She was just some loopy handwriting on a piece of paper. But she forever changed the way I felt about my father.

Thanx in advance.

It was dark that morning of my junior year in high school when I woke to the sound of my mother crying. I crept downstairs and saw her by the family-room window, watching a car's headlights wind around the lake we lived.

"What's wrong?" I whispered.

"Twenty-three. Twenty-four," she said. "If I don't hear the crunch of gravel by: twenty-five: he's with some other woman."

In that dim light my mother looked older than ever, and more convinced that Dad was cheating. Even I knew. At parties my parents threw, women always gathered around Dad like he was a campfire. Once, when I was little, I had sneaked downstairs, wondering what he held in his hands to attract so many admirers. But it was only some story he was telling. It was just the way he was.

My mother, who's so British that everyone calls her "Mum", had been turned into a detective by her marriage. She could recognize a woman's voice, analyze handwriting, sniff out a whiff of perfume a mile away - partly because she was totally crazy about Dad. But mostly because she knew.

Mum then made a shocking announcement: She was going there, t bring him home. I couldn't talk her out of it, but amazingly, I persuaded her to take me along.

Ten minutes later we spotted Dad's blue Mazda RX-7 as we coasted down Walnut Street. Up ahead, 425 reflected off the mailbox in front of a tiny white house. The lights were on. Mum pulled over, and I hunkered down in the passenger seat as she marched up the walkway and knocked, hard and loud.

Silence. A porch light. Then, there she was. The woman had peach-blond cotton-candy hair that glowed in the light. At first she looked goddesslike in her flowing white robe; but then she shoed away a bug and I saw the lit cigarette dangling between her long red fingernails. I heard her say, "You're crazy, lady," and then, before she slammed the door in my mother's face, "Get lost or I'll call the cops."

Mum stood on the porch for what seemed like forever. She knocked again. Twice. She looked out at me in the car and shrugged. I was getting scared. A police car pulled up. "My husband is in there and I want him out," she told the officer.

Just then, another cop appeared from around back. Out of breath, he said, "Don't know if he belongs to you, but a six-foot-tall man with dark hair and glasses just ran out the back door."

That would be Dad. Mum ran back to the car, jumped in the driver's seat and slammed us into reverse. We caught up with Dad at his car, me scrunched down even further, a cramp in my neck. Mum lunged out of the car.

"How could you do this to me?" she demanded.

He was seething. "How could you do this to me?"

It was all I could do to keep my head down. At first Mum went at Dad like a freight train, but then her steam condenced into tears. He floored it out of there. She opened my door and handed me the keys.

"You drive," was all she said.

I didn't even have my learner's permit yet, but I plunged the key into the ignition. As we rolled slowly home, Mum cried hard, her head propped against the window. I made some lame remark about the shirt I wanted to wear to school the next day. She told me it needed ironing. Maybe that woman and Dad were just friends? Mum stared at me and said, "You are not to tell anybody about this."

For the next few days I couldn't eat, sleep, read, think, do anything. I needed to talk. I needed to scream. When you find out that your father is sleeping with someone he shouldn't be, it ruins everything. I mean, I had just started to deal with the idea that he fooled around with my mother. Mum and Dad,, my two pillars of strength, had in one night become scorched black holes in the earth - one to be pitied, the other to be hated. And hating someone you love turns your life inside out.

I eventually exploded. I cried to my two sisters and my brother. My older sister said, "I think it's none of our business." My little sister just bawled. My brother was so mad at Dad that I had to threaten decapitation if he did anything crazy.

Just as I was hitting bottom, Dad changed a little. Instead of working late every night, he showed up for dinner now and then. On Sundays he took us on picnics in the country, where we pretended things were OK. A truce was going on between my parents, broken only by Mum's fierce whisper piercing the occasional dawn: "Where have you been?" After he answered her by putting his fist through a closet door, she stopped asking.

One night when we were playing Monopoly, Mum drew the CHANCE card about getting married, tossed all her money at Dad and ran crying from the room. Looking straight at my father, I stood up and ran crying out the door myself - over to see my friends.

Lynn and Molly, my best pals, never made judgments about my Dad, even when I did. They even told me that their fathers were boring in comparison. One Saturday night at Lynn's house, we sat watching her balding father read the paper; I told her I was going to strap my dad to his La-Z-Boy to keep him at home. For the first time in a long time, I laughed. It's been a few years, and I've mostly forgiven my father. Partly because he's human. Partly because he's dead. When he passed away at 56 from a brain aneurysm (a burst blood vessel), we all went through the pain of losing him for real.

My parents never did get divorced. You can't know exactly what exists between two people in love. You have to let them play out, even if they recklessly hurt each other, even if they stupidly forgive each other - even if they're your parents.

That ugly dawn on Walnut street turned out to be a lesson for me. When people shock me by saying, "You're so much like your father," I laugh, then lie awake at night, worrying. But I know I could never hurt the people I love like Dad did. I have seen peach-blond cotton-candy hair. The pain stops here.

Может, имеется в виду, что она ничего вообще из себя не представляла?

:-)

ТМ: спасибо за пассаж

My mother, who's so British that everyone calls her "Mum", had been turned into a detective by her marriage. She could recognize a woman's voice, analyze handwriting, sniff out a whiff of perfume a mile away - partly because she was totally crazy about Dad.

А вот блондинка как раз была просто loopy handwriting, вот и все.

как вариант : Она была (ассоциировалась с) бессмысленными закорючками на клочке бумаги.

А под loopy handwriting, возможно, автор имела ввиду свой почерк, т.е. данное повествование написанное ей самой. Здесь, по-моему, не видно указания на то, что блондинка или мать оставили после себя вещдок?

Что касается loopy handwriting, я бы не стала однозначно переводить его как каракули. Существует еще трактовка: traditional loopy, flourishing cursive taught in schools, например. Хотя, не буду специально настаивать.

Она была странной, похожей на неровный, непредсказуемый почерк на чистом листе бумаги.

(Странно взять с собой дочь для выяснения с кем сегодня муж, странно, что она (мать) все старалась узнать о нем (с точки зрения подростка) и т.д.)