He slumped. That’s all. Fifty-two years old, and he let his shoulders come down and his elbows go onto the table and he sat there in his mother’s dining room like a man on a couch, and he did not take his eyes off my reflection while he did it. His mother said his name in the voice. He said, mildly, without straightening, No. One word, at a volume you’d use to decline more potatoes. My daughter put her fork down. Nobody had ever heard it.
There were about four seconds of nothing. Then my son — nineteen, no instinct for the moment whatsoever — said are we doing this now? and slumped too, and then my daughter did, and then all four of us were sitting in that room like teenagers on a bus while an eighty-six-year-old woman looked at her gravy. I stayed at the sink with a dry pan in my hands because I could not turn around and let her see my face.
She didn’t say anything else about it. She asked my son about his classes and he answered, and the meal went on, and it was the strangest forty minutes of my life. In the car my husband said he’d been waiting since 1996 for a way to do it that wasn’t a fight, and that watching me hold that posture at a window had finally made it obvious, and that he was sorry it took twenty-nine years. I said I’d been holding it so long I’d stopped knowing it was a posture.
We’ve been three more Sundays. She still does it — she did it in July about my hair — and every time, my husband slumps, and the children slump, and it has become the most absurd form of civil disobedience I have ever participated in. She has not adjusted. But at the last one she said something dry about the four of us and my son laughed, out loud, in that kitchen, and I dropped a spoon.
