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Downstairs  Kitchen 29 Over Coffee “I think if I’d been a man,” Mother told me, “I would have played football for Notre Dame.” She was eighty-eight when she said this. She could have done it, too, followed by Harvard Law and clerking for the Supreme Court. As it was, she had us—family and house, PTA and Heart Fund—till my brother went to college. Then she ran the Chamber of Commerce from 1961 until she died. I think if I’d been a man, she’d never have sat at that table and told me all those stories, how her mother hit her with the butcher knife but only the dull side, how she slapped her so hard it bloodied her nose. Mother needed to see her pain reflected in my face so she could push it away. What do you think you’d have done, she’d say angrily, with seven little children, your husband gone all week, and you living at the back door of nowhere? ...

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