Lake Effect – Cynthia Daprix Sweeney

They saw one person vomit and that was it, they were all sick. But it quickly became clear they were all suffering from something. Donna opened the trash and saw the wrappings of sandwiches from Finnegan’s. She called the store to report what was happening and helped all the girls into her van and headed for the Emergency Room. A few blocks over, Janet Anthony who owned a dress shop next to the Finnegan’s on Clover Street and picked up lunch at the store every day for her and her husband who was a tailor woke up at three in the morning with a queasy feeling that quickly progressed to full-blown diarrhea and vomiting.

Her husband followed an hour later, and they spent the night vying for the only toilet in their apartment. By Thursday afternoon Robby was feeling a little better. He went downstairs but his grandmother wasn’t in the kitchen. He found her in her bed, moaning and delirious. She looked awful and couldn’t seem to string more than a few words together. He called an ambulance. Early Friday morning, Helen got a call from one of the doctors in the ER at Rochester General.

He suspected something more than a stomach virus. Twelve patients who needed anti-emetics and IVs all reported having bought prepared food at Finnegan’s. “I’m sorry to hound you when you’re not feeling well,” Helen said to Eddie when she got him to the phone. “But I’m hearing a lot of people are sick and—” “It’s the beef,” Eddie said, his voice weak. “The beef?” “I don’t want to say the name or I’ll heave. The sandwiches. Robert’s sandwiches.” “Shit.

Okay. Any idea what I should do?” “Check refrigerator number three,” he said, dropping the phone and heading, Helen assumed, back to the bathroom. Helen made sure the sandwiches were pulled from all the shelves in town and instructed the two unaffected employees in the deli department, which she temporarily closed, to trash all the inventory from refrigerator number three.

Bess Pfeiffer didn’t mean to start anything when she walked into Honey Finnegan’s house with seven copies of The Joy of Sex. She thought it would be fun. Their group had been meeting for years and even though it started as something that kind of sort of resembled the consciousness raising groups they’d been reading about, it had, predictably, become a watered-down suburban version of consciousness raising.

The wives and mothers of Cambridge Road weren’t talking politics or sex or activism or civil rights or even a light, sugar-coated feminism, but mostly trying to help each other as their children climbed the slippery shoals of adolescence to the sebum-soaked years of puberty. They discussed teachers and curfews and their concerns about cigarettes and liquor and peer pressure.

That their kids—some of them only yards away from where they met—were already smoking pot and bringing Welch’s grape jelly jars refilled with Smirnoff’s to the massive treehouse in the Tannenbaum’s backyard would not have occurred to any of the mothers in the room. Except Bess, a high-school nurse and trusted confidant of some of the older teens, especially the girls, who couldn’t talk to their parents about sex or, God forbid in this neighborhood of Catholics, birth control.

The women chatted about husbands and cooking and which families were not obeying the local leash laws, and should their bowling league move from Wednesdays to Tuesdays and why were Father John’s sermons so excruciatingly boring and did they still need to abstain from meat on Fridays?

So when Bess saw the book on display while browsing at Sibley’s she thought, Why not? Why not have a little fun, stir things up. Her status on the block was already dicey as the first divorcee, the first victim of a burgeoning national trend if the media was to be believed, when her husband walked out because he fell in love with his office manager, who was the spitting image of twenty-three-year-old Bess. She brought the stack of seven books to the check-out and enjoyed the look on the face of the young girl behind the counter when she asked if they could be gift-wrapped.

“I guess?” the girl had said. “I’ll have to check.” She returned quickly and said she could only wrap three books for free. “Pity,” Bess said. “Well then I’ll take them unwrapped.”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: a2abf822921e6e38
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,136,963 bytes (1.084 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 443
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 428.07 minutes
• Total Words: 85,614
• Total Characters: 483,326
• Average Words per Page: 193.26
• Average Characters per Page: 1091.03

Most Frequent Words

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