knots, like someone had put cigars out on the wood. Outside of her it was just Aunt Zoe, sick and crazy, skin white and patchy as a plaster saint’s, tossing lobsters into boiling water.
Jamal came and stood beside Ben.
“Hello, Jamal,” Ben’s mother said.
Jamal nodded, smiled shyly, as if they’d just met.
“Jamal is a vegetarian,” Aunt Zoe said.
“We know that, honey,” Ben’s mother said.
“I was a vegetarian, too,” Aunt Zoe said. “For fifteen years. And then one day I walked into a McDonald’s and had a Quarter Pounder. Just like that.”
“I know,” Jamal said. He stood in his coiled way, as if he were gathering himself up, getting ready to leap. He was himself, neither masculine nor feminine. He was Jamal, brave and unconcerned, quiet, with living eyes and spirals of heavy black hair.
‘I’ll make the salad,” Ben’s mother said. She kissed Ben’s forehead. She went and broke a head of lettuce with her hands.
“I went deeper and deeper into it,” Aunt Zoe said. “I got so I couldn’t stand the idea of ripping carrots out of the ground, or pulling tomatoes off a vine, or cutting wheat. It seemed like even vegetable life had some kind of consciousness. Like a tomato plant suffered. I got so that I’d only eat things that had fallen off on their own. Windfall fruit, nuts. My diet got tinier and tinier. I couldn’t slap mosquitoes or swat flies. Then one day I walked into that McDonald’s, almost without thinking, and ordered a Quarter Pounder. It made me sick. But the next day I went and had another one. And that was the beginning of my downfall.”
“A Quarter Pounder has, like, seventy grams of fat in it,” Ben said.
“Well, fat is part of life, I guess,” Aunt Zoe said. “Death and fat and, you know. All kinds of things.”
“We eat a lot more grains these days,” Ben’s mother said. “I’ve tried to cut our fat intake by at least half.”
Aunt Zoe looked at the boiling lobsters with an expression of appetite and regret.
“Lately I’ve been on a couscous kick,” Ben’s mother said. “It’s easy, and you can do a lot of different things with it.”
“I know,” Aunt Zoe said. “Proper nutrition is a good thing, I know that. I just had to—I don’t know. Release myself from the obsession, I guess.”
“You don’t have to turn everything into an obsession, you know,” Ben’s mother said.
Aunt Zoe laughed. “Balance,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing.”
She looked at Jamal, humorously, helplessly. She was getting ready to let him be the one who worried and measured and said, Just this much and no more. Eleven years of motherhood had been enough for her. She wanted to be a child again.
Jamal didn’t let anything happen on his face. He left the room, walked out the screen door onto the porch. Ben could see him through the window, stretching his long thin arms, looking up at the sky.
His mother followed his eyes, saw Jamal, winked at Ben. Had she felt the movement of his thoughts when she smoothed his hair?
“Ben, honey,” she said. “Maybe you could set the table.”
“Sure, Mom.” He got plates and silverware, went into the dining room. The dining room had a long blue table, flying fish painted on its bare wood walls. From the living room, an announcer talked about a wall of fire marching to the ocean. As Ben set the table, he made sure the knives and forks and spoons were perfectly straight.
Uncle Will arrived the next morning, with his boyfriend. Ben’s stomach heaved at the thought. He watched from an upstairs window. He chipped away scabs of paint with his fingernail.
They came in the boyfriend’s car, an old MG Ben wouldn’t have minded taking out himself. But he wouldn’t get in their car, he wouldn’t want his ass on their upholstery. He watched as they got out, were met in the yard by his mother and Aunt Zoe. Hugs, kisses. Uncle Will was tall, rabbit-faced, too clever, wearing cutoffs and a white muscle shirt to show that he owned one of those cut-up unathletic bodies guys could hack out with free weights. An invented body, hefty without being fit. He looked like he’d trained for the decathlon and probably couldn’t run ten yards. His boyfriend was a professor type, with a boxy head and a distracted attitude, as if music he hadn’t chosen was playing inside his head. His skinny legs ended in a pair of high-top sneakers, which he wore without socks.
Ben’s mother