And This Is Laura. Ellen Conford. Читать онлайн. Hotlib. HOTLIB.NET

I’LL BET NONE of this would have happened if I hadn’t been such an ordinary, run-of-the-mill person. If I’d been my sister, Jill, for instance, I’d have been too busy rehearsing Romeo and Juliet and winning bowling trophies; if I’d been my brother Douglas, my time would have been occupied with piano playing and captaining the Hillside High School debating team. Even my little brother, Dennis, is so busy memorizing TV commercials and doing his daily counting he hardly has time left for anything else.

Dennis is counting to a million. Why? I have no idea. Why do people climb mountains?

For a long time I was convinced I was adopted; how else could you explain the fact that while surrounded by a family of overachievers, there was absolutely nothing that I was brilliant at? Oh, I do well enough in school. Very well, in fact. Like almost straight “A’s.” But I don’t do anything special. I mean, if my mother were introducing us she could say, “My daughter Jill, the actress. My son Douglas, the musician. My son Dennis; would you like to hear him do the Anacin commercial?”

But when she got around to me, what could she say? “And this is Laura. She’s twelve.”

Of course she wouldn’t. She never has. She’s a little casual about introductions anyway. She’s a little casual about everything. What she usually says is “Meet the mob.”

Nevertheless, being utterly average in my family is a tough row to hoe, believe me.

And it’s not merely the lack of my outstanding ability that sets me apart. It is, in fact, a whole question of life-style.

Take breakfast, for instance.

Now, my idea of breakfast is: orange juice, scrambled eggs or cereal, toast and milk. A nice, normal, healthy breakfast, right?

For Dennis’s breakfast, my mother plops fourteen different little packets of dry cereal on the table, each one of them coated with sugar, and lets Dennis eat whichever ones he wants. And he sits there wolfing down Sugar Stinkies and Cocoa Barfos and Hunny-Bunnies until I can practically hear his teeth disintegrating.

And when I point out that he’s ruining his entire mouth with that junk, you know what she says? “He gets fluoride treatments.”

Jill’s breakfast consists of a stalk of celery, two tablespoons of wheat germ and black coffee. Black coffee! I mean, she’s fifteen years old.

“Don’t you realize she’s going to stunt her growth with that?” I ask.

And my father says, “She’s five foot six. How much growth can she stunt?”

Douglas eats frozen pizza for breakfast. That is, he doesn’t eat it frozen—my mother sticks a couple of those packaged pizzas in the oven and heats them up. At least he has milk with them. My mother says pizza is a perfectly fine breakfast nutritionally because the cheese has protein and calcium and the dough is like toast or bread and the tomato sauce has Vitamin C, like orange juice. Okay. She’s got me there. But it’s not normal.

My father has been known to eat veal kidneys. He points out that in places like England kidneys are very commonly eaten at breakfast. But we are not living in England. We are living here and kidneys are not commonly eaten for breakfast in the United States. And the smell of kidneys cooking at seven o’clock in the morning . . .

Even Jill has threatened to report him to the Environmental Protection Agency for fouling up the air, but he just says, “Stop picking on my kidneys.”

My mother doesn’t eat breakfast. She drinks coffee. I don’t blame her. Sometimes when I look around at what the rest of the family is eating I lose my appetite too. But back in the first grade I learned that A Good Breakfast Is The Start Of A Good Day, so I force myself.

Now, this whole story has to begin somewhere (and it’s about time, too) so since I’ve begun to fill you in on the hideous details of breakfast, we might as well start there.

It is a drizzly morning in late September as we look in on the Hoffman household. A typical Monday at 522 Woodbine Way, with nothing to distinguish it from any other Monday. As we join the Hoffmans, we hear Laura say . . .

“But that’s not logical. If you’re so concerned with our individual likes and dislikes at breakfast, how come we all have to eat the same thing for dinner?”

“Because preparing dinner is more trouble than preparing breakfast. Therefore, preparing six dinners would be six times more difficult than preparing five breakfasts.”

“That’s logical,” my father said.

“And besides,” my mother went on, “anyone who doesn’t like what we have for dinner is always free to go and cook whatever he or she prefers.”

“What’s the matter, Joe? You’re so grumpy today. Frankly, Bill, this irregularity is getting me down. I’ve tried everything—”

“Dennis, please. Not first thing in the morning.” Jill held her hand to her head.

“Nagging headache? Why suffer? For fast, fast, fast relief—”

“DENNIS!”

“Douglas, dear, I think your pizza is burning.”

He didn’t look up from his newspaper. “ ’S all right. I like it that way.”

“It’s not enough,” I said irritably, “that he has to eat pizza for breakfast—it’s got to be burnt pizza.”

Douglas sighed and plopped his paper down on the table. “All right, all right, Fussbudget. I’ll take it out so it doesn’t offend your delicate sense of smell.”

“Don’t do it on my account,” I snapped. “I was just worried about your being able to read the paper through all that black smoke.”

“You’re exaggerating slightly.” He snatched

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