Poor Dad’s separate features began life as factory thirds, then really botched the arrangement! Eyes set this close threatened to become unanimous, cycloptic. Forehead low, skin more “manila” than pink, ears attached like opened armoire doors, wide-wale nostrils on too short a nose nubbed above a mouth like some gift-shop nutcracker’s. It was the facial equivalent of scrambled eggs.

People divorce each other for “mental cruelty.” And my mother could’ve made her court case with four simple mug shots—sides, the head’s front, its gourdy back. For “cruel and unusual ugliness,” Grace Delman might have received major alimony. Instead she seemed to have settled for a platinum veterinarian every Sunday.

Mom had a way of making nothing much seem fun. At least nothing she ever planned showing us. Carnivals were loud and “cheap.” Christmas just meant further work. “Hanging doodads up can be nice, but taking them down just kills me. The sadness of their going back in dusty boxes for another year.” Then came a sigh the size of a soup bowl.

My overeducated mother was a thin, stark woman with ideal breasts and a big undirected intelligence that seemed, like her chest, fastened to her by mistake. Snobbish, sickly, “intellectual,” she lived at the uneasy mercy of a rustic, watchful little town.

Maybe if she’d gone to church? If only Grace volunteered to read aloud for chain-smoking bomb-blinded soldier boys out at the VA. What if she’d kept our yard way nicer? Could anything have made Mom popular? She had no womenfriends: always a terrible sign. Nobody came near her, nobody but Dad and me, and maybe one more.

Newly married, she’d read every book in the town’s public library, even electrical-engineering texts; then Grace Meadows Delman began to buy new novels by mail order, at retail. Soon this expense nearly outstripped our family’s meal budget. Three novels a day, Mom speedread without much training and very little retention. She claimed she read to escape—but I noticed: it didn’t make returning any happier.

Her costly book-habit seemed to keep my dad a traveling salesman. In this, I now see, there might have been a plan. Mother’s unhappiness was “catching,” like the flu. So was her desire.

Mom’s sexual indifference to my father drove him half-insane. Come sundown, the itchingness grew palpable in a tract house small as ours. His longing for her soon drove me crazy. Clyde cringed with needing her; he would be smoking midnight Camels, patrolling one room; I’d rest wide awake, wearing blue footed pajamas, uneasily erect in another; and we’d both listen to her, their bedroom door half open, Yes? No?