AND THE LITTLE ONE SAID

1 0 8 Y A N D T H E L I T T L E O N E S A I D J E A N M c G A R R Y The day Mom made me a maple-walnut cake and threw it in my face, you stood there watching it chunk down on my shoes. My eyes burned for days, and I couldn’t get the sweet smell out of my nose. You made her do it. My mom – our mom – was a fifty-year-old widow with a widow’s peak, dark blond hair, and a toothy smile. The day my dad died, she had a date with my uncle, and had ditched him by the time we put Dad in the ground. Give her time, people said, she’s grieving. She was grieving, but it was because her forties (called her thirties) had become her fifties (still called her thirties), and no one thought she had us at nine or ten. Dad was a pharmacist – he loathed the word druggist, but we insisted, and called his shop the drugstore. There were three, and his was last choice, because no soda fountain, no liquor rack, no dirty magazines. Mom’s dad had the best drugstore, with racks of nylons and socks, T-shirts, and books with strippers and gunmen on the covers. I was in there all the time, mixing up shakes, and selling cigs and rubbers. Mom had always thought I was the loser, because tall and gawky like Dad – smart, too, and a born goody-good, while you 1 0 9 R were the type to win a prize in the turkey raΔe, just the first stroke in landing you in clover. More came along after the two of us, Frankie and Eddie, twins, living to butt heads and vie for Mom’s attention, of which she had almost none, being absorbed with little Millie, Doug, and Princess, who all came after, and none of them Dad’s – at least, that’s what he thought. Little Millie is still only four feet tall, but she has all her marbles,andisarealpet.Momhadtriedanabortion,butthedoctor was a quack, and poor Millie came out too early and half baked. She’s the most human of us all, the most reliable. She’s the one who wiped my face that day, and cleaned out my ears. It was gloppy stu√, and to that I attribute my on-again, o√-again hearing. We admired your straight shot, first out of the house, then out of the neighborhood – our city being a place with nothing for anyone, and yet no one but you ever left, or even thought about it. Dad died of the usual causes: drinking, heart trouble, diabetes, cancer, and the war, where – although a supply sergeant – he lost an eye and his left thumb. He wouldn’t talk about it, so there had to be a story and no glory, as we liked to say about anything that went wrong. Not that we said it to his face. He had a bad temper, and kept the strap looped over the kitchen door, and we learned to run like rabbits, leaving little Millie to take the heat. And he wouldn’t smack a midget, so all that rage was stored up and killed him in the end, because the one who really pulled his chain was Mom, but she was a sprinter in school, and first up the stairs and into the bathroom , door locked. (The others didn’t lock, but pounding up the stairs, Dad lost his breath and his balance. We always found him sitting there, or looking out the window, gasping. If looks could kill, we’d all be long gone.) Maple walnut was my favorite, and that meant we never got it – not in ice cream, not in cake, not even in pancake syrup. For that, we had Karo or molasses, which wrecked whatever was drowned under it, plus left a taste in your mouth for days. Mom hated cooking, so unless Dad had had a few, but not too many, and got up the dinner (beans and franks, fried eggs, or shit...