Breakfast Buffet

It was far too quiet at the breakfast table for anything good to be brewing. I slid into my usual place and hoped for invisibility.

My grandmother was smoking and scowling at my mother. My mother was trying to pretend she didn't notice and doing a poor job of it. Her hands shook when she raised her coffee cup and she looked haggard and sick, all the easily recognizable signs of a hangover were in place. The boys began to squabble over the jam pot and Nana snapped at them to leave the table. From her tone of voice, it was clear that she'd tolerate no argument and the boys willingly slinked off.

“I'm not hungry,” I ventured and Nana glared at me.

“Drink your juice and make yourself some toast,” she ordered, “It's window washing day and your mother is going to be no help at all.”

My mother surrendered but not peacefully.

“Mother, I'm sick!” she wailed, then slammed her coffee cup down, burst into a flood of tears and fled like a frightened rabbit. My grandmother looked disgusted but calmly lit a Kent 100 and added two tiny sacachine tablets to her coffee.

“Sick, is it,” she said clearly, spitting the words, “Goddam drunk, more's the pity. Just like your grandfather.”

So much for invisibility, I thought dimly, downing down my juice and toast in quick swallows and furiously casting about for an exit. I loved my grandmother with only a little less passion than I hated my mother but her wrath could be just as fearful. I watched her deliberately chain smoke her Kents and drum her white knuckled fingers on the table top while my mother sobbed methodically upstairs, wondering if it might just be the calm before the real storm. As soon as I was pretty sure she'd forgotten I was there, I muttered something about getting the window washing things and slipped away like a thief in the night.

In retrospect, it does seem as though there was very little love lost among the women of my family. My mother and grandmother were at each other's throats constantly with neither having much use for the New York contingent who spent much of their time sniping and bickering at us or each other or at my daddy's sisters who they saw as uniformly lower class.

And of course my headmistress Aunt Helen, who had married in, was universally and enthusiastically disliked by one and all, including - at times, at least so it seemed - her own husband. In less charitable moments, my daddy had been heard to say that her one redeeming feature was her unintentional ability to unite the family, particuarly the women, against a common enemy.

As they almost always did, Nana and my mother worked out a shaky truce by lunch and each gave me a quarter for the windows. I suspected it was more for my silence than my hard work.