The End of the World as We Know It Read Online Free PDF Page A

crabs from Archie Newton when he came by in the truck—softshells when they were in season—and big tins of potato chips from the Charles Chips man, who also came by in a truck once a week. She always looked lovely. She was known to be a great cook, but really all she ever did was sit in the enormous kitchen and tell Martha what to do, how to make deviled crab or angel food cake, recipes which Martha must have known by heart, after all those years.
    Dodo watched television. Dodo was in love with the flickering image, and she would sit on the floor and watch anything that was on. She loved the early soap operas. She loved
American Bandstand
. She was a romantic.
    She was the greatest playmate a child could have. She was strong, so when we played horsey she could carry an eight-year-old boy on her back with ease, crawling around the sitting roomon all fours for hours, one eye on the TV. We would use her thin belts for reins. We would also arm wrestle and Dodo would always win. And, like all children, she could be mean, hurting you for no reason, pinching you until you bruised. But most of the time she was sweet and funny and amenable, and we adored her. My parents would pack us off to Fredericksburg in the summer so my grandmother could look after us, but she was old, and Warren was downtown working, and Dodo, except for nap time, was always available. Once my parents went to the Adirondacks, to Onteora, unimaginably far away, and we were at my grandmother Jinks’s house for three weeks.
    Jinks was extraordinarily mean to me. She was my father’s mother, she doted on him, and she considered my brother and sister to be part of her family, since they were named after members of it, and I was considered to be part of my mother’s family, since I was named after my mother’s father. She would sit us all down, my brother and my sister and me, and she would say, “Look now, children. Everybody thinks Robbie’s so smart, but we all know that he’s just good at imitating the grownups. That’s not really intelligence. A parrot can do that. You two are really the smart ones.”
    She would also sit me down with a family photograph album and show me pictures of one of my father’s uncles who was also named Robbie. He looked like Rudolph Valentino, hair all slicked back, three-quarter profile in the World War I uniform, dark handsome eyes, completely handsome everything. “This is your uncle Robbie, whom you’re named after,” she would say, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. “It’s a pity you’ll never be good-looking like he was.”
    I would spend days every summer in this house with this woman, living her life and trying not to feel too bad.
    Breakfast was elaborate, served in several courses: a fruit course, and then big silver trays with scrambled eggs and bacon or ham or shad roe. There would always be fresh biscuits with country butter. My grandmother had a lifetime collection of elaborately painted teacups, and they gleamed from a china cupboard in the dining room.
    Dinner was served in the middle of the day, and it was roast beef or roast chicken or a fresh fish or deviled crab with vegetables and rolls or more biscuits, followed by dessert, and all of this was made by Martha and served from her seat by my grandmother, who had taken up the duty after my grandfather’s death and never relinquished it. Supper, after Martha left, after cocktails, was light, sandwiches or sliced chicken and, of course, potato chips. Dodo ate voraciously. She never seemed to run out of hunger. She was just hungry all the time.
    Then we’d sit on the terrace in the warm summer night, drinking Cokes out of brightly colored aluminum glasses. The ice would melt in the glasses after five minutes. Cokes tasted different back then, better, or at least they seemed to have more fervor, on the terrace in the bright pink or ruby or turquoise glasses, in the dark with the