“So, as you all know, I’ve been forced to live alongside Nancy and Andrew in their natural habitat for the first time in over a year and have witnessed many a spectacle,” I iterate to my eager friends, as they crowd between the backsplashed walls of my kitchen in Long Island, faces alight with anticipation. Gabby’s elbows are perched on the marbled counter, hands cupping her cheeks as her wild curls bounce off her shoulders. I can expect her theater-minded self to press me to write a play after this rendition or, as she likes to state with a pointed hair flip, “If you won’t write this shit down, I will.” Cross-legged and cradling a container of peanut butter pretzels poppers, Ally peers up at me from behind her too-big glasses. Grace is planted in a bar stool, her permanently sarcastic green-eyed gaze fractured in the reflection of her cracked phone screen.

It is a scene well-rehearsed, my kitchen arching into a theater, illuminated by the Brazilian hand-blown glass pendant lights dripping over the island counter, my friends crouched around to listen to my parents’ newest enactment of suburban stir-crazies. Nancy, the avid tennis player who retired from her yacht-clubbing days at the age of 40, who clings to her weekly book club as ritual, and who actively claims to be a devout Catholic, but who has also conveniently forgotten to attend the mass down the street for the past ten years. Nancy zips herself into a pantsuit from Monday to Friday to take her throne as the financial audit empress of Wall Street (her nine to five activities almost entirely consist of yelling at inferiors to do their jobs better unless they find themselves in sudden want of a pink slip). Andrew, who has donned the same pair of beaten-up of Sperry Topsiders for the past twenty years and who insists on driving a broken-down Honda that my younger brothers and I have lovingly termed “The Mini Van Space Cruiser.” Andrew, who we sometimes call Andy – but never to his face – is the captain of the sailing team at Plandome, a team that has never won a race. Andy insisted that our most recent residence be located near a body of water so that he could refine his sailing prowess; unfortunately, he has yet to complete a course without overturning his Sunfish into the ruddy waters of the Long Island Sound. Andy is a retired trader and ex-businessman who now channels his excess energy into accidental destruction. Nancy often comes home to find holes knocked out of the walls, or walls missing altogether, for the sake of unplanned “house renovation.” He typically fixes his messes eventually, even improves the houses along the way– we’ve bounced between nearly ten, all within a three-mile radius of one another, due in part to my parents’ insatiable stir-crazy – but not before ample confusion and the inevitable layer of powdered drywall that will coat our clothes for at least twice as long as he predicted.

My friends were the first to hear when my brothers and I rushed into the basement of our seventh house following an out-of-the-blue explosive noise, only to discover an alarming black void where an Eggshell-painted wall (or was it Safari Bisque? Unclear, but the decision had most definitely sparked an extended debate) previously stood, as Andy proudly smiled, sledgehammer swinging from his too-large hands as he announced, “we have room for a pantry now!” They received a detailed rendition via text message when Nancy spontaneously offered to take me shoe shopping and, after telling me the boots I was eyeing were too expensive, manifested the very same pair a week later in a neat little box on the counter, in her size. They’ve listened to every run-down of Andrew’s “house remodels” as his idle hands perpetually itch towards destruction, every re-hash of Nancy’s reign as “Ice Queen,” as Gabby has affectionately dubbed her, and we collectively giggled our way through four years of high school’s highlights, as my parents never failed to bewilder. A year in which we were all away at college had prompted a void of these treasured tales – although I had received a few hostile text messages from Nancy regarding a “stolen” Android charger of which I seemed a questionable culprit, given my exclusive commitment to Apple, and my residence at university several states away, and had also experienced one implosion while I was home over Christmas involving an ill-placed bucket of hummus and a spontaneous trip to Philadelphia – but reiterating my parents’ insanity was not as effective over text, and I could tell by their hungry eyes that the high school crew was ready for some fresh material.

“On Saturday, Nancy told Andrew to trim a few bushes in the front of the house because she’s a perfectionist with a side-fixation on gardening. She then proceeded to shut herself up in the kitchen, leaving Andrew, who is arguably unhinged, to his own devices.” My friends nod at the practiced patterns of my parents and my theatrical manner of discussing them. Their eyes flicker to Nancy’s corner desk in the kitchen, recognizing her weekend sphere of habitation.

“An hour later, as Philip and I are peacefully eating watermelon on the front steps, we hear a strange wailing resonating from the yard. We go outside to find Nancy holding some broken hydrangeas and crying to the high heavens. Turns out Andrew decided to chop off the top half of her favorite flower bush. It is unclear at what point he lost his marbles. Nancy reacted like the universe itself had collapsed. It is unclear if she ever had any marbles to begin with. Philip and I had to refrain from laughing as she first began frantically whacking Andrew with a magazine she had on hand. I’m guessing he wasn’t expecting assault via both a literal and literary Economiston his Saturday morning. She then collected the snapped stems, trimmed their leaves, and put them in a vase in the kitchen. It’s as if Andrew shot her prized deer and she mounted its head above the sink to keep its memory alive, that’s how she talks about these fuckin’ flowers.” I then explained that I had heard her plotting to replenish the vase each week by pillaging the community garden. Trade destruction in for destruction, to maintain the shrine to her murdered garden fellows.

At this point my audience is beside themselves with laughter. I see their eyes wandering through the kitchen to the window that frames the gardening mishap. Green twig-like stems poke up from behind the glass. The severed bodies of Nancy’s precious babies. We collectively chuckle because my parents are ridiculous humans, actors in a verifiable suburban comedy. The uptight banker and her clueless husband. A modern romance. From the other side of the picket fence, I’m sure Nancy looked like an asylum escapee or a housewife recently let off her chain. I was half expecting her to host a funeral for her maimed bush; she told me at one point she feels haunted by its “ghost.” I nodded at that comment empathetically, while secretly flipping through my mental catalogue to see if I knew of any therapists on hand.

Almost a year later, I found myself spending a semester in Los Angeles, where Gabby already attends the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Seated at a rooftop brasserie downtown, I hear Gabby re-enact the tale of the hysterically halved hydrangea bush. My birthday has recently passed and Nancy sent me a basket of pears in the post to commemorate the occasion. I have no special affection for this particular piece of fruit and we had been musing as to feasible explanations behind the mysterious “gift,” when Gabby offered to introduce some context to Nancy’s role as the Ice Queen.

As my glass, replete with red wine, clinks within a crowd of her friends, their unfamiliar laughter seems to tumble rather uncomfortably onto the table of overpriced tapas before us. Gabby’s hands are waving erratically, fingers flickering towards the sky, the atmospheric candles carving shadows in her face as she creases her brow to mimic my mother’s. I feel a strange itch at the back of my throat and I realize I am thirsty – I have had too much to drink.

My hand flits through the air to attract the attention of a waiter and my spine tenses. My mother doesn’t speak in the tinny voice that Gabby is dramatically exhaling. My father does not seem as wolfish as her flailing limbs demonstrate. How hurt they would be, to know they are story-time fodder between tipsy sorority girls and aspiring actresses. The legendary Nancy and Andrew. How widely would their suburban tropes travel, across dinner tables and tapas just like this? My mind wandered back to that afternoon in late July as I attempted to grasp whether my parents were truly as absurd as I had painted them.

***

We were sucking watermelon seeds in the late summer heat.I had just returned from my first year at college and Philip’s small blond head was resting against my shoulder. His eyes were blue like fragments of the sky. The white of his irises was mirrored in the bright hydrangeas. He looked so small, curled up against me, yet completely at ease among the gentle thrum of the cicadas. We were comfortable like this, our toes nestled in the grass, the lilting whispers of nature’s peace interrupted only by the occasional snip of gardening shears.

My eyes wandered over the perfectly petaled orbs that floated beneath the front windows, bobbing beauties that had traveled with us between homes. Ten moves, nearly a dozen houses, and every time my mother uprooted those flowers to bring them with us. It was as if their thirsty roots, snaking into the soil, tethered us to an ambiguous sense of home. The walls of our bedrooms were ever-shifting, the concrete that encased our lives re-configuring every handful of years. Yet we always had my mother’s hands and the hydrangeas.

The shadows of an oak tree stretched before us, imprinting darkness on the ground. The garden was empty of my mother’s presence, as it had been all summer. Her overalls lay, crumpled, in the corner of her cavernous closet. The steel rods transfixed on the shelves now bore rows and rows of pantsuits and ironed-out button-downs. Long gone were the paisley prints and colorful cardigans. She told me she no longer had time to tend to fussy flowers. It was enough, she said, to see the hydrangea bushes from the kitchen window before she left each morning, as the sun tiptoed into the sky and stretched its warm fingers over the yawning ivory petals.

My father had lost his job following the collapse of the twin towers and his pride, as well as his faith in corporate America, deteriorated along with them. No matter how high the bills piled, how many times we were forced to downsize homes, he refused to put on a tie. I remember my mother sitting at the table at night, her quiet tears eventually giving way to desperate pleas, before exploding into screams that ricocheted off the kitchen china and vibrated within the silverware. She clasped her hands to whatever deity she believed presided over our ever-shrinking house and finally began to send out her own resumes, despite the 16-year gap in her professional history. The jean-pocket in time where she stored her proclivity for gardening.

Five years later and one of her children was halfway through an Ivy League-caliber education, she could afford her too-big house with the sky-blue shutters, and my father stood outside. Clumsily snipping at the bushes, relegated to “house maintenance,” as my mother called it. He was never one for gardening.

I looked down at Philip, who is five years younger than I, and frowned at the thought that he had never seen the sun’s rays filter through my mother’s unruly hair, as she smiled through the sweat dripping from her brow and dug her denim knees deeper into the dirt. Laughter would bubble up from her chest freely, with the easy cadence of a flowing stream. I remembered the first time she showed me how to plant carnations, easing cubed floral arrangements from their black plastic containers, working her fingertips gently into the soil to loosen their roots, white veins wrapped around ebony particles, gently coming undone. She lay their vulnerable bodies in my purple-gloved fingertips and I remember feeling a surge of pride, that she trusted me with such a task. Birthing them into the soil. The memory unraveled as soon as it had come, carried away by the cicada chorus. The garden we sat in now was not related to the soil of my memories, the particles of my past perception of my mother. Now she was likely sitting in the kitchen, her once-blue eyes grey and glued to a corporate-issued computer.

A sudden snap cut through the July heat and for a moment the world went silent. There was a slight commotion of desk papers and the abrupt screech of chair legs scraping across wooden floorboards. A wail began to gather in the kitchen, at first an echoed vibration, but, as the front door flew open and my mother emerged, bearing a magazine branded in black and red, the noise crystallized into a piercing shriek. My eyes scanned the pools of grass before me and settled on my father, frozen in front of a deformed sort of bush, broken stems protruding every which way. His hands, wrapped around the guilty shears, hovered over a pile of ivory petals. My mother began gathering the hacked hydrangeas in her arms, cradling them, and with her free hand began frantically swinging at her husband. The freckles spattered across her nose, echoes of a past in which she was free to mother her flowers and care for her children, comingled with the dirt sputtering from the ground and ran down her cheeks in streams of salt and grit. Finally, her arms grew tired and she sank back into the grass, either unaware or unbothered by the grime creeping onto her khakis. A few moments passed before she stood, collected the corpses of her cherished flowers, and retreated into her mausoleum home to become marble once more.

It was ridiculous, it was absurd, but still I wondered, how many times had my mother’s fingers dug into a bed of soil to cradle those hydrangeas? How many times had she nursed them back to vivacity, despite their inconsistency of environment? As their roots took hold of each new situation, new neighborhood, new soil, so did my mother. Until it was time to transport and re-plant again. And even after she had decided she was fed up, she would take root and remain, for how many years afterwards had she buttoned herself into a pantsuit, zippered her lips, and trekked to the train station to do what my father had not the courage?

***

My eyes wandered over the fractured twilight of the Los Angeles skyline, the golden sunlight sinking beneath the glass rims of our champagne flutes. Laughter tinkled around me, dancing in the spaces between our tapas plates and along the lights dangling from the rooftop spires. I saw my mother not in Gabby’s flailing limbs and dramatic tone, but in the potted plants decorating the walls around us. My cheeks ached with the plastic smile arching over my face and I turned away from the giggling crowd for a moment, my thumbs quickly running over my phone screen to let my mom know I would call her when I got home.