How to Cook Your Daughter Read Online Free PDF

trailed out to the playground, which was crammed with shouting kids, and sought refuge behind the swing set.
    â€œHey, little girl! Stay in the playground! Do not go out of the marked playground area. Got it?” Who was this girl with the bright yellow band across her chest and waist?
    â€œOkay.”
    I turned and fled into the crowd, making myself small on one of the benches. A kid my own age sat next to me.
    â€œDid that safety yell at you?” she asked.
    â€œA what?”
    â€œA safety. They’re just big kids that get to boss us around on the yard.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    The bell rang, and we headed back to Miss Mole.
    That night at dinner, Kathy and I told my parents about school. Daddy became livid when he learned that we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
    â€œYou girls are not even American for fuck’s sake. (Actually, I was, but Kathy had been born in England). I don’t want my children pledging allegiance to any flag, especially not the American one,” he told us. “I don’t want you girls involved in any of that nationalistic crap. What a fucking country!”
    He would write a note to the principal of Lebanon Township School, he promised, insisting that Kathy and I not say the pledge. All I could think of was Miss Mole telling the class to stand up, hands over hearts, her mole hair waving as she spoke. “Everybody except Jessica Hendra.” I imagined her sharp voice as she said my name, her scowl, and the looks on the other kids’ faces as they stared at the commie hunched over her desk. “We knew by her lunch she was weird,” they’d whisper.
    But Daddy was even more outraged about the safety who kept me away from the swing set. “Hitler Youth,” he called her, not that Kathy and I had any idea what a Hitler Youth was.
    â€œWas this girl giving you a Sieg Heil?” he asked me.
    Thankfully, by the next morning, my father had forgotten about the note and protesting against the safety. He was busy getting ready to go to New York. There was more and more work for him at the National Lampoon.
    My mother would shuttle him to the commuter bus that left from Clinton (about fifteen minutes from our house) and went into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Many evenings, Kathy and I would go into Clinton with Mom to pick up Daddy. Sometimes, he would have spent the night—or even a few nights—in New York, and we always looked forward to seeing him again. Often, he would bring little goodies back from the city. I remember once he brought back some caviar and black truffles he had shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s. Stealing from the “big stores” was “a moral imperative,” he told me, flashing his loot proudly. “But never steal anything from a mom-and-pop store, okay, Jessie?” Of course I said yes, but I didn’t understand at all. I didn’t know what “imperative” meant, but I knew that stealing was wrong. Was my father a no-good thief or a modern-day Robin Hood?
    Then one night Daddy emerged from the bus with his head wrapped in an enormous white bandage streaked with red where the blood seeped through. He looked like a bleeding Mummy, and Kathy and I were horrified. Later that night he told us the story of what had happened, and I was convinced he was Robin Hood.

2.
THE BROWNIES
    HE WAS WALKING WITH A FRIEND DOWN IN SOHO LATE the night before when a car came speeding down the street and almost hit them. He yelled at the driver to slow down, and the driver did more than that. He stopped, backed up, and jumped out of the car, pulling a gun on my dad. Daddy thought that was it, that the man was going to shoot him right then and there in the face. But then the man heard a police siren coming toward them, and, instead of firing, he hit my dad over the head with the pistol and sped off.
    I was thrilled and frightened by my father’s bravado. I had seen him yell at a good many cars,