It all started when Harold brought my mom the butthole painting. They really were huge jelly doughnuts, two to be exact, but any normal person could see they were buttholes. That part must have slipped Harold’s mind. Sometimes you can’t see the thing right in front of your face.
“I like doughnuts,” Mom said.
That wasn’t the problem. Everyone likes doughnuts. The problem was these giant oozing caverns looked nothing like munchkins. But somehow she couldn’t see it, either.
To make it worse, she hung it right over the seat where Dad used to eat in the kitchen.
But I let it go because I knew it was part of my mother’s grand plan. Harold belonged to the prestigious Langham Club in Andover, and my whole life my mother’s dream was to get into this club and be served fried clams under a mounted deer head. Solely because she wasn’t allowed to. I said how do you even know they have mounted deer heads but she said, “Oh, they got ’em.”
My grandparents had also tried to get into the club, but they had to settle for an inflatable pool in the backyard, where they’d rub some Vaseline on a watermelon and say, “Kids, go nuts.” That was our country club. Pushing around this big honking lubed-up watermelon.
