15 July 1998: Walter and BJWL

When I was in middle school I had to share music stand with one Walter X, the other 3^rd clarinetist. All we had in common was our lousy clarinet playing. Well, also that we each considered the other an ugly freak and that our social standing was considerably marred by this association. But also the fact that we had no social standing which said association could mar.

Naturally we voiced our individual dissatisfaction to our mothers, who, being mothers, severally interpreted our griping as childish expression of actual Like. After a band performance, my mother told me Walter was a handsome boy. I gagged, realizing she thought I Liked him and needed encouragement, but luckily I had the presence of mind not to strengthen her convictions by any vociferous if veracious denial.

Soon after, Walter sneeringly volunteered to me that his mother thought me a pretty girl; his sneer implied both her mistake and his disagreement with that opinion. However much I disliked him, I was willing to talk to him if the subject was mother-stupidity, so I responded with my own mother's similar comment and grimacing a similar sneer.

He was a year ahead of me and my eighth grade year was happily Walter-free. Going into ninth grade, I opted for Latin, which was offered in the same period as band. Besides that I did want to learn Latin, I had no intention of sharing a music stand with him, and thus the association and proximity, again. The possibility that I improve my playing enough to be a 2^nd clarinet and share with someone else didn't occur to me until years later; and the low demand for Latin meant I could only take it for one year whereas band would've lasted throughout high school, at least one of whose years would have been again Walter-free.

So we were both losers, clarinet-wise.

However, we were not both losers ugly-wise. I should point out that when our respective mothers first complimented the other child, they both were lying through their teeth. Walter was gangling, obscenely freckled, squinty-eyed, possessed of a nose properly belonging to some other species, undeservedly arrogant, foul-mouthed, and on the whole entirely unprepossessing. I, on the other hand, suffered from nothing a little independence from my mother and orthodontist wouldn't cure. My hair was mutating from curls to the sort of gruesome waves that makes one's head look corrugated. I wore those unflattering early-80s plastic framed glasses, with bifocals. I was an unpopular outsider and my public behavior reflected my alienation. Also my face looked off because of a strange retainer I continually masticated.

Let us now skip to my twelfth grade and the last I ever heard of Walter X. In the interim, independence had seen me past braces, through a flattering hair cut, into contact lenses, and with enough self-confidence that my continued unpopularity no longer bothered me quite so much.

My mother looked up from her Old Lyme Gazette one evening (funny how all these mother-epiphanies happened over a local paper). Did I know a Walter X, she asked? I reminded her of our tortured acquaintance. She told me he had been arrested, and when she told me for what charge, I was not at all surprised.

"That surprises me not at all," I told her. "When he was in high school [the vice principal] eventually suspended him because he kept kissing girls in the cafeteria at lunch." This is something that very young elementary school boys and girls do at recess; his grade level had progressed to where he no longer had recess but his social and emotional level had clearly been retarded (to match his clarinet playing).

"You never told me that," my mother replied, implying thereby that I was inventing the tale on the fly.

"No, in fact I'm not," I told her, used to her belittling me. "If I never mentioned it, it's because I consider him unworthy of attention" (I read a lot of Ayn Rand that year) and silently added that I seldom volunteered anything to her anyway--when someone assumes your pointed dislike of something is disguised Like, it becomes tireless and pointless to tell her much of anything, especially further gossip about the supposed Like-object, even his letters in the school paper about the decline of the family and all social ills being caused exclusively by women's "lib."

Anyway, given the charge, she appeared to believe me. He'd been arrested for sexual assault.

The boy whom I had disliked from the start but whom she had prodded me toward was not simply charged with sexual assault but guilty also. She has such dependable taste in men.

Conclusion: the only two boys in my life whom my mother has ever liked were Walter and Bill (whose car she dashed to on our third and last date to get a glimpse of, against my explicitly stated request, and whom she liked, it's true, for the same reason I dated him: he was a novelty).

However hapless my relationships before or since (mostly since)--BMA, PSA, NCS, PLT, SSP, and RDC--she has roundly and undisguisedly a) disliked the boy and b) either because of a) or because she didn't choose the boy herself, disapproved of the relationship.

I dated one KFC for a few weeks my freshling year of school. My parents came up together on Presidents' Day to take me out to lunch (but not to tell me that my father had moved back into my mother's house, as had indeed happened that weekend) and among my news was this man. I told them what town he was from and what his major was. "Accounting," my father mused. "Is he Jewish?"

"I have no idea." How did one even know? Why would one care? Nothing in my WASPy background had led me to assume or deduce anything from a name or nose. Meeting anyone Jewish, knowing anyone Jewish, was beyond my ken. My father cared, irreligious though he be.

"Well, what's his last name?"

It was a decent God-fearing (Christian God, that is) Scandinavian name, and my father asked nothing else.

When I first met RDC, I thought he looked Jewish. He alleges he looks unmistakably Italian. Whatever; I still didn't care. My mother cared, irreligious though she was [note my parents' religious standings get different tenses]. Upon my introducing him to her, and her repeating, mangledly, his multisyllablic and uncommon surname, her first question was, "What kind of a name is that, dear?"