Andy subscribed to Elle, Cosmo, Glamour, Vogue, and W, a dozen or so your celebrity gossip rags, and O, of course. He read O in the interests of personal self-improvement, self-fulfillment, self-nurturing, and an improved sense of all-around selfhood. He wanted to like himself. Andy's wife Gloria suspected Andy of homosexuality or at the very least of being at the far metrosexual edge of heterosexuality, but seeing as how she was 82.5% lesbian she figured the wisest course was not to make an issue of it.
Come vacation they drove south with their 3-year-old son Claude to visit Gloria's mom Delores, whose cancer was in remission. She lived on the water and wore a tan and played golf. Her husband Dave, Gloria's father, died in a rather grisly boating accident. It was still retold with gory relish by the older staff at the country club, as a kind of object or moral lesson on boating etiquette and the terrible things that can happen when you don't respect your propeller.
Andy liked Delores. She had a great sense of style and was a kind of real-life Jacquelyn Onassis in his eyes. Like Jackie O she had a great tragedy in her past that she wore with grace, like a fashion accessory. Unlike Gloria she approached every day as a chance to inhabit some new fashion, as if she were a living model and her life an ever-changing magazine spread.
On the second day of their visit Gloria and Delores got into a spat over something having to do with Claude causing Andy, whose capacity for conflict was low, to flee to the nearby shopping district where he window-shopped the women's clothing stores. Meanwhile Claude himself, who insights were relatively sophisticated for a 3 year old, was beginning to realize that his family life was rife with conflict, and that existence, which he'd spent his first two years thinking was pretty easily deciphered, was really rather murky after all. He understood that his parents' sexual positions were if not reversed then close to it, and knew without knowing how that his grandmother was somehow complicit in his grandfather's death.
That night he lay awake with his hands folded behind his head, thinking about how he was going to have to go to kindergarten, then grade school, then middle school, then high school, then college, then for his postgraduate studies, and so on. And somewhere along the line he'd be expected to marry, or at least fall in love, and have children or at least consider children. And it was all so boring he thought he'd go mad.
