I Feel Bad About My Neck Read Free

never crossed my mind to worry about a purse being caught in the rain, much less being waterproofed. For a moment I thought once again about how my mother had failed to teach me anything about purses, and I almost felt sorry for myself. But it was time for lunch.
    The two of us went to a bistro, and the Kelly bag was placed in the center of the table, where it sat like a small shrine to a shopping victory. And then, outside, it began to rain. My friend’s eyes began to well with tears. Her lips closed tightly. In fact, to be completely truthful, her lips actually pursed. It was pouring rain and she hadn’t had the Kelly bag waterproofed. She would have to sit there all afternoon and wait for the rain to end rather than expose the bag to a droplet of moisture. It crossed my mind that she and her Kelly bag might have to sit there forever. Years would pass and the rain would continue to fall. She would get old (although her Kelly bag would not) and eventually she and the bag would, like some modern version of Lot’s wife, metamorphose into a monument to what happens to people who care too much about purses. Country songs would be written about her, and parables. At that point I stopped worrying about purses and gave up.
    I came back to New York and bought myself a purse. Well, it’s not a purse exactly; it’s a bag. It’s definitely the best bag I have ever owned. On it is the image of a New York City MetroCard—it’s yellow (taxicab yellow, to be exact) and blue (the most horrible blue of all, royal blue)—so it matches nothing at all and therefore, on a deep level, matches everything. It’s made of plastic and is therefore completely waterproof. It’s equally unattractive in all seasons of the year. It cost next to nothing (twenty-six dollars), and I will never have to replace it because it seems to be completely indestructible. What’s more, never having been in style, it can never go out of style.
    It doesn’t work for everything, I admit; on rare occasions, I’m forced to use a purse, one that I hate. But mostly I go everywhere with my MetroCard bag. And wherever I go, people say to me, I love that bag. Where did you get that bag? And I tell them I bought it at the Transit Museum in Grand Central station, and that all proceeds from it go toward making the New York City subway system even better than it is already. For all I know, they’ve all gone off and bought one. Or else they haven’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m very happy.

Serial Monogamy: A Memoir
    My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of The Gourmet Cookbook (volume 1) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). The Gourmet Cookbook was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish brown binding. It was assembled by the editors of Gourmet magazine and punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious pictures of food the magazine was famous for. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and a world-class apple pie. But thanks to The Gourmet Cookbook, Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel; before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese egg rolls from scratch. A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.
    Owning The Gourmet Cookbook made me feel tremendously sophisticated. For years I gave it to friends as a wedding present. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned,