Living!

I’m a huge fan of context. I don’t see how anyone can understand anything at all without it. While I come from four generations of lawyers, and I know Yes and No are often the best answers, I’ve always found those very difficult to use. To me, in isolation, those two words are almost meaningless. When being questioned in a courtroom once, I was instructed to reply with a Yes or a No. I replied, “I can’t give you a meaningful answer if I’m restricted to just those two words.”

I’ve become comfortable with the responses: OK, Good, Fine, Reasonable Enough, and a few other short ones over the years, but I suspect that the people who know me best are a bit cautious about asking me questions when they’re in a hurry or don’t really care about my answers. If they do, or just have some time on their hands, they do, though; then they sit down or otherwise make themselves comfortable as they get ready to hear one of “Irene’s funny little stories,” and they hope that, this time, it’s really going to be somewhat entertaining.

Since I don’t really know where to start, I’ll start at the beginning this time, and move chronologically. Mostly.

Late one Friday night, many, many years ago, my mother and father were eating at Blackie’s House of Beef in Washington, DC. It was something of a local legend. I don’t know what they had done with my four-year old sister, but hope my grandmother was involved, because I don’t once ever remember us having had a babysitter, so the other possibilities are just something I don’t want to think about. She probably remembers. Older sisters have a way of remembering everything, don’t they?

After her-my mother’s, not my sister’s-third whiskey sour, and probably a prime rib, Philadelphia rare, my tiny mother, who didn’t drink, calmy told my father, in what remained of her South Carolina Low Country drawl, which she detested, but she always reverted to after a drink, “Charles. I’m in labor.” On the way to the car, almost certainly while lighting a cigarette, I was born. Since I don’t remember anything about that, so that’s all I have to say about the that event.

My earliest memory is of me sitting on the kitchen counter, dangling my legs over the edge of the counter. I couldn’t get up there myself, which meant I had probably recently been picked up, and I loved being picked up. (I still do. I know that part of the reason I stay thin is to preserve the possibility that I will be picked up. It’s doesn’t happen all that often anymore, but I like to keep the option open.) I also loved sitting there, so I was happy.

I heard the sound that meant it was afternoon, so my sister would be getting home from school soon. I learned at some point that it was the sound of an airplane flying low overhead, but at that time, to me, it was just the sound the sky made telling us it was afternoon. We were living in a rented duplex in Yonkers, New York by then. My mother was a handy little thing. She was hammering something (or -things) on the counter that, as it turned out, wasn’t (or weren’t) as thick as the nail was long, so she ended up hammering it (or them) into the counter. When she pried them apart, there was a hole in the countertop. I was shocked! Stunned! Deeply afraid. I knew we were in very deep trouble. “Mommy?!? What are you going to tell the landlord?!? What is he going to do?!?””

“Well, Anne. I think I might just not tell him.”

This rocked me to my core. I had never known my mother was capable of lying, and I recognized this lie of omission was tantamount to a lie even at the age of three. By the time my sister got home, though, I had come to realize that my mother and I now shared a deep, dark and terrible secret; and I kind of liked that feeling.

My mother cooked frogs’ legs that night. Something happens to their tight little tendons when cooked that makes them jump in the broiler. I don’t remember eating them, and I’m glad.