Something very sad happened this weekend, but I’m not going to tell you about it. It was warm on Saturday, so warm that we could spread a blanket on the grass at the side of Henry’s soccer game and sit there in the late afternoon sun with our shoes off, watching him play. We had already exchanged Henry’s costume at Target, gone grocery shopping, and gotten the boys haircuts. David had gone to the dentist, my dentist, where he learned that some of his teeth were cracking. I shrugged my shoulders at the news. The dentist fixes teeth. He’ll be fine. Dad joined us at the soccer game, and on the blanket. He was taking the boys back to his house, so he and Mom could watch them while David and I went to the Spoon concert.

The West Side highway was backed up. We sat under the George Washington Bridge for a long time. I saw David’s office, which is filled with pictures of me, including one with my eyes closed. Why is that there? We ate Japanese noodles. I ate too much.

David went to the bar and I stood by myself, watching people meet each other, and the stage, where workers moved things around. On the sound system they played something with a slow rising line and I felt that, standing there, I was at the portal to happiness. When the band came on the bass and drums vibrated through my body and thrilled me. Then the band stopped thrilling us and everyone started talking about other things. We left during the encore. They didn’t play David’s song. There wasn’t traffic, driving home.

Sunday morning the fax didn’t work. We were tired and had to find a fax. We went to the supermarket in my parents’ town and I hit the car door against another car door but didn’t really notice and then a woman got out of the other car and yelled at me but then saw it was all right and waved me away.

We saw my uncles and other people at my parents’ house. Our children were happy, and happy to see us, and we kissed and hugged each other. My niece was there and did something funny and then everyone laughed and then she did it again, so everyone would laugh again, and this was even funnier than when she did it the first time. Then she did it again, and it was just as funny.

We had to get Henry back for a birthday party. John was tired but wouldn’t sleep. We all sat on the blanket on the grass at our house. John whispered David a spooky story. I went inside to get the car keys so I could pick Henry up at the birthday party and heard one of the doorbells ringing loudly and continuously. I pressed the other doorbell to see if that would make it stop, but instead both doorbells rang loudly and continuously. I saw dirt tracks all over the carpet. I called David and asked him to fix the doorbells and vacuum up where he had tracked mud on the carpet. The mud on the carpet was making me anxious. I took John to pick up Henry. When we got home David had shut off the doorbells by shutting off the power to parts of the house, and had vacuumed the carpet. That made me feel better. Now David was anxious. He was dressed but I had to get dressed. I ran upstairs to get dressed. My parents weren’t there. I didn’t have the right things to wear. I ran my stockings and had to find another pair. My parents were there. Henry was mad at my father. My father was hurt. David was yelling at me. I had to hug Henry. I had to leave. David drove quickly into the city. We couldn’t find parking. We tried to pull into one lot but it was full. Another lot was full but let us leave our car parked out over the sidewalk. We went into the building.

We went to pick up our car. They sent us outside where a crowd of people was gathered. An elevator delivered the cars to the crowd, one by one. We saw people we knew, and talked with them. They are probably moving to Brazil. We saw other people we knew. Cars blocked the road and other cars honked. Most of the cars that came out of the elevator scraped their undercarriages on the sidewalk. I was determined to avoid this. When our car came out, I did. I drove us to the West Side highway. It was stopped again. We sat in traffic. We couldn’t reach my parents to tell them this. Finally one of them called us.

I wanted them to see the movie they wanted to see, but they were too tired, they wanted to go home. I ate all the chicken salad Mom had given us and was unsatisfied. Both children were too tired, they fell apart near bed time. Henry was too tired to brush his teeth. I wanted to read books with him but instead I said, You win, I’m shutting the door and I don’t want to hear you again tonight. David had a call he had to be on. I watched TV by myself in the dark. This is how it happened. This is how it always happens.

At temple on Friday, I was worried that my father would misbehave. Scoff and get restless and telegraph his contempt for the proceedings to the other people there. Mom and Dad raised us antireligious, and inconsistent. Otherwise I couldn’t have this situation, I couldn’t be worried that Dad would misbehave at the temple I joined so that my children will be able to understand what Judaism is, before they reject it.

There was a period in my 20s when I had just married David and my parents and I fought bitterly, and I thought that I would never have the relationship that I wanted with them. David and I moved to Brussels and had a baby, and for this reason and others, things improved. I used to wish that I hadn’t had that period with my parents, first because it was painful for me, and then, more recently, because I hated having hurt my parents. But now, strangely, I realize I’m glad that we had a period of acrimony and grief. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to see my parents as clearly as I do, and love them as much as I do.

At the temple I was worried about Dad. The night before he’d started laughing when Mom said the word bima and at the temple he’d been making jokes as we settled down. I guess Phil Spector got out for this, was one, on seeing a man with enormous head of hair. Also, I had no idea what the service was going to be like, and I wanted everyone to like it and not, if they were my father, think it was stupid and a waste of time. This isn’t a story about God, this is a story about my family, and how, as I listened to the music and read, in the prayer book, about repentance, which is the act of being sorry for what you’ve done and changing yourself, making yourself better than you had been, I stopped worrying about my Dad, because I knew that down the row he was reading the same thing, and that he would feel the same way I did about it.

I walked into the kitchen, said something to Henry, looked at the headlines in the newspaper, and felt a sense of dread steal over me. It’s still here. I thought, by going through everything I looked at and thought about, by doing some detective work, that I would be able to identify the cause and defang the dread, but I haven’t. It remains, and it remains mysterious. I went over the paper, to see if it was something there, but I can’t imagine that the dollar’s descent to parity with the Canadian dollar or even the Mets’ spectacular flameout, unsettling though they are, is responsible for this. It could be the war, of course, but it's not.

We can go a little deeper, we can get personal, it could be my visit with my parents last night, which wasn’t ideal, or my mistaking when Henry’s tennis classes started and causing him to miss the first two sessions, or the fact that I tried to tidy up the house last night and realized that I live in a pigsty shit-hole, or the embarrassment I felt at the end of my tennis lesson, when I almost vomited on the court, or the more private shame of slipping on the bathmat, failing, over several long seconds, to regain my balance, and falling into the tub.

While I try to get to the bottom of this mystery, or better yet, while I don’t, I’ll mention that I’m reading the new Junot Díaz book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. So far my favorite thing about the book is that fact that, with big chunks of it in Spanish and other parts referencing sci-fi stuff I know nothing about, I can barely understand some of what I’m reading. Incomprehensibility, I think, is totally underrated as a literary technique. Not only is it realistic, a tool for representing the life we currently (slang, cell phones, channel-surfing) and kind of eternally (born into history, unable to maintain focus or consciousness) lead, it shows you, again, what writing can do: Writing brings you the pieces, the parts, and you work to make it whole, to solve the mystery. Or you don't.

For the first several days of any vacation, I think, What’s vacation for? That’s how much fun I am to be with.

But I’m even more fun before vacation starts. Five days, maybe six, if you’re lucky, and sometimes people are very lucky, I know my husband considers himself (he’s said this) the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, before we leave I become, what’s the word? totally anxious about everything that I ever had to do or will have to do until the end of time. What about the children? is a thing I think to myself. They will have school in three weeks. What am I going to pack for Henry’s lunch? How will I ever get the doctor to sign their medical forms? How will I convince her to do this? And money! We might not have enough! David, do we have enough money? He says What? and rolls over. Also: Did I really graduate from law school? I never got my diploma in the mail, it’s true. On the other hand, the school communicated with the Bar and I couldn’t have passed the Bar if I didn’t graduate and I did pass the Bar. And yet those dreams that I have another paper to write are so convincing. Speaking of dreams, and writing, and all that, all that good stuff, Did I spend the last six years writing a shit novel? I hope not! Body hair. I must have it removed. Am I inappropriate with the children? Was Mom tense on the phone with me? What did Dad mean when he said that thing the other day? And what about the laundry and I have to get to the drug store and are we renting car seats? Aha! That’s it! Those things are vacation things. I’m tense about vacation! Relief floods through me, my husband is grasped around the middle and lifted into the air, the children are kissed all over their ears, because they've turned their heads from me. Vacation! Not my whole fucking life. Thank God. Now I can go lie on the sofa and put off packing until the last possible minute.

I’m not leaving tomorrow, by the way, I’ll be here tomorrow, but after that you’ll have to win your own round-robins and threaten your own children and wish you were somewhere else, on your own. You won’t have me to do it for you. You’ll have to make your own half-assed references to other people’s art. Maybe this will be good for you. Maybe this is just the kind of thing you need. I think it is, actually. You’re lazy, and you’re soft.

Henry and I like to play Sorry! together. Henry doesn’t know how much I like to play it, because I never offer to play it. But I always hope he will ask if we can.

We fought over Sorry! this morning. He was losing and so he said he wanted me to win and was trying to move his pieces so that I would win. I said this was not an acceptable way to play a game. I said we wouldn’t play the game if he played this way. He continued to play this way. I said the game was over and removed our pieces. He cried and said I was mean and retreated to the play room, where a very meaningful pillow was thrown at me as I entered. By this point I had realized that I should have just walked away from the game, instead of dismantling it. It had been childish of me to dismantle it. I didn't say that to Henry, but I apologized for ending the game. He said that I was mean to apologize for something I had done wrong.

Eventually we played two more games. He won the first and I won the second.

For years at bedtime Henry wanted us to tell him stories. There were rules, his rules: The stories had to be true, and they couldn’t be repeated. Now John has started making this request, but I think he’s too young for the stories we used to tell his brother. Last night he asked for a story about Papa, and I told him that once Papa was angry with his mother, and decided to punish her by running away. (Henry loved this story.) Young Papa went to tell his mother he was going to run away, because he thought she’d be very sorry for what she had done, but instead she said, If you’re going to run away, you’ll need a thermos and a sweater. Papa thought to himself: This is bad. Then his mother took him to the front door and said goodbye. He wandered a little while on his street, maybe sat under a bush somewhere, then came home and rang the bell. He was readmitted.

Johnny’s eyes were huge in the dark. I found myself tacking a hasty, bad lesson onto the thing: It’s better to stay with your mommy in the house. John was relieved. Yes, it’s better to stay with Mommy. Then he wanted another story.