How to Cook Your Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I believed his story. I would have believed anything he told me. I learned the truth only recently. My dad had, in fact, been pistol-whipped, but in a barroom brawl. It turns out he was defending a woman he was having an affair with at the time, something that would have been hard to explain to your six-year-old daughter, let alone to your wife. Regardless, my mother rarely questioned him about his often erratic behavior or about the increasingfrequency with which he stayed in the city. Before cell phones and answering machines, it was harder to track people down. You could just disappear—and my father often did.
    After Daddy’s bloody return from New York, I became even more anxious about him going there. I worried he would yell at a car again and that, this time, he would get shot, hurt, or run over. That we would go to Clinton to pick him up from the bus, and he would come down the steps covered from head to toe with bandages oozing blood. Or worse, that he would not be on the bus at all—that he would be lying dead along side some New York street curb.
    The days he stayed home in New Jersey to write were always better. On those days, I could keep track of him. I could relax and not worry so much while I played with our neighbor, Becky Bradford. We’d play dress ups, go in the stream, or just run around outside. Neither Kathy nor I were much for dolls, especially not Barbies, at least not around our house. Playing with Barbies meant enduring jabs by my father, who found the dolls absurd. As he put it, “Only in America would they make a doll for kids with tits like that.”
    If we wanted to play dolls, we would walk up the long gravel driveway to Becky’s. Her mother, Connie, made us peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches on spongy white bread while she inhaled Parliaments. Like most everyone but my mother, she wore the standard Brady haircut and pants suit of the normal mom. Best of all, she thought Barbies were cute. I could play for hours up at their house, reveling in Wonder Bread, Fresca, Barbies, and maybe even an episode of Mighty Mouse . The Bradford house was my portal to suburban America. I felt slightly guilty when I returned from a day at Becky’s—as if I had been off doing something illicit. I wondered: Could my parents smell the Hamburger Helper on my breath?
    I never stopped feeling awkward and out of place at Lebanon Township School. But there seemed one way to belong.
    I had seen them sitting outside the A&P supermarket in Clinton. They always wore their hair in little bows or pig tails, and they dressed in crisp, green dresses; little caps; white knee socks; and brown shoes. The cookies came in neat packages laid out on the tables in front of them. And next to the boxes were pictures of the girls sitting around a campfire, putting up canvas tents, or holding the hands of grateful-looking old ladies. I wanted to be one of those girls. I wanted to look official and perky and go camping and sing songs. I wanted to sit outside of the A&P on Saturday mornings with my friends, giggling and selling cookies.
    But I found out from the girls in my class that you couldn’t just become a Girl Scout. You had to earn that green uniform. You had to make it through the Brownies.
    I decided not to tell Daddy about joining the local Brownie troop. If he thought the safeties at school were Nazis…well, I had a feeling that he wouldn’t approve of the uniformed Brownies. It was always easier to tell my mother about such matters. She said if I wanted to go to the next troop meeting, that was fine.
    I would go to the first meeting without the official brown uniform, which I would get sometime before the second meeting. I couldn’t wait—an official Brownie. The first step toward becoming a full-fledged Girl Scout—the campfires, the singing, the Saturday-morning cookie sales. Nirvana!
    The troop met after school, and on the day I went, the Brownies were making