Free The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes

turkeys, hams, a large luxurious dinner—too much pie.
    â€œWhat does ham taste like?”
    â€œIt’s good,” my mother says.
    â€œWhy don’t we ever have ham?”
    â€œYour father doesn’t really like meat—he thinks he’s a vegetarian.”
    Despite my thinking I will make it a decent day, I cave in. Norman is going to church with his family and then having Christmas dinner, and they have a fucking Christmas tree. I know because late last night I drove by the house, and I saw the driveway filled with cars, a wreath on the door, a thousand lights inside.
    In the afternoon, my mother does the winter equivalent of spring cleaning—she is on a stepladder in the closet. “Does any of this mean anything to you?” She shows me an old frying pan, a cookie tin, a chipped plate.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’m thinking of going to a movie,” I say.
    â€œDo you think you’ll get in?” my mother asks.
    My father is in the living room reading. “What are you thinking of seeing?
    â€œ Schindler’s List .”
    â€œI read a review that was negative,” my father says.
    â€œBye. Have fun,” my mother says.
    â€œIt’s not supposed to be fun. That’s why I’m going.”
    Â 
    I grew up convinced that every family was better than mine. I grew up watching other families in awe, hardly able to bear the sensations, the nearly pornographic pleasure of witnessing such small intimacies. I would hover on the edge, knowing that however much they include you—invite you to dinner, take you on family trips—you are never official, you are always the “friend,” the first one left behind.
    The movie theater is crowded with families, with couples, young and old. I find a single seat in the middle of a row—everyone rises to let me pass. I’m sitting in the theater by myself, distinctly aware that I do not want to spend the rest of my life alone, frightened that I will never be able to make a life, that I am too fractured to connect with another person.
    The film, taken from a novel by Thomas Keneally, is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, a Nazi, a womanizer, who ultimately turned around and saved the lives of eleven hundred Jews. I watch thinking of Norman, Norman as Schindler—German, Catholic, charismatic, charming, struggling with right versus wrong. I watch prison camp commandant Goeth, who shoots Jews for target practice, thinking of the randomness, the unpredictability, of history. Even those who seem decent or even perhaps heroic aren’t; instead they are human, deeply flawed. It is about the degradation of the soul, struggling to maintain some small sense of self amid so much loss, struggling to maintain oneself in a death camp, to remain human, alive, even in death. It is the Christians versus the Jews, the dividing of families, oddly relevant.
    If Norman were truly the big guy, the good Christian he pretends to be, he would accept responsibility. He would tell his children that there had been a lapse in the marriage, but that something good had come of it—me.
    On all sides of me people are weeping, and yet I am finding the film uplifting—it is equal to what I am feeling.
    Â 
    I drive home. The lights are on; I am in front of the house, the only house we ever lived in, in front of my family. I pull into the carport. I am so angry, so sad, hating everyone for who they are and for everything they are not. It is the rising of emotion, as everything I can’t articulate begins whirling inside me. I gun the engine. I imagine driving the car into the house, crashing through, desperate to get past what is blocking me. I am gunning the engine, wishing I’d take my foot off the brake; the car is straining under my foot. The car, a brainless machine, wants to go forward, to hurl itself blindly through the wall and into the kitchen. I picture the cabinets emptying out,