In general, my father’s determination to make his views known matched my mother’s resolve to ignore them. My parents argued all the time. But they almost always argued as equals. When my mother made decisions without asking my father the symmetry broke down, and my father felt hurt. My parents had built their relationship on heckling, and as the years went by, the boundary between the playful and the bitter exchanges became increasingly blurred. Their marriage was like a rocky mountain range; as experienced climbers, they knew how to ascend the dangerous peaks, and how to shrink back from the
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