So it doesn’t matter so much if my mother’s drunk some afternoons when I get home from school, or if my parents spend evenings sitting on the couch as if locked in some long, intricate conversation they can’t seem to find a way out of. If she’s been drinking a lot her sentences begin with “Face it, Larry…,” an opening salvo followed by some unpleasant truth about him, or me, or my sister, or all of us. He listens, defers, she persists. He tries to argue with her, then gives up and defers some more. I try not to listen, try to steer clear; it’s better if her attention doesn’t turn to me. But there’s a persistent rhythm to her voice, a kind of edgy litany which seems to pervade the house, and the longer it goes on the more my father seems to punctuate it with low sounds of assent, “That’s right, yes, that’s the way it is.” I can hear in his voice he doesn’t mean it, but he seems compelled to agree with whatever she says anyway, required to placate her. They’re fixed in a kind of combat on the green Naugahyde sofa, though it’s a strange sort of battling, since they are not arguing; she is railing away, wearing him down from disagreement to deferral, night after night. What are they wrestling with there, why doesn’t someone get up and walk away?

One night I’m called into the room, and she begins to criticize me for something—that I’ve become affected, because of my drama class? That I never clean my room? Something she says pushes me too far and I snap back, and in an instant my father’s up off the couch and coming at me. He says, “Don’t you ever talk to your mother like that,” his fist in the air, raised to strike. In an instant it occurs to me that now I’m as tall as him; I’ve never noticed this before, our bodies are the same size, and here he is about to hit me. I step back quickly, and something strange happens; he is so involved in the momentum of the swing that he falls right to the floor. And there we are: my mother lying on the couch, my father at my feet, facedown on the gold carpet, and me standing in the doorway, not knowing what to do with myself, suddenly self-conscious, without a clue what to do next. My father lifts his red face up and says, “Get out,” and I do—past the plum tree and the dusty olives, out to the still-hot twilight of Rosewood Street, the mountains going deep lavender in the distance, off to any place at all.