Dinner on Larchmont

I looked for you across the street where the shade is.

I said we could walk up and down the street and look at all the places, but this is where everybody wanted to eat.

Well, the other side has the shade.

You're under the umbrella anyway. You were born and raised here. I can't believe you have so much trouble with the sun. I love it. I love summer.

tyle="font-style:italic;">They had pushed two tables together under umbrellas, taking up the sidewalk and making it hard to look at the beautiful and strange people passing by on the street. The young, enthusiastic Mexican American waiter with a blue stripe in his hair and a long apron over his dress shirt and tie asked, Everything all right? Do you need a few minutes?

No, we're ready.

Mollie ordered five cheese ravioli with cheese sauce. M thought about the horrendous fat content of all that cheese. No vegetables. Mollie had already had a mastectomy and skin cancer. She was sitting there in a shirt and tie. The shirt was dark and heavy and covered her arms.

I'm going to the dermatologist Monday to have more skin cancers burned off.

Why are you sitting in the sun. Do you have on sun block?

No.

My god, trade places with me. Are you nuts?

When the waiter came back with large glasses of ice water and lemon, Mollie said

, I love your hair.

Mollie had kept her hair very short,really short, since it had grown back after the chemo. > short.

The waiter said,

thank you.

So how was Utah?

Mollie said<

/span>, You know we're DAR.

What's DAR?

Mother said that to me once. I looked at her. M raised her eyebrows.

Uncle Fred has documentation!

What's DAR?

Daughters of the American Revolution. You know, like the huge rancho your Dad's family lost to his brother during the Revolution? I know. Fred's Mormon. He's traced our family back to medieval France. You know Manuel here is pure French with a little Catalan mixed in. From Maximilian ,poor guy Everybody who is not Irish in the world is French. Lucky for our children, they're both. By the way, did you know the Spanish are Celts? Never mind that the Celts died out long before Whoever the Conqueror. Manuel's and my children are nearly pure Celt. Irish and Spanish. Both sides from France. What more could they want? They are natural kings. Our family is very old. They know in Utah. They have documentation. You know every single family in the world is exactly the same age.

>Jo said<

/span>, and your point would be?

Uncle Fred has documentation. Not what they have on the internet. They have a secret site that only Mormons can use. He showed me. We have three ancestors that came over on the Mayflower.

If every family that came over on the Mayflower really did...

Those families are all interrelated, you know.

If every family that came over on the Mayflower really did, it would have had to be the Queen Elizabeth. You know how small those boats were? Anyway the people who came on those little boats were not the cream of society. I want to be from the family that financed the trip. Also, where are the mansions in Connecticut where our fellow DAR live that we intermarried with? I need to get to know them. Did Uncle Fred's documentation happen to document that schizophrenia has run in the family since medieval France?

The Celts have not died out!

Yes, George, they have, their culture, too. Oh, and they were in most of Europe, not just Ireland. Also, the reason hardly anybody but the British bothered to conquer the island which is right there across the North Sea is because it wasn't worth the trouble. Even Joyce called it the sow who eats her own farrow. But we sure can the fuck talk. English isn't even their own language and look at the writers!