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me. “Well, it still looks bad.” The fateful pause. Then: “You’d better stay home.”
    Relief.
    I was always nervous that when we dropped Kathy off at school, one of the teachers might run out to the Scout, grab me, and force me into the building. I would hide as best I could, sometimes covering myself with my jacket. But no one ever came out. They had clearly given up on me.
    Back home, without my dad around, I headed upstairs to my room to lose myself in a make-believe world—the sort I could control.Inside the walls of my Victorian dollhouse sat delicate furniture from a store in New York. Each room was full of tiny replicas—plush nineteenth-century sofas, mahogany tables, and porcelain bathtubs with tiny claw feet. I had minute plates of food: iced cakes, loaves of bread, cheese boards, and whole chickens. I wanted nothing modern, especially the family that lived in the house. The mother wore a long Victorian dress, the mustachioed father a dark suit, the children black button shoes. They had a nursery with cozy brass beds, a rocking horse, and thumbnail-size copies of Kate Greenaway books. My house even had a nanny, bedecked with a black cap. I camped next to the house, sticking my face into their living room, admiring the straight-backed, red, velvet sofa, the tiny grandfather clock, and the fake wood burning in the fire place. The nurse became Mary Poppins and sent the little girl and boy up to their beds in the nursery. I pretended that she was tucking me in along with them, kissing me on the forehead. “Spit spot into bed,” I made her say. And none of them had pinkeye.
    My mother pried me away from that world long enough to take me to the doctor. If he thought my pinkeye was fake, he didn’t let on. He prescribed drops that would cure conjunctivitis, but of course they wouldn’t work on me. After weeks and weeks of the morning rubbing ritual, Mommy suspected I was making up my illness—mainly because my conjunctivitis always got mysteriously better on Saturday but worse on Monday. But she thought it simply had to do with how much I hated school, and she arranged for Kathy and me to transfer in the fall. I doubt she had the emotional energy to examine what was going on with me anyway. Looking back, I’m not sure she truly wanted to be a mother—not then, when she was surrounded by a group of creative singles looking to make their way in the world. Here she was, shuttling us to school and packing sack lunches. There they were, freeto do as they pleased—and her husband ran with them. For her, just getting through the day had become a challenge.
    I don’t know if my mother knew of Daddy’s many affairs, but everyone at the Lampoon did. The tryst my father had with Michael O’Donoghue’s girlfriend plunged the office into chaos, and the rift between the two men quickly became public. It wasn’t the first time Michael and my dad had shared a woman. It was just that this time, Michael was furious at what he saw as a betrayal. My father tried to smooth things over at first. In a letter he wrote to Michael that my mother showed me recently, he even came close to apologizing:
    Michael
    I have never done anything, at any time, for any reason that was intended to hurt you. There are few people I desire to hurt less. I never did and I never will.
    I have never tried to elbow you out of the magazine (sic) or the record or any other project, and I never will. It would be suicidal.
    I’m not enjoying all this one iota. It’s sad, poisonous and terribly unfunny. So please, let’s stop. I miss you.
    Tony
    Even in trying to apologize, it was all about my father—how he wasn’t enjoying the drama, how squeezing out Michael would’ve been suicidal for him . My mom believes Michael opened the letter, read it, and returned it without comment. Writing years later about the affair and subsequent falling-out, my father adopts a more