Blue Plate Special Read Free Page B

face. In photos, I look like an elf or an alien. I was never babyish in any way. It was probably a bit eerie for someone else to be watched so intently by those gleaming, saucerlike eyes.
    When I was nine months old, well before I could walk, I looked up at my mother from my baby seat on the table and said very clearly, without a trace of baby talk, “I want more Cheerios.” My mother was naturally startled to have her incontinent, tiny infant not only speak but address her in a complete sentence. I’d never said anything before, never babbled or baby talked.
    From the get-go, I felt a nervous, headlong urge to catapult myself into life, to start realizing the desires I seem to have been born with: to learn as much as I could about people, to figure out how words worked, and to collect as many of them as I could. I wanted words the way other kids wanted fun experiences or toys or friends: intensely, greedily, as many as I couldget. I stood between my parents in the McGee Avenue house when I was about two, raising my arms toward them. I had just learned that there was such a verb as “comfort,” and I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I wanted it demonstrated.
    “Comfort me,” I said to them, feeling deeply and totally focused on this. They looked down at me, puzzled; was I upset? I was not. I was calm but insistent. “Comfort me,” I repeated, shaking my upstretched hands for emphasis.
    They must have figured out what I was after, because they picked me up and theatrically pretended to give me soothing, reassuring affection—first one of them, then the other—while I watched them closely. There they were, my parents, comforting me. This memory is one of the nicest ones I have of my father. There he was, being a father, just for a moment. I had to ask him to, in the spirit of curiosity about a word, but he complied. I have always kept this memory in the mental equivalent of a velvet box at the back of a top shelf in a closet, where rare things are hidden so no one steals or breaks them.
    A s if to compensate for me, my sister Susan was a fat, cute, cuddly, sweet baby who laughed as early as I had stared fixedly at people, hard peals of merry laughter even while she nursed, milk running down her chin, until my mother had to laugh, too. Right away, Susan sent me into fits of hysterics; I lay gasping feebly on the floor like an exhausted beetle. She was a pretty baby and a pretty little girl. She was hilarious with her family but quiet and meek and shy with strangers. And she was given to explosions, wordless fits of emotion during which she could only cry, kick, scream, and howl. She was unable to talk, to tell my mother what the matter was. There was something vulnerable and tender about Susan that made me fiercely protective of her from the start. She was my sweet companion throughout childhood, always stalwartly by my side. She camerunning up to my classroom, crying, when she wet her pants in kindergarten so I could help her get home to change. She came to me on the playground at recess when her jacket zipper was stuck so I could fix it. We bolstered each other. I got as much from her as she got from me—her absolute trust in me gave me confidence, made me feel tough and strong.
    We never fought as children. We were both docile peacemakers by nature, but we were also terrified of the possible repercussions of overt conflict, having seen it firsthand from our father.
    And then, when I was four and a half, Emily arrived—a placid baby with a big round head, fat kissable cheeks, button brown eyes, and a button nose. Her arms and legs and stomach were all dimples and pudge. As soon as she was born, I decided that she was mine and claimed her. She was born with thrush, a yeast infection in her mouth; the pediatrician treated it with gentian violet, so my mother’s shirts all turned purple around the nipples. In her early months, Emily had several very high fevers and had to be rushed to the ER and packed in