This Is Where I Leave You

wrong all morning.”
    I nod slowly, accepting the lie, feeling sad and old and not up to the conversation. “Strange r things have happened,” I say.

Chapter 24
    3:20 p.m.
    Today’s Inappropriately Self-Absorbed Shiva Caller award goes to Arlene Blinder, an obese, sour-faced neighbor with dark patches of varicose veins running up her thick, mottled legs. That’s an unkind description, to be sure, but the view from down here in the chairs is not a pleasant one. All legs and crotch as far as the eye can see, and, if you look up, double chins and nasal hair. And Arlene Blinder is far from anyone’s idea of a physical specimen. The small catering chair disappears into her massive bottom like it’s been swallowed, and the thin metal legs creak and moan as she settles down. Arlene’s husband, a rail of a man named Edward, sits beside her in silence, which is pretty much all anyone’s ever seen him do. Somewhere there must be an office he goes to, a job he performs, but if he does, in fact, speak, no one but Arlene has ever been around to hear it.
    “Oh, we’re expanding the kitchen,” she says, as if someone had asked.
    “It’s been a nightmare. First they dig the foundation for the addition and discover a boulder the size of a car. They had to bring in all this equipment and it took them four days to get it out. And then, after they dig down, they tell me the existing foundation has crumbled, and they’re going to have to underpin the rest of the house. I don’t know what they’re talking about, all I know is it’s another fifteen thousand dollars out of the 158gate. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I never would have gotten started.”
    For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They run on treadmills, these women, work out with personal trainers and play tennis at the club, but still their hips widen, their legs thicken, their breasts sag. Genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart. There is something in their expressions that is either wisdom or resignation as they sit quietly around my mother and Arlene relentlessly holds the floor like a dominant elephant bull.
    “And then yesterday they knocked out the water line and I couldn’t take my bath...”
    “There’s an image I didn’t need,” Wendy mutters.
    “Look at her chair,” Phillip hisses.
    Indeed, the legs of the folding chair are visibly bowing, and whenever Arlene makes a hand gesture, the chair shudders and seems to sink a bit further.
    “And the contractor is running two other jobs in the neighborhood. The Jacobsons, he’s redoing their pool house, and he’s doing a family room for the Duffs. So there are days when he doesn’t even show up, and God forbid the man should answer his cell phone. So whenever there’s a problem, which is pretty much always, I have to get in my car and go track him down.”
    “When will you be finished?” my mother asks, and for an instant I think she’s asking when Arlene will be done boring us to tears.
    “That’s what I’d like to know,” Arlene says. “At this rate, I won’t have a kitchen for the holidays, and my Roger is supposed to be coming in with the grandchildren.” Her Roger was in my class, a morbidly obese kid with crumbs on his shirt who wrote a computer program that he sold for millions, bought a mansion in Silicon Valley and a mail-order bride from the Philippines.
    “It will be worth it when it’s done,” Mom says, trying to wrap things up.
    “If it hasn’t killed me by then,” Arlene says, and then gasps at the potential offensiveness of her remark. But before the awkwardness of the moment can harden into something uncomfortable, there’s a sharp cracking sound as Arlene’s chair finally gives out, and she comes crashing down to the floor with a shriek. There follows a moment of stunned silence, the kind that stops time and pulls it like taffy. Everyone’s inner child struggles to suppress a grade-school snicker. It takes a handful of women to help Arlene to her bloated feet. I look at Edward, who has gotten up from his own chair but has been pushed outside the circle of straining