Still Life with Plums Read Online Free PDF Page A

support and watch my mechanically inclined sister hoist the tire iron and jack from the trunk, pry off the hubcap, and start twisting off lug nuts, sinewy muscles straining. Twice I open my mouth to offer assistance, but really, what would be the point. Instead I head back inside and commandeer her Kool-Aid chore, stirring up a whirlpool in the purple liquid with my spoon. I carry the pitcher to the drink table in the fellowship hall just as M-O-H settles Pam on a chair in the middle of the festivities to open her gifts. The sugar-hyped flower girl spins pirouettes beside her, lacy dress billowing out like a bell.
    Lucky for me the food table is unattended and now’s my chance to grab more cake, ignoring my ex’s jibe,
Like you need more cake
. Or is that Mother’s voice?
Up yours
, I snarl at both, heading right for the confection, opting for a corner piece with a massive pink flower. I lean against the counter and shovel it in, enjoying the tacky feel of lard frosting coating the roof of my mouth.
    Afterwards, I resist the urge for a third piece and fix a to-go plate for Jeremy, my current husband, endowed with a kind, kind heart. The only human who loves me as unconditionally as my four dogs and three cats, a man who lavishes me with praise that I someday hope to believe. I am still very much recovering from Husband Number One, and maybe from Mother, too. Who, by the way, is still angry at me for depriving her of her own mother-of-the-bride moment because her only daughter, her only
child
for that matter, eloped not once, but twice. A scab she picked at asrecently as yesterday when she helped me select a shower gift for Pam. Of course I wanted to go to Spencer’s for something slightly pornographic, but Mother bribed me into Macy’s china department with the promise of a free lunch that would involve red meat
and
, if I truly behaved, beer.
    I obliged, a regular angel, even kept my elbows in and my smart-aleck remarks to myself as I scooted past $150 Lenox salt and pepper shakers and napkin rings. I owed Mother that much, or so she always claimed, because I was such a gross disappointment. Of course she never used those words, but she often tells the story of when the doctor first held up my slippery seven pound, eight ounce body (the only minute of my life I was not overweight) and pronounced my gender—
It’s a girl!
Mother claimed that my whole life flashed before her eyes.
    Not
my
life, it turns out, but my life as her daughter. Days filled with matching dresses, shopping sprees, joint hair appointments, and tea lunches with cucumber sandwiches and delicate cookies that I would primly nibble.
    I am not a nibbler—as evidenced by the cashew and cake-snarfing incidents. I hate dresses and pantyhose, white gloves, and clutch purses. I cut my own hair—mostly symmetrically—and, as a child, I liked to splash around in mud puddles when I wasn’t playing with fire or sawing off my Barbie dolls’ hands. (I preferred Troll dolls, I confess, their stout bow-legged bodies and wild vertical hair a closer fit to the reality that was me.)
    Squealing laughter pulls me away from my beloved Trolls to the spectacle before me—poor, poor Pam wearing a paper-plate hat piled high with her shower gifts’ bows. She looks at me and shrugs, resigned to the humiliation that comes with the bridal territory. I nod in a manner that suggests I
will
be circulating hyperbolic stories about this around the doggy dryers come Monday morning.
    Someone taunts, “She broke another ribbon. She’s up to
five
kids now!”
    Please don’t make us name them
, though I can always use the spare names Mother accumulated for the other children she never had (my father, lucky bastard, making his great escape when I was three, even if his freedom only came in the guise of a massive coronary, snuffing out my tadpole siblings too)—Marcia, Helen, Barbara, Stephen, Matthew, and Nicholas. Mother kindly offered—if that’s the right word—to let