WEATHER in reverse

She’d been shocked when Phil, after some surreptitious tête-à-tête with a realtor, had driven her out to see it three weeks before they were married. “A McMansion?” she cried in horror, staring at the brand new edifice through the Range Rover's windshield. “You went to the Cooper Union, Phil. Surely you know a crime against aesthetics when you see one.” But it wasn’t, of course, about aesthetics for Phil. The brick leviathan, with its Mayan-pyramid front stoop, garish Doric columns, and painfully treeless, sun-baked quarter-acre lawn, bespoke not beauty to him but belonging, stability, some perversely willful American capitulation to Normalcy his own parents – stinking rich Fifth-Avenue alcoholics whose only hobby had been lobbing heavy objects at each other’s heads – had forgotten to make. When he responded to Sharona’s derision by extending a trembly lower lip, salty pools collecting on his lower eyelids, she dejectedly relented. She’d never worked up much of a resistance to that particular awful ploy of his. Besides, it wasn’t permanent. And her work hours were so crazy, she knew, home wasn’t much more than a place to crash for eight unconscious hours anyway.