Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: A great first line, in fiction or literary nonfiction, can grab your attention, give you a sense of character, provide some context for the story, and entice you with a hint of what’s to come. A great first line does all that and also hits you with the electric shock of voice and tone. Julie Marie Wade’s extraordinary essay, “Mrs. Williams [Or a Study of Postmodernism and the Many Ways that Walls Are Broken],” begins with such a line and then goes on to deliver a triple power punch of story, character, and insight into the darker regions of the human heart. “I have to be frank with you: this story won’t end well, no matter how I tell it,” Wade begins, and from there we embark on an odyssey that interrogates youthful angst, gender roles, and enigmatic danger with plenty of delightful details along the way. From Lutheran Bundt cakes to lip-shaped bedroom telephones, and the deeper message of finding one’s way in an ambiguous world, this essay stayed with me long after the first reading.

Writer’s Statement: I’ve written a lot about my own mother as a formative influence and fraught figure in my coming of age, and at some point, more than a decade ago now, I realized I wanted to shift the gaze of my creative nonfiction toward other mothers—the way childhood and adolescence are not only shaped by the happenings in our own households but also by what we witness in other homes as we observe our friends’ lives and their families’ ordinary and idiosyncratic dynamics. This project has made me wonder if there is such a thing as “ordinary” after all.

“Mrs. Williams [Or a Study of Postmodernism and the Many Ways That Walls Are Broken]” is the final essay-chapter in my forthcoming collection, Other People’s Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025). In many ways, it was the hardest and most necessary of these pieces to write, as it marked for me an awakening about safety, danger, and the ongoing ambiguity concerning who we can trust. Did Mrs. Williams know what was happening in her household? Did she ever suspect her husband of any misdeeds? I’ll never be sure, but I feel great empathy for her and her family, and I still think fondly of the friendship I shared with her daughter during that brief, intense time during our middle school years. 

Please note that names have been changed to protect the privacy of those represented in this work of memoir. 

---

Mrs. Williams [Or, A Study of Postmodernism and the Many Ways That Walls Are Broken]

I have to be frank with you: this story won’t end well, no matter how I tell it. If that’s a deal-breaker, then you might want to quit while you’re ahead—flip through a magazine instead, or find the best thing on television.

Jenna Williams was a writer, and I was too, which brought us together in the beginning and set us apart in the end. It wasn’t the writing exactly, you understand, but what we believed about it. Jenna always said, “There are some things you just can’t write your way out of.” If I had taken her word for it, I wouldn’t be writing this now.

I met Jenna when she was in sixth grade and I was in seventh. I had skipped sixth grade at my old school to get out of a bad situation, but ironically, I ended up in a worse one at the Calvary Lutheran Church-School on Thirty-Fifth Avenue. My mother loved a bargain, and as it happened, she and my father had been shopping for a new church ever since my mother’s unfortunate alienation of the entire congregation at our old church, St. Paul’s of Shorewood Lutheran on Twenty-First Avenue. Fourteen blocks was just far enough to make a fresh start in West Seattle, and it turned out that if you transferred your membership to Calvary, you could send a child to school there for 20 percent off. This is what they mean about two birds with one stone.

The Williams also may have joined the church for pecuniary reasons. They were a single-income family, since Mr. Williams didn’t work, and the multi-child discount surely proved appealing. Calvary was so desperate to boost enrollment then that you could educate two kids in church-school for little more than the price of one. Tithing was expected of course, but my mother thought you could bring a Bundt cake to coffee hour and call it even. Who knows? Maybe the Williams did too.

That first Sunday was an exercise in hyperbole. My mother wore too much perfume and a straw hat swathed with gauzy purple ribbon. I think she was going as Anne of the Island. She dressed my father in a burgundy sweater vest and gray sport coat, even though it was August and sweat was pooling in the dent under everyone’s nose. My ensemble was pink and trimmed with lace, a ruffled mistake my mother had snagged from the clearance rack at JCPenney. “Glinda called; she wants her dress back,” someone might have said, but mercifully, no one was using that rhetorical construction yet.

From our place in the last pew, I scanned the room of receding hairlines and elastic-waist pants, walkers propped on tennis balls protruding into the aisles. For some reason, Lutheran seemed to be synonymous with old. Perhaps the Lutherans recruited so hard because their core contingent was dying off and soon there would be no one left to light the candles or water the ferns or bake those obligatory Bundt cakes. But if these hymn-singing elders thought I was sticking around, they had another thing coming. My contacts in college had already confirmed that chapel was optional and nylons nothing but a scratchy relic of the past.

When I glanced over at the pew beside ours, I saw Jenna, a tall, sturdy girl with Barbie-blond hair and cheeks perpetually scorched—like she was always blushing and could never stop. She was giving me the once-over too, with her big cornflower-blue eyes. I bowed my head and pretended to read my bulletin. When I looked up again, she put her pointer finger to her temple and made the shape of a gun. As the organ music swelled to the top of the treble clef, she flicked her thumb and fired.

I liked Jenna instantly. She had the round, expressive face of a Disney character, impish and kind at the same time. She was the sort of girl who would have been thoroughly believable as a plucky sidekick in a sitcom or a film, the one who plays Janeane Garofalo to another girl’s Meg Ryan, the one who doesn’t believe she’s as pretty as she really is, or—sadly—as worthy of love.

Like all the girls I knew, Jenna also had a mother. For better or worse, there seemed no getting around this fact. Mrs. Williams was a short, svelte woman in tailored slacks who stood beside her daughter, holding the hymnal with an air of formality but merely mouthing the words. I admired her low investment in this task, the way she didn’t seem out to impress anyone with gusto, feigned or otherwise. Mrs. Williams’s hair had once been blond too, I could tell, but it had since turned the color of ash and sand and was styled like Diane Keaton’s in every movie since Annie Hall—which I wasn’t allowed to watch, by the way, because my mother hated Woody Allen. I had seen the video case at the library plenty of times, though, and the fact was, Mrs. Williams looked a lot like Diane Keaton. If only she had worn the ties!

My eyes rolled over the Williams clan as though they were beads on an abacus. I had done this with my own family too, countless times, wanting us all to add up to something—a story that made sense. Jenna’s brother was small and nondescript, Kieran Culkin in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He knelt and slid his toy trucks along the pew, and his mother, who had let him wear the T-shirt and jeans to begin with (to church, of all places! my mother would shriek), didn’t force him to stand.

Mr. Williams towered above the rest of the family. I knew of no celebrity equivalent for him, except maybe Raymond Burr in the new Perry Mason made-for-TV movies. Not that he was as old as Raymond Burr, mind you, but similarly imposing and sad. His flesh seemed to fold into layers, and a thin navy sweater stretched across his chest like a tent with a wide pole through the middle. The pants beneath him hung low and were belted to his torso in such a way that I could imagine him tipping from side to side like a teapot, never moving forward or back. When the time came for communion, I noted that he did not join his family at the altar.

* * *

“So, do you go to the school too, or just the church?” Jenna asked, cutting ahead of me in line for donut holes. By school, she meant the portables in the parking lot, where I had recently taken a series of exams to prove I could enroll in seventh grade.

“Starting next week,” I said. “You?”

“Same.” She crammed as many donut holes into her cheeks as she could, which gave her the likeness of a flushed blowfish or an embarrassed chipmunk—a cartoon character either way. When she swallowed at last, with an acoustic gulp, Jenna motioned for me to follow her outside.

“What grade?”

“Seventh,” I said.

Her rosy balloon-cheeks inflated again, and she sighed. “Really? You don’t look the type.”

“To be in seventh grade?”

“No, Silly—to be a delinquent. I’m Jenna, by the way.” She took a swig of watery fruit punch in a Dixie cup and sized me up some more.

“A delinquent? I’m not a delinquent.” What delinquent ever dressed like the Good Witch of the North? “I’m Julie,” I told her, and put out my hand.

Jenna slapped me five and continued. Maybe she thought handshakes were for burly old men and tinny-voiced ladies. Maybe she was right. “Look, from what my parents told me, the seventh-eighth grade combination class is mostly for delinquents. They added the middle school just last year because so many kids in this part of town have been flunking out of public school. A lot of their parents and grandparents go to church here, so it’s a good market for rehabilitation.”

“Well, how am I going to fit in with a bunch of delinquents?” I asked, half-rhetorically, gazing across the staggered rows of cars to the big brown architectural turds that were soon to become Matriculation Central.

“Oh, you’re not,” Jenna laughed, but there was no malice in it. She poked her Birkenstocks through the gaps in the railing, wiped her hands on her paisley skirt. “It’s no big deal,” she promised. “I’m a misfit too, so we’ll look for each other at recess.”

* * *

My parents assured me that Jenna Williams must have had a fanciful imagination, because there was no way on earth they would enroll any daughter of theirs in a middle school for delinquents, even to save a buck. Since I was their only daughter, I assumed they were telling the truth. However, just crossing the parking lot that first morning gave me reason to doubt. Several boy-men who were roughly seven feet tall and sporting patchy beards and pirate-style earrings barked at me as they pulled Marlboros and beef jerky from the pockets of their puffy parkas. (It was, of course, much too warm for such parkas to begin with.) A girl named Danica tugged the plastic barrette out of my hair with one swift motion and pitched it to another girl who crushed it under one of her knee-high combat boots and laughed. “I’ve heard of easy targets, but this is fucking pitiful,” she said, then spat something on the ground that looked like tar. Before I reached the portable’s door, a semi-normal girl wearing a denim skort and a cross around her neck approached me. I sighed with relief and smiled.

“Is anyone home at your house?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “My mom just dropped me off.”

“Better check anyway,” she grinned, flashing her multicolored braces. Then, as she punched me hard in each of my small doughy breasts, she shouted triumphantly, “Ding! Dong!”

* * *

Jenna sought me out as promised on the parking lot-turned-playground, her steno pad open with a pencil lodged in the coils, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. She looked older and oddly secretarial, like she was getting ready to take shorthand or something. Soon, I’d learn that Jenna thought of clothes as costumes: she always dressed as somebody else.

“Shell-shocked?” she asked, leaning beside me on the cyclone fence. I could tell from her tone it wasn’t really a question.

“I’m not sure this is going to work out,” I said. “Maybe I should ask if I can transfer back to sixth grade.”

“Do not do that!” Jenna commanded, tearing a pack of Skittles with her teeth. “Has your cheese slid completely off the cracker?”

“But we could be in the same grade. We could—”

“You want to trade Christjaener for Hoffman? You want to give up flying under the radar, doing anything you want, for a whole year of nonstop surveillance? We can’t even go to the bathroom without a hall pass.” Jenna shook the rainbow candies into her mouth, tipping her head back like she was planning to gargle. “It’s a police state in there, and we’re not even the delinquents.”

Police state? Really? “Where did you go to school before this?”

“I was homeschooled,” Jenna said, “but that’s completely beside the point.”

“So, is your mom a teacher or something?”

“Colleen? Are you kidding? She’s a lawyer. Don’t get me wrong—she’s cool and stylish, and whip-smart. But she isn’t exactly the motherly type.”

“What?” I felt breathless just listening to Jenna, the certainty of her delivery as surprising as the content of her speech. “You call your mother by her first name?”

“Only sometimes,” she said, giving her pencil a thoughtful chew. “And mostly just to piss her off.”

* * *

Within a few weeks, I’d been cleared for after-school visits at the Williams house. My mother, a former schoolteacher, was studying to become a bank teller and could use the extra time to herself.

“I know it’s a tight squeeze back there,” Mr. Williams said, making an apologetic face in the rearview of the family’s low-riding Cadillac with the torn-up seats and tinted windows. For a luxury car, it no longer seemed so luxurious. Rather, it was dirty and cramped and smelled faintly of unwashed dog. “I forgot Jenna was bringing a friend home, so I didn’t think to take in the hymnals.”

Before I could ask, Jenna explained. She was always good that way—reading people’s minds, intercepting their questions, never letting anything linger. “My dad volunteers a lot. He repairs books when they start to fall apart. These are for the Kenney Home.”

“That’s nice.” I smiled, and Mr. Williams smiled back, his small black eyes disappearing into the flesh around the sockets.

“Who wants a Slurpee?” he asked.

“I do! I do!” Jenna’s brother, Mark, lurched forward in the passenger seat. His newly spiked hair rose like a rooster’s comb just above the headrest.

“What about you girls?”

My mother was watching my weight, and I was watching her watch it, but this wasn’t something I felt comfortable saying out loud. Instead, “That’s okay. I’m still pretty full from lunch.”

“I need some Corn Nuts stat, Dad,” Jenna said, as he made a sharp turn into the mini-mart.

From the glove box, he withdrew an accordion wallet pleated with bills. “Pump some gas while you’re at it,” he told Jenna. “And get me some nachos, Son.”

When they were gone, I opened my math pack and the graph-paper notebook with light-green lines. Mr. Williams’s arm stretched the length of the bench seat, and he turned halfway around so he could see what I was doing. “Algebra?” he asked.

“Pre.”

“Are you good at it? Are you good at math? I think Jenna really needs a tutor.”

“She seems pretty whip-smart to me,” I said, borrowing her word.

“Oh, she’s smart,” he said, nodding. “No doubt about it. Both my kids are smart, but they’re not so much for the standardized tests, you know? They don’t show up real bright on the record.”

“Were you their teacher?” I asked, glancing at him now. He had turned off the engine but kept the windows rolled up; soon, a boa of sweat had wrapped around my neck.

“You could call it that.” Mr. Williams laughed, letting his fingers dangle over the seat now, a gondolier testing the waters. “I did my best, but sometimes I think my wife’s the one with all the brains in the family. Anyway, if you decide you want to earn a few extra bucks, I’d be happy to have you work with Jenna. Minimal supervision, I promise.” He laughed again and slowly retracted his fingers.

* * *

Jenna wasn’t great with spelling or punctuation, I’d soon observe, but she was prolific and original, her mind a relentless conveyor belt of ideas. She wrote poems and stories and op-ed pieces for a newspaper that didn’t exist, and what she really wanted to be when she grew up was a playwright. “Not exactly like Shakespeare,” she said. “More like Mamet. I want to make tragedy funny—and cuss a lot in print.”

I didn’t know who this Mamet was, but I could tell our aesthetics didn’t quite jive. I thought comedies should make you laugh, and tragedies should make you cry. I thought you should let your audience know what they were in for and not pull some crazy punches at the end.

“I used to want to be a puppeteer,” Jenna explained to me that first day when we climbed the long staircase to her front porch, our hands full of hymnals and food-stuffs. We looked like we’d robbed a church and moved right on to a movie-theater concession stand. “But then I realized I was just being self-conscious about my face, and I shouldn’t be, right? I mean, someone has to make the average girls look hot.” I remembered the term for this was self-deprecating humor. “Now I can see myself being writer, actor, and director, but I’ll probably start out as a dramaturge.”

My head was spinning like those plates in Greek restaurants, except I’d never actually been to a Greek restaurant because my mother believed the whole Mediterranean was full of sleazy men with twisty mustaches who only wanted to pinch and fondle American girls. I had, however, seen those spinning plates somewhere in films.

“I don’t know what a dramaturge is,” I confessed, and this was startling too—the way I’d grown accustomed to having the best vocabulary in the room.

“Don’t worry,” Jenna said, kicking the front door open with the heel of her rain-stained cowboy boots. “I’ll fill you in on everything.”

* * *

Everything, in this case, meant a national competition called Odyssey of the Mind that Jenna was hell-bent on entering. “I want to get Liann and Mindy and some of the other girls from my grade to do it, and since you’re technically supposed to be in sixth grade anyway, you can compete with us. It’s going to be a blast.”

“And what is it exactly?”

“All in good time,” she promised, dumping the hymnals on the dining-room table and leading me into the kitchen. “What do you want to drink?”

“I’m fine with water,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous. Nobody’s fine with water. Have a soda,” she said, “or some Tang or something. Mark! Will you go feed Beau and the rabbits?”

“You have rabbits?”

“We used to have more, but we’re down to sixteen, give or take. Straw?” She held out a bag of fifty bendy straws, and I took one just to be polite.

“Where are they—your rabbits?”

“In the backyard,” Jenna said, gesturing toward the window. “We have to keep them in hutches, of course, or the dog will lose his mind.” She took a soup spoon to a jar of peanut butter, got a decadent scoop, then held the spoon in her mouth as she led me up another set of stairs with a rickety white banister. The ceiling seemed to close in around us on our ascent. “Old houses,” Jenna muttered, the peanut butter still gluey between her lips, the spoon clanging to the floor. I noticed with some amazement that she never went back to reclaim it. “But do you know what is so frickin’ awesome about this place? It’s over one hundred years old, and every spring we’re featured on the Historic Homes Tour!”

* * *

If my mom had been there—which, thankfully, she wasn’t—I’m pretty sure she would have described Jenna’s room as “squalid,” “putrid,” probably a “hovel,” since my mother was especially fond of condemning nouns. But Jenna called the room her “garret,” which suited her perfectly as an artist, she said. She twirled around the overflowing hamper, then stripped down to her skivvies and went searching through the bedsheets for her sweats.

“See that house out there, the big colonial on the other side of the tennis courts?” Jenna unhooked her bra, which was my intuitive cue to look away.

I perched on the window seat, the wrappers of several Mars bars crinkling beneath me. “I think so,” I said, but really all I saw were the hemlocks and the live oaks, steadfast as ever, with their leaves that never changed.

“That is Matthew McDaniel’s house. He goes to Blanchet and lettered last year in cross-country and crew. And if it seems like I know everything about him,” Jenna said, standing on the window seat and tying back the curtains with two of what I assumed were her father’s handkerchiefs, “it’s because I do. I fully intend to marry him in ten years, and he will most definitely be taking me to my senior prom.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. Jenna didn’t speak in suppositions. For her, saying something seemed to make it true.

“Okay, so, let’s get down to business.” She was wearing one pink sock and one green, but this may have been on purpose. She opened the bag of Corn Nuts and began to pace around the room. “I’m really into this idea of postmodern theater. Does that mean anything to you?”

I shrugged. “Not really. I know I like musicals, and I’m partial to a good British farce.”

Jenna shot me with one of her scrunchies. “Get serious, Julie! That’s so passé. We’re never going to win Odyssey of the Mind with something textbook. Do you know about breaking the fourth wall?”

I wanted to come up with a clever response, but instead I opened my Coke and dug around in my book bag for the straw.

“Basically, it’s when you’re watching a show, and the characters seem at first only to be talking to each other. Then, suddenly, they start talking to you, the person in the audience. They step out of character to deliver a message or reveal something about the script. Breaking the fourth wall is the moment when a production goes meta.”

“So—just to make sure I’m following—you want to enter this play competition—”

Jenna leapt to her feet and rummaged through her desk until she found a colorful brochure, which she promptly thrust into my hands. “Not a play competition exactly. Odyssey of the Mind is an exercise in problem-solving through performance. I want to play with the idea of walls and breaking them down. We could make a bunch of bricks out of papier-mâché and stack them into walls of varying heights. But then I was trying to figure out about the historical component. The judges like there to be something with math or social studies or literature, and then it hit me—THE BERLIN WALL!” She was the most animated I had ever seen her, and her cheeks glowed as red as the star on a San Pellegrino bottle. I had tripped over one on the floor. “And you know how people were taking pieces of it home and selling pieces of it, and they’re only just now really saying that they’ve finished dismantling it?” I nodded again, but to be honest, I hadn’t been keeping up with the news.

“Oh my god, Julie! Oh my god!” Jenna flung open the double doors to her closet. She had the kind of crystal doorknobs that I liked. “I think I have a Ronald Reagan mask! And if it’s not in here, it’ll be in Mark’s room. I wore it for Halloween a couple years ago. Don’t you remember—when he was saying to Gorbachev, ‘Tear down this wall!’ Well, I could say that, and we could have pickaxes and wheelbarrows on stage, and—” Jenna lunged toward me, feverish with joy, and swept my neatly curled bangs from my forehead. “Do you think you could wear a flesh-toned bathing cap? Would you mind? I know my mother has one because she hates to get her hair wet, and then—” she twirled around again, eyes alighting on the multipack of markers on her desk—“we’ll draw that big goofy birthmark on your scalp!”

* * *

Mrs. Williams was supposed to drive me home that night, but she got tied up with a court case and called to say she wouldn’t get in till late. “It happens a lot,” Jenna said with a wave of her hand. “She’s a litigator, so it comes with the territory.”

“Well, do you think your dad could take me home?” I asked.

“No, he’s busy.” Her voice was firm, decisive as ever. “But you can use my phone to call your parents,” she said, pointing to the bedside table.

“There’s a phone in here?” Mark had wandered in before with the cordless.

“We have two lines,” she replied. “See those lips?” They looked just like the mouth on the Twizzlers commercials. I thought they were for decoration. “Pick up the top one and dial.”

* * *

By the time my dad arrived, it was dark outside and raining. He motioned for me to hop in the front seat, even though my mother’s rulebook clearly stated I was to ride in the back until high school.

“Did you have fun?” he asked, patting my knee and turning down the Barry Manilow.

“I think so. Yeah—I mean—Jenna is fun. She’s just—I don’t know—kind of exhausting.”

“Well, touché!” he laughed, which surprised me since the word was French, and my father was famously stumped when it came to other languages. “I’d be willing to bet big money that’s how a lot of your friends around the neighborhood feel after playing with you.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true.” I tried to return his laugh with a little giggle of my own.

“So, tell me,” my father said, in that stage-whisper way he had of trying to sound casual. “What’s it like in there?”

“At the Williams’s?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the road as the windshield wipers sloshed back and forth across the glass.

“It’s nice—old. Did you know their house is on the Historic Homes Tour?”

“I guess what I’m getting at is—Mr. Williams—he really doesn’t work at all?”

“Well . . .” I groped around in my mind for the right words to answer. “He does a lot of volunteer work, repairs old books. And you know, he used to homeschool Jenna and Mark.”

“I don’t know,” my father sighed. “Doesn’t feel right, this whole stay-at-home husband business. I think a man should support his family—and a woman should be at home with her kids.”

“But Mrs. Williams is a litigator,” I protested. “That’s a very important kind of lawyer.”

“Well, if she wanted to be a litigator so bad, maybe she shouldn’t have had a family,” he replied.

“You want me to have an important job someday—and a family,” I shot back, my voice coming sharp and fast as Jenna’s.

“Of course, Smidge. Women have to have their own work to fall back on. But we know you’ll do the right thing and put your job on hold when your kids are small, the same way your mother did for you.”

A cold feeling began to slither down my back. I was damp from the rain, but it wasn’t that. It was something internal, hard to explain. I thought about the plaque on my bedroom door, the one designed for me before I was born—back when I was just an idea of a person. In flourished script, it read Julie Marie Wade, Attorney-at-Law.

“But what if Mr. Williams was the litigator? Would he have to put that job on hold when his kids were small?” I studied my father’s jawline in the headlights of passing cars.

“Well, that’s just it,” he replied. “Mr. Williams isn’t.”

* * *

After that, whenever we saw the Williams at church, I contorted like an awkward sea creature, knowing my parents had no interest in befriending Jenna’s parents, that in fact they thought poorly of them (“their priorities are way out of whack!”), and I feared their judgments would show. My mother had remarked to my father on more than one occasion: “If we have to buy your clothes at the Big & Tall Shop, where in heaven’s name does Colleen buy Dan’s clothes—West Seattle Awning?”

My father had remarked to my mother, also within my earshot: “Maybe Colleen doesn’t buy Dan’s clothes. Maybe he has to buy them himself.”

My mother’s reply, predictable as always: “And with her money.”

Another time, when he thought I had gone downstairs, I heard my father ask my mother: “What’s a classy, petite gal like that doing with such a slob anyway? Makes you wonder if she’s getting some on the side.”

The fact was, I only recognized this euphemism because Jenna had used it to relay one of her many conspiracy theories. “Pastor Winterstein has something going on the side with Miss Christjaener. I guarantee it.” She was impersonating George Zimmer from the Men’s Wearhouse, pointing her finger and underlining things in the air.

“You don’t know that,” I said. “He’s married to Boots, the organist, and they’ve been together for like a hundred years.”

“Variety,” Jenna replied, nonplussed. “Men can’t be monogamous. It’s not in their DNA.” As with everything else, she left no room for argument.

* * *

This particular Sunday was memorable because of one of Pastor Winterstein’s prayers. He led us first through the usual rote recitations of gratitude and penitence, and then gave some time for others to offer their prayers. People prayed for sick relatives, for lost jobs, for children who had been sent back to juvie. Sometimes they tried to be more abstract, more coded about their troubles. It was common to hear, “For the compassion to turn the other cheek” or “For strength in the face of temptation.” But then Pastor Winterstein’s deep, velvety voice rejoined the series of spoken offerings: “Father, we pray on behalf of all the women in our congregation who have received harassing phone calls. Please give them comfort, and please let these obscenities cease.”

Jenna and I exchanged glances, as we always did. Her eyes were impossibly blue. She pointed to Pastor Winterstein and then to Miss Christjaener, sitting alone in the first row, dressed as always in black, like she had come for a funeral. Jenna made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and then the gesture for intercourse she had taught me. I rolled my eyes but giggled a little in spite of myself. That’s when my mother pressed down hard on my foot with her heel.

* * *

“May I please go to Jenna’s house after church today?” I implored my parents during the recessional song.

“Is your homework done?”

“Yes—and impeccably.”

“Don’t push it,” my mother snapped. Her tone matched her faux-alligator clutch purse.

“It’s just that we have the Odyssey of the Mind tournament coming up, and there’s the soundtrack we have to finish making, and—”

“This better be something you can put on your college applications, that’s all I can say,” she sighed. I take off to find Jenna before she can come up with a reason to stop me.

* * *

“I want to work Humpty Dumpty into it somehow,” Jenna said. “And Rapunzel, too, because it’s a high castle wall the prince has to climb. History is good, but myths are better. The postmodernists love them because they’re stories that don’t have to make sense.”

“What is this project you’re working on?” Mrs. Williams wanted to know. This particular day we were riding home from church in her snazzy red sedan, but even though the car was hers, Mr. Williams was driving.

“It’s a performance piece about breaking down walls,” Jenna began. “We’re interested in everything having to do with walls. Mindy is going to make actual balloon-flowers on stage during the show and attach them to the walls.”

“Very nice.” Mrs. Williams smiled. “I like it. Wallflowers.”

“Exactly. Later, Liann is going to ride through on a little girl’s bike with training wheels and pop all of them with a pin.”

“Interesting,” she said, nodding. “I can see this is going to be very dynamic.”

“It’s going to be more than dynamic,” Jenna exclaimed. “It’s going to be dynamite!”

“Let me know if you want to borrow The Wall,” Mrs. Williams offered, running her hands through her Diane Keaton hair. “I have it on record and cassette.”

“Genius, Colleen!” Jenna said. “Pure genius.”

“What’s The Wall?”

The heads of Jenna and Mrs. Williams swiveled toward me simultaneously, and then they exclaimed in unison, as if they had planned it that way: “Pink Floyd!”

* * *

Once inside the house, Mr. Williams disappeared down the basement stairs, just as he always did, and Mrs. Williams immediately took off her shoes. My mother didn’t believe in walking around barefoot, which was why you’d find a pair of ratty Dearfoams in almost any room of our house. But Mrs. Williams had perfect, pedicured toes, which she wiggled happily on the living-room rug, and she asked Jenna to pour her a glass of Franzia from the fridge.

“I have a brief to work on, Jenna,” she said, “so here’s twenty dollars. Why don’t you girls order a pizza? Mark’s gone over to Tyler’s house, and I’m sure your father can fend for himself.”

“Cool. Thanks.” Jenna was barefoot now too, and when she saw me looking at her feet, she laughed and said, “You know you can take your shoes off if you want. Mark and I finally did our chores, so the floors and rugs are clean—for the moment.”

I left my loafers in first position by the door.

“So, what kind of pizza do you like?” Jenna asked, carrying a magnet that has Domino’s phone number printed on top of a large slice of pepperoni.

“Any kind—all kinds,” I stuttered. Then I glanced at Mrs. Williams reclining on the white couch, her violet toenails without a chip or smudge, the glass of wine in her hand.

“Julie, what’s going on? I can read you like a book, and this question isn’t that hard,” Jenna said.

 “I’m just—I’ve never—we don’t—”

“Out with it!” she demanded.

“I’ve never had pizza delivered before.”

Mrs. Williams looked up from her leather folder and furrowed her brow. “Do your parents prefer carryout?” she asked.

“No, I mean, I’ve only ever had pizza at school or from my grocer’s freezer.” I tried to make a joke, but Jenna and her mother wore identical expressions on their faces. Mrs. Williams was pale, and Jenna was rubicund (a word I have learned from her). They seemed to regard me the way people must have regarded Galileo when he suggested the whole flat-earth story was just a myth.

“Never?” Their voices, synchronized again.

I shook my head. “No. My mother doesn’t believe in people delivering things to your house.”

Mrs. Williams reached for her wine glass first, then cocked her head. “And why is that exactly?”

“Well, she thinks that, for instance, if you order a pizza and somebody who is working for five dollars an hour plus tips sees that you live in a really nice house, they’ll tell all their friends, and when their shift is over, they’ll come back and rob you. If you’re still home or if you put up a fight, they might even kill you.”

I had probably said too much, but Jenna and her mother began to howl with laughter. They laughed so hard that Mr. Williams lumbered up the basement stairs and called from the kitchen, “What’s so funny?”

Jenna grinned at me. “You’re plangent, that’s what you are. That’s why we were meant to be friends. Maybe we should write a performance piece about your mother.”

Mrs. Williams wiped her eyes with a tissue and instructed us to order breadsticks and chicken wings too. “She needs to have the whole experience,” Mrs. Williams said.

While Jenna was placing the call, I took a seat on one of the brocade wingback chairs near the fireplace. “I don’t know how anyone could raise children without Domino’s,” Mrs. Williams sighed. She seemed to be speaking mostly to herself. “They’re a godsend.”

* * *

Later, in Jenna’s bedroom, we shared the window seat and scarfed down the pizza and sides. “And you’ve never had Chinese takeout before either?” she asked, incredulous.

“Just to settle the matter once and for all,” I said, mimicking my friend’s dramatic flair, “never, in my entire life, has anyone come to my door with food and given it to me in exchange for money.”

Jenna gaped at me in her exaggerated way, and we both laughed.

Then, suddenly: “Is my dad paying you to be my friend?” There was no segue to indicate that we were switching gears, but then with Jenna there was never a segue. My mouth dropped open, a drawbridge of surprise.

“I know—” she said, interrupting me before I could even assemble the words—“he wouldn’t phrase it that way. He’d ask you to be my tutor because I don’t get the best grades in school, but really, I think it’s so I won’t be alone daydreaming all the time. My friend-making skills might be even worse than my grades.”

“Jenna,” I said, “you’re my friend because I like you. You’re fun to be around. No one is paying me to spend time here.”

“But he asked you, didn’t he?” She started pacing again, her standard MO, but this time while tugging on the sticky strings of a Koosh ball.

“Does it really matter?”

“Only to the extent that you’re not on the Dad tab,” Jenna replied. “Because it turns out my last three friends were all getting paid to spend time with me, and I guess the funds must have dried up when my schoolwork didn’t improve because I never heard from any of them again.” She put on her magician’s hat for effect. “Poof! Gone.”

“That won’t happen with me,” I say, twisting her wand until it turned into flowers. “We’ve got a play to put on.”

“Uh—”

“I mean, an exercise in performative problem-solving!”

* * *

Remember when I told you this story doesn’t end well? I should have said: I’m sorry, if it were up to me, I’d change it, but I can’t. The truth is, I didn’t even see this coming.

Maybe there were signs. Maybe I should have thought it strange that Sunday night when Mrs. Williams told Jenna to ask her father to take me home, and Jenna insisted that her mother do it. She replied that she was up to her earlobes in work and that Mr. Williams had nothing to do but fix old books and play video games.

“No,” Jenna said, stomping her foot the way a child might, but stern at the same time, like a schoolmarm. “You do it.”

On the car ride, I told Mrs. Williams about the Julie Marie Wade, Attorney-at-Law plaque on my bedroom door. “My parents had it made because they wanted to remind me of my potential, even before I could read. They wanted me to grow up knowing I could succeed in any professional career, even if I didn’t do it forever.”

“I can see that,” Mrs. Williams mused, “but it does feel like a lot of pressure for a kid to come home to a law office every night.”

I asked her if she ever felt like she had to choose between being a good lawyer and being a good mom.

“Choose, no—but compromise, yes.” She selected her words very carefully, the way lawyers always did on TV. “That’s true for everyone, though, I think. Not just for working mothers.”

* * *

We didn’t place at Odyssey of the Mind, and Jenna was distraught for months afterward. The judges noted that we were an “enthusiastic ensemble” but thought we “tried to take on too much” and “our objectives were muddled at best.” The last-minute addition of Frost’s “Mending Wall,” which I read from behind a curtain like the disembodied voice of the Wizard of Oz, might have seemed gimmicky to the crowd, but all of us performers really loved the poem.

Jenna went to horseback-riding camp over the summer, which she always did, and then we found each other again in Christjaener’s class. Miss Hoffman returned to school as Mrs. Weatherhogg, having married the man who drove the local flower truck and become de facto mom to his three children. She also joined the growing roster of victims of the Calvary Lutheran obscene phone caller, who apparently panted a lot and told the women in great detail about outfits he had seen them wear. Everyone assumed it was one of the delinquents.

Jenna told me that all she wanted for Christmas was a ThighMaster because she had decided to tone up to form a space at the top of her legs, a gap where the thighs didn’t touch. “I want enough room for a keyhole’s worth of light to pass through,” she said.

My mother had recently bought us a ThighMaster to share, and I told Jenna she could use it when she came over.

We were Nairing our legs at the time, something I had never attempted before, but Jenna said it was better to burn off the hair than try to get it all with a razor. I wasn’t even supposed to be shaving.

“Why do you have a ThighMaster anyway?” she asked, as we sat on the lip of the grimy tub, our pant legs rolled up, waiting for the timer to ding.

“My mom thought I was going to be tall and skinny like Gwyneth Paltrow.” I paused for effect, the way Jenna had taught me. The power of a line was in its delivery. “She has never quite recovered from the disappointment.”

Jenna grabbed my wrist, as if she were bracing herself for a blow. “Are you kidding me? You are tall and skinny!”

“Well, I’m tall,” I told her, “but so are you.”

“I’m tall like a wall,” Jenna said. “You’re tall like a statue.”

“What does that mean?” I had never looked at her across this line before.

“It means you’re well sculpted. You have curves in all the right places. You’re on your way, Leading Lady.” Jenna raised an imaginary champagne flute and pretended to toast. “Even my father thinks so.”

“What?” The timer dinged, and she tossed me a towel.

“Everyone thinks I should be more like you.”

* * *

Another time, watching Matthew McDaniel’s house through binoculars, Jenna asked me if I wanted to be a virgin when I got married.

“I’m not sure I’m going to marry actually,” I said. “But I’d rather not die a virgin if I can help it.”

“You won’t have any problem there,” she replied, her voice so much softer than it used to be, and flatter too—a murmury monotone.

“Did you give up inflection for Lent or something?” I teased, but Jenna didn’t seem to get the joke.

“It doesn’t matter if I have sex before marriage or not,” she said. “Girls who ride horses as much as I do get their hymens broken early on.”

“But—you can still be a virgin without a hymen, right?”

Jenna held a piece of celery between her teeth like a cigar. She mock-exhaled, then did her best George Burns: “You can be, honey, but really, what’s the point?”

* * *

The last evening I ever spent with Jenna, her mother came home early, happy to have won a case. Strangely, though, she didn’t bother to tell Jenna’s father, even to call down to him from the top of the basement stairs.

“I brought Chinese food to celebrate!” she proclaimed, a late twentieth-century prophet in a power suit and pearls. “Lo mein. Fried rice. Wontons. The works! Mark, do me a favor and run down and get the food from the car.”

“Well done, Colleen.” Jenna nodded her approval over a glass of Crystal Light.

The heels skittered across the floor, the briefcase rested on the counter, the wine poured forth from the fridge, and Mrs. Williams told me I should stay for dinner. “I’m in the mood for a girls’ night. Let’s watch a movie,” she said. “What about Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters?” She looked at me. “Any preference?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know those movies,” I said.

“You don’t know Manhattan?” Jenna threw her hands in the air and rushed to the video cabinet. “What about Annie Hall? You have to know Annie Hall!”

“Oh, they’re Woody Allen movies,” I sighed. “My mother doesn’t—isn’t—a fan.”

“He’s our favorite,” Jenna said, laying out the VHS tapes with all the ceremony of communion wafers and sacramental wine.

“What is it she objects to about him?” Mrs. Williams asked, motioning for Mark to bring the food directly into the living room.

“I think it’s more about him than his movies,” I replied. Mrs. Williams slid the chopsticks out of their paper sheath and nodded for me to continue. I liked how she moved them about as if conducting a musical score. “It’s just that whole thing about how he married his daughter. I know she was adopted and all, but it really creeped my mother out.”

“You know what really creeps me out?” Jenna asked, sitting back on her heels. I could tell from her tone it wasn’t really a question. “All-girls Catholic schools.”

About an hour before, I had confided in Jenna that my mother was sending me to Holy Names Academy in the fall. They offered merit-based scholarships, and their graduates were virtually guaranteed to go on to do great things. I even tried a George Zimmer impersonation when I broke the news.

“Why is that?” Mrs. Williams laughed now, bemused, guiding a fried dumpling deftly to her mouth.

“They’re full of lesbians,” Jenna said, deadpan. “Some come in gay, but everybody leaves that way.”

* * *

I don’t know much about theater—not really. Jenna and I used to talk about hosting our own variety show: the celebrities we’d get to make cameos, the role of improvisation in sketch comedy. We also marveled often and aloud at how Vicki Lawrence managed to transform herself so completely into Mama. She made you forget she was really just a young woman in a gray wig and a floral dress with nylon socks that sagged below her knees. I laughed because she reminded me of the Lutherans.

In our Odyssey of the Mind production, Jenna wanted to use walls as dividers so people in the audience could see what was happening simultaneously at the same moment in history or in the same house even. But the meaning of the walls kept changing, which, in retrospect, made our performance especially hard to follow.

When I was in high school, a story came out in all the local papers that a Seattle man had sexually assaulted a number of young girls, all of whom had been about his daughter’s age. Reports never confirmed whether the daughter herself had been subject to abuse or if she might have suspected her father. In the course of the trial, during which the man was sentenced to thirteen years in the state penitentiary, it was further revealed that he had also been responsible for several years of obscene phone calls to female members of the congregation at Calvary Lutheran Church.

My parents left Calvary once rumors about the Williamses surfaced and soon rejoined their old flock at St. Paul’s. Fourteen blocks was just far enough to make a fresh start in West Seattle after all, and a fresh start could last my mother at least a few years.

Jenna never returned any of my calls, of course, which made more sense after the news story broke but was still never easy for me to accept. Lonnie Newsome told my mother it was Mrs. Williams who caught her husband, that she walked in to find him compromised on their bed, telling someone’s teenaged daughter on the telephone that he wanted her to strip slowly for him. And from this, a much larger unraveling began—as terrifying and convoluted as any myth.

Much later, my mother would call me in my grown-up apartment and ask, her voice gravelly with fear, “Did Dan Williams do something to you? Is that why you’re the way that you are?”

“No, Mom,” I said, deadpan. “It was Catholic school. It turned me so gay. If you hadn’t sent me there, I’d have a husband and three kids by now.”

Though I am not a playwright and never will be, I can picture a dim stage with a series of spotlit partitions. In one stall, two thirteen-year-old girls sprawl on a cluttered bed listening to The Wall and bicycling their newly Naired legs. In another, a woman in her forties who bears a striking resemblance to the actress Diane Keaton takes notes on a yellow legal pad for an upcoming criminal trial. In the last stall, we find a large man alone in a basement, reclining in a La-Z-Boy. He has a phone in his lap, the kind where the push-button numbers line the receiver, and the receiver lights up in the dark. There is a book, too, folded along its stapled seam—a directory of some kind. We can’t make out his face, but across the wall we see the silhouette of a little boy, his newly spiked hair rising like a rooster’s comb.

But even this is too much to look at. Anything more, and we, the audience, the witnesses, would implode.

Julie Marie Wade is a professor of creative writing at Florida International University in Miami and the author of many collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023) and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. Her newest project is The Mary Years, winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize selected by Michael Martone and forthcoming from Texas Review Press in November 2024.