A 52-Hertz Whale by Bill Sommer Read Free Book Online Page B

follow the same rules as group.
    Regards,
    Louisa
    From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 2, 2012 at 6:03 PM
Subject: RE: Help!
    Um, Louisa, Arianna asked for our opinions. Which requires us to “judge,” which everyone seems to think is a dirty word these days, but it’s not.
    Ellen
    From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 2, 2012 at 9:47 PM
Subject: RE: Help!
    Hi Ladies—
    Thanks for your emails. You echo some of my own concerns.
    I am, of course, very worried about my girls, but the bigger issue might actually be my mother, believe it or not. She lives next door to us, and she’s like Napoleon in an apron, lipstick, and sensible Italian-made shoes.
    To give you a little background, my mother disapproved of me leaving home before I was married, let alone moving across the state to study painting at a college where boys and girls lived in the same dorm. I think she thought I would become a zingara , or gypsy (her term for “hippie”). Of course, once I escaped my mother’s grasp and began painting nudes at college, I didn’t just associate with bohemians, but I decided to marry one—Peter Frances Lucca, an ancient-history student who wore his hair long, addressed everyone as “man,” and smoked cigarettes. My mother was furious the first time I brought Peter Lucca home. The only thing that could be worse than the fact that Peter was a zingara was that he was also a third generation Sicilian. It really didn’t matter that Abruzzo, the region where my mother was born, and Sicily are part of the same country; she assumed that southerners were either poor backwards farmers or slick gangsters flashing their overinflated bravado at every chance they got. “Not that I have anyting against siciliani ,” my mother once said to me, “but most turn out to be mafiosi or contadini , take your pick.”
    Of course, Peter turned out to be neither, and over the years, my mother slowly warmed up to him. She liked how he still made his own homemade sausages and red wine and how he respected the ancient Romans, studying their culture and marveling at how modern life, from our calendar to our use of roads, was founded on their early contributions. After Peter’s wake last year, my mother even camped out in the funeral home overnight, refusing to end her vigil, even after the coffeepot ran dry and crumbs were all that remained of the tray of nutty pignoli cookies.
    I share all of this for a reason. If it took my mother so long to warm up to Peter, who actually WAS Italian, what will she think of someone like Albert who is a complete nutt?
    Best,
    Arianna
    From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 2, 2012 at 9:54 PM
Subject: Oops!
    In my last email, there was a typo. I meant to write “mutt” not “nutt.”
    Best,
    Arianna
    From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 4, 2012 at 7:56 PM
Subject: RE: Netflix Recs
    Dear J-Turtle,
    Glad you dug Whale Rider . I haven’t actually seen it, but I think I might now. I just guessed based on the title. Even without having seen the movie, I can safely say that Corinne was my Pai. I was a total wreck a lot of the time I was working with you in the Resource Room. Did my best to hide it, but I wasn’t sleeping much at that time, and on occasion I was just downright loopy. I don’t know if you remember, but this one time I showed up and I’d shaved only the left side of my face. I noticed during a trip to the bathroom. In the morning, this wasn’t so bad, but my beard grows in pretty quick, so by the end of the day, I had this Jekyll-and-Hyde thing happening, which actually sort of matched my feelings at that time. The whole last hour, I was trying to creep along the wall so Mrs. Whatshername didn’t notice. She asked me to check on some kid’s worksheet, and I actually