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Translated by Jay Rubin |
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I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife
about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a
question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices
can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted
the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all.
Things happen. Or not.
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If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told
my wife about the bakery attack. I hadn't been planning to
bring it up--I had forgotten all about it--but it wasn't one
of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.
What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger.
It hit just before two o'clock in the morning. We had eaten
a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and
gone to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the
same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the
force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous,
overpowering hunger pangs.
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Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be
technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French
dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick
of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only
two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish
a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules
of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.
I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing
secretarial work at a design school. I was either twenty-eight
or twenty-nine--why can't I remember the exact year we married?--and
she was two years and eight months younger. Groceries were
the last things on our minds.
We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt
just to lie there. On the other hand, we were also too hungry
to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into
the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. What
could have caused such violent hunger pangs?
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We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but
no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never
changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer.
It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter,
but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill
our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other
things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an
appetite.
"Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed
in deodorizer?"
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I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did.
"Let's get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant,"
I said. "There must be one on the highway."
She rejected that suggestion. "We can't. You're not
supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned
in that way.
I breathed once and said, "I guess not."
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Continue reading at |
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http://ctina.com/bakeryattack.html |
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