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would be no school for me at all. (Guam was once discussed.) I feared I’d end up knowing nothing, have nothing to rely on that could distinguish me. I’m sure it was all an inheritance from my mother’s feelings of an unrewarded life. Though it may also have been that our parents, aswirl in the thickening confusion of their own young lives—not being made for each other, probably not physically desiring each other as they briefly had, becoming gradually only satellites of each other, and coming eventually to resent one another without completely realizing it—didn’t offer my sister and me enough to hold on to, which is what parents are supposed to do. However, blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.

Chapter 3
    W HEN OUR FATHER TOOK HIS DISCHARGE IN the early spring, we were all of us interested in the presidential campaign then going on. They agreed about the Democrats and Kennedy, who’d soon be nominated. My mother said my father liked Kennedy because he imagined a resemblance. My father profoundly disliked Eisenhower for reasons having to do with American bombers being sacrificed to “softening up Jerry” behind the lines on D-Day, and due to Eisenhower’s traitorous silence about MacArthur, who my father revered, and because Ike’s wife was known to be “a tippler.”
    He disliked Nixon as well. He was a “cold fish,” “looked Italian,” and was a “war Quaker,” which made him a hypocrite. He also disliked the UN, which he thought was too expensive and allowed Commies like Castro (who he called a “two-bit actor”) to have a voice in the world. He kept a framed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in our living room on the wall above the Kimball spinet and the mahogany and brass metronome that didn’t work but came with the house. He praised Roosevelt for not letting polio defeat him, for killing himself with work to save the country, for bringing the Alabama backwoods out of the dark ages with the REA, and for putting up with Mrs. Roosevelt who he called “The First Prune.”
    My father maintained a strong ambivalence about being from Alabama. On the one hand, he pictured himself as a “modern man” and not a “hill-William,” as he said. He held modern views about many things—such as race, from having worked alongside Negroes in the Air Force. He felt Martin Luther King was a man of principle and Eisenhower’s civil rights act was badly needed. He felt the rights of women needed a fairer shake, and that war was a tragedy and a waste he knew about intimately.
    On the other hand, when our mother said something slighting about the South—which she often did—he grew broody and declared Lee and Jeff Davis to be “men of substance,” even though their cause had misled them. Many good things had come from the South, he said, including more than the cotton gin and water skis. “Perhaps you could name me one,” my mother would say, “naturally excluding yourself, of course.”
    The instant he quit putting on his Air Force blues and going to the base, our father found a job selling new Oldsmobile cars. He felt he’d be a natural at selling. His warm personality—happy, welcoming, congenial, confident, talk-a-blue-streak—would attract strangers and make what other people found difficult easy for him. Customers would trust him because he was a southerner, and southerners were known to be more down to earth than silent westerners. Money would start coming in once the model year ended and the big sales discounts kicked up the values. For his job, he was given a pink-and-gray Oldsmobile Super-88 to use as a demonstrator, which he parked in front of our house on First Avenue SW, where it would serve as good advertising. He took all of us for drives out to Fairfield, toward the mountains, and east toward Lewistown and south in the direction of Helena. “Orientation-explanatory-performance checks,” he called these day trips—though he knew little of the