“That was my thinking.”

“Nice of you to ask. But that only happens when I’m on an official date with a guy.”

ZALMAN’S WAS in a dim, tin-ceilinged basement, and by six fifteen it was already packed and noisy with a line out onto Delancey Street.

“Girl’s a knockout,” my father said, after Glenna excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. “Lighten her hair, you got Veronica Lake.”

My mother said, “I read in a magazine that Veronica Lake is a drunk.”

Dad made a smart move here. Instead of commenting further on his favorite erstwhile movie star, he put an onion roll in his mouth.

My mother’s estimation of Glenna was harder to discern, and I hoped the unpleasant pucker of her lips was due to the sour tomato she was eating. Judging from the photo albums in the den, she had also been a knockout in her prime and still was if you were knocked out by a middle-aged, blue-eyed brunette who had kept her shape. At the moment, though, that wasn’t doing the trick for my father. He was more interested in Glenna coming out of the ladies’ room.

As she squeezed past the close-set tables in her tight, salmon-pink shirtdress, my father couldn’t take his eyes off her, and my mother spritzed some soda water into his glass from the seltzer bottle and said, “Take a drink, Alex. And cool down.”

My father, gentleman that he was, rose to hold the chair for Glenna. I beat him to it, and he said to her, “I gotta tell you how nice it’s been meeting the girl who got my son to comb his hair.”

“My pleasure,” she replied, and after treating him to a smile that I thought would bust the brass buttons off his double-breasted, navy-blue blazer, she gave me a quick kiss.

My mother’s puckered expression remained in place, even though she was done with her tomato, but my father didn’t seem to care. From the moment my parents had entered the restaurant, he had been weird. Zalman’s didn’t have a liquor license, and he had brought a couple of bottles of wine, one of which he finished by himself while he glanced around as if looking for someone.

My father calmed down when the waiter delivered our dinner. The food gave us something to talk about. You can have quite a discussion about rib steak topped with mushrooms, chicken fricassee, stuffed cabbage in sweet-and-sour tomato sauce, whipped eggplant, and potatoes mashed with chicken fat.

When we ran out of food, my father quizzed Glenna about the effectiveness of a new tricyclic antidepressant, Trelozin, that doctors were prescribing during her psych rotation. Danzig had been involved in developing the drug, and it sold so fast Danzig’s stock price had jumped 20 percent.

“We’re such a happy country,” my mother commented, and then my father picked up where he had left off.

Long ago, I had observed that when my friends were over, my mother invariably asked them about school or their plans, and she acted genuinely interested in their responses. Nobody asked her anything. If my father was around, they asked him. Not her. Maybe it was that kids are taught not to ask embarrassing questions. I mean—what would a mother say? I cook and clean. I worry about everyone.