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was always trying to get him to do things with us, like play board games, but he wasn’t having any of it. She was somebody who could play Monopoly and lose everything and never get mad, no matter how many of her hotels you took. But my father would play like it was life or death. If he wasn’t winning, you could see him getting grimmer and grimmer as the game went on, and one time when my mother had monopolies on Boardwalk and Park Place and had all the railroads, he got to his feet and pushed the entire board over and stalked out of the room, swearing at all of us. My brother and I sat there in stunned silence, trying to figure out whether or not we were going to cry. But my mother laughed and told us not to worry; it was just because he was a real banker, and he knew that life wasn’t as simple as the game made it seem. She got up and went into the kitchen and made him a banana daiquiri, and then she went out to the backyard, where he was skimming leaves out of the pool in the dark. She turned on the pool light, and the backyard lit up in an eerie aqua glow, and I saw her touching his arm and then pretending to withhold his daiquiri from him. Pretty soon they were laughing, and he was reaching around her, trying to get the drink she was holding back from him. This was, I told my brother, the way you knew people were very much in love. That kind of thing was fun for them.
    My mother and I talked about love and men all the time. “You see?” she said to me. “The way you handle men is you just have to palaver over them, make them think they’re the most important thing in your life. They’re so easy, really.”
    About boys, she said, “They don’t really know what the hell is going on, or how anybody feels—and so we have to help them along with that. We women,” she said, “are the ones responsible for how people feel.”
    When I told her that it seemed unfair we had to do all that, she laughed and said, “No, no, no! Oh no, honey. We got the best deal of all. Do you know how boring life is without feelings?” I must have been twelve then, and we were standing in the kitchen, and my father and brother were outside by the pool, staring silently in opposite directions. “Look at those poor saps. Wouldn’t know what to say to each other if the house was on fire! What do you suppose they’re thinking about?”
    “Well,” I said. “Daddy’s thinking about how many leaves are in the pool now compared to how many were there yesterday, and David is thinking about soccer.”
    She erupted in laughter. “Exactly!” she said. “See? Isn’t it fun? You can do it, too. You just have to read their minds, and then you can do anything you want with them.”
    She and my father went out every Saturday night to a club. But they put on a little show before leaving each time: my father grumpily knotting his tie and pretending he’d rather watch the basketball championships or the TV movie of the week, and my mother laughing and calling him a stick-in-the-mud—years and years of Saturday nights like this, with her pushing him out the front door, all for the amusement of David and me, who were lying on the floor watching TV. She’d always turn and wink at me as they left and make that little circle thumb-and-index finger sign that meant “okay.”
    Then, when I was thirteen years old, all the ladies in the neighborhood started up a consciousness-raising group, meeting every Thursday night just to talk. At first it seemed harmless, like more of the same visiting they’d done with each other around the swimming pools while we kids wore floaties and jumped into the deep end and they watched us. But as the years went on, the group seemed to get sort of strange. My father pointed out one time with an angry laugh that there had been three divorces in that group, and one woman had just left town without her family and didn’t even bother to get a divorce or write to them or anything.
    I asked my mother what the group was