402
PARTISAN REVIEW
bracelet of green, red, and blue stones that blinks, like a headlight,
on the arm of Mr. Hans's wife, or the fact that I don't look exactly
the same as I did only a year ago, that my body now bears visible
signs of femaleness?
"The economy can't get any worse, that's for certain," Mr.
Hans says. "What do you say?" He turns to my brother Eric, who is
sitting on his left, as if to solicit his opinion, and then turns back to
my father.
"True," my father says. "And maybe he'll get things under con–
trol. "
Lily holds out her hand in front of her like the woman in the
Palmolive commercial and admires my mother's diamond ring,
which she is wearing.
"It looks good on me, don't you think?"
No one listens to anyone in this family. We never have.
"It's too big," I say. "Or your fingers are too short. Or fat.
Something."
The diamond, round and defined, signals blue, yellow, pink,
and white in the combined glow of the candles and chandelier. Mr.
Hans, who sounds to me as ifhe is insistently repeating himself, con–
tinues to talk to my father . My father is amorphous as the world out–
side my head, the world Out There.
"A good man," he says of someone Mr. Hans has proposed.
"But he has no clout ."
Between the two of them, they will remake the affairs of a coun–
try in which neither of them live but both have a stake in, half sen–
timental and half paternalistic .
If
I were a small foreign country, a
Jewish state, would my father notice my breasts?
Mrs . Hans smiles at my mother. "Everything is so delicious,"
she says, although I notice she has left most of the fish salad and
hasn't taken second helpings of anything.
"Don't be fooled," I want to say but don't. "My mother doesn't
cook. She's not my real mother."
"Thank you," my mother says.
"What was the name of the actor who played Dobie Gillis on
the 'Dobie Gillis' show?" Rachel asks.
"Maynard something," my older brother Benjamin says. "I
think he killed himself."
"Really?" Rachel says. "But wasn't Maynard the name of
another character on the show? Maynard G. Krebs. They always in–
cluded his middle initial."
