry, who was now working as a night clerk and going part-time to college. She had to sneak the money out of the thousand-dollar monthly household allowance Richard gave her. To explain the bandages that covered her nose after her first nose job, she told Richard that their maid had opened the door into her face.
        George changed his last name to Dunham and worked his way up quickly in Richard's dealership. George married Sue, a young woman who wanted to get her hands on some of the Dunham money. Lisa, their daughter, was precious to Timmie. But Sue despised Timmie and rarely let her see her granddaughter.
        Timmie was obsessed with Lisa. She worried about her granddaughter's safety, her diet, and whether she got enough love and attention at the day-care center while her parents were at work. She lost sleep worrying about the little girl, but felt blissful when she got to be with her. Sometimes, she'd bribe Sue with gold bracelets or hint that she could get George another raise at the dealership, and she'd get Lisa for whole weekends at a time. Richard let her charge anything she wanted to buy for her. She told stories to Lisa, painted with her, and taught her to sing all of the Shirley Temple songs she knew.
        Over the years, as gas prices rose and Japanese cars became more popular, Richard found it increasingly difficult to run his dealership profitably. After declaring bankruptcy, he and Timmie moved to his home town, Bauxite, Arizona, where he still owned some land that was listed in his mother's name, and Richard became a mobile-home-park operator, and later, a land developer.
        Timmie was isolated almost like a prisoner. The nearest real town was 20 miles away, and Richard never let her go anywhere without him. Her Corvette was old now, and there was some problem with the wiring that Richard never got around to fixing. She couldn't risk breaking down in the desert heat, often as high as 120 degrees. Richard jumped in his pickup at six every morning and rarely returned home until late at night. He supervised work on his property and flew all over the state in his airplane, buying used mobile homes for his workers to refurbish. Timmie sat alone in her richly-furnished library in their double-wide mobile home.
        She subscribed to a publishing company that mailed her special editions of literature classics, with leather bindings and 14-karat gold edges on their pages. Timmie finally had time to read to her heart's content. Reading, however, was no longer interesting to her. Each year, it seemed to get harder for her to comprehend what she was reading. She felt frustrated by how many times she'd have to read a paragraph before it would stick in her mind. She was now almost 60. Her mother, Agnes, was in her late 70s and still mentally sharp, still able to play musical instruments. But Timmie's ability to draw and paint was certainly deteriorating. She lied to herself and said it was just that she was out of practice.
        Timmie missed her boys. Tim was in Idaho working as an electrician. George was getting remarried and starting medical school. Jerry seemed to be all over the place. He wrote to her a few times from Maui, and then from Denver, and she even got a postcard from him in Thailand, where he was visiting Leroy. Leroy had a job teaching English to Thai police cadets.
        Physically, Timmie felt better than ever. Every day, she would walk for several miles across the desert, going in different, random directions. She would stand on the small mountains that she and her husband owned, and look at the little town below.
        Timmie made lists of things to do, even simple things such as putting the mail in the mail box. When Richard would take her out to dinner with local businessmen and their wives, she'd secretly make a little seating chart on her napkin: circles with names in them showing the location and name of each person. Little Lisa was no longer allowed to visit her grandmother and Richard. The last time Lisa had gone to Arizona, Timmie had forgotten to keep her eyes on her, and Lisa had wandered off into the desert, where she was lost for several hours.
        On his second trip to Thailand, Jerry called Timmie and Richard at their home in Arizona. They were in a big hurry because they were going on vacation to Russia, and they had to catch a plane. They were a little frantic because Timmie couldn't remember where she'd put their passports.
        They had a bad connection. Jerry shouted into the phone: "Guess what, Richard. I'm in Thailand. I'm getting married to a woman I met on the plane when I was here last year."
        "Oh, you better watch out for those dragon ladies. Pretty soon she'll be controlling your money," said Richard good-naturedly. "I'm just kidding. Congratulations, Jerry. We're real happy for you. Wanna talk to your mother?"
        "Hi, Mom. This is Jerry. I'm in Thailand! I'm getting married!"
        "Oh, my God," she cried, shocked to the bone by the prospect of an interracial marriage. She switched from her Nebraska mode to her California mode, and then, "Oh, my baby. I'm so happy for you," she cried. "We're going to Russia if I can find the damned passports. Oh, honey, I love you so much. I hope you're careful over there in China."
        "I'm in Thailand, Mom."
        "Thailand."
        "I love you, Mom."
        "I love you, Jerry."
        Richard finally found the passports in the butter compartment of the refrigerator. He wasn't surprised. Timmie was acting strange and forgetful lately. She had been using his house key and car keys that day because she had lost hers again, and now she had misplaced his, too, and they missed their plane. They had to wait until the next day to leave.
        Jerry was the only one in the family who would admit that something was seriously wrong with his mother. Even his brother George, halfway through medical school, didn't want to see it.
        Timmie suspected that she had Alzheimer's disease. She ordered some books about the disease from a book store in Phoenix and kept them hidden from Richard. When Jerry returned from Thailand, he visited his mother. He wanted to tell her about his new wife and share his excitement. He would have to wait several months until Ruey would be able to get a visa and join him in the United States.
        Timmie decided to act as if everything were fine. She didn't want to upset Jerry. She and Richard had just moved into a huge Spanish-style home that they had built at the base of the biggest mountain on their property. Timmie had designed it on a scrap of paper a couple of years before. She was excited that Jerry was finally going to see it.
        Jerry parked his car in front of the new house, and Timmie ran down the steps to hug him. They held each other tightly.
        "What's wrong, Mom?" asked Jerry.
        "What do you mean, 'What's wrong?' Everything is fine. Oh Jerry-Tim-George . . . Jerry, I'm so glad to see you."
        "I'm glad to see you, too."
        There had recently been an unusual desert rain, and the air was full of the wonderful smell of wet earth and greasewood plants; the desert was green. "Wanna go for a walk?" Timmie asked. "See, the desert is blooming today."
        They walked for about an hour before Jerry had the courage to broach the subject of Timmie's forgetfulness. Timmie had just screamed "Watch Out!" and saved Jerry from stepping on a rattlesnake, and Jerry's heart was pounding. "Mom, I don't know how to tell you this, but you're changing, you're forgetting a lot, and I'm sure about it. You could graph it; I mean each year it's getting worse. I want you to go to a doctor."
        "There's nothing wrong with me, you little idiot, and I'm certainly not going to one of these quack doctors around here."
        "Ok, have it your way, but I'm just telling you this because I love you and I'm worried about you. Half the time you don't even get my name right."
        They walked on for a while in silence, and Jerry noticed that Timmie was crying. He felt guilty for making her cry. "Do you know what Alzheimer's is?" Timmie asked.
        "Yeah, I've been reading about it."
        "So have I," she admitted. "I think that's what I have."
        "Well, why don't you go to a doctor and find out for sure? Maybe you just have a blood clot or something."
        "Because what if I do have Alz . . . whatever you call it . . . If Richard finds out, he might put me in a home."
        "So you're just going to keep on trying to act like nothing is wrong, is that it?"
        "That's it. Nothing is more humiliating than losing your intellect. I can't begin to tell you the panic, the shame I feel knowing that my mind is doomed. Your mind is where you are. That's your soul. Your mind is who you are, your spirit." Timmie was talking flatly, as if she'd memorized what she was saying, or had thought about it many times. "The most frightening thing is the fear that whenever I become confused, it's for a reason, that I'm getting worse. My heart actually hurts from fright, like I've heard an intruder in my house. I get lost in the store; it's like a labyrinth for me. It's fatal, isn't it Jerry?"
        Now Jerry was crying. "Yes."
        "Tell me again what's going to happen to me."
        "If you have Alzheimer's, you'll lose your short-term memory completely and forget where your are, forget everybody's names, forget what you just did or said. Then you won't be able to take care of yourself, like brushing your teeth and going to the bathroom. Eventually, you'll fall down and break your hip, get pneumonia, and die."
        "Thanks a lot."
        "Any time."
        "I was going to take some pills or use Richard's gun, but now I don't feel like it. I'm afraid."

        Richard kept her at home as long as he could. The women he paid to watch her would quickly become exasperated and quit. Timmie was smart and mean and could trick them easily. And Richard was feeling fear that she might do him bodily harm. He hid the two revolvers he always kept around the house and hid the kitchen knives.
        One night she ran through the house naked, screaming, "You have a big green head, Richard! How does it feel to be pregnant?" Another night, Richard woke up in the middle of the night to find that she had flooded the house by turning on every faucet. One time, she took all of his right cowboy boots, leaving the left ones in the closet, and threw them in the garbage. Another time, she filled the toilets with rocks. After she got lost in the desert for the second time, he had her committed to a psychiatric hospital with a special ward for Alzheimer's patients. He was given power of attorney; Timmie was no longer a viable person.

        Every Christmas, Jerry and Ruey drive to the hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, where Timmie lives. Ruey is a slender, pretty Thai woman. Her eyes flash with love and creativity. She is an accountant. Jerry is an English teacher. Timmie is 63 and has lost her mind. She lives in a luxurious Alzheimer's ward with other rich people who have lost their minds. The other patients look old, but from a distance, Timmie looks like a 40-year-old movie star. There was some concern among the hospital staff because Timmie's pubic hair had been shaved. Nobody knew who did it or why. Jerry was afraid that she'd been molested and raped by some orderlies. If they had raped her, she would have forgotten about it instantly, as people with advanced Alzheimer's forget everything.
        "Hi, Mom," said pregnant Ruey, running up to Timmie and hugging her. Although Timmie had seen her many times, Ruey was still a perfect stranger to her. Timmie did recognize Jerry. She held him tightly and sobbed. Then she stopped abruptly and smiled.
        "I'm amazed. I'm over shrr, there's a grinner grinner and a grinner. I just can't believe it, I can't believe that I'm here and it's just getting me cuckoo. Because two days before, I wanted to die and I don't even know looking back to see what it was about then, but it is so nothing, those big hotels, they're just so nothing, that it just, they're just, I can't even eat, and it's just grush and mush and not good food or anything. And that's just how I feel. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel tomorrow. But that's the way I felt now seeing the cars going on the freeways."
        "How are they treating you here, Mom," asked Jerry.
        "Oh just fine. And then isn't there something you'd like to see in this place maybe like Daddy died."
        Jerry said, "Tell me about Daddy; tell me about your father."
        "It's hard to tell you now without telling you the way it really was," answered Timmie. "It's just strange, it's nothing, it was like nothing to me in my childhood besides Elaine and I, and if there's some money in the side of the side, that would be cuzzled up to my little . . . money, 'cause I always wanted to get money, but I wanted there to be the money too, so I would be sure that there would be money left over, and it was always in my head and I hate it, you know, and it's even hard now, but I want things to be right, and that just means right to me [evil laugh] so then what did I do? [In high voice:] Hold me Daddy! He would have no way of even thinking within himself that anything would go wrong. He didn't know that it was that way, he just, everything was copacetic, and everybody else was always reading a book and I was always reading a truck. There's not much that I did. Daddy had a sharp shrun . . . trunk. It was probably comfortable to him. If this was your bed, it would be your bed. Well, I was. Shirley Temple, there she is. Right there. Under the bed when you want it."
        "Tomorrow is Christmas, Mom," said Ruey.
        "Well I know that. What's going to be our next big project in our little pile of goop. Then the phone would ring and sing and burst some place and go to bed. I think it was just trying, as high as I could go in the needle and still keep it going before the roof will come tumbling down. It's not very fun, is it? Let's just go eat ice cream."
        Jerry found a nurse and signed Timmie out for the afternoon. Ruey helped Timmie with the seat belt, and Jerry drove them to a Baskin Robbins. He had Ruey watch Timmie while he ordered the ice cream. When Jerry returned to the table, it was as if Timmie were seeing him for the first time.
        "Hi, Elaine!" Timmie said to Jerry. "This ice cream is so good I'd eat it even if it were detrimental to my health. Baby your mother. Remember, God is watching you. Well, he oughta come in a little closer."

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© 1993 by Jeff Syrop