The Monsters of Templeton Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wilhelmina bragged today of having three fathers, for which I send her home as chastizement. Be wary of speaking of your promiscous past before impressionable kids. Little pictures have big ears. Mrs. P.
    "Can't even spell, that wench," my mother said as she applied glue to the back of the note, tears of laughter dampening her cheeks.
    But at the moment she greeted the little pulsing me in the hospital, hands spread over her midsection, Vi knew she would stay to raise her child in a healthy way, far from hedonistic temptation. She would be a good mother in Templeton, she decided; I would grow up safely there.
    To be frank, this part of the story always sounded a little fishy to me, but I could never figure out why. I just swallowed it. And, until I visited San Francisco later, I was grateful to have been raised in my small and beautiful town. Then, when I saw that gorgeous, gilded city under the fog, I regretted Templeton and its tiny ways, its subservience to the baseball tourists that came in hordes every year, its lack of even a decent movie theater. I regretted San Francisco's transvestites in their lovely clothes, the cafes, the furniture stores with imported Indonesian furniture; I thought I would have been a different person, a better one, had I only been raised in a larger place. Like a fish, I thought, I would have grown to fit my bowl.
    Vivienne would probably have understood my desire for a larger childhood, had she thought about it at the time when she came home to Templeton for good. She may even have convinced herself to return to San Francisco, to give her child a larger life. But in the slow-warming spring that year, she was pregnant, poor, scared, jittery from coming off drugs, incapable of too much thought. It is easy to imagine the loneliness, the feeling of worthlessness from her lack of education, the solitude, the way the town turned on her. How she was even more isolated by her grand old house and her simultaneous poverty. As I grew, I would have a pool that my country-clubbing grandparents had put in, two in-town acres, a lake to play in all summer long, a short walk to the bakery or General Store. I would have enormous privilege. And yet I would have to pick my clothes out of a bin in the basement of the Presbyterian Church and during hard times run into the Great American grocery store to buy our cheese with food stamps. I would be Willie Upton, related to all those famous people, pet of every history teacher I ever met, the student NYSHA hired as a receptionist every summer and trotted out to show visiting writers, but also a girl who dressed in the bathroom stall during gym class, ashamed to let anyone see the state of her underwear.
    This, too, Vivienne saw as constructive, however; her favorite pedagogical tool was the old carrot-on-a-stick-plus-a-dash-of-the-spurs method. "Nothing," she always said, "can be learned if you don't work a little at it," and so every (pagan) Christmas of ours, I had to smooth all the wrapping paper into reusable squares and roll the ribbons up into little nubbins before I was allowed to play with my toys, which were, for the most part, handcrafted wooden ducks from retired Vermont maple trees and puppets made by Guatemalan victims of domestic violence and other things of that ilk. Once, even, when I was six and learning to read big words by reading Anne Sexton's Transformations aloud, I stumbled on penultimate. I sighed and blew the bangs off my head and said, "I can't do it."
    Vi smiled unperturbed over her knitting, and said, "Sure you can,
    Sunshine."
    I threw the book across the room. "No," I said. "I can't."
    My mother pursed her lips, stood, went to the kitchen, made a whole plateful of whole-wheat graham crackers with natural peanut butter and local honey, and came back. She slowly began eating one with little moans of delight until I stood and reached for one, but then she held the plate away, and opened the book and put it back in my lap.
    I knew what she was