Michael is shouting again. He’s holding his sandwich open so we can see the mess inside. I watch him thrust it around his head, see mayonnaise spill onto the floor. He’s saying, “This is disgusting.” Mom is saying, “What?” He’s saying, “Mom, don’t you know how to make a sandwich?” Mom is saying, “What?” He’s saying, “You have to spread it around, make it even. Jesus Christ, not just glop it all in one spot.” Mom is saying, “I made it for you.” He throws the sandwich on the floor and makes a new one for himself. He demonstrates how to spread mayonnaise on the bread the correct way, slowly, the way someone might teach a child. Mom picks the old sandwich off the ground and throws it away. Afterwards, she still makes Michael’s sandwiches for him. [hr] The argument ends with Catherine rolling up her sleeves and showing us what she has hidden underneath. It is summer, and she is still wearing long sleeves. The middle school counselor has called. He's heard rumors about Catherine and her friends, rumors about what she does in the girls’ restroom. I watch Catherine pull up her sleeves and show Mom her arms. She shouts, “I cut myself all the time.” Mom stands up, and looks, and sits, facing away. She is saying, “But why?” Catherine rolls her sleeves down. She says, “I hate you.” Mom is saying, “Why?” Catherine is saying, “I hate you and I want to live with Dad.” Afterwards, Catherine still lives with Mom, and Mom still assures the school counselor that everything is fine at home. [hr] I stand in our living room, and their voices rage all about me. It can’t have been, but I remember them racing circles around the room, blinking in and out of sight, now on the couch, now by the front door, now in the hall, and me in the center of it, spinning till I made myself dizzy. Them sprinting in and out doorways, stomping up and down stairs, slamming cabinets shut and slinging them open, dancing up the walls, jumping on the ceiling, and me in the center, standing in the living room, bare toes massaging the frilly fibers of the carpet, not making sense of any of it. And their voices. The house shook, I think. The glass in every window of the house rumbled, like a summer thunderstorm had rolled in and wind tore at the walls. They screamed, did nothing else, not even words as far as I could tell, just screams. What aroused such fury, I don’t want to know. And then my Mom lifting the framed pen and ink drawing of some Victorian manor off the wall beside the front door, where it had hung for as long as I could remember. And then Mom standing in front of me, and the framed drawing raised high over her head, and her shouting all her loss and frustration out her throat (forgive her, she was under a lot of stress), and the frame smashing into the floor by my feet, and the glass shattering to pieces, too many pieces to ever be put back together. Maybe it was because another thing from our old lives that had once seemed stable and permanent had been torn from its place, or maybe it was because it was scary and kids cry when scary things happen. Either way, I cried and ran away. My sister, Catherine, followed me. She caught me. She asked, “Why are [i]you[/i] crying? What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Why are you [i]crying[/i]?” [hr] It's a feeling of being outside yourself, of observing events but not taking part in them. It's a feeling of being outside of and apart from your family. I called it corpuscular. This was not the correct word for it. I was wrong about a great many things. I was just a kid. [hr] We are all in our twenties now. Except for Mom—she is in her fifties. On Mom’s birthday, we send her happy birthday texts. On Mother’s Day, we send her happy Mother’s Day texts. We don’t see each other very often, and when we do, we drink craft beer. We make jokes and laugh and enjoy each other’s company. We never talk about sandwiches with too much glopped mayonnaise or wearing long sleeves in summer or that drawing that used to hang by the front door. We forget. We assume we’re pretty good people, pretty decent sorts of people.