Chapter One
Trying as always to engage my progeny, I say, “You can always quit school and go into business with me.”
“Sophia,” Lulu says, “Sasha isn’t going into business with you. She’s going to Harvard.”
I could try and explain that Harvard, like most of the rest of the world, is as anachronistic as the dinosaur—both frozen to death by sun blot. But Lulu speaks in a language others no longer speak.
Lulu has finished pinning her skirt, but still stands at the mirror. She slides her arthritic hand over her hipbone, down her seventy-year-old thigh. “Sophia, did you know that Nancy Reagan wore a red Chanel suit just like this at Ronnie’s inauguration?” She has her other hand at her neck, three fingers firmly placed on the pulse point.
My mother and that first lady would have been identical twins, if Nancy Reagan had had a large, slightly crooked Jewish nose and wore a blond pixie wig. On the other hand, I look exactly like Michelle Obama, if she were white, had short-short medium-brown hair, was 5’4”, and had bland features that could be used as statistical averages. (Inch-long hair isn’t just a fashion statement. Long hair = lice threat.)
Lulu beams at her first-lady image, leans over and shimmies to force her pancake-floppy breasts into her Victoria’s Secret push-up bra. She insists it’s the best-engineered bra ever made. My yuck factor is tempered every time I remember that this life isn’t easy on Lulu either. Lulu’s vision for her twilight years was traveling to exotic places—not living with her children and grandchildren in this relative Garden of Eden, which just happens to be in Hell.