Charlie and Gray, but nothing that happened in his family was ever a joke. They looked like they were sitting shivah, as they waited for the maid to tell them that dinner was served. She was the same African American woman who had worked for them for thirty years, though Adam could never figure out why she did. His mother still referred to her as “the schwartze” in front of her, although she spoke more Yiddish than he did by now. She was the only person Adam enjoyed seeing on his rare visits home. Her name was Mae. His mother always said with a look of disapproval, what kind of name was Mae?
“How was synagogue?” he asked politely, trying to strike up conversation while his sister Sharon spoke in hushed tones to their sister-in-law Barbara, and his brother Ben talked golf to their brother-in-law, whose name was Gideon, but no one liked him, so they pretended he had no name. In his family, if you didn't make the cut, everyone pretended you had no name. Ben was a doctor, and Gideon only sold insurance. The fact that Adam had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School was canceled out by the fact that he was divorced because his wife had left him, a fact for which, in his mother's opinion, he was almost certainly to blame. If he were a decent guy, why would a girl like Rachel leave him? And look what he'd been dating ever since. The mantras were endless, and he knew them all by then. It was a game you could never win. He still tried, but never knew why he did.
Mae finally came to call them in to dinner, and as they sat down at their usual places, Adam saw his mother stare down the length of the table at him. It was a look that would have wilted concrete. His father was at the opposite end, with both couples lined up on either side. Their children were still being fed in the kitchen, and Adam hadn't seen them yet. They'd been shooting basketball hoops and secretly smoking cigarettes outside. His own children never came. His mother saw them alone with Rachel, on her own time. Adam's place was between his father and sister, like someone they had made room for at the last minute. He always got the table leg between his knees. He didn't really mind it, but it always seemed like a sign from God to him that there wasn't room for him in this family, even more so in recent years. Ever since his divorce from Rachel, and his partnership in his law firm shortly before that, he had been treated like a pariah, and a source of grief and shame to his mother in particular. His accomplishments, which were considerable in the real world, meant absolutely nothing here. He was treated like a creature from outer space, and sat there sometimes feeling like ET, growing paler by the minute, and desperate to go home. The worst part of it for him was that this was home, hard as that was for him to believe. They all felt like strangers and enemies to him, and treated him that way.
“So, where have you been lately?” his mother asked in the first silence, so that everyone could hear him list off places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where there were gambling and prostitutes and roving bands of loose women, all of whom had been summoned there for Adam's use.
“Oh, here and there,” Adam said vaguely. He knew the drill. It was tough to avoid the potholes and pitfalls, but he usually gave it a good try. “I was in Italy and France in August,” he reminded her, he had spoken to her since.
There was no point telling her he'd been in Atlantic City the week before, dealing with another crisis. Mercifully, she had no idea where he'd been on Rosh Hashanah and didn't expect him to come home. He only made the effort on Yom Kippur. He glanced at his sister then, and she smiled at him. For an instant, in a momentary hallucination, he saw her hair get tall with white streaks in it, and fangs come out. He always thought of her as the Bride of Frankenstein. She had two kids, whom he rarely saw, who were just like Gideon and her. He went to everyone's bar and bat mitzvahs, but other than that, he never saw them. His