Mrs. Cone had noticed how Sheba ate as well. The past couple of dinners, she had tried to leave half of her meal on her plate. But with little success, as just as someone—Dr. Cone, usually—made a play for her food, she would come back to it with a few quick stabs. And last night, when we were clearing the table, I found Mrs. Cone in the kitchen, using her hands to shove down the half piece of lasagna that she had left on her plate. I’d never really thought about food, or how much to eat or not to eat, until these meals with the Cones. In my own house, you ate everything you took. If you weren’t going to eat a whole chicken breast, then you sure as heck didn’t put a whole chicken breast on your plate.
In addition to eating, or trying to eat, like Sheba, Mrs. Cone had been dressing like Sheba too. They were about the same height, but Sheba was more of a curvy line while Mrs. Cone wasn’t a line at all. Her hips jutted out, her breasts jutted out, and lately they all had been jutting with greater enthusiasm as she wore tight pants, jumpsuits, and clingy maxi dresses. They were clothes that demanded you look at her, something that was virtually impossible when Sheba was nearby. Sheba sparkled. My eyes trailed her from room to room, as if she were a rocket sailing across a night sky. Mrs. Cone, in her snazzy outfits, was the contrail from that rocket, her breasts, behind, and flaming red hair streaking by in Sheba’s wake.
Sheba and Mrs. Cone came home a few minutes before the chicken was ready. They both oohed and aahed over the way the house smelled and I could see that this made Izzy proud. I prayed the chicken would taste as good as it smelled.
Sheba helped Izzy set the table while Mrs. Cone stood in the kitchen with me as I finished preparing the rice and the string beans I had steaming on the stovetop. She leaned over to see exactly what I was doing when I spooned sauce over the chicken, and when I sliced off a hunk of butter and melted it into the beans.
“How do you know how to do this?” The long locks of Mrs. Cone’s blond wig fell over her shoulder. She pushed them back with the side of her dangling hand, the same way Sheba pushed her long hair out of her face. It was a gesture I had tried to copy many times when I watched Sheba push her hair away during the opening monologue of her variety show. In person, she didn’t do it as often as I’d seen her do it on the show. I wondered if it was a nervous habit.
“I help my mother with dinner every night.” I wanted to ask how she didn’t know how to do this, but I felt that it might be rude.
“I’ve never cooked,” Mrs. Cone said.
“Your mother didn’t teach you?” I spooned the rice into a serving bowl, then melted a pat of butter on top and garnished it with parsley.
“Oh, she tried, but I just wasn’t interested. I was boy crazy, and I loved rock and roll. There wasn’t time to care about things like cooking.” She laughed. “Nothing’s changed!”
I blushed. It was odd to think of Mrs. Cone as boy crazy. She was married! “But you ended up with a doctor, not a rock star.”
“Richard was in a band in college—he was at Johns Hopkins and I was at Goucher. When he started medical school, he quit the band and I quit school to marry him.”
“Were you disappointed that he didn’t stay in the band?”
“Not as much as my parents.” Mrs. Cone pulled a string bean from the pan and bit off half.
“They wanted you to marry a rock star?”
“No, but they didn’t want me to marry Richard. Medical school or not.” She shrugged.
“Why not?” I needed to take out the chicken, but this news seemed important and I didn’t want to turn away.
“Because he’s a Jew!” Mrs. Cone laughed.
I tried to laugh with her, but I didn’t understand why that was funny. I busied myself by putting on the oven mitts. Then I opened the oven and took out the chicken. “So you’re not Jewish?”
“No way. We were Presbyterian. I grew up in Oklahoma.”
“Oh. Wow.” Oklahoma seemed exotic. I’d never met anyone from Oklahoma. And what about a Presbyterian marrying a Jewish person? Would my parents think a half-Jewish family was easier to take than a whole Jewish family? Did Mrs. Cone’s parents, like mine, think Jewish people had a different physiognomy? Dr. and Mrs. Cone seemed more like each other than my parents. If I really thought about it, it was my parents who appeared to be different breeds （my mother the talker, the doer; my father the silent newspaper reader）。 And the Cones seemed happy and in sync. They were different versions of the same model.