Sublime

One night, before she went home from the library, Lina found a room of cookbooks. She wrote down a California chef’s salad dressing recipe and made it in a jar. Her dinner tasted like a dish in a restaurant Sometimes, now, she was happy.

I knew her before her arches had points, before the paint to finish her had been invented.

When we returned home on the bus every day after long hours of reading and arithmetic and sometimes tense, confusing dramas with other children, we each sat on a stool in the kitchen, ate the cookie or cake our mother had baked for us, and told her what was new. She laid out our clothes for school, put towels in the dryer so they would be warm when

Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

This, Mrs. Crupp said, would leave her at full liberty to concentrate her mind on the potatoes, and to serve up the cheese and celery as she could wish to see it done.