Two Rivers

Read Two Rivers for Free Online

Book: Read Two Rivers for Free Online
Authors: T. Greenwood
unspoken between them.
    My mother, Helen Wilder, met Charlie Montgomery at Middlebury College, where Charlie, my father, was studying engineering, and she, music. They married not long after they graduated and, despite more grandiose plans, moved to Two Rivers when my grandmother died, leaving them the house that my father had grown up in. Convinced that they might be able to save some money before moving on, my mother agreed to spend the first few years of their married life in Two Rivers. My father accepted a job at the Two Rivers Paper Company, and my mother taught piano. But when she became pregnant with me, she must have known that her tenure in Two Rivers would last more than a few years. And before she knew it, I figure, she had probably resigned herself to bake sales instead of classical performances—to the quotidian life of a New England housewife instead of the glamour of a concert pianist’s.
    The truth was, though I adored my mother, I was also embarrassed by her. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mother. Not my best friend, Ray’s, not Betsy’s either. She was fluent in French ( Parisian French, she emphasized, not the bastardized French of Two Rivers’s French Canadian population), and she had even been to France as a foreign exchange student while in college. She was constantly using French vocabulary when English, in her opinion, would not suffice. This, like much about my mother, was upsetting to the regular people in Two Rivers. First of all, she hadn’t taken my father’s name when she got married, convincing many people that they weren’t married at all but simply living in sin. She didn’t cook and she didn’t know how to sew. She wrote angry letters to the editor of the local paper and she refused to wear skirts. And, perhaps worst of all, instead of reading Redbook or Ladies’ Home Journal , she had the Rexall order one issue of The New York Times every week. This would have been fine, except that she insisted on picking it up each Sunday morning when everyone else was just getting out of church and stopping at the drugstore for their Sunday sundries. Thanks to The New York Times , everyone in Two Rivers knew that Helen Wilder did not believe in God.
    Betsy’s mother, on the other hand, had learned everything she knew from magazines: glorious glossy magazines that were spread out in full-colored fans on every end table in the house. She made cupcakes that looked like witches at Halloween and robin’s nests at Easter. Mrs. Parker believed wholeheartedly in God and went to church every Sunday in dresses she made herself from crinkly patterns that smelled like dust. Later, Betsy would let me hold the fragile parchment only after I’d washed my hands.
    The summer that we were twelve, I fell in love twice. First with Betsy Parker, and then with her mother.
    For a whole week after I’d spoken to Betsy outside her father’s barbershop, I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to go see her again. I didn’t need a haircut, or else I would have just returned to the barbershop. My father considered himself a competent lay barber and methodically cut my hair on the last day of every month (outside so as to avoid getting any hair on the floors, which already generated near tumbleweed-sized dust balls). Finally, after much rumination, I concocted a story about needing to borrow sugar.
    It was a typical Saturday; my mother was curled up on the overstuffed chair in our living room lost inside a book, and my father was in the basement working on his folding machine. It had to have been eighty degrees outside, but my parents were inside people. Especially in the summer. My mother abhorred the sun, and my father preferred his basement workshop to the outdoors. As soon as I was allowed to operate the lawn mower, I took it upon myself to tend to the overgrown and unruly chaos that was our yard, but then, when I was only twelve and not allowed to touch anything with a motor, I made my way through the

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