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Show Motherlunge a novel 231 tarnishing, and how to seem interested in golf. "What's your favorite recipe for peaches?" Charmaine had once asked me, the first summer I'd worked for her. I had stared back at her. It seemed clear that I was never going to be a person who has favorite recipes. \ Maybe it was the hormones. Anyway, I kept on smashing the snails. My flowerbed-a tangle of idiot-proof larkspur, cosmos, and poppies, snail-scarred but nevertheless vigorous-thrashed in slow motion toward the sun. And I continued to fail to get pregnant. I was thinking again of Dorothy, who, by the time she was my age had gotten pregnant easily, accidentally, twice. I'd been thinking of her at Pavia's wedding, too, when I was new to sexual activity myself, and before I realized all that it transmits (sex, I mean) and what heritable tendencies toward fear and sadder magic the two of us-Pavia and I-sheltered within ourselves as a result of Dorothy's improbable congress with our dad. I thought we were different from our mother, I mean. The reception for Pavia and Jack's wedding had been held outside, under a white canopy on the back lawn of the Methodist church in Supernal. Dorothy was wearing Yoko Ono sunglasses, the ones that look like welder's goggles painted black. They're in style and anti-cataract, my mother claimed. Her pudgy hand shook as she lifted a plastic cup of wine to her mouth. No one was talking to her. Walter was slowly pacing the area behind the church dumpsters, smoking. From time to time I would hug my mother from behind-a cheery |