Blue Plate Special Read Free Page A

intelligent face, and a strong jaw.
    They stayed up all night talking under the stars. They became an inseparable couple right away: Liz and Ralph, good-looking as movie stars, cool, smart, and fun. They were great pals, extremely well matched, even though he was twelve years older than she was. They hung out with a pack of interesting friends. They went to parties. They ate in Chinatown at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where a famous waiter named Edsel Ford Fong screamed at the customers and told them what to order. They went camping in Aspen and Arizona and the Tetons with two other couples, a pair of musicians nicknamed Oboe Bob and Oboe Molly who rode motorcycles, and my mother’s oldJuilliard friends, Peter Schickele, the composer who would later invent P. D. Q. Bach, and his wife, a dancer. They laughed a lot, sang together, bantered in fake accents, and cracked each other up.
    But my mother was pregnant with me by the time of their Carson City wedding the following winter, and in her last months of pregnancy, as they settled into a cheap, tiny shack of a bungalow on McGee Avenue in Berkeley together—and then for several months after I was born—she stopped feeling sexual. This was a normal enough occurrence, of course, but it greatly upset my father. He called her frigid and gave her books to read about this so-called unnatural condition, books that had been written, naturally, by men. My mother sensed that something was wrong with my father’s interpretation of things, but had no idea, in those days, what it could be.

CHAPTER 3
The Johansens
    My mother wanted to name me Katherine, but my father, who had some unpleasant association with the name from some ex-girlfriend in his distant past, refused to let her. He agreed to compromise on Kate as a middle name. My mother’s mother suggested Laurie for my first name, possibly because she’d always liked the boy in
Little Women
; and my father, who had no associations with the name, agreed to it.
    As soon as I was born, my mother became instantly vapor-locked on me. Most mothers tend to be somewhat obsessed with their firstborns, but her fixation on me was a little more intense than usual. Photographs taken shortly after my birth show her staring down at me, clutching me, engrossed, mesmerized, as if she could not believe I existed, as if she were afraid that if she took her eyes off me for a split second, I might disappear.
    I was a frustrating baby for her in many ways. I had no interest in breast-feeding, or in solid food either, when that came along. I had likewise no interest in lap sitting or cuddling. My mother yearned to enfold me in her arms and rock me as much as I would let her, which was not at all. Possibly I sensed her extreme focus on me and tried to shield myself from it. I was and am by nature averse to being stared at, solitary, and fierce about my autonomy. My poor mother, who wanted a chubby little lap child to suckle and dandle, a sweet-temperedbaby who would coo and gurgle with cuddly placidity, had given birth to me instead.
    I didn’t want to be looked at; I wanted to do the watching myself. As long as my baby seat was turned toward whatever conversation was going on, and I was left alone to watch and listen, I was perfectly happy. If I couldn’t hear the grown-ups talking, I fussed. If my mother tried to hold me too long on her lap, I made an impatient grunting sound to be put down and left alone. I was too busy eavesdropping to eat. A little suck on the nipple, a bit of tapioca or Cream of Wheat, and that was that, time to get back to business.
    Consequently, and not surprisingly, I was a very skinny baby. Old ladies stopped my mother in the Berkeley Co-op, to her chagrin, to poke at my sticklike little arms and instruct her on what I should be eating and how she should be feeding me. It got worse. When my hair grew in, it did so in white-blond wispy tufts that stood up on my small head. I had huge staring green eyes set into a small, pale