My Year of Meats Read Online Free PDF Page A

Unfortunately they couldn’t find another rump roast that looked the same, and in between each take, Suzie had to wash off the raw meat in the sink and pat it dry with paper towels and make it look new again.
    It was kind of funny at first. Jane stood off to one side, funneling the Pepsi into the Coke bottle, which Suzie then poured onto the tired rump, over and over again, until the meat turned gray. Finally they told her to put it into the oven a few dozen times, and when that was over she was so relieved—but then, out of the blue, Jane asked for the matching, already cooked roast she was supposed to have prepared in advance, so they could shoot her taking it back out of the oven without wasting time. She was supposed to have prepared the meats in multiples , Jane groaned, in stages . But Suzie hadn’t understood this. There was no help for it, and they all just had to wait for the roast to cook, and it was the longest three hours Suzie had ever spent. The crew went out to the van, where she could hear them laughing.
    Later they shot her and Fred and the kids eating the Coca-Cola Roast for dinner, but the kids were cranky because they didn’t like the taste of the Pepsi, and Mr. Oda kept screaming at Jane, and Jane kept telling the kids to act like they were enjoying their meat, until finally Fred stood up and walked out the door.
    She should have known then. She should have just put her foot down, put a stop to the whole thing. Then Fred would have just come home eventually, like he always did, and the Sociological Survey would never have happened, and she would never have learned about the cocktail waitress, and the neighbors wouldn’t have, either. And right now she would be happy—well, not happy, perhaps, but at least asleep. She wiped her nose again and inspected the silvery streak that lay on the nonabsorbent surface of the polyester. It looked like a slug trail. At least, Suzie thought, she would ask her sister to send the old quilt back, since she just couldn’t seem to stop crying.

JANE
    “Well?”
    Kenji, my elegant, sloe-eyed office producer, leaned back in his chair, feet propped delicately against the editing console. He was eating cashew nuts from a small cloth sack. He gazed pensively at Suzie’s horrified expression—slack—jawed, incredulous—frozen on the screen.
    “The Survey’s a bloody bore,” he offered. He’d been educated in England, one of the new breed of issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, who wore his British accent like his Armani suit, casually draped, with a sense of perfect global entitlement.
    “... could have cut out quicker and thrown in a couple of reaction shots of someone laughing.”
    “No one was laughing,” I told him.
    “Oh.”
    Our office was located in the East Village. It was an improbable location for a Japanese TV production company, since most tended to cluster around Rockefeller Center, a secure, Japanese-owned neighborhood. Kenji had preferred SoHo, but Kato had nixed the idea because the rents were too expensive, and so we settled here. I thought it was great, five blocks from my apartment, but Kenji, who lived on the West Side, was still annoyed.
    When the first edited episodes of My American Wife! arrived from Japan after airing, the New York office staff crowded around the VCR in the conference area to watch the fruits of their labors. The disappointment was palpable— My American Wife! was dumb. Silly. After the first few shows, the New York staff stopped watching.
    The program looked liked this: The Wife of the Day appeared in a catchy, upbeat opening ... she introduced her husband and her children ... she led us on a tour of her hometown and her house ... and she ended up in her kitchen, where she cooked the Meat of the Week. Occasionally there would be a special regional or seasonal theme, but at first the programs stuck to this format, embellished with various “corners,” with titles like “My Hobby,” “Lady Gossip,”