A thousand dollars is gone the second you drive off the lot.” At about this time—late June—he said he was thinking of taking a driving trip down to Dixie, to see how things looked there, among the “left backs.” My mother told him this was a trip he’d make on his own and without his children, which annoyed him. She said she didn’t want to get close to Alabama. Mississippi had been enough. The Jewish situation was worse than for coloreds, who at least belonged there. In her view, Montana was better because no one even knew what a Jewish person was—which ended their discussion. Our mother’s attitude toward being Jewish was that sometimes it was a burden, and other times it distinguished her in a way she accepted. But it was never good in all ways. Berner and I didn’t know what a Jewish person was, except our mother was one, which by ancient rules made us officially Jews, which was better than being from Alabama. We should consider ourselves “non-observant,” or “deracinated,” she said. This meant we celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and the Fourth of July all the same, and didn’t attend a church, which was fine because there wasn’t a Jewish one in Great Falls anyway. Someday it might mean something, but it didn’t have to be now.

When our father had tried to sell used cars for a month, he came home one day with a used car that he’d bought for himself, and had traded away our ’52 Mercury for—a white-and-red ’55 Bel Air Chevrolet, bought off the lot where he’d been working. “A good deal.” He said he’d arranged to begin a new job selling farms and ranch land—something he admitted he knew nothing about but was signed up to take a course on in the basement of the YMCA. The other men in the company would help him. His father had been a timber estimator, so he was confident he had a good feel for things “out in the wilds”—better than he did for things in town. Plus, when Kennedy was elected in November, a period of buoyancy would dawn, and the first thing people would want to do was buy land. They weren’t making more of it, he said, even though there seemed to be a lot of it around there. The percentages in selling used cars, he’d learned, were stacked against anybody but the dealer. He didn’t know why he had to be the last person to find these things out. Our mother agreed.

We, of course, didn’t know it then, my sister and I, but the two of them must’ve realized that they’d begun to draw away from each other during this time—after he’d left the Air Force and was supposedly finding himself in the world—and to recognize they saw each other differently, possibly begun to understand that the differences between them weren’t going away but were getting larger. All the congested, preoccupying, tumultuous, moving around base after base and raising two children on the fly, years of it, had allowed them to put off noticing what they should’ve noticed at the beginning—and it was probably more her than him: that what had seemed small had become something she, at least, didn’t like now. His optimism, her alienated skepticism. His southernness, her immigrant Jewishness. His lack of education, her preoccupation with it and sense of unfulfillment. When they realized it (or when she did)—again, this was after my father accepted his discharge and forward motion changed—they each began to experience a tension and foreboding peculiar to each of them and not shared by the other. (This was recorded in various things my mother wrote, and in her chronicle.) If things had been allowed to follow the path thousands of other lives follow—the everyday path toward ordinary splitting up—she could’ve just packed Berner and me up, put us on the train out of Great Falls and headed us to Tacoma, where she was from, or to New York or Los Angeles. If that had happened, each of them would’ve had a chance at a good life out in the wide world. My father might’ve gone back to the Air Force, since leaving it had been hard for him. He could’ve married someone else. She could’ve returned to school once Berner and I had gone to college. She could’ve written poems, followed her early aspirations.