a little too bare in the scar-revealing, harsh overhead lights of the dining room.

Men and women were separated at the Club, the women animatedly playing mah-jongg, the men silently chewing on cigars over a hand of cards; women still had special tee times so as not to interfere with the breadwinners'-i.e., their husbands'-precious leisure moments; there was tennis too, but that was more for fashion than exercise, giving everyone an excuse to wear sweatsuits that rarely encountered sweat, couples sometimes sporting matching ones; a men's grill, a women's lounge, the oak boards memorializing golf champions in gold leaf, the same man winning seven years in a row, now dead, the large locker rooms with masseur's tables, the bathrooms with combs sitting in blue alcohol, the pickle-and-cole-slaw bar, cleat marks on the rug, the Founders Board with his grandparents' names still on it, immigrant dining room help, all referred to by their first names, always smiling too hard and at the ready.

What shocked Myron now was that people his age were members. The same young girls who had sneered at their mothers' idleness now abandoned their own foundering careers to "raise" the kids-read: hire nannies-came here to lunch and bore each other silly with a continuous game of one-upmanship. The men Myron's age had manicures and long hair and were well fed and too well dressed, kicking back with their cellular phones and casually swearing to a colleague. Their kids were there too, dark-eyed youngsters walking through the clubhouse with hand-held video games and Walkmans and too regal a bearing.

All conversations were inane and depressed the hell out of Myron. The grandpas in Myron's day had the good sense not to talk much to one another, just discarding and picking up what was dealt, occasionally grumbling about a local sports team; the grandmothers interrogated one another, measuring their own children and grandchildren against the competition, seeking an opponent's weakness and any conversational opening to jab forward with tales of offspring heroics, no one really listening, just preparing for the next frontal assault, familial pride getting confused with self-worth and desperation.

The main clubhouse dining room was as expected: waaaay too overstated. The green carpeting, the curtains that resembled corduroy leisure suits, the gold tablecloths on huge round mahogany, the floral centerpieces piled too high and with no sense of proportion, not unlike the plates traipsing down the buffet line. Myron remembered attending a sports-themed bar mitzvah here as a child: jukeboxes, posters, pennants, a Wiffle ball batting cage, a basket for foul shots, an artist wanna-be stuck sketching sports-related caricatures of thirteen-year-old boys-thirteen-year-old boys being God's most obnoxious creation short of television lawyers-and a wedding band complete with an overweight lead singer who handed the kids silver dollars shrouded in leather pouches that were emblazoned with the band's phone number.

But this view-these flashes-were too quick and thus simplistic. Myron knew that. His remembrances were all screwed up about this place-the derision blending with the nostalgia-but he also remembered coming here as a child for family dinners, his clip-on tie slightly askew, sent by Mom into the inner sanctum of the men's card room to find his grandfather, the undisputed family patriarch, the room reeking of cigar smoke, his pop-pop greeting him with a ferocious embrace, his gruff compatriots who wore golf shirts that were too loud and too tight, barely acknowledging the interloper because their own grandkids would do the same soon, the card game trickling down, participant by participant.

These same people he so easily picked apart were the first generation fully out of Russia or Poland or Ukraine or some other shtetl-laced combat zone. They'd hit the New World running-running away from the past, the poverty, the fear-and they just ran a bit too far. But under the hair and the jewelry and the gold lame, no mother bear would ever be so quick to kill for her cubs, the women's hard eyes still seeking out the pogrom in the distance, suspicious, always expecting the worst, bracing themselves to take the blow for their children.

Myron's dad sat in a yellow, pseudo-leather swivel chair in the brunch room, fitting in with this crowd about as well as a camel-riding mufti. Dad did not belong here. Never had. He didn't play golf or tennis or cards. He didn't swim and he didn't brag and he didn't brunch and he didn't talk stock tips. He wore his work clothes of all things: charcoal gray slacks, loafers, and a white dress shirt over a sleeveless