“Well, I heard . . .”

Somewhere around the tenth I heard, Kate began to laugh. And some laugh it was. Harder than I could ever remember. Laughed so hard she nearly slipped out of her chair. Laughed so hard tears sprang from her eyes as she covered her bright red face with her available hand. Laughed so hard I was afraid she’d pee her pants.

The conversation stopped as the others watched. Our hostess: “What’s so funny?”

“All of you,” Kate said, wiping her eyes. “You haven’t met the woman, you don’t even know her name. None of what you say about her is true!”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” Kate said, standing to leave, “she’s my best friend.”

KATE

NOT LONG AGO TIM EMERGED FROM OUR TINY BATHROOM WITH A LOOK OF ABJECT horror on his face. When I asked him what was wrong, he refused to explain. “Tim, please,” I begged. “No,” he whispered as he wiped the tears from his eyes. I moved close to hold him, and he confessed. He’d farted in the bathroom, and devastatingly, the smell was unlike that of any fart he’d ever let fly before. The smell, he claimed, had “a certain middle-aged texture, a tangy thickness, a queer persistence.” Surely he wasn’t serious. Then he explained how this particular fart was identical in smell to those of his father. Hence the tears. I laughed, because how absurd, right? But the smell for Tim evidenced what he feared most. No amount of good intentions, no wishing it were otherwise, can prevent the inevitable slow drip of our parents back into us. We repeat their sayings, we yield to their petty theories, we perpetuate their quirks and facial tics and even their fart smells. It can’t be stopped. Muted at times, perhaps. Redirected, maybe. But they win, parents do, in ways we haven’t even yet imagined.

Tim and his fatherlike fart came to me as we climbed the stairs to our apartment after our hasty departure from the Wellfleets’ dinner party. For as much as my life has been a direct retaliation to my mother and her wild ways, my behavior moments earlier had reminded me how I hadn’t shaken her motherly imprint. Whenever I exaggerate, I am most like her. Best friend? Why did I have to reach so far? Couldn’t I have said, “Well, that hasn’t been my experience. I rather like Anna Brody.” The truth was, other than one meeting on a snowy day and a brief phone call last spring, I didn’t know her. The truth was, I wanted to know her. I was dying to know her. But for all I knew, everything those party guests had been saying could very well be true. Maybe they were being kind!

At home, Tim apologized to Pearl, our babysitter, for our early return. He paid her for the hours she’d been promised, walked her to Clinton Street to hail a taxi, and then came home and found me already in bed, under the covers, wide awake, agitated.