Just As I Thought by Grace Paley Read Free Book Online

first held him close, but could protect him for only about twenty minutes fifty years ago.
     
    —1997

Peacemeal
     
    Because I believe in the oral tradition in literature, I have been opposed to cookbooks. But I must concede I missed my chance. My mother and grandmother died silent and intestate—as far as borscht and apple pie are concerned. Or is it possible that I wasn’t listening, that I was down the block drinking chocolate sodas and watching gang fights, which, in my part of the Bronx, raged between the kids of the Third and Fourth International?
    After that, there was the war, then at last the daily life of grown-ups for which supper is prepared every night. I entered that world without a cookbook, but with an onion, a can of tomato sauce, and a fistful of ground chuck. If I have progressed beyond that worried moment, it is not due to cookbooks but to nosiness and political friendships.
    I know lots of these recipes, because in the forty-five minutes between work and a Peace Center meeting I have often had to call Mary or Karl and ask, “How the hell did you say I should do that fish?” I have also gathered some hot tips at the Resistance dinners, which we served once a week at the Peace Center to about a hundred young men who were not going to be part of the U.S. plan to torment and murder the Vietnamese people.
    Certainly this cookbook is for people who are not so neurotically antiauthoritarian as I am—to whom one can say, “Add the juice of one lemon,” without the furious response: “Is that a direct order?” This leads to the people who made this book. We are a local Peace Center in a public neighborhood. We have lived and worked in basements and lofts, churches and storefronts, and are now at St. Luke’s Church.
    Although I have not been very useful to the writing and editing of this cookbook, I now see it as a sensible action—since it’s impossible to invite everyone to supper.
     
    —1973

Other Mothers
     
    The mother is at the open window. She calls the child home. She’s a fat lady. She leans forward, supporting herself on her elbows. Her breasts are shoved up under her chin. Her arms are broad and heavy.
    I am not the child. She isn’t my mother. Still, in my head, where remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness), she leans far out. She looks up and down the block. The technical name of this first seeing is “imprint.” It often results in lifelong love. I play in the street, she stands in the window. I wanted her to call me home to the dark mysterious apartment behind her back, where the father was already eating and the others sat at the kitchen table and waited for the child.
    She was destined, with her meaty bossiness, her sighs, her suffering, to be dumped into the villain room of social meaning and psychological causation. When this happened to her, she had just touched the first rung of the great American immigrant ladder. Her husband was ahead of her, her intentional bulk kept him from slipping. Their children were a couple of rungs above them. She believed she would follow them all up into the English language, education, and respect.
    Unfortunately, science and literature had turned against her. What use was my accumulating affection when the brains of the opposition included her son the doctor and her son the novelist? Because of them, she never even had a chance at the crown of apple pie awarded her American-born sisters and accepted by them when they agreed to give up their powerful pioneer dispositions.
    What is wrong with the world? the growing person might have asked. The year was 1932 or perhaps 1942. Despite the worldwide fame of those years, the chief investigator into human pain is looking into his own book of awful prognoses. He looks up. Your mother, probably, he says.
    As for me, I was not paying attention. I missed the mocking campaign.
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    The mother sits on a box, an orange crate. She talks to her friend, who also sits on an