Free How to Cook Your Daughter by Jessica Hendra

always been a tremendous issue with my father, and the Lampoon years werehis thin time. But he would go on and off diets and (when he wasn’t too hung over) made a point of working out. He equated fat to weakness, and despite her smarts and determination, Kathy was simply a fat kid to my dad. She assumed he preferred me because I wasn’t, and perhaps she was right. In the end, her weight might have been her best protection. Yes, she resented me. But she never knew the consequences of being Daddy’s girl.
    When Henry Beard took over the Forge, he brought with him something that came to symbolize all that was wrong in my household: a croquet set. My parents and their friends saw it as a chance to exact revenge. It wasn’t so much about going from hoop to hoop. Instead, it became about the opportunity to smash another player’s ball far off into the bushes. And so rivalries, jealousies, and personal vendettas played out on our lawn.
    Members of the Lampoon staff (and their assorted significant others) came to get away from the sweltering city and took full advantage of the nastiness of Henry’s croquet set. Kathy and I looked on while the adults became monsters. Matches routinely ended in cursing and tears. Forget what they taught us in school: that it didn’t matter whether you won or lost. For my parents and their friends, winning was everything, but how they won—and who they hurt along the way—meant even more.
    I had seen this kind of game-playing before. Michael O’Donoghue had started it by bringing his Monopoly set to our house during the winter. He, my father, my mom, and sometimes one of Michael’s girlfriends used to sit up all night playing and smoking grass. Even from my room, I could hear the gleeful shouts as someone cleared someone else out. Sometimes they would get too tired or too stoned to play any longer, and they’d leave the game lying there, inmid-play. Kathy and I knew better than to disturb the Monopoly board in the morning.
    But Michael no longer came to the house, given his feud with my father, and warm weather and croquet supplanted cold nights and Community Chest. If Kathy and I joined in a game, we were treated with some mercy, but only if it wasn’t too late in the afternoon. By evening, everyone was so drunk or so high that no one cared whose ball was sent skimming out in to the far reaches of the garden.
    One evening, the croquet had gone on even later than usual. Lunch was a distant memory and dinner nowhere in sight. All the adults had been drinking since three in the afternoon, and the mood had grown nasty. Sean Kelly, a Lampoon editor, had brought his soft-spoken girlfriend, Valerie, to our house for the weekend. And in proper Hendra form, she was welcomed by becoming the croquet target of the afternoon. After her ball was sent off the course one too many times, Valerie finally crumbled.
    Wielding her croquet mallet over her head, she ran toward the barn and began pounding it over and over again as tears of rage poured from her eyes. I watched Valerie’s delicate arms, as though in slow motion, swing the wooden mallet toward the wall with all her might, letting out the repressed frustrations amassed during a weekend with these ruthless satirists—men for whom a show of emotion was cause for ridicule, for whom the joke was always the most important thing.
    I was fascinated by what she was doing. I fantasized that I was there next to her, banging my mallet against the barn, screaming and crying too. I didn’t know exactly why, what it was I wanted to scream out of my body, but I knew I felt something there. Now, of course, I realize it was confusion over what had happened with my father. I no longer felt safe. And I had begun to feel angry. I had just turned seven,but there wasn’t an adult around me who cared that I was a kid—or who had any idea that it mattered. But I didn’t run over and join Valerie. I knew that if