Lies My Mother Never Told Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

Here, watch. I’ll do it first.”
    Scared as I was, I watched him do it, then did exactly what he had done. It didn’t feel good, was unpleasant and frightening, but it didn’t hurt , especially with him standing right there next to me.
    â€œDo it a few more times,” he said. “Then we’ll go to the drugstore and buy that spray. You’ll have it if you need it, but you probably won’t. And if your sinuses don’t get better quick, then it means you have some kind of infection and we’ll go see a nose doctor.”
    He made it a point to go back to the same pharmacy and order the spray from the same pharmacist, taking his time, reading the labels, speaking to me in English and asking me which one I wanted. The pharmacist didn’t say a word but looked miffed as he rang up the sale.
    I did not need the spray again. But now I had the little white plastic bottle with a blue label, right on the bedside table, just in case. That night, I slept like a stone, feeling safe and protected and that all was right with my world.
    Â 
    In Deauville, on August 5, my birthday, my father gave me my mint-condition first edition of his newest book, The Ice-Cream Headache . He had all of his books bound in leather with gold lettering—blue for Jamie and brown for me—and gave them to us on birthdays and other holidays. In this one he wrote: “To Kaylie—on her ninth Birthday. Hoorah! A new one is almost finished! And so am I.”
    My bound editions went high up on a shelf next to my brother’s, to save until we “grew up.” All his books except for this one were big and fat and frightening. I knew that The Ice-Cream Headache was a collection of stories, so I asked my father if he thought I was old enough to read it. He considered this for a moment and said, “Sure—go ahead and start with the childhood stories.” And he told me their titles: “Just Like the Girl,” “The Tennis Game,” “A Bottle of Cream,” “The Valentine,” and “The Ice-Cream Headache.”
    My father rarely talked about his childhood. He was eight years old in 1929, when his family lost everything in the Great Depression. Now, to prepare me to read the stories, he told me they were based on his own childhood in Robinson, Illinois, and that the grandfather in “The Ice-Cream Headache” was his own grandfather, George Washington Jones, a lawyer who was a quarter Cherokee and had written a book himself, a treatise on why Christ’s trial was illegal. My father had loved and admired his grandfather, adored his own drunken father, whose best advice had been to always tell the truth, and hated—passionately hated—his mother, Ada, on whom the mother in the stories is based.
    â€œWhy did you hate her?” I wanted to know.
    â€œBecause she was a self-pitying, sanctimonious, self-righteous bitch.” And that was all he would say on the subject.
    Â 
    I was taking riding lessons and swimming in the ocean every day, living a dream life of privilege, far from Robinson, Illinois, where I’d never been. I’d never met a single relative on my father’s side. His childhood was far removed from anything I knew, but his writing was so straightforward, so honest, the details so clear—the oppressive midwestern summer heat, the small backyard, the public school’s hallways, the mother’s sweating back as she toils over the kitchen stove—that I felt I was there with him, witnessing his childhood as an invisible onlooker. His mother beat him mercilessly and then demanded that he feel sorry for her, because her life was so hard, being married to the town drunk. He knew how to appease her with loving words of pity and compassion, when what he felt was revulsion and terror. And I knew that even if some of the details were changed—my father often said that’s what a writer did, fool with the facts—the