I don't think my father ever saw Bella. She was small, so small that her eyes and surprisingly large beaky nose came only just over the top of the kitchen table. Her chin - and a very slack mouth that muttered and dribbled in a kind of singsong language I could sometimes understand - were lost to view, below the rim of the thick, much-scoured, gargantuan table. Her hands, snapping at spinach, rolling a wooden pin in dough, fluttered about the sides of her head as she worked, like dancing ears.

LRB 6 December 1984 | PDF Download