“That’s something even Mother herself didn’t understand at the time. It made her defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in the lederhosen, she felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward Father. And she could not hold it back. Mother’s lederhosen man, apart from the color of his skin, was exactly like Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The way he was so happy trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a little boy. As Mother stood there looking at this man, so many things she’d been uncertain of about herself slowly shifted together into something very clear. That’s when she realized she hated Father.”

MY WIFE GETS HOME from shopping, and the two of them commence their woman talk, but I’m still thinking about the lederhosen. The three of us eat an early dinner and have a few drinks; I keep turning the story over in my mind.

“So, you don’t hate your mother anymore?” I ask when my wife leaves the room.

“No, not really. We’re not close at all, but I don’t hold anything against her.”

“Because she told you about the lederhosen?”

“I think so. After she explained things to me, I couldn’t go on hating her. I can’t say why it makes any difference, I certainly don’t know how to explain it, but it may have something to do with us being women.”

“Still, if you leave the lederhosen out of it, supposing it was just the story of a woman taking a trip and finding herself, would you have been able to forgive her?”

“Of course not,” she says without hesitation. “The whole point is the lederhosen, right?”

A proxy pair of lederhosen, I’m thinking, that her father never even received.

—translated by Alfred Birnbaum

BARN BURNING

I MET HER AT the wedding party of an acquaintance and we got friendly. This was three years ago. We were nearly a whole generation apart in age—she twenty, myself thirty-one—but that hardly got in the way. I had plenty of other things to worry my head about at the time, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a spare moment to think about age difference. And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one’s fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won’t change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.