Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be-except responsible. They are casually yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented eleven-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal.