Stuffed by Patricia Volk

you.”
    Adrenaline shot to my fingertips. My lips felt carbonated. I was caught in a lie. I made a lame excuse about having two epergnes, and the epergne donated to Channel 13, while similar to hers, was actually the other one. That I needed only one epergne, and hers was so much nicer. I knew she didn’t believe it. Who would? I expected her to be angry. I deserved it. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that a recluse who collected antiques might be watching the Channel 13 auction? Was there something in Aunt Lil that made me betray her? Was there something in me?
    I had made it onto Aunt Lil’s hit list. The question was, What took me so long?
    I waited for her to hang up on me or say how disappointed she was. But a funny thing happened. She laughed, told me she missed me, and invited us to come up.
    “I have an eighteen-karat-gold-mesh etui I’ve been saving for you,” she said. “There’s a lapis on the clasp.”
    I couldn’t face someone I’d lied to, even though that meant hurting her doubly. I hurt her once because I lied to her about the epergne, and then I rehurt her by being too ashamed to face her after lying to her.
    Time passed. The phone rang. “I’m not well,” Aunt Lil said. “The doctor up here thinks I need an operation.”
    I did a little research, then made an appointment for her with a gastroenterologist at Columbia-Presbyterian. She hired a driver to take her to the city. I kissed her good-bye as they wheeled her into the OR. After the surgery the doctor found me in the waiting room. His scrub suit was translucent with perspiration. I could see his chest hair through it.
    “Your aunt will be fine,” the surgeon said. “But I’ve never had an experience like that. Cutting her large intestine was like sawing through steel.”
    I suppose that’s what happens after eighty-something years of butter and sour cream.
    When I visit her the next day, Aunt Lil says, “I’d really like you to come up and take that gold-mesh etui. It’s eighteen karat, dear. I got it at an estate sale. A man shot his wife. She’d been keeping company with a poet.”
    “You keep the etui, Aunt Lil. You enjoy it,” I said.
    She turned her face to the wall. “I don’t understand,” she said.
    When Aunt Lil left my grandmother’s table, the thing the sisters came back to was her long fingernails, how they curved down like talons, how the polish was chipped, how Mandarin they were, how thick, how ridged, and the dirt that collected on their parched and flaky undersides, most likely, I think now, merely residue from spaetzle.

    Mom believes you should “never write anything to a boy you wouldn’t want on the front page of the
New York Times.
”

BACON
    There are people who say it’s impossible to remember events from the age of one. That pre-verbal memories are actually stories you’ve heard so often, they get codified as memory. But I remember. My sister slams my thumb off in the door. I run to my mother, interrupting her phone call in the foyer, and hold it out to show her. And I remember looking up at a light. A black rubber cup like our toilet plunger sinks closer to my face. I wake up in a different crib next to other children in cribs. My mother’s face is in the porthole of a swinging door. It disappears, replaced by her friend Ruth’s.
    Two or more sore throats in a row, and a tonsillectomy was standard operating procedure. It was fun to be sick. There were house calls. Dr. Jackson with his deep, syrupy drawl came into your bedroom and said, “Whale, whale, whale. How’s mah little girl?” You had to stay in bed. Sometimes you had to be “tented.” You’d sit under a sheet with your head as center pole while a glass vaporizer bubbled and hissed with water and Vicks VapoRub to “break up” your lungs.
    “Are you breathing?” My mother listened from outside the tent. “Breathe deep! I don’t hear you breathing!”
    Recognizable hands slipped food under, a “Spit in the Ocean,” Cream of