In an attempt to distract my restless, unhappy mother (and keep her off the booze), my father handed her a stack of credit cards and free rein to decorate. With pent-up frustration and unlimited resources, she hurled together paint, fabrics, and furniture like a child clumping colors of Play-Doh into one muddy ball. Every day, boxes or crates arrived at our doorstep: tables, dressers, art, a birdbath. Most items resided only days or weeks before being re-crated and returned. Besides the pink mirrored bar, the modular sofa was the only piece that survived my mother’s whims, it being the original inspiration and centerpiece around which she constructed her decorative vision. Often, awakened by footsteps in the hours past midnight, I would go downstairs and find my mother walking through the house, carrying fabric samples from room to room, drinking and fretting.

By the time I was six years old, my father came home late every night and slept in his study (the one room my mother was not allowed to mangle). My mother, who slept most of the day, went out at night to Alice’s Bar and drank until last call. Were it not for their misery, the machinations of their comings and goings would have been farcical; my mother listening for my father to close his study door before leaving the house; my father at his desk, waiting to hear the bedroom door click shut before racing into the kitchen for a snack. Weekends were trickier with my father at home, and their system often malfunctioned. An unexpected change in weather would cancel a tennis game, and the whole operation would fall apart.

“I want a divorce!” was my mother’s refrain as she stormed through the house with gin (or wine or vodka) sloshing over the rim of her glass.

“You’re not getting one fucking penny!” was my father’s response in their well-worn duet. “You don’t do anything! Get a job for Chris’sake!”

They’d continue up the stairs while I hid under my bed, their voices reverberating off newly sponge-painted, orange walls.

“You’re giving me a migraine!” My mother would yell as they stomped past my room, my mother slamming the door in my father’s face.

In the silence that followed, Anna would come to my rescue and carry me off to her little nest over the garage. There, with my head safely resting in her lap, I fiddled with the cross around her neck, swinging and tangling it in my fingers as she watched her soap operas.