Food hounds argue about meatballs

Last night at around 10, Mary accused me of having had more of the organic turkey meatballs than she had, which is absurd. At the early round of dinner with kids, we were each apportioned three. Mary had, indeed, put one off to the side and not eaten it together with her pasta, but afterwards, when she must have plucked it from the pan with the zucchini and ensnarfed in a certain number of rather pleasant bites. So when each of us had a pre-bedtime snack of a touch more pasta with meatball, she basically maintained that I served the meatballs cut up to disguise having taken more, momentarily forgetting about her earlier one. But I would never cheat her of her food like that.

Once, a few years ago, I ran out to Ace on Saturday morning to pick up some sort of hardward, I was listening to NPR and I heard a young woman tell about her family -- none of them slim -- and how they would eye each other suspiciously and territorially at the dinner table as each angled for the choicest morsels. She signed off Curtis Sittenfeld, and I'm thinking "Sittenfeld, Sittenfeld... I know that name." I get back the house and Mary's telling me about the thing she had just heard on NPR by the sister of her student Jo Sittenfeld. And we were both looking at each other like, "that's our house... and get your eyes off my sandwich."

And now Curtis is the author of the hot best-seller Prep, much to the consternation of certain Princeton-area novellists. And we'll never have her over for dinner, though we've got a Jo's portrait of her on our wall.