Enclosed is a letter I received last week from the woman I was involved with when I first met your mother. It seems to me that you might be curious one day about how your father was perceived by paramours, and between the enclosed letter and whatever your mother tells you, some truth is bound to emerge.

Or maybe not. Pleasant companionship between your mother and me, due to some mysterious force that outweighs our respective charms, is scientifically proven to have a half-life measured best with a stopwatch, and the woman who wrote the enclosed letter has gone barking mad at least twice in her life. I was with her for the second bout of insanity.

I was married to a high school sweetheart a few weeks before my 21st birthday, and the separation that followed twenty months later left me bewildered, numb, and even less rational than most men are at that age. On a Saturday night two months after the separation, still reflecting on Marianne's statement that my introverted nature had been a major factor in her decision to help me pack, I ran into her in a Korean restaurant/punk rock bar. "Introverted? I'll show her introverted," I thought, encouraged by those ever-helpful friends, Ernest and Julio. If perceived introversion was the problem, I reasoned, then my having sex with the mother of the punk band bassist, who was only three years younger than I was, right in front of the stage would certainly solve it.

Afterwards, the recipient of my affections asked me if I was drunk. Well, Southern men of my generation did not at that time admit to drunkenness. Picturing ourselves as almost peers of Jeb Stuart's heroes, we did our best to project the image of hard-drinking, invulnerable cavaliers, impervious to anything so mild as the effects of alcohol. In other words, my response to the bass player's mother was, "Certainly not," which presented me with a bit of a challenge when she went on to say, "Good, then you'll remember my phone number," which she then recited to me.

Instructed to call her before one o'clock the next afternoon for reasons I had not yet fathomed, I resolved to do so, but to not be trapped into any contact beyond a brief, polite phone conversation. "Call her to prove that I wasn't drunk when I lifted her skirt on the punk rock bar dance floor, wish her a nice day and be done with it," was the extent of my plan. A determined older woman, however, can make mincemeat of a college boy's rough plans and overcome every obstacle he can dream up. She lectured me for calling late, because her minister husband would return from his church duties in a nearby small town by two. Fourteen months later, while I was living with her and Jennifer, her thirteen-year old daughter, the minister's wife cracked. 

I don't remember the exact order of events, but the events were these:

1) The owners of a Taiwanese gift shop came to the house to take back approximately $200.00 worth of merchandise ranging from tasseled white plastic elephant statuettes to tasseled cardboard fans that she had admired enough to purchase with a bad check

2) She fully stocked the bar with brandy, whiskey, vodka, gin and tequila, then two days later poured out every drop of liquor in the house, including the pint of bourbon I kept hidden in a hiking boot at the back of my closet

3) She attempted to buy, with no income other than the child support she was receiving from the minister, three houses with elevators and swimming pools(only two also featured live-in French gardeners). One of these mansions was promised to little Jennifer; the other two were to be maintained as lodgings for the agents of The Lord, who were expected to arrive in Richmond shortly to confer with her eleven-year old son. I studied the boy once more, but still saw little enthusiasm for anything beyond that next roll of quarters for the video arcade up the street.

4) Feeling sudden pain as I tried to sleep one night, I woke to an exorcism in progress, a hand covered in molten candle wax and, when I said, "God damn it to Hell," as a simple, obvious reflex, a sharp blow from a brass candelabrum. Pointing out that those demons had been with me longer than she had and had earned squatters' rights did not quell her ambition to rid me of their relatively lucid company.

5. It was around Day Four of her Ten Days Without Sleep that I found her in the back yard, completely nude on a frosty March Virginia morning, making some sort of symbolic figurines out of garbage can twist ties and pineapple chunks. I think it was a rather abstract Nativity scene. At least Jennifer agreed when I shared this tableau with her to go out to the suburbs and stay with her father for a few days.

6. Therefore, it must have been before 5 (above) that I came home from afternoon college classes to find Flyblown and Fleabit, Jennifer's two Shetland ponies, inside our inner city apartment instead of in her father's suburban pasture. The minister's wife had brought them to town one at a time in the back of her Dodge Colt station wagon so that Jennifer would no longer miss the amenities of country life unnecessarily. I don't know who hated this situation more -- Me, the goddam ponies, or the downstairs neighbors -- but I drove Flyblown and Fleabit back to the minister's place myself.

After 240 continuous waking hours of bizarreness, the woman went to sleep and awoke eight hours later as rational as she had ever been. Her husband later told me that she had done much the same thing twenty years early, but I was determined to carry out the threat I had made late on the Ninth Day. I had said that I was going to pack my things and leave if she didn't become sane again immediately. She didn't and I did, that is, I packed and tortured her with the vision of all those bags and boxes for another few weeks until the college semester ended, at which point I put everything in storage, bought a new Volkswagon camper van, and went to spend the summer floating around the pool drinking daiquiris in Shreveport.