My Mother Was Nuts Read Online Free Page B

it may as well have been the capital of the Bronx. Everybody went to Alexander’s. My mother only bought things that were on sale, though. She bought Christmas presents at the end of spring and summer and hid them in the closet. My blind grandmother, who only liked dark-coloredclothes, ended up in chartreuse and leopard prints. She had no idea. It was hilarious to watch her try on the clothes.
    “What color is this, babe?” she’d ask, standing in an outfit that was a shocking pink.
    “It’s brown,” my mother lied.
    The next outfit was chartreuse.
    “What color is this, babe?”
    “It’s black.”
    Everything was either black or brown. I never asked my mother why she lied to my grandmother. I didn’t have to; I understood. Sometimes you ignored the facts to make life easier.

CHAPTER 4
Dinnertime

    A 1947 portrait of Penny, her sister Ronny, and brother Garry
Hal Altman
    I DON’T EAT MUCH . I’m not what you would call a foodie, and I have my mother to thank for that. She was more than satisfied with a bialy and butter or an onion sandwich. She ate standing up in the kitchen rather than sitting down with the rest of us, who she had only the slightest interest in feeding.
    She prepared dinner out of a sense of duty and was vocal about her feeling, or lack of feeling, for the culinary obligations tradition had bestowed on women of her generation. The last thing she wanted to do was spend her day standing over a hot stove. To put it bluntly, she hated to cook.
    “Only idiots do that,” she said. “They don’t have any creativity. They just read recipes and do what they’re told.”
    My father rarely came straight home after work anyway. He preferred drinks with his cronies to dinner with us, though my mother offered her own explanation for his absence. “He has another family in Philadelphia that he likes better,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.
    But I didn’t know from sarcasm then. I learned later.
    His side of the family was a mystery. My father once told us thatour family came to America on the
Mayflower
, which made me feel special in school every Thanksgiving when the teacher showed us pictures of Pilgrims.
Those were my relatives
, I thought. In truth, his parents, Joseph and Ann, lived someplace in the Bronx, but I only went there for dinner a couple of times, and my only memory of those dinners was spaghetti noodles hanging over the back of my grandmother’s kitchen chairs.
    My brother and sister went there more often than I did. Garry said it was while eating spaghetti there and listening to opera that he figured out we were actually Italian, not Pilgrims, and our real name was Masciarelli. By the time I was old enough to figure things out on my own, my father had disowned his family and none of us cared anyway. If he really did have another family in Philadelphia, my mother seemed grateful for the break.
    Sunday was family night, the only night we could count on my father being home for dinner, and then he wanted spaghetti and meat sauce, with hot peppers on the side, a salad with oil and vinegar dressing, and red wine. The man who denied being Italian wanted only Italian food.
    I had no problem with spaghetti. We had it all the time. If any of us wanted spaghetti other than Sunday, my mother made what we called her “orange spaghetti.” She cooked up the noodles and emptied a can of Campbell’s tomato soup on top with chunks of mozzarella cheese. It was delicious, and it was even better the next day, when she heated it up in a frying pan. I pity generations who have only known to reheat food in microwaves. I asked for it so often my mother would say, “You’re going to turn into a piece of spaghetti.”
    When I was very little, I would run behind each person’s chair, hang from the back, curl my feet off the ground, and scream, “Hanger! Hanger! Hanger!” I don’t know why. No one questioned it. I just did it. Once I was too old to run around during dinner, I realized that I