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that your mother or grandmother prepared.
    But no . She did not believe this.
    It’s true—she does remember her Hungarian grandmother preparing noodles in the kitchen. Wide swaths of soft-floury ghost-white dough on the circular kitchen table that was covered in oilcloth, and over the oilcloth strips of waxed paper. She recalls the Grandmother, a heavyset woman with gray hair plaited and fastened tight against her head, always in an apron, and the white apron always soiled,wielding a long sharp-glittering knife, rapidly cutting dough into thin strips of noodle. And the Grandmother’s legs encased in thick flesh-colored cotton stockings even in hot weather. The surprise was, sometimes you could see a pleading girl’s face inside the soft flaccid Grandmother-stern face. And the little girl remembers something white-skinned, headless in a large pan simmering on the stove, the surface of the liquid bubbling with dollops of yellowish fat.
    You loved your grandmother’s chicken noodle soup! You don’t remember?
    She hides her eyes. She hides her face. She is sickened, that terrible smell of wet feathers, plucked-white chicken-flesh.
    Protesting, I had nothing to do with that.
    Trying to recall in a sudden panic—what had happened to her pet chicken, she’d loved so?
    Our memories are what remain on a wall that has been washed down. Old billboards advertising Mail Pouch Tobacco , in shreds. The faintest letters remaining that even as you stare at them, fade. The Hungarian Grandfather who’d been so gruff, so loud, so confident and had so loved his little granddaughter he’d been unable to keep his calloused fingers out of her curls had died at the age of fifty-three, his lungs riddled with steel filings from the foundry in Tonawanda. The Hungarian Grandmother lived for many years afterward and never learned to speak English, still less to read English. The Grandmother died in a nursing home in Lockport to which the granddaughter was never once taken, nor was the granddaughter told the name of the nursing home or its specific location.
    Why was this? The Mother had wished to hide the little girl’s eyes. Even when she was no longer a little girl, yet the Mother wished to shield her from upset and worry.
    What happened to me? What happened to Happy Chicken?
    Oh, the little girl did not know!
    The little girl did not know . Just that one terrible day—Happy Chicken was not there.
    She mouths the words aloud: “Happy Chicken.”
    There is something about the very word happy that is unnerving. Happy happy happy happy.
    A terrible word. A terrifying word. Hap-py.
    Waking in the night, tangled in bedsheets, shivering in such fright you’d think she was about to misstep and fall into an abyss.
    Happy. Hap-py. We were so hap-py . . .
    In the cold terror of the night she counts her dead. Like a rosary counting her dead. The Grandfather who died first and after whom the door was opened, that Death might come through to seize them all. The Grandmother who died somewhere far away, though close by. The Mother who died of a stroke when she was in her mid-eighties, overnight. The Father who died over several years, also in his mid-eighties, in the new, twenty-first century shrinking, baffled and yet alert, in yearning wonderment.
    Wanted you kids to have the best you could have, but that didn’t happen. We were just too poor. I worked like hell, but it wasn’t enough. Things got better later, but those early years—! The only good thing was, we lived in Millersport. We lived on the old man’s farm. You loved those animals. Remember your pet chicken—Happy Chicken? God, you loved that little red chicken.
    Daddy brushing tears from his eyes. Daddy laughing, he wasn’t the kind to be sentimental, Jesus!
    She was thinking of how they’d found the rooster—not Mr. Rooster then, but just a limp, slain bird—beautiful feathers smudged and broken—out