#1
My mother and I agree about relatively every aspect of my childhood: my father was a degenerate deadbeat, I broke my finger playing freeze tag, and my fourth grade farm diorama was an impressive undertaking cheated out of the prize for first place. The one point of contention surrounds an argument I had with Maria Rubio in second grade, during which my mother swears I bit Maria.
I cannot state this clearly enough: I firmly believe I did not bite Maria Rubio.
First of all, I actually liked Maria, and I didn’t really like anyone. She was one of the three friends I actually had. Why would I bite one of my friends?
Second of all, Maria was pretty puny. I could have taken her with a good punch, or at least a dignified face slap.
Third of all, although I cannot remember the argument today, I remember that immediately afterwards I claimed that she bit herself to make it look like I bit her. No, I did not claim this, I stated it with conviction. Because that’s exactly what must have happened.
More importantly, wouldn’t I remember biting somebody?
I would, and I can tell you this with absolute certainty because I did bite Veronica Viscovitch, and I remember it. She deserved it, and no one will argue otherwise. Veronica was one of those popular girls, around to make the lives of nerdy girls living hell. As the Queen Bee, she took insult to everything. At lunch time I made the serious blunder of remarking that I hate cream cheese when she was in fact eating a bagel with cream cheese, and she verbally attacked me. Things escalated, and she threw the first punch, but since she was standing and I was sitting down, she had clear advantage. She also hung around with a lot of kids from public school and had experience fighting. In any event, I bit her, and my braces left an imprint on her forearm. It was one of the proudest moments of my grammar school career.
In any event, I do not remember biting Maria Rubio, and, therefore, did not, could not, absolutely did not bite her, despite what my mother thinks.

#2

The other day I was on an Uptown F train sitting across from a young, attractive couple. The woman had a baby in her lap, and the man was reading a newspaper. I remember being impressed because I can never read The Times in public without swatting someone in the face as I awkwardly attempt to fold it. In any event, my boyfriend was with me, and I remember looking at this couple and wondering if we would ever be like them, wear such smart looking clothes and have a little baby and fold the newspaper the right way. Just as the thought crossed my mind, the woman began to speak to her husband. She said, “I really hope your mother doesn’t talk to him like a baby when we get there.”

Without looking up from the paper, the man grunted. “He is a baby.”
The woman said that her husband knew what she meant and that the baby was just beginning to talk so gibberish wasn’t helping. Her husband remarked that she was the one speaking as if the baby wasn’t even there. At this point, I regretted sitting across from them instead of the sleeping homeless man at the other end of the car, but I knew it was too late to get up because they would know why we moved.

The argument progressed, and the entire time, the husband never looked up at his wife. I grasped my boyfriend’s hand and held tightly, praying we would never become them.

The argument really escalated when the woman demanded her husband look at her. He did not. She kept saying, “Tom?” and ended up swatting the paper out of his hand. She said he never fucking listened to her. I was really just trying to drown out their voices by concentrating on the hum of the lights and the jerking noises the train was making, but it was impossible so I decided to watch the baby. He was probably about a year and a half, and he was plump with what seemed like endless rolls on his chubby legs. I watched him reach up toward his mother’s ear, grab her earring, and put it in his mouth. I waited a second to see if his mother would notice, but she didn’t. She just kept yelling at her husband, and he kept ignoring her. She was saying he needed to get psychoanalyzed. I turned to my boyfriend and asked him if we should say something. He said he thought so. I could
tell neither of us wanted to be the one.

I said, “Excuse me? Your baby is eating your earring!”

Thankfully, he had not swallowed it, and ours was the next stop so we rushed off the train as soon as we could. As we walked, I asked my boyfriend if he liked my mother. “I know a trap when I see one,” he answered.