They were four, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, living an ordinary life in a quiet suburb. Their neighbors, too, were ordinary people: a young family with lively twins, a retired couple with a baby granddaughter, a family of a mother and her three sons. They had the perfect houses, the ones with shingled roofs, shabby attics, soundproofed walls, shiny kitchens, and picket fences. They had the perfect schools, the ones that emphasized good grades, college preparation, mindless learning, and impeccable test scores.

The neighbors holed themselves into their perfect houses, never feeling obligated to know the other, yet they did feel obligated to plaster a smile on their face when they crossed paths outside, trimming their yards to emphasize the undisturbed normalcy of their homes or stringing their dog along by its leash. No one ever wondered what went on inside their homes.

The young family let their screaming children run free in the afternoons, showing off all the marker of success: owning a big house, having two children, and working cushy 9-to-5 jobs. The parents refused to acknowledge the façade they were living. Maybe if we don’t talk about it, the neighbors won’t know. The wife had a string of lovers to make up for her lackluster marriage. She’d only married him for the money. The husband came home from work every night to eat dinner to the light of the TV. He made sure he tucked his kids in.

The retired couple held each other’s hands when they strolled through the neighborhood, living the ideal life.  Every weekend, they stuffed their car full of luggage and drove off to visit their cooing granddaughter. They never asked their daughter who the father was. They didn’t want to know.

The mother and her three sons enjoyed a party every weekend, her oldest coming home every week from college to check on his brothers. The father flitted in and out his sons’ lives using the divorce as an excuse. No one asked where the mother disappeared to after work. No one wanted to know.

The family of four enjoyed the American dream, both parents working in IT, the son relishing his first year in middle school, the daughter relishing her last in high school. The father, outwardly a gregarious and funny man, acted like a teenager trapped in a middle-aged man’s body, shamelessly flirting with other women and fueling his passions with his bottles of gin, rum, and vodka that trashed his study. The mother, outwardly a quiet and approachable woman, struggled to keep her family together, suffering her husband’s verbal knives.