My Summer With George Read Online Free PDF

as he walked in the door, real dinners, with meat and potatoes and vegetables. And sometimes Daddy would play ball with Jerry after dinner or let Merry hold the hose when he watered the front lawn.
    We children resembled our parents: Susan and Merry were square and sturdy, with pale skin, blondish hair, and brown eyes, like Mother; Jerry, Tina, and I were slim and small-boned, with darkish skin and hazel eyes (I always called mine green), like Father. Jerry’s and Tina’s hair was dark brown; mine was a sort of russet, which later turned quite red. Mother was taller than Father, and her height popped up in Jerry, Susan, and me. Merry and Tina were tiny.
    But Daddy himself was gone, and Mother had vanished too, gone up in steam and the constant smell of baking cakes and breads. We could not live typical children’s lives. But even with our help, Mom never earned enough to do more than pay the mortgage and the electric bill, buy coal and food. We didn’t have a car or a telephone, we never went to a movie or had a soda at the drugstore. Most nights, dinner was canned soup or eggs. The only thing there was plenty of was unsold bread, cake, or cookies, which made up a large part of our diet. Mother invented a dish made of stale bread broken into little pieces and sautéed in butter with onions, parsley, thyme, and, if she had them, bits of sausage or chicken livers. We loved that. But mostly we ate leftover cake (we all had bad teeth), to the envy of our school friends. But with the perversity of children, we hated having cake for dinner, at least after the first twenty or thirty times.
    The worst thing about our house wasn’t the food or the lack of money, though: it was the mood. When I was small, Mom still smiled—she looked at us, talked to us, laughed at us. The family would often go into giggles as we worked together in the kitchen. But although her work became a little easier as we got older—Jerry took over the huge job of making bread, Susan and Merry began to bake the layer cakes, and Tina and I helped tend the shop—Mom became sadder and quieter. I didn’t understand why, and I resented it. I was a callow kid; I had no sense of how she must feel, seeing her life pass in that way. And she always told us that the only thing that mattered to her was us, her kids, our survival, our staying together. Believing her, and knowing we were trying so hard, I felt that the least she could do was be happy. At eight years old, I thought happiness was volitional.
    When Jerry finished high school, he found a job in a huge commercial bakery in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bridgeport was too far away for him to commute even if he’d had a car, so he took a room there. Mother accepted this; she seemed even to have expected it. But for my sisters and me, Jerry’s defection was a terrible rending of family solidarity. All those years, the six of us had struggled as a unit to keep our family alive. We had watched our friends going to movies or football games or away on summer holidays, our faint envy offset by the conviction that we and our work were essential to our family and the family essential to each of us. Jerry’s leaving breached this, even if he sent Mother ten dollars every week. And besides, we missed him. Jerry was the most fun of all of us, the one Mother loved most. He was the oldest; he’d heard the most laughter in his youth, and it was his nature to crack jokes and tease. And Mother’s matter-of-fact acceptance of his leaving was silently subversive; it implied that the family was not the inviolable unit we had thought it.
    Jerry’s leaving had an immediate effect: in her sophomore year, Susan, who was three years younger than Jerry, signed up for the high school’s secretarial course without telling Mother. And on her graduation day, as we celebrated with ice cream (a treat), she announced triumphantly that she was going to New York to get a job in an office.
    This Mother did not expect. She cried, “You are