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R E C I P E - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K Should high school reading lists be required to include minority and women authors? Weigh in on the book quota debate in Table Talk's Education area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Not waiting to inhale
Dear Daughter: Go to jail. Love, Mom
The water lilies look splotchy up close
The fun police
Women beware women
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PEEP SHOW | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The year I turned 7 I was sure it was my big Easter year. I was the next oldest kid in the clan; at the very least it was my turn to get a real live animal. I'd had my first Communion triumph and something profound was sure to happen to me. My grandmother had driven me up to Aunt Helen's on Good Friday, and until my mother arrived on Saturday I'd been too fawned over by relatives to indulge the holy trinity of my flawed character -- greed, impatience and illicit curiosity -- by snooping around for muffled bleats and chirps from behind closed doors, or to look for telltale clues that I was the most virtuous, deserving and rewardable child in the family. Somehow I found myself unchaperoned late on Saturday afternoon; my mother had arrived and she and my grandmother and my aunt had disappeared. My cousin Peggy had gamely painted my fingernails and then taken a powder; who knows where my uncle was. And this is where memory becomes distinct: the late sunlight slanting through the bathroom window next to Peggy's bedroom. The cool shaded green of her floral wallpaper. The frilly blue tuxedo shirt and lumpy neck acne of her junior prom date in the photograph on her dresser. The collapsing stack of Seventeens on the floor of her dark closet, and behind them, me poking around until I find a brown grocery bag of plastic eggs and, on top, the flimsy cardboard carton of marshmallow Peeps, which I am holding when I hear footsteps and suddenly I am trapped unseen in Peggy's bedroom with my mother and my grandmother, and my mother's voice is moving into the accusatory register of a conspiracy gone sour. "But Mother," my own mother hissed, "how could you lose 40 Easter baskets?" My grandmother once made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle for absent-mindedly driving her car straight through the plate-glass window of a drug store. In the newspaper photograph, she was holding her face in her hands, like a doddering old-lady version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." This is how I picture her looking as my mother interrogated her about the missing 40 Easter baskets, which had somehow dematerialized from the trunk of her car. Finding the Peeps in the closet had already muddied the waters of my innocence. Snooping had netted me a bagful of Easter candy I hadn't really wanted to find. I tried to convince myself that the Peeps I'd found were just, well, maybe surplus candy from last year ... But the conversation I was overhearing was really testing my faith. My mother and my grandmother left the room, my mother muttering furiously that the stores were already closed and she didn't know how they would replace 40 baskets let alone all that candy, and I started praying. Dear God, I prayed, please let that whole scene be a bad dream and I promise to stop being such an insufferable child. You can forget the pony -- just let there really be an Easter Bunny and I'll be good forever. Or something to that effect. Needless to say that a sleepless night finally faded into an anxiety-plagued Easter morning, and when all of us kids were assembled that afternoon for the annual egg hunt, fresh from church in our stiff dresses and cinched-up seersucker pants, we found -- under the bushes, down the crumbling chimney of the outdoor barbecue, tucked into windowsills and hanging from the rafters over the patio -- baskets, but not the wide-rimmed, beribboned wicker jobs we usually found. That year's baskets were improvisations: grass-filled colanders and green plastic strawberry containers, cracked sand pails and shoeboxes fitted with twine handles. There were plenty of colored hard-boiled eggs in the flower beds, and here and there a lonely marshmallow Peep or a plastic egg rattling with two or three jelly beans inside. I lugged my sagging shopping bag-cum-Easter basket up and down the hillside, grief-stricken, while Peggy's goat gnawed its way out of its pen and slipped into the house undetected, where it ate an entire toilet seat. They'd asked me to accept that a sticky wafer sprinkled with wine was the
body and blood of Jesus Christ, who died for the sins of the world,
including my own. Yeah, right, said my sinful 7-year-old self. But
somehow, even 30 years later, I can take one bite of sugar-sprinkled
marshmallow and remember what it tasted like to believe.
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