Read First Person Peculiar for Free Online Page A

I say. “They don’t have them in her kingdom.”
    “What are they, some kind of Communists?” she demands.
    “They don’t have any electricity,” I explain.
    “You mean she doesn’t even have a food processor?”
    “That’s right,” I say.
    “That poor girl!” she says. “And no disposal unit in her sink?”
    “None,” I say, and I can see that suddenly she’s working up a head of sympathy.
    “How can anybody live like that?” she says.
    “She manages just fine.”
    “Nonsense!” she says. “Nobody can live without a trash masher. My son’s wife may be a fish, but she isn’t going to slave 30 hours a day just because I had to!”
    “That’s very thoughtful, Ma,” I say. “But—”
    “Don’t interrupt!” she snaps. “You bring her by this afternoon. I’ll have some knishes ready, and some blintzes, and maybe a little chopped liver, and we’ll watch Oprah and I’ll show her my kitchen and …” Suddenly she stops and re-thinks her schedule. “Bring her earlier and we can watch Dr. Phil, too. And tonight they’re re-running that old series with Lloyd Bridges. It should make her feel right at home.”
    “You’ll like her, Ma,” I promise.
    “Like, shmike ,” she says. “If I have to go through life without ever being able to point to my son the doctor, at least I can point to my almost-daughter the gefilte fish girl. Mrs. Noodleman down the block will be so jealous!” She pauses. “We’ll have to put a little meat on her bones.”
    “You haven’t even seen her,” I say.
    “That’s all right,” she says. “I know your taste in women. Cheap and skinny.”
    “Ma, you think any woman under 200 pounds is skinny.”
    “And you think any woman who doesn’t ask for ice cubes and a straw with her wine is sophisticated.” She gets up, and I can see she’s getting set for a couple of hours of serious puttering. “Now, you go get her and bring her back, while I prepare something for the poor undernourished thing to eat. And I think I’ll invite Rabbi Bernstein, since we need someone to work with her, and he’s always fishing when he should be at Temple, and …”
    As I leave, she is trying to remember which company sells the pens that write under water so she can send out wedding invitations to the bride’s family.
    ***

I actually wrote a version of this story, under a female pseudonym, back in the mid-1960s for the only issue of an “all-women’s tabloid.” I never kept a copy, so this isn’t an exact duplicate, and I’d like to think I’m half a century better, so when an anthology where the theme fit opened up, I took another shot at it.

    The Revealed Truth
    Her first name was Helen. No one knew her last name.
    She wasn’t a local resident, that much was certain, since everyone in town knew everyone else. She had been passing through, on her way from somewhere to somewhere, probably driving a little too fast, especially on the fatal turn, and a tire had blown out while she was heading south on River Road. Her car plunged right into the river.
    It was only eight or nine feet deep, but her door was locked and her window open. She banged her head pretty hard on the dashboard, and before a pair of startled fisherman could drag her out of the car she’d drowned. They carted her off to the hospital, dead on—well, before —arrival.
    Her purse had the name “Helen” embroidered on it. It didn’t seem likely that her wallet and registration had floated away, but they weren’t in her purse or her car, and a whole troop of Boy Scouts volunteered to look for them, or some other ID, in the water and along the shore.
    Turned out they only spent about four hours searching. No, they didn’t find it, but word reached them that she’d been miraculously revived, and they concluded that she could probably tell the authorities her name.
    I heard about it while I was working on my next Sunday sermon, something about gluttony being a worse sin than most people thought, and I