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turned into Tania yet?”
    â€œNo, Dad,” I said, rubbing my red thighs, which were burning with white, raised claw marks.
    My dad patted his jacket pocket looking for his glasses to inspect my wounds. He was always looking for his glasses the way drinkers are forever trying to remember where they set their drink down.
    â€œWe’ll look at those scratches in the morning. Good night, goils,” he said.

    So, from oldest to youngest we had: a book-hater, a compulsive reader, a paperwork fanatic and an idiot detective.
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    MOM’S NEW BRONXVILLE PERSONA was about normalcy. She was embarking on a brand-new personal adventure of dullness. Watch me as I transform into the biggest suburban dud mom you’ve ever seen. Being a normal mom involved one pottery class in White Plains, and later one single aerobics class at the school gym. I’m happy to say she never donned leg warmers or a bodysuit. Her jogging career spanned two separate jogs with me around the neighborhood with frequent cig breaks. That was it for her involvement in public life. No clubs, classes, exercise, lunches. No PTA commitments or Junior League or friends. My mother hung out in the kitchen all day long. No one bugging her too much, her days spent at the long butcher-block table, smoking, doing the New York Times crossword, making herself iced teas and little cold steak sandwiches with ketchup, occasionally driving down to the Bronxville Police Department, which had built a brand-new doggy jail because Guinness kept getting out of our house and terrorizing people and eventually mauling an old woman’s toy poodle to death. After springing Guinness she might watch a little tennis on the small TV, but otherwise she’d flip through cookbooks, make grocery lists, feed Oiseau. She’d talk to whatever visitors came through, her kids, their friends, sign a report card or two. The only thing Mom read was the newspaper, period. She conceived of meals and went to the grocery store and cooked. This was the new Mom.
    Her repertoire, Northern Italian and French mixed with midwestern basics, might have been called Mussolini in Missouri or Mid- Ouest Boozer. She made classic midwestern stuff like lamb with mint jelly, German potato salad, ham steak with applesauce, the world’s greatest fried chicken. From our time living in Amagansett she’d picked up more rustic coastal summer dishes like mussels in white wine and garlic, fried trout with cucumber-dill sauce, duck à l’orange, broiled tomatoes (bread crumbs, olive oil and garlic on top, usually served with steak), and things she threw on a fire like roasted onions cooked and served in tinfoil with tons of butter and salt (so simple, and I don’t know anyone else who makes onions like this). A regular weeknight dinner might be coq au vin, veal marsala or chicken cacciatore. She liked a challenge, making things like, on occasion, pot-au-feu, which she pronounced pot-uh-fooooo . People who say there’s nothing worse than “a little knowledge” have never experienced my mother’s “a little French.” She mispronounced everything: un was ume , un peu was ume pooo , bon appétit was bone appetitaaah . Over-the-top incorrect, but she was convinced her accent was “divine.” She and my father went through a homemade-pasta phase in the early ’80s, using a chrome pasta maker that attached to the butcher-block table. My dad made the pasta: shaping a pile of flour on the table and cracking an egg into it and pushing the dough through the machine rollers to flatten it and then guiding the eggy mass through the chrome teeth while they drank wine, blared The Marriage of Figaro , and Mom made her spaghetti sauce with beef and vegetables. She made incredible spinach cannelloni with Dad’s flat lasagna-like noodles. She made a salad where she cooked up some bacon, saved the grease and mixed it with red wine vinegar and sugar