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an incident at a New Year’s Eve gala when she was standing in an impossibly long line for a ladies’ room. I never heard the end of the joke; all he had to do was to start to tell it, and my mother would get so embarrassed that she’d beg him to stop. He’d keep going, and even as her eyes filled with tears he’d continue, until finally stopping short of the “punch line” by telling her,
Julie, you’re just too sensitive
.
    As the youngest in the family witnessing all this, I’d hoped my elder siblings would stand up to him; but Dad’s rage was like an oncoming tank which most people instinctively ducked away from. Yet he was the sort of forceful man who didn’t respect “wimps” and you couldn’t miss his smirk of disdain for people he could cow. Someone had to stare down his guns for Mom’s sake. When nobody did, the sight of her defeated, slumped shoulders and tearful face became so intolerable that I had to speak up. Although Dad enjoyed some preliminary sparring, he could not bear to lose an argument. And that’s why, when his shouting failed him, I was the one he hit. A whack across the face or back; a shove; a rough painful twisting of my arm or wrist—right there at the table, while the others averted their gaze.
    When Dad’s rage was finally spent, Mom would be off the hook. At this point he usually looked bewildered, as if he could not fathom why the rest of us found his behavior so shocking that afterwards we all pretended nothing had happened; until the next time. It was always worse when the twins were away at school, leaving Mom and me alone with him. I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but in a way it was my father who unwittingly helped me find my calling in life—by inspiring me to become a teenage makeup expert in order to learn how to cover up the bruises I got from him.
    I left home as soon as I could free myself from his financial support, fleeing to the Yale School of Drama through tuition loans and a scholarship for a theatre degree in production design. When I couldn’t find work in the theatre right away, I spent a summer assisting a top makeup man in Hollywood, and I realized I was much happier playing with pots and tubes of cosmetics. Ever since then I’ve been in business for myself in Los Angeles. There in Lotus Land, among possibly the most neurotic people on earth, I felt that I’d found a more understanding family.
    —
    M Y MOTHER WAS patting my hand now. “Any new men in your life?” she asked hopefully. I shook my head, careful to appear serene about my current circumstances. She knew of my broken engagement, and probably understood, on some level, why I’d backed out of marrying a perfectly nice stockbroker who could have given me children to dote on and a life of ease—because he was the sort of guy who had to be completely in charge of every aspect of his life, and I just couldn’t bring myself to entrust one man with my entire future, as my mother had done.
    Perhaps because she
did
understand all too well, she reached out and stroked my hair with a soothingly fond gesture. Then, as if she’d suddenly figured out what she could do to brighten the situation, she rose to her feet and whispered conspiratorially, “Come, I want to show you something.”
    Somewhat halfheartedly I followed her through the hallway to the laundry room at the back of the house, where she bent down to open a sliding door in a cupboard beneath the washer-and-dryer.
    “I never noticed that cupboard before,” I said. “What’s it for?”
    “It’s just a crawl space, in case any wiring or plumbing has to be fixed or changed. But to me, it’s better than a vault!” She chuckled to herself. “Oh, I guess I’m just like
my
mother, after all. Your
Grand-mère
Ondine was always so worried whenever she heard about yet another burglary on the Riviera. She
did
have her little hiding places for her valuables—and I remember a secret storage area under a closet floor, where during the