Free How to Cook Your Daughter by Jessica Hendra Page B

synchronicity, stood up on one of the rocks and unwittingly modeled every inch of his nude body to the Bradford audience. Without a word, Connie grabbed Becky’s bike, yanked it around, and started pushing it back up the road as fast as she could, Becky still on it. Doug followed his wife, lugging Jeremy and his bike.
    I stayed hidden in the bushes for most of the afternoon, wondering how I could ever show my face at the Bradford house again. I nevertold my parents that our neighbors strolled down the road that day. Why bother? They would have thought it was hysterical or that I was being too uptight. The Bradfords never said a word about what they had seen, at least not to me. In fact, the next evening, Connie called to very kindly ask Kathy and me if we would like to go with them to the Dairy Queen. My mother had never heard of the place but said we could go if we liked. We did, and it was heaven.
    Even Henry Beard, a relative conservative among the Lampoon crowd, succumbed to the spirit of treating Red Mill Road as a small nudist colony. He shocked the passengers of a passing car one morning by walking casually from the Forge to our house in nothing but loafers. He arrived at our door, borrowed a book, and lay down on the lawn to read and smoke his pipe, like a professor on holiday.
    While everyone was experimenting with taking off their clothes, Kathy and I were busy putting them on. Our craze that summer was dressing up. And like my obsession with the Victorian dollhouse, dressing up in long party dresses and playing prince and princesses became a way to escape. While the drugs and drink flowed freely downstairs, we wore white gloves and set up tea parties on the second floor. Despite the scene her parents had witnessed, Becky Bradford was still allowed over and joined in the tea parties too. We even held our dog, Freckles, prisoner, stuffing his front legs through the sleeves of dresses and tying bonnets on him. He tried to walk around our bedroom with his back legs completely bound in a gold, 1950s prom gown and a flowered hat rigged to his head with yarn.
    Freckles was a stray who had wandered on to the New Jersey property when we were in Los Angeles. When we returned from California to reclaim the house, Freckles was part of the package. He was a medium-size mutt, with a white face, a mostly black body, and two-toned legs. The little black dots on his snout were what earned him his name. My dad considered Freckles a reincarnation of his own father. “When he looks at me with those eyes, I know he’s really dad,” he once told us. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. I just knew Freckles was a good ol’ country dog and a frenzied guide. If you went for a walk, he’d follow for a time, then take off running ahead before running back to urge you onward, panting and wiggling all the while. He also kept a sharp eye on his territory, barking wildly and chasing every car that drove by the house until his legs gave out.
    And as he had done with the rest of us, my father wanted to use Freckles for a piece in the Lampoon . The cover, no less. The concept was simple, my dad explained (though I don’t think he bothered to tell Freckles, reincarnated father or not): Freckles would be pictured, his tongue hanging out, with a gun to his head. The caption? “Buy This Magazine or We’ll Kill This Dog.” Freckles, however, was no professional, and the Lampoon ’s art director wouldn’t even give him the chance to audition. Of course, we still loved him, and we thought the art director was wrong. After all, he submitted to being dressed up without so much as a whimper, unlike the cat that scratched and clawed whenever we tried to dress her in doll clothes and put her in a baby carriage.
    Our dress up clothes came from a junk shop about a mile up the road. It was owned by Mrs. Kruger, who stood out in my mind as the neighbor who, by comparison, made my family look good. Not normal.