The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

The kitchen cabinets don’t look white to me. They look cream. The stone looks white, the fixtures look white, the ceiling and the doors look white, but the cabinets look cream. I confronted the kitchen designer on this point when he came to pick up his check. I said, I’m concerned that the cabinets aren’t white, and I threw my sword down at the ground where it stuck, quivering. I shouted, Prove yourself a man! He grabbed the sword and we began to fight. It’s Decorator White, he said. There are lots of shadows in here. He feinted. I said, I looked at it at night and in the day and it doesn’t look white. No one could have made a mistake? I stabbed. He said, No, it’s definitely Decorator White, and I said, throwing my sword from my right hand to my left, You knew my stone was Carrera! He was unprepared for an attack coming from this side and I slashed his arm, drawing blood, which shocked both of us. He fell back against the cabinets, smearing red across them, and I approached, to finish him off. But he was playing, from his supine position he disarmed me, and I was forced to swear my fealty to him, and to Decorator White, and to say that I am happy having cream-colored cabinets, and in fact will call them white from now on, and so on.

David said, How do you know there isn’t an afterlife? I said, You could say that about anything imaginary. Even in the course of our fight about the afterlife, I thought, Even though there is no way that there’s an afterlife, it would still be a nice surprise.

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.

We’re going to go to the pool today. I’m going to sit on the edge of the kiddy pool in my bathing suit and my eyes are going to tear from suntan lotion running into them and John and another boy or girl, to be selected from any number of boys and girls at the pool, are going to fight over his excavator, which John brings to the pool and leaves on the side of the pool, but which is not to be touched. An excavator is an extremely potent lure, it will call four-year-olds to it from the deep end, it will pull a stumbling one-year-old through the water holding her mother’s hand. But it is not to be touched!

At the pool everyone is more or less naked, and the veneer of civilization seems very thin. In fact the hold civilization has on us is nowhere better demonstrated than at the pool, where enjoyment is tempered and bent to the ever-present rules.