The Angry Woman Suite by Lee Fullbright

horrid children in the schoolyard, like Earl and the women of Grayson House.
    Was that such a terrible thing, wanting to save my girls? Wanting to instill honor where there had been none?
    So there you have it. Long story short, I am not the victim my daughter Elyse will try telling you I paint myself as. Nor did I ever abuse a child. Ever. Elyse is a pathological liar—she needs help. Professional help. I’m the one who was abused. Truth is, I’m a man who did his best with what he had to work with, and, plain and simple, I wasn't given much. The rest of my truth is that Elyse, like everyone else, starting with the women of Grayson House, and Earl, and progressing right through my very first day of school, crapped on me.
    But I digress.
    “Back off, Billy.” To my amazement Billy did back off, and the hecklers scattered. I looked up into the blue-gray eyes of Aidan Madsen, the schoolmaster I knew mainly by reputation, although we had spoken once before. A bit of a celebrity with his “Folks at Home” radio show on WDEL, featuring his Delaware Boys band, Aidan Madsen was a common sight on roadsides: a tall, athletic figure in vest and jacket, a fiddle case in one hand and a battered briefcase in the other, hitching rides in and out of East Chester.
    I eyed Aidan Madsen warily, wondering if he remembered me, thinking he probably didn’t; I wasn’t like Earl. Stupid Earl had presence, and he had timing; Grandmother just didn’t give Earl enough credit. Earl knew exactly what to say and when to say it, especially if he thought it would save his sorry hide. But I didn't have presence or timing. I was only five years old, a small five, a born scapegoat.
    Earl wasn’t so tall either, even for fifteen, but whereas Earl was stocky and already had broad shoulders, I was slight. I’d no shoulders to speak of, and no promise of any, and my legs, the parts that showed between the hems of my pants and the tops of my socks, were toothpick-thin; straight, milky lines broken only by the joints of my big, knobby knees. Earl was blond, but my dark hair, almost black actually, accentuated my paleness. And then there were my hands. No one else in the family had hands like mine. Earl called them spider hands. Did I mention Earl was a pissant? But my hands were thin and bony with abnormally long fingers, and I kept them in my pockets as much as I dared, which wasn't as much as I’d have liked, because if the women saw me with my hands in my pockets, I got the big lecture on how gentlemen did not walk around with their hands in their pockets; how gentlemen always walked with their shoulders back and their arms loose and relaxed at their sides; how gentlemen did not hum or sing to themselves. Humming and hands in pockets were bad habits, like biting one’s fingernails, and everyone knew bad habits were, well, bad.
    I couldn’t bear it if Aidan Madsen remembered me. We’d only spoken that once, when I wasn’t yet five, on that rare day I’d accompanied Mother into East Chester to purchase the supplies we neither grew nor recycled. Mr. Madsen had bid Mother good morning, and I’d been amazed that a famous gentleman such as Mr. Madsen, who had, the women said, won the Delaware Valley Industrial Editors’ Man of the Year Award for “communicating the American Way of Life in and out of the Delaware Valley,” knew who Mother was. Mainly I was amazed he even acknowledged her. Most people walked by us with their noses in the air.
    “Ignore them,” Mother always said, referring to the shopkeepers who looked at a point past Mother’s shoulder while taking her money. “They have small minds. Hold your head up, Francis. And for heaven’s sake, stop humming.”
    I pretty much assumed all people heard disjointed bits of composition in their heads, just that mine came out more readily than most. What I couldn’t figure, though, was why humming should bother Mother so much when the bigger problem, it seemed to me, was that people looked