My mother had faith in the antibiotics. I had even gone so far as to get her to let me take them with chocolate milk. Cecilia reacted melodramatically over her not getting to have any.

“You sis’er is sick! You, be lucky you not sick!”

My over-confidence grew and God found my acquisitions dishonest, especially my first glass of Coca-Cola. I took another piece of steak into my mouth and didn’t even bother to chew. I was blowing it back out when suddenly God struck me with his wrath and ordered the Coca-Cola bubbles to ascend to His Kingdom in Heaven. The additional pressure unexpectedly ejected the meat through my half-napkin; it landed a few inches in front of me, next to my glass. My mother at first blinked at it in apprehension, as if this were the final stage of tuberculosis.

“Yuck!” exclaimed Cecilia, then she had to go and ask, “Did that come out of her nose?!?”

“Let me see dose ot’her napkin,” my mother requested.

Next to my plate were a few balled-up ones I hadn’t bothered to throw away. My lack of movement was confirming her suspicions. She reached over the table. As she opened her valuable half-napkins up, one after the other, each contained, to her horror and to Cecilia’s fascination, a piece of steak. Crying, my mother called the flesh I’d wasted, “her own sweat an’ blood”. I was lost in confusion.

Locked up in the pantry closet, I stared at the shadows of hanging prosciutto with distaste. A silhouette of provolone cheese in a nylon net swayed in the air as I hit it with a yardstick. I was seated on a twenty pound bag of Idaho potatoes. The stale air reeked of smoked carcass, thyme, nutmeg, goose-garlic and onion-chive. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been offered a choice. I could have gone to my room, but there I would have had to write, “I will not in the futur I pramice, to spit Momy’s hardworking meet out of the window.” I found the phrase long for five hundred times, even if I had already convinced her to scratch off the redundant “never again”. I could have stood outside with one foot on Fool’s Stool, but I wasn’t keen on Ursula seeing me like that, should she come over. At least here, I could play.

“The closet?? Geez! Isn’t that kind of … severe? Locking up your daughter in a dungeon?” I rejoiced at Ursula’s shocked tone.

“Dere’s no lock!” replied my mother, “an’ she deserve.”

“Yeah!” added Cecilia, “That’s what she gets for trying to fool us.”

“Us” … I vowed to myself that I would tell my mother to look under Cecilia’s bed. She had broken my mother’s Greatest of Modest Moussorgsky record thinking it could soar like a Frisbee and thought it had less chance of being noticed there.

“You! Go to bed! It’s pas’ you time!” accused my mother.

“No it’s not!” retorted Cecilia who could not quite read Roman numerals, yet had fine intuition when adults wanted to be alone.