The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller

blanket she kept for watching TV. I would shake her awake, and she’d shuffle into the kitchen, drink a glass of orange juice, look at the clock. At seven on the dot, she’d take her medication – she was always muttering about her thyroid being off-kilter. By the time my dad came downstairs, she was dressed and cheerful,masterfully fixing everyone’s breakfast, packing lunches, organizing book bags. She cooked nourishing meals but rarely sat with us at the table for long, preferring to stand by the stove spooning rice pudding from a china cup into her endlessly chattering mouth.
    But then there were days when my chirpy, talkative, cheerful mother went quiet and staring, seemingly deaf to even my requests. She would dump the dinner on the table and rush away from the teeming mass of us to lie down and eat toast with butter in front of the television that stood at the foot of her bed. My father, Des, sighed when this happened, but he didn’t reproach her. He knew there were times when his wife quite simply shorted out, went limp and affectless as a run-down robot. Des would rally then; singing in his painful rasp, he washed dishes, supervised baths. I relished these evenings being overseen by my father, because he would ignore me a little. I was just part of the other kids, not a unique and special creature, not the apple of anyone’s eye. It was a relief. I roughed around with the boys, wrestled, kicked, giggled. But inevitably a sense of guilt overwhelmed me on those nights and, wish as I might to simply go to bed with a rough kiss from Dad, skipping the elaborate affections of my mother, I felt her pull me toward her; her will had infested my own. I walked into her room then. She was always fully dressed, on the bed, her plate of toast on her abdomen. She looked at me with a mix of joy and apprehension, as though at any moment I might renege on my affections. I had such power over Suky; it frightened me and made me bold. Sometimes I let my face go cold and stony just to watch the fear flash in her eyes.

Des
    An impassive Hartford Armenian, my father had a thick, gravelly voice that made him sound as if he had just eaten a large spoonful of peanut butter. He moved his powerful, squat body with a deliberate, oxlike slowness. The russet circles surrounding his kind black eyes made him look perpetually exhausted. Father Sarkissian never got too happy, but then he never got too sad, either. His unlikely choice to become an Episcopalian minister had been made against the wishes of my grandfather, a fervent Armenian Orthodox who never forgave his Protestant wife for luring their only son from the church of his ancestors.
    As it turned out, Des was a born pastor. He worked on his sermons scrupulously, kept the rectory open late for lost souls who needed a sympathetic ear. Yet one sensed, beneath the folds of his holy robes, not the airy, bodiless expanse of the spiritual man but the squirming flesh of a man all too much alive. Des always emphasized Christ the man in his sermons, to the point that some of his parishioners wondered aloud whether he actually thought Christ was also God, seeing as he nearly never mentioned it. To be honest, I don’t think my father cared much about the God part. The miracle was the reality of Christ, his it-ness, the fact of him. I remember at dinner he once said that what really mattered was what people did to each other here on earth. The Holy Ghost could take care of itself.
    Des was a compassionate man. He listened with a concerned, interested look as people with porridge-colored complexions and red-rimmed eyes told him their troubles on their way out of church or at our house in the evenings, when they had put their children to bed and had a few hours’ respite before their daily obligationskicked in again. He seemed to enjoy us kids, in an abstracted sort of way, cocking his head and watching us as we did our homework, argued, played. He was always tender with us