Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online

three or four times until she turned to me. “Amy, how does she do that?” The five-year-old deigned to explain, “She’s bionic.” Amy in peril. When she was about eight or nine months of age, and just becoming vertical, Carl used to come at her on his tricycle. Her crime was her existence. Perhaps out of a sense of fair play, he would signal his hit-and-run intentions by singing an atonal dirge that went, “Amy took the car, Amy drove it home. But she had trouble. So Carl drove…” As the song continued, he would barrel down on his baby sister. Upon hearing it, Ginny or I would rush to grab her up, usually before the vehicle got to her first.
    Amy doing cartwheels—her preferred mode of travel. Once, as I walked behind her, buckling under three suitcases, she cartwheeled the length of Logan Airport. Amy in kindergarten at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, where we lived in the 1970s. Carl went there, too, and Ginny taught kindergarten and first grade there. If ever Amy caught Ginny with another child on her lap, she would saunter by and elbow her mother in the ribs as a reminder of who came first. Amy and “The Case of the Very Strange Rabbit.” For her fifth birthday, we reluctantly got her a bunny that had been advertised as a “dwarf rabbit,” but which grew to colossal size, nearly filling his large cage. From behind the wire mesh he stared at you with his red eyes. He was pure white. Amy named him “Raisin.” Amy and Carl in competition. Amy and Carl in conspiracy. At the ages of ten and seven, they surprised Ginny with a Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. They had prepared scrambled eggs without using butter in the pan, giving the dish the look and consistency of the skin of an armadillo. Smiling and chewing very slowly, Ginny ate every bite.
    Boppo taking Amy shopping when she was four, for a green Lacoste dress. (Amy was pleased when I took Jessie on a similar shopping trip.) Boppo taking Amy out to dinner in a restaurant, also when she was four, just us two. She wore a blue-and-white check dress and black Mary Janes, and her hair was in bangs. We went to Billy Martin’s in Georgetown. The headwaiter held Amy’s chair. We sat and talked for a minute or two. Then she said she’d like to go to the ladies room. She returned to the table, but went back to the ladies room every few minutes for the duration of the meal. She didn’t need to go. It made her feel sophisticated.
    A favorite story of Jessie’s concerns Amy when she was three, and we were living in Dunster House at Harvard. It was a Saturday morning, and I was about to go off to a meeting of a committee to award fellowships for study in Cambridge, England. At the breakfast table, I told the children it was a very old fellowship—I probably called it a prize—even older than the country, and that the boys who won the prize were very special. Three-year-old Amy was outraged. “What about the girls?” she said.
     
    I found it easy to beat Amy in a footrace. We would start out on a quarter-mile track, and once she had burst from the starting line and was about to leave me in the dust, I would jog some twenty yards, cut across the oval, and wait for her frown of disgust at the finish. Nothing to it.
     
    When Wendy was pregnant with Andrew, Ginny gave her a baby shower. She asked Amy and all the women invited to write a cherished memory of their childhoods, which Ginny collected in a book for Wendy. Amy wrote: “One of my favorite childhood memories is when I would go out to dinner just with my Dad. I would get all dressed up and we would walk into Georgetown and go to Billy Martin’s. I loved the excitement of feeling so grown up. And I loved just being with my Dad. The best part, of course, was leaving Carl at home.”
     
    “Ginny’s perfect, isn’t she?” says one of our friends, observing her change Bubbies and direct Jessie to a homework assignment, while efficiently handling an “I-won’t-wear-this-jacket” crisis with