This Is Where I Leave You

house might have mother issues.”
    “They’re breasts, Judd. The same ones you suckled at.”
    “Those are something other than breasts.”
    “Your father didn’t see it that way. When we made love, he used to love to - ”
    “Shut up, Mom!”
    “Why is it so hard for you to accept that your mother is a sexual being? Do you think you were immaculately conceived? I should think it would make you happy that your father and I were still fucking.”
    Yes. That’s what she said. My mother is a sixty-three-year-old bestselling author with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Pamela Anderson’s 86breasts, who talks about fucking her late husband like she’s discussing current events.
    “Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that that was a remotely normal thing to say to your son. It still doesn’t mean I want to hear the intimate details of your sex life.”
    “Judd. I’m your mother, and I love you.” That’s what she always says, what she advises the millions of mothers who read Cradle and All to say, just before eviscerating or emasculating their off spring. The next word is always “but.” According to Doctor Hillary Foxman, the patron saint of frustrated mothers, this is called softening, rendering the child receptive to correction. What I’ve learned, after nine years of marital spats, is that everything before the “but” is bullshit.
    “But,” she says, “your sorrow has become malignant.”
    I nod slowly, as if considering her words. “Thanks, Mom. That wasn’t even the slightest bit helpful.”
    She shrugs and pulls herself up off the bed, stopping at the foot of the stairs to consider me. Dust mites dance in the sunlight pouring down from the opened door upstairs, and I can see the bags under her eyes, the gray roots at her scalp, and the acute sadness in her eyes as she looks at me. Somewhere in there, underneath those ridiculous breasts and the psychobabble, is a real mother, hurting for her child, and for reasons I probably couldn’t begin to explain without years of therapy, her pain fills me with a quiet, relentless rage.
    “I miss your father,” she says.
    “I miss him too.”
    “Do you?”
    “I missed him while he was still alive.”
    She nods. “He was never comfortable expressing himself. But he loved you very much.”
    “Not like he loved you.”
    She smiles and massages the back of her neck. Upstairs, Phillip and Tracy have finally, mercifully finished, and a welcome quiet fills the room.
    “I’m sorry you couldn’t have your old room,” she says. “I thought Paul and Alice could use some privacy. They’ve been trying to conceive, you know.”
    “Wendy mentioned something.”
    “That sofa bed is fine for sleeping, but it’s simply not built for procreation. The springs creak like a couple of fighting cats. You can hear it throughout the house.”
    “I don’t suppose I can stop you from telling me why you know that.”
    “Your father and I made love on every bed in this house.”
    “Of course.”
    “Anyway, I found an ovulation test kit in the wastebasket in the hall bathroom, so I’m thinking these are key nights for Alice.”
    Mom never had any use for discretion, never even had the sense to fake it. She habitually went through our drawers and coat pockets, inspected our sheets, listened in on our phone calls, and read Wendy’s diary so often that we started composing entries just for her to find. Mr. Jorgenson, my phys-ed teacher, still says I can’t call him Ed, even after I had a three-way with him and Mike Stedman, who swears the whole genital herpes thing was just a nasty rumor started by his ex-girlfriend who was pissed at him for sleeping with me and Ed.
    Liz Coltrane gave me these awesome pills that make you vomit after every meal, so I don’t have to use my finger anymore. It’s much more civilized, and I can finally grow my nails again. Thin and manicured! Win-win!
    I know incest is wrong. I just figured I’d do it once to see what all the fuss was about. But now Paul wants to do it with me all the time and it’s starting to get creepy. It would have been so much easier with Judd, if only he wasn’t gay.
    Mom believed that intra family secrets were unhealthy, and because of that, we spent the better part of our childhood lying our asses off to her.
    When I was twelve years old, she unceremoniously handed me a tube of KY Jelly and said that she could tell from the laundry that I’d begun masturbating, and this would increase my