At sixteen I took off for a college halfway across the country, and from then on returned home as little as possible. When I graduated I was so terrified of getting caught once again in my mother’s orbit that I applied to graduate school. But in 1970 I finally went home. I was about to be married, and I thought the least I could do was introduce my future husband to my parents. Dad was very pleased. He reached to pat Doug on the back—they were exactly the same size—and within minutes they had disappeared into the study and a conversation that would last for the rest of my father’s life. Meanwhile Mom and I went into the kitchen to start dinner, and as the lobsters crawled across the counter I noticed that her hair was now entirely white and she was thickening around the middle. “Isn’t this very old-fashioned?” she asked, coolly stuffing the creatures into a pot. “I thought that these days people your age just lived together.” I was certain that Mom would eventually warm to the idea.
