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my downfall.”
    “It’s all right,” Jeremy says. “Because I am queer. I’m, like, a total fag. And now this queer is going upstairs. Goodbye.”
    Off he goes, clumping noisily away from us. I’ll let him sit up there for a minute before I go up to talk to him.
    “Anyhow,” Lucy says, “the word is ‘gay.’ You can’t say ‘queer’ unless you are queer.”
    “They’re the same, aren’t they? Those words?” Corinne asks, trying to smile. I truly wish she would stop talking.
    “Well, what’s really interesting,” Astrid says, suddenly turning around and facing us, “is why Jeremy would say that he’s gay when all the evidence is to the contrary. And there’s been quite a bit of evidence already, Corinne, though you wouldn’t know that.”

    “No, I wouldn’t know,” Corinne responds.
    “Tell her about Alissa,” Lucy says to her mother. “Little Miss Princess? The pink stockings? The locket? The bunny factory?”
    “No, we’re not going into that,” Astrid says.
    “At least he didn’t get her pregnant,” I say helpfully, because he didn’t. They used condoms.
    “But he could of,” Lucy says proudly. “If he had tried.”
    “This is so the wrong topic,” Astrid says. “Corinne, you must be very tired. We’re all surprised to see you, as no doubt you know, and I suppose you’d like a glass of water. Are you hungry? Thirsty? The salmon will be ready soon, and we’ll all sit down to eat. I wish you had given us a bit of notice. And we’ll have to catch up on all your news!” Astrid tries a smile.
    “I don’t have any news,” Corinne says. “Well, I mean, it’s all news, it’s all news to me. What isn’t news? This bright shiny kitchen is news! And Lucy: you certainly are the newest thing.” She looks at all of us, one by one. “Oh, have pity on me,” she says, and then she begins to cry, and all the women move toward her.
    —
    Once I’m upstairs, I knock on Jeremy’s door. He doesn’t say “Come in,” but I go in anyway. I’ll spare you the details of his room. He’s lying on his bed with his eyes closed. His shoes are off and his big feet are sticking up at the end of the bed in their white socks, and he has an arm flung across his face, covering his eyes. I am amazingly proud of my son. I love him so much, but I have to hide it.

    “Jeremy,” I say. “You’ll have to come back down eventually.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s unfair. She’s unfair. I mean, she’s, like, crazy. And I…and I’m supposed to love her, or something? Because she was once my mother? Fuck that.”
    “I need to say something to you,” I say. “I just can’t think of what.”
    “Please, Dad. None of that wisdom shit, okay? I hate wisdom. I just fucking hate it.”
    “Okay,” I say. “You’re in luck. I don’t have any.”
    “That’s good. Can we talk about something else? No, I know: let’s not talk.”
    So we don’t talk for a minute or two. Then Jeremy says, “You know, this isn’t so bad.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, having your mother show up and act crazy. That’s not so bad. I mean, you know how I’m studying world geography now?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And, like, the point of world geography is not where the countries are, but what people actually do, you know? I mean, take a country like, for example, Paraguay. You know where Paraguay is, right?”
    I nod. But I actually don’t know where it is. Near Bolivia?
    “So”—and here he sits up—“so, okay. Anyhow, Paraguay is like this nothing country in the middle of South America, and they don’t even all speak Spanish there, but this weird Indian language like Sioux except it’s South American, but the point is, when you look at conditions, it’s not all happy days down there. Well, maybe it’s happier now. But what our textbook said? Was that they had, you know, torture parties there. Once. Where torturers get drunk and turn the dial up to eleven. Like they did in Chile. And