And This Is Laura. Ellen Conford

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      “Douglas, dear, I think your pizza is burning.”

      He didn’t look up from his newspaper. “ ’S all right. I like it that way.”

      “It’s not enough,” I said irritably, “that he has to eat pizza for breakfast—it’s got to be burnt pizza.”

      Douglas sighed and plopped his paper down on the table. “All right, all right, Fussbudget. I’ll take it out so it doesn’t offend your delicate sense of smell.”

      “Don’t do it on my account,” I snapped. “I was just worried about your being able to read the paper through all that black smoke.”

      “You’re exaggerating slightly.” He snatched the pizzas out of the oven and dropped them onto a plate. “As usual.”

      Douglas is sixteen. He’s extremely sarcastic. I don’t exaggerate. I report everything exactly as it happens.

      “The first meeting of the dramatics club is this afternoon,” I said, “so I’ll be a little late.”

      No one was very impressed. Why should they be? Jill has had the lead in every play she’s been in since elementary school. The last play I was in was a second-grade production about the Basic Food Groups called something like “Mealtime Frolics of 1970.” I played a grape. Along with thirteen other grapes I made up a bunch.

      “You’ll enjoy it,” Jill said. “Is Mr. Kane still the advisor? He was really nice.”

      “Sure. He’s my English teacher, remember? He asked me if I was going to join. He said, ‘Your sister was so talented.’ ”

      “He remembers me? Isn’t that nice?”

      That, I thought, depends on your point of view.

      “What has that got to do with your joining the club?” my father asked.

      I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess he thinks it runs in the family.”

      “Ridiculous,” he scoffed. “You’re an individual.”

      “And individual people,” Dennis droned, “have individual hair problems. Don’t settle for just any shampoo. Hi-Lite makes a shampoo that’s just right for your particular hair problem. Cucumber for oily hair, strawberry creme for dry hair and Hi-Protein Egg for normal hair. Do you think my voice is getting any deeper?”

      “Noticeably,” my father said. Dennis is seven. He wants to be a TV announcer when he grows up.

      Douglas folded up the paper and pushed his chair back. “Better get going. Coming, Bernhardt?”

      Jill gulped down the last of her black coffee and jumped up.

      “ ’Bye, all.”

      “ ’Bye, all,” Douglas simpered and waggled his fingers at us. Jill whacked him on the shoulder.

      I finished my eggs and cocoa and reminded Dennis that if he dawdled much longer he’d be late for school.

      “Don’t worry, Laura,” my mother said, with a look of amusement. “I’ll make sure he’s not late.”

      “Okay, okay,” I said hastily. “I was just trying to be helpful.” Actually, I had very little faith in my mother’s ability to get everyone’s departure times straight. When she’s working on a book, as she was then, she tends to become preoccupied with what’s happening in her story and more than a little foggy about what’s happening in the Real World.

      My mother is a writer. Every day—or almost every day—after we’ve all gone to school and my father has left for work, she goes up to her room and writes for five hours. And then, four times a year, she sends a new book off to her publisher.

      Two of the four are gothic romances. You know, with heroines who go to live in crumbling old castles where dark family secrets are buried and everyone acts strangely and the heroine finds herself in Terrible Danger. She writes those under the name of Fiona Westphall. The other two books are westerns.

      Yes, westerns. With good guys and bad guys and gunfights—the whole bit. She writes those under the name of Luke Mantee. She picked that name in honor of Humphrey Bogart, who played a character named Duke Mantee in some movie.

      Back before she was married and of course, before we all were born, my mother was in the movies. No one famous, you understand, just bit parts. Her movie name was Margo Lancaster. (Her real name was Maggie Luskin.) She certainly doesn’t seem much influenced by the whole Hollywood experience. She doesn’t even have a scrapbook, which I think is a shame. She says she never had anything to put in one.

      I’ve read a few of her romances. They’re pretty good, although they all seem very much alike. I asked her once wasn’t it monotonous to keep doing practically the same book over and over again?

      “Well, it’s kind of a challenge,” she said, “to write one story twenty-seven different ways, so that the reader never recognizes it’s the same book.”

      The westerns I can’t read at all. I think they’re boring. Someone must like them though. My mother sells a lot of books. (She says the westerns are pretty much all the same too. But she seems to enjoy doing them.)

      “Would you like a ride?” my father asked. “I’m just about ready to go.”

      “No thanks, I’ll walk. I don’t know why you have to go this early anyway,” I added. “You could sleep late in the mornings, get up when you pleased—”

      “But normal fathers don’t do that,” he teased. “Normal fathers get up at the same time every day, have breakfast with their family, catch the same train to work—”

      “Well it’s no use pretending you’re a normal father,” I retorted, “so I don’t know why you bother getting up early.”

      “Because I couldn’t sleep through you kids in the morning; why fight it?”

      Normal fathers. That’s a laugh. Normal fathers are not, first of all, named Basil. (What was Grandma Hoffman thinking of?) Normal fathers are named Fred or Morris or George or David or Joe—no one’s father is named Basil. And second of all, no one’s father that I know has a laboratory all to himself at a huge corporation, where he’s got no work to do at all but is just expected to fool around.

      That’s right, fool around. He doesn’t have to do anything. He goes in when he wants to and comes home when he wants to and no one bothers him. It seems he’s a scientist who was brilliant enough to be sought after by seven different companies who just wanted him to work in their lab (his own lab, really) because he might hit on something terrific which they could make a lot of money on. He also invents things. The company that finally got him pays him an enormous salary.

      You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He wears shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt in the summer (the same ones, every year) and gray work pants and a ratty-looking gray sweatshirt in the winter. And sneakers. When company comes he puts on socks. But he is, everyone says, a genius.

      Now the question arises, wasn’t I proud of him? And shouldn’t I have been proud of my mother, the famous authors, СКАЧАТЬ