THE UPS AND DOWNS OF DIET
I have this thing about eating. It all depends what it is and who I'm eating it with. Like Aunt Mildred's tarts. There I am standing on her doorstep looking up at her and she's looking down at me with all these spiky orange curlers coming out of her head and her eyebrows all tweezed out saying, Oh, Little Missy how nice of you to visit me, your momma wrote you were coming, but I could tell the way she walked back to the kitchen looking up at the ceiling momma hadn't written anything, just put me on the bus with five bucks and kissed it off. Yep, I could eat those tarts all day. Then there was Uncle George. The real thing, kept chickens, came home from the factory for lunch. He had this big nose just like Magwitch, and excuse me, even bigger nostrils, like a horse to be precise, and let me tell you he was one heavy breather, so whenever we were eating baloney together we'd be sitting there at the table sucking up slice after slice, Jesus, you could skate on the garlic that's how thick it was, and he'd be looking down at me from way high up on his nose and he'd be kind of laughing to himself and then he'd say what he always said when we were eating baloney, he'd say, So Missy, you like that baloney don't you, like he couldn't get enough of me, and all the time he'd be sucking everything in the room up into his nose and then wheezing it out back until for a moment the whole world got stuck back together perfect again, that's how good it was.