We suddenly felt utterly helpless and awkward and didn’t know what to do. My mother stood up; we’re sitting here in the dark, she said, switching the light on. I can’t see those revolting things any more, she said, instead of her usual, I don’t care for them much; I can’t see those revolting things any more, and they did look disgusting, the mussels, they gleam when they’re freshly cooked, but now they’d dried up and were all wrinkly. They also seemed darker; yellow with green edging and the shells wide open offered an unpleasant sight. I’m feeling bilious, my mother said, and this made complete sense to me even though I didn’t know exactly what bilious meant; my mother knew, she was forever suffering from bilious complaints. And we glared at the mussels until my mother fetched from the fridge the wine meant for that evening’s celebration. It was a
Spätlese, a special one; we always drank Spätlese on special occasions, and on really special occasions we drank sweet ice wine. The more a wine tastes of liqueur the better quality it is, and this Spätlese was bound to be very expensive and high quality, in fact we ought not to have been drinking it before my father arrived home, but we couldn’t spend the whole evening staring at the vile mussels, with my mother feeling bilious. She opened the wine and we felt terribly insubordinate. We sat around the dead mussels as if part of some conspiracy and drank father’s second-best wine without him, gradually realizing that the mood had been spoiled for all of us; my brother said, this sticky stuff, is this what he considers to be high quality. We couldn’t help laughing at my brother’s grim expression, and he and I drank as quickly as our mother, only she gets tipsy more quickly; our helplessness and anxiety faded away, and at that point we were fairly sure that he’d had a car accident because he still hadn’t come home. As we drank the