Levy, who cries on escalators, doesn’t hate her children. She doesn’t hate her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rather, she hates that a woman must extend herself to assume a domestic role and become a stranger to the person she once was.

To celebrate having passed the boards for foreign medical graduates, my father bought a new Chevy Caprice station wagon, turtle green with matching interior. The flatbed in the back folded into a bench seat that faced the rear.