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Candied sweet potatoes made from a can! As if she didn’t know real ways to cook sweet potatoes. Eddie had loved yams. She remembered the time she had told Luciente that with some money and a decent kitchen, she was a good cook! How many ways she had learned to cook in her life: Mexican, Puerto Rican, soul food, and what Professor Silvester called continental. All good food. She wished she could be cooking a feast for Luciente and Bee. She pretended she was making a Thanksgiving di
She and Adele put all the boards into the dining room table, making it very long, and then covered it with snowy linen and set it with china and real silver plates and silver‑plated salvers for breads and rolls and crystal goblets, except for the little children, who got ruby‑tinted glasses for their milk. Luis came in to open the wine himself with a fuss, a sparkling rosй.
Now Luis sat at the table’s head in a chair with arms, carving the huge turkey with an electric knife he flourished wildly. The strange stuffing he had already piled in a big bowl. On his right and left were Mark and Bob, his sons by his second marriage. Next to Bob, Dolly was dressed up in a jade green pants suit with a ruffled copper chiffon blouse, looking gorgeous and wound tight enough for her head suddenly to fly off. Nervousness ticked in her throat like a bomb. Delicately she ate green olives from a glass dish. Neither Shirley nor Carmel was there, of course, left to their own devices. Luis liked to command the attendance of all his children at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, having the money to back up his commands. But Nita was missing. Carmel had insisted she was too sick to go. Then came Celeste, Adele’s eight‑year‑old from her first marriage, Co
Luis, big with pleasure, lorded it now over his full plate and the di
Mark grew red in the face and his fork slumped in his hand.
“Now take Dolly. She doesn’t need to eat to get fat. She just looks at the potatoes and she gains weight, right?”
“I’m not fat, Daddy. I’ve lost all the weight I need to.”
“It won’t last. It’s heredity. Look at your mother. If I didn’t work as hard as I do, I’d be as fat as she is.”
Luis was fat. He’d been fat for twenty years, but he refused to admit it. He talked about weight all the time. He wanted his women to be thin for him, she thought, wondering if she could ask for more turkey yet or if she should wait till it was offered. Dolly sat nervously poised for further attack from Luis. She had grown up thinking her parents married; then had come the period when Luis was proving legally he had never married and she was a bastard. Shirley’s parents would never let her marry a divorced man. But then Dolly had become the child of his first marriage, and since she was eighteen she had been supposed to call him Daddy. Adele was Anglo and they didn’t care how many times you got married, just so it was legal. So Dolly had slid into being his legal up‑front daughter again. If only he could have divorced Co
“Look at your aunt pack it away now. Eats like there’s no tomorrow. If you ate like her, Mark, you’d make the football team for sure. Bob, why aren’t you eating your sweet potatoes? Those are the best part of the meal.”
“They are not I don’t like them, Dad. They taste fu
“There’s nothing fu
Celeste jumped. She was happily swishing her candied sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, and broccoli into a multicolored mush, pressing it all together and sculpting it into castles with her fork. “Nothing.”
“Adele, she’s playing with her food again. That’s a disgusting habit. You ought to have that put on your head to wear.”
Adele blinked from her serene, faintly smiling cocoon. Co
“Susan?” Adele focused on her baby in the high chair. “Why, she’s a little darling. She ate her pudding all up!”
“It’s Celeste again. Making mud pies with her food!”
“Oh, Celeste,” Adele said with a sweet smile. “You can play afterward. You know that upsets your daddy.” Her long thin hand laden with rings floated like a scarf through the air and sank to rest beside her scarcely touched plate.
Dolly refused seconds, which Luis seductively tried to press on her, pretending he was only teasing. Mark was still toying with his first serving. The twelve‑year‑old Bob ate dark meat and more dark meat, steadily ignoring everybody. He was chubby and darker than anyone else except her, with small chin and black eyes, the Indian nose. Once when he cast a quick survey down the table, she flashed him a private smile; his eyes widening with surprise, he smiled back. Mainly he seemed to be pretending nothing was real except him and the turkey. He raised a screen of strong protection between his father on his right and himself. You will not hurt me! You won’t get through! the screen said. Indeed, Luis seemed to sense the barrier and he pretty much left Bob alone. He tried once. “That Cesar Chavez guy–I see they got him in jail again. Huh? You still got his picture on your bedroom wall?”
But under repeated prodding, Bob would say only, “I like him. He’s got a nice face.”
Co
After the pumpkin pie, the maple nut ice cream, and the coffee, Luis herded them into the living room she had decorated under his supervision with pots of pink and yellow chrysanthemums, big spidery blooms as big as baby Susan’s head. Mark, Bob, Celeste, and Mike galloped off to the family room one level down to watch TV, but Luis was serving drinks to the adults in the living room. Co
“No,” Luis said. “Co
Dolly glanced at her little jeweled watch, then at the numberless blob of clock on the wall that Co