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Their lives were so ordinary, and they themselves were ordinary enough to think of a commonplace way to shake it all up.
    My mother, however, was not ordinary.
    Very quickly her grief and anger vibrated into something less personal: my father and Ada became her punishment for ever having felt secure. She should have seen the affair coming. There had been signs, she told Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire—lingering smiles, too much help with a coat at Christmas, each one by chance mentioning the same restaurant on the same day. She had not been careful. In this way, their affair became her fault. It was her punishment for forgetting that the world is and always has been a disastrous place.
    My father moved out on a Tuesday morning, the day after my aunts left, right after we had gone to school. And for a little while, our lives didn’t seem to reflect the enormous changes under way. We were used to coming home and finding only my mother there; my father rarely drove into the driveway until half an hour before dinner, and often he was out of the house to meet a client before I had finished my orange juice. So for a few moments each afternoon after I stepped through the door and pulled off my jacket and dropped my bookbag on the floor, I could almost believe that nothing had happened.
    First my father stayed at a Howard Johnson’s near the new Watergate Hotel; after a few weeks he rented a studio apartment on MacArthur Boulevard, not far from his real estate office and near the reservoir. His front window looked across at a stocky little cement castle that had been built at one corner of the reservoir, probably to house pipes and part of the filtration system. When we visited, I often knelt on his new fold-out sofa and looked out at the castle’s four crenellated towers, imagining what it would be like to live there.
    My father seemed unable to furnish or decorate his apartment after installing that sofa bed. For months he ate standing up in his tiny, bare kitchen. He bought a small, black-and-white TV set, which he set up on a milk crate. He kept his underwear and his socks in one of his suitcases. Whenever we visited, we all sat on the wood floor and ate Chinese food out of the paper cartons, or ate pizza and drank Coca-Cola fromplastic cups, which my father washed and kept to be used again. Otherwise he made no effort to keep his apartment clean, and after he’d been there a few weeks dust balls rolled in the corners when we opened the door while spiderwebs floated from the windowsills.
    Meanwhile, every evening my mother walked around our house by herself, opening closet doors and looking into them, opening cabinets, pulling open drawers. Down in the basement she sorted through carefully labeled boxes of winter clothing, old toys, and Christmas ornaments, only to repack them all again. One afternoon I came home to discover every single one of those repacked boxes stacked on the curb to be thrown away. Over the next few weeks, she threw out boxes of books, boxes of photographs, mysterious boxes marked only “Attic” or “Keepsakes.” Some boxes had no labels at all. After a while, I don’t think she herself knew what she was throwing away.
    At night, while we were in bed, she cleaned. Sometimes we woke to the rumbling of furniture being shifted downstairs, or the chatter of plates being run in the dishwasher for a second or third time, or the crash of the silverware drawer being emptied so that she could tear out the old shelf paper. She washed all the windows, a job that must have taken days. She scrubbed the kitchen’s linoleum floor, which had yellow and green squares. One morning, all the yellow squares were white.
    Around the house, she began wearing one of Steven’s baseballshirts and a pair of his outgrown basketball sneakers. He was already as tall as she, and his feet were two sizes larger. She looked surprisingly young in his clothes, despite the deepening lines that ran from