"Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichl Ruth)

"What?" she asked.

"I bet she's going to make that awful quick soup she thinks is so great. You know, it's in all the magazines. You mix a can of tomato
soup with a can of split pea soup, add a little sherry, and top it with crabmeat."

"Yuck," said Jeanie.
"Then I guess she's going to cook those millions of chicken legs on top of rice, although how she thinks she's going to cook them all in our little oven I don't know. And the canned spiced peaches can be the vegetable; they're easy because all you have to do is open the can and put them on the plates."
I was surprised (and relieved) when she ordered a giant cake from the local bakery. That left only the hors d'oeuvres; I wondered what she had up her sleeve,

The next day I found out. Jeanie and I were playing croquet, but we put down our mallets when Mom's horn started, and watched the car speed through the trees, leaving billows of dust in its wake, We ran out to see what she had dragged home.

"Horn & Hardart was having a sale!" Mom announced triumphantly, pointing to the boxes around her. They were filled with hundreds of small cartons. It looked promising. "It's almost like getting it catered," I said happily to Jeanie as we toted the boxes inside.
My happiness was short-lived; when I began opening the cartons I found that each contained something different.
"The Automat sells leftovers for almost nothing at the end of the day" said Mom, "so I just took everything they had." She was very pleased with herself.

"What are you going to do with it?" I asked.

"Why, serve it," she said.

"In what?" I asked.
"Big bowls," she said.
"But you don't have anything to put in big bowls," I pointed out. "All you have is hundreds of things to put in little bowls. Look," I began ripping the tops off the cartons, "this one is potato salad.
This one is coleslaw. This one is cold macaroni and cheese. Here's a beet salad. Here's some sliced ham. Nothing matches!"
"Don't worry," said Mom, "I'm sure we can make something out 0f all of this. After all, everything in it is good."
"Yes," I muttered to Jeanie, "and by the time it gets served everything in it will be four days old. It will be a miracle if it's not moldy."
"I think it would be better if it was," said practical Jeanie. "If people see mold they won't eat it."
"Pray for rain," I said.
unfortunately when I woke up on the day of the party there was not a cloud in the sky. I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. But not for long. "Nobody sleeps today" Mom announced, inexorably pulling back the covers. "It's party day!"
Some of the food had acquired a thin veneer of mold, but Mom blithely scraped it off and began mixing her terrible Horn & Hardart mush. "It's delicious!" she cried, holding out a spoonful. It wasn't. Fortunately it looked even worse than it tasted.
I thought the chicken legs were a little dubious too; in order to get them all cooked we had started two days earlier, and the refrigerator couldn't hold them all. But they glistened invitingly and the oven-baked rice looked fine. We spooned the peaches into Mom's big glass bowls, and they looked beautiful.
I wasn't very happy about the soup. Mom had left the crabmeat out of the freezer to defrost for two days, and even she didn't like the way it was smelling. "I think I'll just add a little more sherry," she kept saying as she poured in bottles of the stuff.
"People will get drunk on the soup," I said.
"Fine," she said gaily "then maybe they'll donate more to Unicef."

My brother arrived, took one look at the rickety chairs on our uneven lawn, and headed straight for the bar. Mom had hired
some local high school boys to be bartenders, and they were pouring whiskey as if it were Coke.
"You've got to stay sober," I said to him. "You've got to make sure that nobody in Shelly's family eats the soup. And they should probably watch out for the chicken too."
Bob had another drink.
My memories of the party are mercifully blurred, but a yellowed clipping from the Norwalk Hour tells part of the story. My mother looks radiantly into the camera beneath a headline reading WILTON
FAMILY HOSTS BENEFIT FOR UNICEF.

A family photograph of me handing a check to a grinning official in front of a sign that says SECURITY COUNCIL in both French and English tells another part of the tale.
But my brother owns the end of the stor Thirty-five years later his children can still make him turn green by asking, "Remember the time Nana Mimi poisoned everyone?"
"Ooh," he moans, "don't remind me. It was awful. First she extorted money from them. Then she gave out those antibomb favors; it was the early sixties, for Christ sake, and these were conservative businessmen and housewives. But the worse thing was the phone calls. They kept coming all night long. Nobody felt good. Twenty-six of them actually ended up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. What a way to meet the family!"
I missed all that, but I do remember the phone ringing while we were still cleaning up. Mom was still exulting in the photographer's flashbulbs, and saying for what seemed like the forty-seventh time, "Look how much money we raised!" She picked up the receiver.
"Yes?" said Mom brightly. I think she expected it to be another reporter. Then her voice drooped with disappointment.
"Who doesn't feel well?"

There was a long silence. Mom ran her hand through her chic, short coiffure. "Really?" she said, sounding shocked. "All of
them?" She slumped a little as her bright red fingernails went from her hair to her mouth. Then her back straightened and her head shot up.