I would set him on the peacock plate in the center of the dining room table, slather him in lard, and wait for his complaints. He never complained; he just lay in his fat. I couldn’t resist the temptation to arrange his appendages like whorled dinner rolls. Eventually, my husband came home to find our son glistening on the plate. When he peered over him, the baby pissed a clear loop into the air, wetting my husband’s nose. I laughed out loud, my husband glaring back at me. “Joke’s over,” he said. He was quitting his job. He ordered me to find work.

“Fine,” I said. “But don’t act so bothered. We drink blood every Sunday.”

I’ve always been struck by people’s precious behavior toward their porcelain. The way it signifies a museum-like state of things. Not in my house. My father had had his share of museums. He’d slept under a wall of wool uniforms hung from wire hooks, eaten breakfast with sooty kerosene lamps. My sister and I were forbidden from stepping inside a museum. He swore that if we approached the Historical Society, he’d lock us in.

I thought of several possibilities for defiling the porcelain as I suddenly saw the rest of my life arranged linearly before me. I sketched a time-line of happenings: birth, baptisms, confirmations, wedding anniversaries, death. I did not want such occurrences to trumpet any eating on porcelain.

I was hired by a nursing home as a dietary aide. My shift began at 6AM. Each morning before dawn, I wiggled through our wicker-laden bedroom, zippering my white outfit, rolling the implements of my work face—tools by the name of Kittenliver, Plum Dick, Braun Lawn—into a multi-compartmented case sewn into a pant leg of a rat-bitten WWI uniform. (I’d made this in high school to transport drugs. The antique military uniform guaranteed my father, a shameless snoop, would not go near it.) I did not wear make-up, not even to my own wedding, but engulfed by a white hairnet, my face appeared barren and religious.