The Moment She Was Gone

The crying was one thing.

When I stopped eating, that was another story.

I was never a picky eater until my father left home. Then everything seemed to taste rotten.

One night, I was playing in the living room with this dart set my grandmother sent me for my sixth birthday — we weren’t allowed to see Grandma Kate anymore, but she still sent us gifts, which my mother didn’t dare keep from us.

The dart set had a target with circles on it and a bull’s eye and six darts with different colored feathers on them for different players. I put the target on a piece of plywood so the darts wouldn’t damage anything if I missed. My mother was already annoyed that Grandma Kate had sent me a game with pointed things in it; she’d have taken a fit if I threw a dart and wrecked a wall or a piece of furniture.

When she called us in to dinner, Aaron came from where he was pounding on the piano, and Annie came from where she was playing with one of her dolls, and I came in from practicing darts, carrying one of the darts with me, the one with the red feathers. I was sort of twirling the dart around on my fingers when my mother came in with our dinner. She prided herself on her cooking, my mother did. She cooked about as well as Aaron played piano, but all her friends kept telling her she was a terrific cook.

That night, she was serving these thick veal chops Aaron loved, with mashed potatoes and creamed spinach she made herself that wasn’t frozen. She had just put everything on the table when a fly started buzzing around the kitchen. This was an old apartment, what they called pre-war, and it had no air-conditioning, which meant we kept the windows open winter and summer, though not as much in the winter, and there were flies in it year round.

Through the open doorway connecting kitchen and dining room, I watched the fly as it landed first on the refrigerator and then the cookie jar in the shape of a pig on the counter near the stove, and then zipped out of the kitchen and into the dining room and landed on the wall someplace behind me. I whirled around in my chair and without even taking aim, threw the dart, and hit the fly smack behind its head, pinning it to the wall. A gooey white fluid came oozing out of the fly, and I went “Ick!” and turned back to the table to find sitting in front of me a big bowl of mashed potatoes that looked just like the gooey white stuff coming out of the fly.

My mother didn’t know I’d nailed a fly to the wall with what had to be the luckiest shot in all New York City, even better than a bull’s eye. She’d been busy running in and out of the kitchen carrying platters and plates and now she saw me looking down at the bowl of mashed potatoes she’d worked very hard to make creamy and smooth, and she saw me nulling a face, and heard me saying “Ick!” and she said at once, “What now?” because ever since I’d stopped crying over my father leaving, I’d been a pain in the ass about eating.