The oven pings. The TV dinners are done. Even though Mom is probably average weight or less, she wearily heaves herself up like someone who weighs a lot more. She puts a TV dinner on Alan’s yellow Superman tray with a glass of milk, then gestures for me to take it to him.

In the den, Alan’s no longer sniffing his toes. As usual, he’s sitting too close to the TV screen, but this evening I don’t have the will to tell him to move back. I put the tray on the floor beside him. He removes the false-teeth bite plate and picks up a drumstick.

Back in the kitchen, the other TV dinner rests on the kitchen table. Mom stands by the sliding glass doors, gazing out. Orange light bathes the backyard, illuminating the weeping willows, throwing shadows over the lawn and beds of orange lilies, white gardenias, and red and yellow marigolds that line the patio.

She grew up during the Depression, excelled academically, and was fortunate to get a college scholarship when there were few to go around. Graduated summa cum laude, got a job as an editorial assistant at Time magazine, hoping to someday be a journalist and writer. There she met the paterfamilias, who sold advertising space for the magazine. They married, had me, and moved to the suburbs. Mom gave up her career to be a mother and live the postwar American dream.

And now? She has a husband who cheats on her, one son she’s buried, another who’s not right in the head, and a third who, if the United States government has its way, could soon end up being just one more American casualty traded for the lives of ten Vietcong.

I seat myself at the kitchen table, feel the moist heat rise to my face from the warm TV dinner nestled in its compartmentalized tinfoil tray.

“How does the application for conscientious objector work?” Mom asks.

Between bites of chicken, mashed potatoes, and mixed vegetables, I explain that I have to write an essay justifying my antiwar beliefs. If the draft board accepts it, I’ll then have to go in person for an interview.

“An essay?” Mom repeats with a grimace. The word is a charged one around here, and not only because I insisted on submitting my epic poem–college essay to Goddard without allowing anyone to read it. Mom and I had a deal regarding the other four colleges she wanted me to apply to: she’d fill in the applications; all I’d have to do was write the essays. But as the deadlines approached, the essays remained unwritten until she finally had no choice but to write them herself.

(If only I’d taken those applications more seriously. If only I had a college to go to now. Even a school hundreds of miles from Middlebury would have meant I could see Robin two or three times a month.)