Free The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick Page B

couple, my parents, and they lived in a charming house that belonged to my mother’s mother. Mymother always sat in the same chair, a blue slipper chair by the fireplace, and she claimed she was always cold, even in the hot, muggy summers, possibly because she so rarely ate anything.
    She had cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, she had cottage cheese and canned pears and cigarettes for lunch, she never ate bread or dessert. She never ate between meals. She was thin but not painfully so and that’s why she looked so good in clothes. She said she’d been fat as a child and she never wanted to be fat again.
    Once, when she was a child, she got run over by a car. It was one of those light, early cars—she was born in 1919—and she wasn’t hurt at all, but my panicked grandfather told her she could have anything she wanted. He felt responsible. His eye had strayed for a minute.
    She said she wanted to have her hair cut like a boy’s.
    Almost every day, people came for drinks, or my parents went somewhere else for drinks. When you went somewhere else for drinks, not cocktail parties, just everyday drinks, you always took your own liquor.
    When people went out for drinks, they’d take their children with them, and we’d play together, unless they were girls, in which case they’d play with my sister. One little girl had a doll baby named Horrible. Horrible had lost all of her hair—some of it burned off with matches—and many of her body parts and one of her eyes and was in every way hideous, but this little girl loved Horrible, or Harble, as she would say, and wouldn’t give her up. At our house we’d play games because we didn’t have a TV. That’s why we liked it when we went out for drinks with my parents. Other kids had TVs. We could watch whatever we wanted.
    My father had an ice tapper, a kind of bendable rod with a heavy metal disk at the end, and this was his way of breaking up ice cubes. You could set your watch by it. Five o’clock, the tapping of the ice cracker signaled the beginning of the cocktail hour.
    Somebody once said to me that all families were either about the parents or about the children, and ours was about the parents. More exactly, it was about the cocktail and dinner hour, my mother always smartly dressed, my father smoking, but only after five o’clock. He could smoke a pack of cigarettes between five o’clock and bedtime, but he only smoked the first inch of a cigarette, which was great when we were older and started learning to smoke, the ashtrays filled with these cigarettes that were almost whole. My mother never dumped the ashtrays at night; she was afraid of fires.
    In Virginia, we generally started smoking secretly about age fifteen; we started smoking in front of our parents at sixteen, and the idea was, you just kept on smoking until you died. Cigarettes cost a quarter a pack.
    My parents believed you learned to drink at home. When I was seventeen and started sitting with the grownups for the cocktail hour, my parents didn’t like it that I didn’t drink, so they’d buy these sissy aperitifs like Lillet, like Cherry Heering, like Dubonnet, hoping I’d like them. When I was seventeen, my mother and I decided to cut down on smoking, so we started smoking pipes, and I would sit with the grownups, smoking a pipe and gagging my way through a glass of Lillet on the crushed rocks.
    My mother wore gloves. Her fingernails were scarlet, hermouth was scarlet. She wore a perfume, Wind Song, by Prince Matchabelli. She loved Joy, and sometimes my father would give her a small bottle for Christmas. Later, when I moved to New York, I started buying her Norell, and she liked that a lot. She didn’t wear Wind Song in its little crown-shaped bottle anymore. She had no idea what Norell cost. She thought it was probably about the same.
    When she died, there was a bottle of Norell on her dressing table. She hadn’t