I’m terrible at them. Just terrible. Calvin always criticizes me for getting so mad and cursing at Maggie. And then I’m so mad I can barely breathe, mad at both Maggie and Calvin.

This time we came home from Vermont, where we swam in my cousins’ pool, played tennis on their court, and just for a little bonus, ate incredible dinners they made every single night. By the third night, we understood we were staying at a loving 5-star house. They were so astoundingly kind and loving I could barely handle it.

We come back and our basement is beautiful. Not done, but the dingy, grody basement has been transformed into something gray and sleek yet friendly. Then we notice that our carport window was broken and there is glass all over the concrete.

Of course there is. Maggie loves to break glass in our carport. She has a Master’s degree in glass breaking. When we discovered the glass, she was out there, literally out there in the stinking green hot tub water on the other side of the wall of windows (one broken) of the carport.

So there’s Maggie, bubbling in the shit tub and Calvin is sweeping and I am fuming. So I say to her, to her pudgy back as she faced away from our house, “Did you break our window?”

And she says, “There was a hurricane!” Okay, yes, there was, and I did watch ten minutes of it on the security cameras and wanted to throw up. It was a terrifying storm. But weirdly it broke this one window and no other, a window that had been broken already a bit.

Even though I just googled, “do already-broken windows break more easily in a hurricane,” I don’t know the answer. I think she broke our window. We know she was mad at us this week because the contractors called and said the cops had come by with a story about a kid in a wheelchair in our house. Calvin said she pulled up a bunch of our plants.

After the “There was a hurricane!” Maggie started her dreary monologue of fake legal action. “I’m getting a restraining order.” That line, which she repeats ad nauseam, is so untrue. I know it’s untrue because I have tried to get a restraining order against her and it’s impossible. The police are asleep or sulking and won’t arrest her. Without a real arrest, there’s no grounds for a criminal order of protection.

Clearly lack of qualifications for a restraining order apply to her just as they applied to us. So I began imitating her by babbling gibberish. I matched her facial expression and pointed my finger at her face as she pointed her finger at my face, and tried to match her sentences. It’s a move I learned in Improv, where I learned all the necessary skills I should have already had at age 40, when I started taking classes with 20-year olds. You mirror your partner and it looks like you’re mind-reading.

It threw her (should I email UCB and tell them how effective their training has been? No.) and she shut up and flung her cigarette at me. She has very good aim although it did not hit me. But then I was just still so spitting mad and I said the thing that has been just eating at me: “I never slept with your stupid husband.”

That just made Calvin annoyed. But screw him! The very idea I would have sex with the guy next door just offends me. Am I a simpleton? Do I try to do something stupid and ugly for no reason? Would I really cheat on Calvin with an unappetizing person in a situation that was bound to come to light?

It just makes me feel so much more menopausal than I usually do. I vaguely remember wondering if every man I met found me attractive. I know I did think stupid things like that when I was in my early twenties, maybe into my late twenties. And I have wondered at various workplaces if some guy liked me, but that entire train of thought takes up almost no real estate in my current brain.

So little real estate, I must emphasize, that it’s inconceivable that I would have set my sights on sad, excessively literal Ricky for a little romp, that I needed random male attention that much that I would extract it from a guy in a pretentious dad country band. I mean, maybe if it were a band of foxy, fun country musicians who resembled Owen and Luke Wilson ca. 1998, yes, now I can see that being a slim possibility.

But the joyless guy next door? No. Absolutely not. I have even read articles about Maggie’s husband’s band and his scene and I have tried very hard to understand his appeal. I have put in the work on the particular Maggie rant. You accuse me of schtupping your husband and I will google said husband to discover how that situation might have happened.

I really would like Maggie to understand that there is no chance in hell that her husband and I were ever in a steamy clinch. If she can’t see that, then I just don’t know.

She’s probably really crazy.