How to Cook Your Daughter by Jessica Hendra Read Free Book Online Page A

its roots. It was up to Kathy and me to water it, which we did diligently. Several days after Christmas, we helped my father replant the tree outside our house. We looked for the softest spot of earth, and found one that wasn’t frozen solid, under the eaves of the old barn. There, it took root again.
    Besides the Christmas posters my dad helped create, the December issue of the Lampoon carried a piece that, even at six and a half, made me curious about the complicated relationship my father had with the Catholic Church. It was a satire of the life of Jesus, but this time, the Messiah was a woman. The piece was called “Jessica Christ by FR. Tony Hendra,” and Daddy took me aside to show it to me. “I thought you might like it, treasure, seeing that your name was in it,” he said. The piece was done in simple comic book form, with large print and pictures of Jessica Christ doing good deeds. But Jessica wore robes with plunging neck lines, not to mention a Marilyn Monroe pinup-style bathing suit when she walked on water. The language was simple, and I could read some of it. But like most of my father’s humor, the jokes were lost on me.
    â€œâ€˜Take eat,’ Jessica said, ‘for this is My body.”
    â€œâ€˜Hubbba Hubbba,’ said the apostles.”
    The last picture showed Jessica nailed to the cross, her huge breasts exposed. Only a skimpy loin cloth dangled from her curvy hips. It terrified me. I told my daddy I wished he had used someone else’s name instead. “Don’t be silly,” he said. But I had seen the small, devotional, black, wooden cross with a silver figure of Christ, the cross that my father kept carefully stowed in one of the drawers of his desk in his office. Not yet seven, I could just sense how Jessica Christ and the lovingly preserved silver figure contradicted each other. What I couldn’t yet comprehend was how the viciousness with which my father went after religion seemed the flip side of the love that he had once felt for it. His venom made me nervous. It was, and remains, a rebellion beyond my depth.
    I was left completely confused about Christianity. My dad told me that they had Kathy and me baptized “just in case.” In case of what? When I asked him about the Easter Bunny, he told me it was “the risen Christ Vampire who comes to suck the blood of little children.” Still, he would later take us to Midnight Mass in the city and make a point of reciting the responses in very loud Latin—over the English of the rest of the congregation. Why? Because, he explained, “real Catholics speak Latin.”
    I had a superstitious notion that my father’s decision to use my name in his parody might bring the wrath of God upon me. And my father did little to allay my fears. In fact, he confirmed them just a few weeks later. When Daddy told me the Lampoon had a little recording job for me, I was ecstatic. I would have a line on a record they were putting together called Radio Dinner . Now I would finally have a chance to make $50, just as Kathy had done with her illustrated “How to Cook Your Father.”
    I also got a day off from school. Kathy, my mom, and I were tomeet Daddy at the recording studio in the city. Instead of risking the trip in the VW—which seemed beyond terminal, its clutch having given out on the steepest hill in the neighborhood—Mom drove our “new” International Scout into Manhattan. The Scout, which Kathy and I dubbed “Flossie,” had no back seats. Instead, we sat on narrow metal side-benches. Forget seatbelts; we clutched handrails that suspended from the Scout’s ceiling. Too late, a neighbor told my parents what the used car dealer hadn’t—that Flossie had been run into the ground by the local mailman. Jolting through the Midtown Tunnel, we met up with city traffic and discovered for ourselves what the neighbor meant. Flossie was not at her best in