Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden

of fruits from the hothouses, and Donan’s famous croissants, which he was credited with introducing to America, and hot muffins and toasts and brioches and biscuits, and cooked or dry cereals, and different cheeses, and chicken hash, and creamed hash and brown hash, and fish balls, and sausages, and bacon, and ham, and any kind of juice you could want, and strong hot coffee, or French chocolate, or China tea. And that was just breakfast.
    I only interrupted twice, once to gag at the fish balls, and the other to tell my grandmother there was a bee drowning in her wine, but she ignored me and drank it down on the next gulp. I then had to project potential allergic reactions for her, and spent the next ten minutes worrying that her throat might swell to the point of suffocation and she would die.
    “What was Grandma Twombly’s favorite?” my grandmother asked, her voice disappointingly normal. God, what a boring last question to be remembered by, I thought.
    “Well, Mother adored soufflés,” Gran said. “In fact, her very last meal was a chicken soufflé.”
    That started my grandfather off on a long recourse about egg courses, which I knew would lead to fish courses, and then meat courses, and then caviar and turtles and lobster and pheasant, so I shut my eyes and concentrated on what my own last meal might be. Obviously it would be dependent on what my crime was, as well as how I was going to be martyred. The most important factor to consider was what I’d want the contents of my stomach to be in the hereafter. I wouldn’t want to be too gassy for the embalmer, though I knew that was unavoidable, due to the metabolism of my intestinal bacteria. Lobster, maybe? Or would that just sit like a lump in my stomach for months, years even, before the worms broke it down? Perhaps something lighter, like popovers soaked in butter. Or a bacon cheeseburger from the Chevy Chase Club? That’s it , I thought.
    My grandfather, who had now finished a second bottle of wine, was expounding on Terrapin à la Florham to Will, who was vacantly pulling all the hairs out of his left eyebrow, one by one. It felt like we had been eating lunch for three days.
    “—and every night it was in season, terrapin was served at Grandma Twombly’s dinner table. It was superb, brilliantly superb.”
    Will started in on his other eyebrow.

    It was a forgone conclusion that any outing involving my grandfather and me would end in mishap. An hour later I was lurking behind the limousine, hanging on to one of the twin flags that were attached to the fenders, eavesdropping on the grown-ups. I was straining so hard to hear what was being said about so-and-so’s terminal illness and imminent death (both huge trigger terms for me) that I didn’t realize I had the flag-pole practically bent in two, and it had not been exactly flexible to begin with.
    Just when they were getting to the most interesting part— and the doctors had to insert a —and I was almost able to hear what they were saying, I started grasping the flag tighter— but since she insisted on an open casket —tighter— and Campbell’s said they wouldn’t —until SNAP!
    My grandfather made me sit up front with the Nazi, on the other side of the bulletproof glass partition. I tried to make conversation with him for a while, but it didn’t go well:
    “So. Selma tells me you’re redecorating the apartment over the garage.”
    “Ja.”
    “Anyone I know?”
    Between the on-ramp to the Turnpike and the toll booth at the Lincoln Tunnel, I plotted retaliation against my grandfather, my brother, the Nazi, my geography teacher, and the male race in general. When I had mentally sealed their fate with an ingenious plot I’d heard about, where a woman killed her husband by putting nicotine from liquefied cigarettes into his aftershave, which snuffed him in about an hour, I was over it.
    I couldn’t bear not being a part of the conversation. As we entered the gloom of the tunnel, I took