Read Online The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick - Free Book Online Page B

something? I know I’ve been kind of out of it for awhile, and I missed Wimbledon, so there’s something I want to know. Who won the ladies’ finals?”
    The shocked nurse answered him, Chrissie Evert or whoever, Martina, somebody, and then she asked him, “How did you do that?”
    â€œDo what?”
    â€œSit up in bed. Talk.”
    â€œI don’t know. It seemed like it was time.”
    â€œYou know you have a baby? A little girl?”
    â€œI know,” said my brother. “I saw her yesterday.”
    And after that he never went backward. He only got better. He never got worse. But he was never the same again. Ever. Never the same.

Burn
    When my brother and sister and I were children, men and women had two things we don’t have now: cocktails and hairdos. They had Gimlets and Manhattans and Gibsons and Singapore Slings and Vodka Stingers and Blue Mondays and Grasshoppers and Old Fashioneds and Highballs and Sidecars. They had Mint Juleps for Derby Day. They also had muddlers and swizzle sticks. Men were known and even famous for their ability to make one or the other of these cocktails. Women never made them, except maybe during the war, they did, when they were alone. But not as well.
    It was a whole male ritual of equipment and liquor and deft hand gestures and quips. My father and his friends would say things like “Let me freshen that up for you.” They would say things like “grease cutter” and “Just have a nightcap and then you can go.”
    People had bars that stood out in the open, on fancy pieces of furniture. They had silver ice buckets. They had silver julep cups. They had Highball glasses with their monograms on them. They got these things for wedding presents.
    Nowadays, except for the trendy run at a Cosmopolitan or aMojito or something, people drink wine. Or hard liquor on Wall Street. When I was little nobody drank wine; they hardly even drank it at dinner, except for very fancy dinner parties. And it was bad wine. At least it was bad wine in the country. It came in jugs. They had cocktails instead. Nobody even says
cocktails
nowadays.
    After dinner parties, at which the women wore taffeta or silk dinner dresses, at which they wore earrings and necklaces and clever dinner rings, my mother used to have a tray of cordials with tiny glasses she would bring out, crème de menthe and Triple Sec and Drambuie and cognac and Cherry Heering. Sometimes she would make pousse-café, an amazingly complicated thing she learned about in
Gourmet
that involved layering cordials according to their various densities, so you ended up with a vertical rainbow of six or seven liqueurs. It was like being the Marie Curie of after-dinner drinks. I still have all the fancy little cordial glasses.
    The women had hairdos, then. Not haircuts—hairdos. They would wear their hair up or down, in braids, in French twists, in bouffant concoctions, according to the various occasions. They put their hair in rollers in the afternoons, before a party, but they never went to the grocery store with their hair in rollers, just bobby pins sometimes, and their hair sparkled from the hair spray used to hold it all in place.
    It was very different then. People in the country lived the kind of life they imagined being lived in the pages of the
New Yorker
magazine. And they were good at it, and it gave them pleasure to be good at it.
    People had real parties. My mother and father would grab at any excuse for a cocktail party or a dinner party. Anywhere people were gay and bright and didn’t have a care in the world.
    They once gave a going-away party for a couple who were going to Europe for two months in the summer. Napoleon came to be the bartender, making cocktails, macerating mint and sugar in the bottom of silver julep cups, serving up Old Fashioneds and Highballs, and the women wore raw silk summer dresses or sleeveless linen dresses with shoes that matched, and some even