Free Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word by Linda Kelsey Page A

for the start-of-Sabbath family dinner. Sarah and I have taken turns sharing
     this task since our mother decided about fifteen years back that life was too short to chop liver and onions. In fact, she
     has given up cooking altogether since discovering her local Dial A Dinner. From Chinese, Indian, and Italian to British cod
     and chips, there is no cuisine from anywhere in the world that can’t be delivered by a boy on a motorbike within thirty minutes
     of ordering, then served straight out of nice, shiny aluminum cartons. My mother explained, “If you add up the time I save
     in shopping and cooking and washing up, and calculate what I could get paid for those hours, you will come to realize that
     takeaways are far more economical than doing it yourself.”
    “Yes, Mummy,” I replied the first time she expounded the Jenny Lyndhurst Theory of Domestic Economy, “but you don’t actually
     have a job or a salary, so your theory doesn’t really work.”
    “I gave up work, if you remember,” said my mother frostily, “to look after you and your sister so you wouldn’t have to be
     poor little latchkey children. Sometimes your ingratitude beggars belief.”
    “But Mummy, I’m not criticizing you for not working. I’m just questioning your theory in light of the fact that you don’t
     get paid.”
    “My theory makes perfect sense. You’re so literal, Hope, you need to look at the broader picture. Daddy has always said that
     I have a great head for business. Whether or not I work is beside the point. And in any case, Daddy and I are so enriched
     from having developed our taste buds over the years. There is life beyond roast chicken, you know. Hope, it amazes me how,
     with such traditional attitudes, you can be so successful in such a fast-moving world as the magazine industry.”
    There’s no use arguing with my mother. She never did make sense and never will do. Although in retrospect, and in view of
     my recent professional demise, her criticism verges on the prescient. But give up work for Sarah and me she did not; she gave
     up working as a salesgirl in Harrods the day she married my father in 1949, when she was nineteen.
    My mother fancies herself a bit of an artist, a bit of a Bloomsbury person. Instead of work, she has
projects
. And instead of making any sense, she has style and an air of expensive dishevelment. The fact that her projects never come
     to anything doesn’t seem to bother my father one bit, but it bothers me a lot, and it probably accounts for why I’m so fixated
     on seeing things through.
    Sometimes her projects involved the entire family. When we were small—I think I was about five—there was the summer-of-the-stately-home
     project, when we were dragged round all the grand houses of England, forced to ooh and aah at bits of old porcelain and swords
     and hedges shaped like swans. One stately home might have been fun. Seventeen in six weeks?
    Then there was the actress project. For about a year, my mother went to classes at something called the Actors Space. She
     gave up all pretense at normal conversation and took to quoting Shakespeare over dinner. When my father bought her a bunch
     of roses, she declared, predictably, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But then she added, “So from now on
     in this household, we’re going to call them thistles.” From then on—and even now—she has always referred to roses as thistles.
    This may be funny, for all I know—my school friends thought she was hilarious—but believe me, it’s not easy to live with.
    Her sense of style, though, is indisputable. As are her good looks. Her hair used to be as fair as mine was dark (I inherit
     my swarthiness from my father’s gene pool). When her hair changed color with age, it didn’t go the dull gray of industrial
     scaffolding, like mine, exposing ugly metallic roots, but segued seamlessly from fair to brilliant white. If I didn’t dye
     my hair, I’d look about a