Home Game by Michael Lewis Page B

of approximately three thousand occasions on which her little girls will dress up like princesses and preen in public. And she appears to agree, and to feel better. Fixed that one , I think, and move on to the next. A family is like a stereo system: A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.
    On this first night, even after the girls return, it is not. I can’t believe it: Five people in the room and there is nothing wrong with any of them. I’m like a man who has fallen from a ten-story building only to get up and walk away without a scratch. I’d count all my blessings, but I’d run out of fingers, so I stick with the big ones. For the first time in three attempts, my wife has given birth without needing doctors to save the child’s life or hers. She’s so physically robust that she declined a second free night in the hospital and came home early. Our baby is healthy and—a first in my experience of newborns—reasonable. He cries when he’s hungry and weeps before he farts and otherwise appears to be satisfied with the world as he finds it. Even his older sisters have gone into remission. Eight hours of the full princess treatment distracts them for a few more from their suspicion that a new baby brother means less of everything for them. We spend an hour in front of the fire like a fairy-tale family, listening to them relive their first wedding. “When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell’s Canyon,” Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)
    When they’re done, they yawn and go off to bed, sweetly, like fairy-tale children, and leave us with fairy-tale leisure—which we use to decode this year’s Christmas cards, stacked up and waiting for weeks. There’s the drummer in the rock band who sends us a card each year but each year has got himself an entirely new family. Not merely a new wife but, seemingly, new cousins, aunts, and uncles. Who are they? There’s a couple we’ve never seen, apart from in the picture they’ve helpfully included, but who say how nice it was to get together with us not once but twice in 2006. Who are they ?
    Two happy little girls sleep in their bunks, and a new baby boy sleeps in the contraption Tabitha has rigged up beside our bed—having given away the expensive co-sleeper she swore we’d never again need because she was done having babies. In time she joins him, and so I curl up with Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, a new edition for which, oddly enough, I owe an introduction. “I think I may fairly make two postulates,” writes Malthus, before advancing the most famously wrong prediction about humanity ever made. “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” And off he sets, with the cool hysteria of the Unabomber’s manifesto, to argue that my biggest problem circa 2007 should be a shortage of corn. On the other side of the Bay, fireworks explode. It’s New Year’s Eve.
    Just before two in the morning, I’m prodded awake. It’s Tabitha, with a look on her face I’ve never seen there before. “I’m sorry,” she says.
    â€œOkay,” I say. “What’s the matter?” But I already know it’s serious. She’s fighting very hard to hold it together. Her eyes dart around, and she fidgets as if she itches in fifty places at once.
    â€œI don’t know,” she says, “I’m really, really scared.”
    She’s like an addict in need of a fix that does not exist. She’s terrified. Worse, she doesn’t know what she’s