Tender at the Bone Read Online Free

make sure that nobody in Shelly’s family eats the soup. And they should probably watch out for the chicken too.”
    Bob had another drink.
    My memories of the party are mercifully blurred, but a yellowed clipping from the Norwalk Hour tells part of the story. My mother looks radiantly into the camera beneath a headline reading WILTON FAMILY HOSTS BENEFIT FOR UNICEF .
    A family photograph of me handing a check to a grinning official in front of a sign that says SECURITY COUNCIL in both French and English tells another part of the tale.
    But my brother owns the end of the story. Thirty-five years later his children can still make him turn green by asking, “Remember the time Nana Mimi poisoned everyone?”
    “Ooh,” he moans, “don’t remind me. It was awful. First she extorted money from them. Then she gave out those antibomb favors; it was the early sixties, for Christ sake, and these were conservative businessmen and housewives. But the worse thing was the phone calls. They kept coming all night long. Nobody felt good. Twenty-six of them actually ended up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. What a way to meet the family!”
    I missed all that, but I do remember the phone ringing while we were still cleaning up. Mom was still exulting in the photographer’s flashbulbs, and saying for what seemed like the forty-seventh time, “Look how much money we raised!” She picked up the receiver.
    “Yes?” said Mom brightly. I think she expected it to be another reporter. Then her voice drooped with disappointment.
    “Who doesn’t feel well?”
    There was a long silence. Mom ran her hand through her chic, short coiffure. “Really?” she said, sounding shocked. “All ofthem?” She slumped a little as her bright red fingernails went from her hair to her mouth. Then her back straightened and her head shot up.
    “Nonsense,” I heard her say into the phone. “We all feel fine. And we ate everything.”

GRANDMOTHERS
    I had three grandmothers and none of them could cook.
    My mother’s mother didn’t cook because she had better things to do. She was, as Mom proudly told everyone she happened to meet, an impresario.
    My father’s mother didn’t cook because she was, until Hitler intervened, a very rich woman.
    And Aunt Birdie didn’t cook because she had Alice.
    Aunt Birdie wasn’t really related to me; she was my father’s first wife’s mother. But she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so when I was born she went to the hospital, introduced herself to my mother, and applied for the job. She was well past eighty, and this looked like her last chance.
    Mom was happy to take any help she could get, and Aunt Birdie threw herself into the job. About once a week I would come out of school to find her waiting on the sidewalk. My friends instantly surrounded her, enchanted by standing next to a grown-up who was just their size. At four foot eight, Aunt Birdie was the smallestgrown-up any of us had ever seen and when she said, “Let’s go to Schrafft’s!” there was a general moan. Everybody envied me.
    We always ordered the same thing. Then we ate our chocolate-marshmallow sundaes slowly, watching the women ascend the restaurant’s wide, dramatic stairway and commenting on their clothes, their hair, the way they walked. Aunt Birdie always acted as if I were the world’s most fascinating person. I wondered if she had been this way with her daughter, the one my father had once been married to, but each time I said the word “Hortense” she pretended not to hear me. Everybody did.
    Afterward, Aunt Birdie always took me back to her house. After the long bus ride I’d run into the kitchen, throw my arms around Alice, and beg her to let me roll the dough for the apple dumplings she made every time I slept over. “Well now,” she always said in the soft Barbados accent she had retained after sixty years in America, patting me with her floury hands. She was a handsome old woman with brown skin, short