The Hero of This Book

She was terrible with money and pinched pennies to convince herself that she wasn’t. My mother hated being bad at anything that involved reason.

That morning he’d given me a long history of Clerkenwell, punctuated by restaurant recommendations; I hadn’t paid attention. Lenin and Stalin had met in a nearby pub,

Any writer will be asked, Why? Why write; why write this book; what made you do it. If I showed you a photograph of my parents, I think you’d understand.

I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people’s brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about.

My parents were a sight gag. Opposites otherwise, too. One shy but given to monologues, one outgoing and inclined to listen. One with a temper; one affable, sometimes enragingly so. Opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe.

The usual feeling of having my fortune told came over me, as it did whenever I approached accommodation for the first time. Good, I was blessed; bad, cursed. A short list of my minor obsessions: hotel rooms, fortune-tellers, coin-op machines. Embarrassing, how much I refer to fortune-telling in my life—by life, I mean writing. Not memoir: I am not

THE MILLENNIUM INCLINATOR, a plaque on the wall said. Funny name for a funicular. It began its ascent. I was going to say inexorable ascent, but of course it would stop when it got to the top. It was just very slow. I was a middle-aged woman with uncombed hair in a glass box; I decided to pretend that it and I were a performance piece.

I brought her, cradled in my arms, the three waffle irons I’d uncovered on the kitchen counter. “Three,” I told her, as though they were a litter. “Yes,” said my mother. “Which one do you want to keep?” “All of them.” I don’t think my mother formally collected waffle irons (though later I would find an antique one beneath her bed), and at the momen

(At antique stores, my father bought Victoriana. My mother liked things from her own childhood: the breadboard with a picture of Uncle Sam captioned It’s Patriotic to Slice Your Own; a statue of FDR as boat captain, hands on a ship’s wheel that was also a clock.)