“It’s exhausting to think about, but if you drive around a neighborhood — try it yourself, but first put some decent clothes on so nobody will think you’re a child molester looking for the one child in America who hasn’t been told never to get in a stranger’s car, and best of luck to you — in every house there’s a family of people remembering clearly and obsessively what the other people have said and forgotten. You’ll show a fingerpainting to your father, and he’ll say, “That’s nice. Go wash up for dinner,” and your hopes of becoming an artist will join your daily grime in the drain, despite the hundreds of other fingerpaintings he’s celebrated in minute detail, magneted to the gallery of the refrigerator. Your mother will let something carelessly slide about your sister which will become a Doric column in your mind, the central piece in the Temple of Sibling Opinion. “I hate olives,” your brother will say once, and you’ll never give him any even though he loves them, he just hated that one. “My daughter is attractive,” somebody will say, and they won’t mean it one-tenth as much as you do. There in the dining room behind the fancy-paned glass and those stickers touting an advanced burglar alarm system, families are investigative reporters. They write down their favorite things and quote them, out of context, all childhood long and through all the dinner parties of adulthood: at college gatherings with cheap red wine and stir-fries, over the exquisite grilled fish of early marriage, then with the carpools all I had time to do was throw together this casserole, hope you like it, and mixed into the pureed peas of the home where you sit on the porch and stare moodily at the shuffleboard courts. Drive around the neighborhood, you dirty old man — Frost Road, Hemingway Way, Byron Circle — and see the houses quivering as the wrong words stick.”