Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

the upper hand socially, I chatted away at him to put him at his ease. It worked. From the corner of my eye I observed him edging closer and closer. Suddenly, his hand flashed out and grabbed Mr. Duchin from my shoulder by his beautiful tail. I screeched and clawed at him, but Cyril fended me off laughing, and playfully began twirling Mr. Duchin around his head like a lasso. In the ensuing fracas, he dragged all three of us out the door. In a flash, Mr. Duchin was gone, streaking toward the maple tree out of which he’d fallen as a baby. Halfway up he stopped and chattered ferociously at us, switching his mangled tail, then made his way toward the dense foliage, which rustled for a minute and closed around him like water around a stone. He never came back, although we called him for days, and I never spoke to Cyril Tomashek again, despite his sullen apologies.

At Stone Ledges, when, as part of Mother’s program of general participation, Bridget, Bill, and I were graduated to the dining-room table for all our meals, an era began. It was a new game with a new set of rules, in which sitting around the dining-room table under Mother’s aegis became a vital experience. The rules were: perfect manners, excellent appetites, and stimulating non-stop conversation. Even when—especially when—one of the three rules was broken, the dynamics of the situation were interesting. Our dining-room table was a big round pine one that could seat as many as twelve, with a revolving lazy Susan on which all the serving dishes were placed (so that we had to contain ourselves from spinning it around and snatching at food as it went by); it was built by slaves in the South before the Civil War, and Mother, who came from Virginia, never relinquished that innate pride Southerners have about anything to do with their heritage.

The rule about our manners was partially enforced by Father (at Mother’s insistence that he become more involved), who, loathing all forms of disciplinary action because of his father, would reach across the table with a huge paddle that he kept by his chair and, in what we all knew was a self-mocking gesture, rap the offender lightly on the head. The next rule, good appetites, was hard for anyone to enforce, because Bridget and Bill were such impossible eaters. They both were finicky and slow, and always had been. I had memories of Bridget as a tiny child, all alone at the long table in The Barn—while I rode in circles around her on my tricycle, having long since finished my breakfast—unable to touch her boiled eggs. She hated them, she couldn’t get them down, they were too soft and runny; there was mucus in them, horrible stringy white stuff that made her gag when she tried to swallow. Whatever nurse we had then—it was before Emily—would make her sit at the table until she finished every mouthful. One day she refused to eat her eggs and sat, looking down at her plate, through the entire morning, my lunch, the afternoon, and my dinner. I protested: the nurse was mean, I was lonely and had nobody to play with, the eggs were all cold and hard and how could anybody want to eat them? They would make Bridget sick to her stomach, they made me sick just to look at them, and I would tell Mother. The nurse rapped me on the knuckles with a spoon, I burst into tears, Bridget burst into tears, and we were both sent to bed. Bridget’s eating habits did not improve, especially when Bill got old enough to keep her company, but not until Connecticut, when they actively affected the whole family three times a day, did Mother step in personally. It was quite a challenge. By that time, Bridget and Bill had become adept at scooping whole platefuls of food into their napkins with lightning speed and stealthily discarding the refuse after dinner. They had to be watched closely. Once, when Bridget was sick in bed for about a week and all her meals were brought up to her on a tray, it was remarked that she had never, despite her illness, displayed such an extraordinary appetite; every single dish was sent back to the kitchen licked clean. Mother and Father were so proud they drove into New Milford to buy her a doll, but before they could present it to her, Emily gave our room a thorough cleaning and discovered, under Bridget’s bed, the accumulation of an entire week’s meals. Instead of the doll, Bridget got a spanking. When all punishment failed to make a dent, Mother decided the best solution was a full-out reward system. She drew up two identical charts on sheets of cardboard, of which the middle parts were as compartmentalized—with a series of carefully ruled horizontal and vertical pencil lines—as graph paper, and the borders as lavishly decorated with flora and fauna as the pages of a medieval Book of Hours. She tacked these up on the dining-room walls. According to the speed with which Bridget and Bill were able to devour all their breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day (the charts were subdivided into meals, days, weeks, and months), their progress was studded with stars—red, green, blue, silver, and gold—each color representing a higher degree of achievement. Although neither of them ever received a gold star, this system produced results and a great deal of rivalry.

As for the third rule, it was expected that all conversation be entertaining, lively, all-encompassing, and, insofar as possible, conducted with decorum. No interruptions were permitted—no newspapers at breakfast (a sore point with Father), except on Sunday mornings the New York Times crossword puzzle to sharpen our wits—and no subject was exempt if it could be introduced with a modicum of style; furthermore, anything of any interest that had occurred between one meal and the next, even if it was an embarrassing