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11 garlic Whenever there is garlic, there is Annelise who taught me to whack it with the flat side of a soup can or cleaver. You’ll mince or press later, she said, so what does it matter? She learned that trick from cooking shows the years she was married to a dean. How could she know how to throw dinner parties, growing up behind a deli after the war? So she watched TV. The summer I was 16, learning to drive, she learned to swim, enduring the dean’s divorce. They’d met in the ’50s, literature students at Washington Square. The Village was not as fun in those days as you’d think, she said, mostly unsafe. M. L. Rosenthal hit on her after class, harmless enough with his club foot and just then unable to guess where he’d left his car. Oh, think of the time a person can waste all her life, she said, trying to peel off impossible paper skins when you can just strike the thing with whatever’s at hand. ...

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