My mother and I would be in her bedroom, and she would sit up on her side of the bed, under the covers, doing needlepoint while we watched, and I would sit on the other side, cross-legged, in my pajamas, and we would chat during the commercials. We talked a lot about the TV lives unfolding before us which, by intention or otherwise, were full of lessons to be learned. We talked about what various characters could do or should do or shouldn’t do and we indulged in the sort of strong opinions that in real life need so often to be held in check. We would laugh and laugh and laugh: not so much at the funny lines, though some of those sent us into easy stitches, as at the absurdity of the relationships portrayed, or the clothes, or the unconsidered values. There was a letting go that went on, on those TV Saturdays. So much of our life together was planned and complex—­scheduled dinners, evenings at the theater, weekends at our house in the country with visiting friends—and to have those evenings of just being, and of just being together, talking of nothing of great moment: it was palpable, something you could bask in. There was a sublimely effortless and undangerous quality to these TV people, to whom—since, after all, they were fictive—we did not have any obligation to be generous. When a series ended, we missed it: our affection encompassed all the people in the world and not in the world, and we breezily extended it to the characters who had amused us.

That world in the TV was a dream version of what was resolutely American and mainstream about our lives, about my life with my mother and father and Freddy. On reruns, the characters seem more than a little bit ridiculous. But those antiheroes and antiheroines were icons, as those evenings my mother and I shared were, too, for something solid and permanent, a kind of smiling middle-of-the-road way of life that nothing could change. The people were nice enough, some of them energetic, or funny, or resilient; underneath a very different exterior, my mother had some of their solid American-ness. Like them, she suffered disproportionately over the episodes of the moment, but in the end remained fairly certain that any real difficulties would be resolved into unimportance. Our lives seemed as ultimately safe as theirs. When my mother first got ill, and throughout the time of her illness, when she was tired, we would watch TV together, and I would remember how easy life was, and it was as though I were eleven, and everything could not help being all right in the end.