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the bathroom, for meals. Mine pushed and shoved as if we were always waiting to see a rock star. In her house everyone did his or her own dishes, hung up his or her own clothes, the way I imagined they did on the
Mayflower
, while we spread our belongings out farther and farther, until Dad had to build additions to our house and soon
these were filled to the brim, for my ancestors were ghetto people, then refugees, always on the go, escaping, who’d come on filthy ships and who’d never have enough room.
    Whatever Jennie’s parents thought of me, they couldn’t tolerate Zap. They wouldn’t put up with a Jew coming to look for their daughter, taking her off to play chess or see a French film. They wanted a guy who’d take her skiing and find his life’s work side by side with the other male Watsons at Watson Electronics.
    Tom hadn’t fared much better when he started seeing Jennie. He was a coal miner’s son and her parents forbade her to see him. When Jennie told her parents she was going to marry the boy they’d chased off their property two years before, they told her she could never see him again. She stopped eating. Her father had made his fortune in transistors and it seemed as if she wanted to become as pea-size as his inventions. Eventually Tom and Jennie eloped and were married in a meadow, where I was their maid of honor. They wrote for themselves one of those simple ceremonies in 1969: they promised to be faithful as long as they wanted to be faithful, and if they didn’t want to be faithful anymore, they said, they’d talk about it.
    When I called Zap to say Jennie was getting married, he said, “Give them my best.” He sent some crystal goblets as a present, large and misshapen, the kind Dracula might serve, and proceeded to go crazy. He joined a motorcycle gang called the Unspeakables and left school. When he flunked his army physical because he was color blind, he threw a fit. “Go back to school,” I offered as sisterly advice. “There’re a lot of women in the world.” Years later, when Mark left me after seven years of marriage, I’d see how stupid those words must have sounded to my brother.
    I’m not sure when I first noticed that something was wrong between Tom and Jennie, but I think it was after they returned to the dinner table following the phone call.
    We had just sat down to dinner when the phone rang, and
they both rushed in opposite directions to answer it. The call was from the children and once I heard Tom say, “Do you think you could let me get a word in?” Sean sat across the table from me, watching me with his blue eyes and looking bored. He didn’t even bother making polite conversation while they were gone.
    When they returned to the dining room, they glanced at one another with resentment they couldn’t hide. I’d seen them give that same admonishing frown to one another at the cocktail party, when Jennie had said you could go crazy in the country. I hadn’t thought much of it then. But I did now. “Just the kids.” Jennie fluttered nervously. “Please, keep eating.”
    â€œLooks like your mother has everything under control.” Tom spoke flatly and no one seemed sure if he intended that as a compliment or an insult.
    Jennie sat at the head of the table, arms folded on the table edge as if she were about to conduct a symphony. “They asked if you’re going to be in any more cowboy movies,” she said, turning to Sean.
    â€œPass the chicken,” Tom said.
    â€œWe’ll go somewhere tonight.” Jennie seemed to be thinking out loud. She hadn’t waited for Sean’s reply. “Tom, let’s go out. Of course, there isn’t much to do. We can go to a film at the mall but they only show gangster films.” She repeated that there wasn’t much to do in Thrace. Gangster films, bowling, a few Princeton bars forty minutes away,