Inner Tube

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YOU’RE NOT GOING TO like this, but some years ago, in the family room of the house where I grew up in Lake Success, New York, my mother cancelled an unrelenting life by plunging her head through the twenty-six-inch screen of a Motorola color television.

Sadly, she was alone at the time, this being a suicidal method surely designed for an audience, she a woman who had played Broadway opposite David Wayne, had for several seasons been something of an attraction at the summer playhouses of Cape Cod. But we were all gone that night — my father at a political banquet, my sister in the dark solitude of northern woods, me on the job, vigilant in the newsroom of a major network — and I guess she just couldn’t wait. Still, that someone so corroded by the defeat of her acting career should play to an empty house — this really fit.

Perhaps she satisfied herself by anticipating the impact our hideous discovery would have. But a neighbor got there first, a retired petrochemicals executive dropping by to return a belt sander. Official vehicles had gathered by the time I got home, and the mopping up was nearly over. I did not see her face charred by implosion, haloed with bright drainage from jugular and carotid.

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