"You don't take food seriously?"
"I take food correctly," she said. "Which is different from taking it seriously. Taking it seriously involves opinions about butter culture and the specific properties of the Sixty-Third Street patisserie's lamination technique. I do not have those opinions."
"Marisol has those opinions."
"Marisol," Eleanor said, with the particular quality she brought to my mother's name — something that was warmth and respect and a long acquaintance with the specific quality of a person she had known about for twenty-two years and had now met, "has opinions about everything. And the opinions are correct. Which makes her both very easy to talk to and occasionally difficult to argue with."
"Accurately described," I said.
She looked at me with the expression she sometim
