“Stop it, asshole!”

It’s Thanksgiving dinner with Boyfriend’s family, and ten of us are enjoying post-meal narcosis at a makeshift dining table in his mother’s Upper West Side living room. Sitting opposite us are Boyfriend’s teenage cousins, B & D, who’ve taken their cue from the conversation lull and started pounding on each other.

“Shut up, B. God, you’re so stupid. You don’t even have shit for brains. More like ground beef.”

SMACK!

“Ow! You little shit! I’m gonna beat you so hard…”

THWAP!

“Retard, you can’t even hit me when you try.”

“Get off me, or I will thrown you on this table right now.”

“Try it, fuckwad.”

BANG!

“AGH! DAD! D’s trying to break the table!”

“You are such a retard. I can’t believe I have to be tormented by your existence.”

CRACK!

“I’m so gonna kill you right now.”

Boyfriend throws me a sly glance. “Just think, this is what it’d be like if we had boys,” he says in my ear.

Jesus. Watching them shrieking curses and inflicting bruises, then headlocking each other and rolling onto on the living room floor, I can almost hear my fallopian tubes clamp shut.

“Hey, you said you wanted kids.” Boyfriend shrugs. “This is what boys are like.”

“It could be worse. At least they aren’t in the bathroom purging their turkey or texting their 26-year-old parolee boyfriends,” I retort. By now the “real adults” have taken notice and begun expressing disapproval at the pre-dessert anarchy.

“B! D! Get the hell outta here! Take your asses to the other room if you’re gonna act like that!” their father yells. Still locked in their Herculean struggle, the boys, now a flailing mass of arms and legs, tumble into the bedroom and close the door. Their thermonuclear mania gone, we turn back to our cabernet and pecan pie.

Five minutes of peace, then, BANG! The bedroom door shakes with a massive impact.

“What the hell is going on in there!?” their father bellows.

Boyfriend’s mother looks at him pleadingly. “Hon, would you go tell them to cut it out before they destroy something?”

I shoot him a sympathetic grimace; no doubt he’ll resent having to shrug off the warm turkey stupor and administer discipline to the 16- and 19-year old disciples of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

To my surprise, he grins. “Sure.” Rising quickly, he flexes both arms and pushes open the bedroom door, then shuts it behind him. Silence ensues.

“Thank God,” his mother sighs, refilling her wine glass.

“I wonder what he did to quiet them down,” her best friend giggles.

“Strychnine, maybe?” I mutter under my breath.

BANG! A crash louder than its predecessors comes from the bedroom, followed by a series of shrieks. “Agh! Get off me!” I hear the boys yelling. “Ok ok! We’ll stop! Just get off!”

The door opens and Boyfriend emerges, gasping for breath. As he reclaims his seat at the table, I realize his shirt is soaked.

“What the hell happened in there?”

“You don’t want to know,” he wheezes, chugging the contents of his water glass. “Trust me.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“You always say that.”

“You did not just have a wrestling match with your teenage cousins!”

“I wouldn’t call it a match. I pinned them, they went down.”

“You wanted to go in there and wrestle with them, didn’t you? You were glad to have an excuse!”

“Hey, what do you want me to say,” he says with a shrug - it’s a statement, not a question. “I was willing to do what must be done.”

I make a face, catching the first whiff of his sodden clothes. “What must be done? What boys are like?” Uh, yeah. Not to mention 36-year-old men with permanent post-adolescent nostalgia.