Nobody's Family is Going to Change Read Free Page A

horn.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A.: What? Speak up. We can’t hear you.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA (a bit louder): A cream horn.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A. (greatly irritated): Your honor, will you please direct this witness to answer my questions loudly and clearly so that the court and the jury can understand her?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  JUDGE: Miss Sheridan, will you please try to speak up?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Yes, sir.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  JUDGE: What?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Yes, sir.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A. (swaggering around): Now, Miss Sheridan, will you please tell the jury what else you ate for lunch.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: A cream horn.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A. (slyly): Do you want to leave it at that?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA (yelling): Oh, all right, two cream horns.
    Emma almost walked into a parking meter. She stopped herself just in time and trudged along, back in the real world now. Oh, the shame of it. Two cream horns.
    Still, when she finally passed her bar exam and she finally had a case and she was cross-examining the school dietitian, it would go like this:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA (prominent young New York trial lawyer): Did you or did you not put out a tray of forty cream horns—and don’t say there weren’t forty, becausethere were, because I counted them—did you or did you not put that tray out there to tempt and lead astray and in particular to ravage the diet of one Emma Sheridan?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  DIETITIAN (meekly): I did.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: If it please the court, this witness refuses to speak up and I have failed in all my efforts to get her to speak louder.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  JUDGE: We will have no more of that. Dietitian of the Gregory School, you will speak up.
    Emma gave a smile of satisfaction. She watched the dietitian cringe and wiggle around for a minute, then own up to her crime. Her mother’s voice broke through her dream: Just because there were forty, that didn’t mean that you had to eat forty, Emma. It didn’t mean that you even had to eat one.
    The shame of it. It was nobody’s fault but her own that she ate like a horse and looked like a pig, so much so that everybody called her Piggy. At first she hadn’t minded. There was a friendly sound to the name. As she got fatter and fatter, however, she realized that there wasn’t anything friendly about it. It was merely a descriptive term for that most shameful of all things, a FATGIRL.
    Emma gave a little shudder. Rounding the corner, she saw Willie up the block dancing around the garbage men.
    How my father ever thinks he can make a lawyer out of that dancing faggot, I can’t imagine. Here I am, with oneof the best legal minds in the state . . . She drifted toward another courtroom scene but was stopped by her rage as she stood like a lump watching Willie shuffle around with the garbage men.
    As she watched, Emma was remembering the conversation with her father that had taken place the night before. Mr. Sheridan had been sitting in the living room reading the paper. Mrs. Sheridan was knitting and watching television, with the sound turned so low that Emma could barely hear it even when she was in the room, standing in front of her father’s chair.
    â€œMay I discuss something with you?” she asked abruptly. Emma had a fairly deep voice. It made almost everything she said abrupt.
    Mr. Sheridan put down the newspaper. “Certainly, certainly,” he said jovially. He folded the paper, took his feet off the ottoman, and indicated that she sit down. “What have you got there? History? Algebra?” He was smiling.
    â€œTorts.”
    He stopped smiling. He didn’t look angry, just paler.
    â€œHave you finished your homework?” he asked quietly.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhere did you get this