“I have never gone off the rails.”
“Arguably, you’ve never been on the rails,” Dad says with a wink at me.
“Bruce,” Mom says very softly. “That is hurtful.”
She rises from the table and floats upstairs with her sewing basket, which contains fluffy white yarn for the kitten cap party she’s organizing for Molly to win back her monstrous best friend, and several shirts whose labels Brian needs removed because they scratch the back of his neck. You can’t just cut off a label with scissors because that leaves a prickly label stub that’s worse than the label itself. Mom snips each tiny, nearly invisible stitch that attaches the label to the shirt, using minuscule scissors that have to be special-ordered from Germany and stored in a deionized glass cylinder or they will lose their sharpness overnight.
Brian, Molly, and I clear the table and clean up while Dad sits in his recliner reading The Wall Street Journal. In the absence of Mom, the silence becomes oppressive.
“Dad,” I tell him, looming over his recliner, “you need to apologize.”
“Please don’t use that tone with me, Hannah,” he replies mildly.
A while later, Molly climbs into his lap, mussing his newspaper, and kisses his cheek—the sort of thing you can get away with when you’re nine. “Please say sorry to Mommy?” she coos.
“I’ll think about it, pumpkin.”
Brian, never a big talker and becoming less so by the minute, stands three feet from Dad’s chair and toes the carpet. Finally, he mutters, “Dad.”
“Yes, Brian?”
“Come on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know.”
“What do I know?”
“Do it.”
“I’m missing the topic of our conversation, Brian.”
“Now, Dad.”
“Now what?”
Brian takes a long breath and screams into Dad’s face, “SAY SORRY TO MOM!!!”
Dad slowly returns his recliner to an upright position—the equivalent, for Dad, of springing out of his chair. “I was just about to do that, son,” he says, walking calmly toward the stairs. “Thank you for reminding me.”
* * *
Mom attributes her exclusion by the other moms to the poisonous influence of one pivotal mom: Kathy Bingham, whom Mom refers to as the High Priestess of Bitches. Kathy has five children, all criminally neglected （according to Mom） while Kathy plays obsessive tennis at the Crandale Country Club, where she’s been ladies’ singles and doubles champion for the past eight years. According to Mom, Kathy controls every aspect of ladies’ tennis at the CCC with the cutthroat brutality of a racketeering boss. Kathy won’t look at Mom, much less speak to her, although Mom insists she’s done nothing to warrant Kathy’s hatred. “I think it’s my hair,” she says, and it’s true that she bleaches her hair a much whiter blond than the other moms’ subtle highlights.
“I’m going to kick the bucket one day, make no mistake,” she has told us. “And given what’s in the peroxide I’m using, it may be sooner than expected.”
When we begged her to stop using the peroxide, Mom said, “Not a chance. Life is all about bargains, and I’m willing to forfeit a couple of years to have hair like Marilyn Monroe.”
* * *
A few nights later, while Dad is grading my practice SAT test at the table after dinner, Mom says, “Bruce, I’m disturbed by your indifference to the very real threat I face.”
Dad pushes back his chair. Dad is a lawyer. “Has he threatened you?”