The Monsters of Templeton Read Online Free PDF

lark!
    For a second, Vi considered the stern portrait of Marmaduke over the mantelpiece. "I like you better now that I know that about you, old guy," she said, and laughed. Something about her laughter, how it echoed and echoed in the cold house, cracked her up even more, and she gasped, her ribs hurt, she peed herself a little. But then she stopped, positive that there was a moment when the face of the man in the portrait twitched into a smirk and a wink. A little complicit grimace.
    Vivienne gazed at the portrait, amazed, and then considered. She had seen stranger things, though those visions were usually induced by fun substances. But also, as a child, she often saw a ghost moving through Averell Cottage. To Vi, the ghost took the form of a giant quivering dove that left great misty feathers strewn about the house. A wink in oil paint was not outside the realm of possibility. She gave the portrait a little grin, winked back. Then she felt sick and ran to the bathroom to heave up her breakfast of canned pineapple, all she could find in the kitchen cabinets that wasn't tinned pork or Jell-O. She had been feeling sick in the mornings. Her navel had swollen a little. Last month, she didn't get a period.
    VIVIENNE, IT SEEMED, was pregnant.
    The story of my conception was one I knew from long before I could even speak: Vi's eyes would always light up with joy and nostalgia when she described how she lived in San Francisco, in a commune, in what she liked to describe as "an experiment in free love," though to me it always sounded like rented love, albeit rented cheaply. There having been four men but only three women in this commune, Vi never went to bed alone; and, as there were also always yogis and painters and sitar players and organic yogurt makers staying over, everyone, of course, was cordially invited to take part in the love fests.
    She was only seventeen, she always said, sighing. What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.
    On the day of the pregnancy test, Vi sat in her paper hospital gown, feet growing cold on the floor. The nurse, a girl three grades older than Vi in high school, was blushing. "I'm sorry," she said. "You're pregnant, Miss Upton," and she could not look Vi in the eye.
    Enter: me. Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, called a hippie-dippie "Sunshine" until I was two and already stubborn and refused to answer to that name.
    The moment Vi was told by that soft little nurse that she was pregnant, she knew she had to stay in Templeton. In the vague swamp that was my mother's brain, she knew that she couldn't kick the drugs if she returned to San Francisco, and that it would be almost impossible to find more in Templeton. Her heart was good, and she didn't want to retard her little cooking baby. Also, if she were going to go back to San Francisco, she would have no idea which of the commune's men had fathered her child; before I was born, any one of the four (plus) could have been my true father. When I was born, however, more than ten and a half long months after she came home--I was even pigheaded in the womb, she always said in explanation--she had pared my fathers down to three: she was fairly certain when she saw my pink skin that it wasn't the black man. This was what she told me later, even when I was two years old, and couldn't imagine what sex was. She was frank, my mother, always. And, until I understood the mechanics of the act, I loved the idea of having three fathers: if one was good, imagine being blessed with three!
    I was once sent home from kindergarten for making this boast. Mrs. Parrot squinted down at me with pity as she pinned the note onto my jacket, and gave me a pat on the head. When my mother unpinned the note in our old Volvo, she chortled, then at home pasted it into my baby album. Dear Ms. Upton, it read.