| Not even my own mother shops regularly anymore. She confessed this to me last week on the telephone. "I just stop in on my way home from the office and pick up some lamb chops or something," she said. "I don't plan ahead anymore. I never know what I want until it's right in front of me and then I don't think twice about buying it." |
| "That's exactly what we do," I told her. "We just walk to the store after work and get dinner. How are you supposed to know on Monday what you'll want on Friday?" |
| "That's right," said my mother. |
| I used to come home from grade school to find her leafing through cookbooks. She owned almost an entire set of Time-Life cookbooks, one for each region of China, France, Africa, and the United States. Once, when she had worked for a week preparing a genuine Chinese feast complete with six entres, two soups, and various appetizers, my father surprised her with a set of dishes he'd bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop. He had skipped work and driven the fifty miles there and back to get them. The delicate soup bowls, robin's egg blue with enameled dragons, were rimmed with gold paint and came with special matching spoons that looked like boats. We dressed for dinner that night and my mother pinned my hair up with chopsticks. |
| Then one day when I was seven she picked me up at school and took me straight to the supermarket. The second grade had just experienced its first air raid drill; when the alarm rang, instead of filing out to the school yard as we did for fire drills, we were told to sit down in the hallway, our backs to the wall, our knees drawn up to our chests, our hands folded over our heads. It was wonderful. For two full minutes we sat there with our heads thrust between our knees while the teachers, in their high-heeled shoes, clicked up and down the hallway. I spent the whole time staring at my underpants. That afternoon my mother and I filled a whole cart with canned goodssoups, stews, juices, fruits. We bought five-pound bags of wheat |
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