This is a story about a sink that was too small and a car that whined in the cold, the boy who didn’t want to grow and the boy who learned to read. The boy who didn’t want to grow would only wear old clothes, nothing new, and the boy who learned to read loved to read the word drool, and could spell, when it was spelled out loud near him, the words dump and asshole. They had wonderful times in the house with the bats and the mice and the rats and the spiders, killing things and listening to them scratch in the walls at night, except that the boys slept soundly, on their backs, their arms thrown out, and never heard the mice at night. Only their father, the man who could hear the beating of enormous moth wings, heard the mice in the walls at night. Their mother, who did not hear the mice in the walls at night, did hear their father at night. Their father had holes in his shoes and their mother had one silver hair and an unreliable lower back and had somehow lost her serve, and even though she couldn’t hear the mice in the walls at night she could hear the people on the other side of the tennis court telling each other what they should do with her second serve, since there was so little on it.

But this isn’t just her story, this is their story, the story of the sink and the car and the two boys, one who didn’t want to grow old, but needed new shoes, and one who learned to read, the story of the animals outside the house, which collected nuts, and inside the house, which made noises in the walls. It is the story of the train ride home, and orange cones on the road. It is the story of everything, even of the stories we haven't told.

Last night sometime in the wee hours I was woken by my husband saying, What the fuck is that? He heard something in the bathroom. He turned his light on. He picked up the yardstick that the previous owners left in my closet and that the children like to whack things with, and advanced, cautiously. He still heard it. What could it be? Could it be the beating of the wings of an enormous moth? It was. When I woke up in the morning the first thing I said to him was You’re part of the conspiracy, by which I meant the conspiracy to wake me at least once during every fucking night, but which probably sounded crazy. Well, I was crazy. When it was time to go and John started whining for a Starburst, because we have a bag of Starbursts on top of the fridge that started as a rewards system for using the potty and which has mutated into a fountain of bribes, I said, You are getting to the door by the count of three or the Starbursts are going in the garbage, and held them over the garbage like someone in a Neil LaBute play.

The thing about Crazy Mommy is that Crazy Mommy wins.

I don’t like Crazy Mommy. Yesterday I played tennis with some women I don’t know very well but who know each other fairly well and felt stupid and smiley and wasn’t playing very well because I wanted everyone to like me, but of course not playing well doesn’t make people like you, does it? It is at these times that the advice of my husband, who, despite (because of?) his tendency to listen for the beating of giant moth wings, is intelligent and perceptive, comes to me, and I think, I don’t give a shit if these people like me. I’m here to play tennis. And then I played well and in fact won. Later in the day I was reading Ian McEwan’s first book, the first story of which is a first-person account of a boy’s rape of his little sister, and I thought, It’s just like tennis. You have to not give a shit about what anyone thinks about you in order to play well.