Excerpt from Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

gotten two great big, pretty, rabbity new front teeth and did not look entirely convincing herself, the way the house always appeared to be quivering in a twilight of its own and how you had to climb through shadows just to get through the door. "Do they have human sacrifices there?" she asked me, wide-eyed.

"Of course not!" I told her, looking frantically around for a receptacle, as I sometimes throw up when something unexpectedly upsets me. "My aunts would never do anything like that—they're so nice!"

But I always tingle with anticipation at the thought of the house, of parting the veiling shadows to explore its mysterious interior, and also because Aunt Charna might give me a present when I next visit.

"Fortunately," my mother continues, "beauty is not the only thing in life. Your Aunt Bernice and your Aunt Adela are honest and hardworking. And we have to be grateful, because they've taken trouble over you. Your Aunt Charna has some style, at least. That one wouldn't be half so homely if only she'd do something about the nose!" She looks sharply at me and then sighs.

* * *

Sometimes my mother takes me to the club where she works, and even though it's exhaustingly dull to play in the cloakroom all day, I can bring my paper and colored pencils, and there is a lurid appeal in the ambiguous suggestions of adult life: the soft, luxurious coats and scarves, the interesting muddy marks of huge shoes on the thick carpet when it's been raining, the great big men who linger and talk with my mother and who smell—and even look—like cigars, and the pretty little basket that the men put change and sometimes dollar bills into.

When we finally get home, my mother and I shake ourselves out and imitate the men we've seen that day, strutting and braying, until I get the hiccups from laughing, and then my mother makes me hot milk with honey in it so I can fall asleep.

* * *

My mother heaps scorn on the men who come to the club, but she heaps pity upon her sisters-in-law as if it could put out a raging fire before it consumes her heart, though it seems to add fuel instead. She argues their case over and over, taking first the prosecution, then the defense. I understand this sort of weighing and measuring, the adjustments and bartering, very well. When I go to church with Mary Margaret, I pry my mind open so that God's dragon breath will smelt the impurities from my thoughts and I will be in an advantageous position to ask that my mother be relieved of pain and live until I'm so old that I don't care about a thing, even her death.

* * *

Her head is tilted back to keep the cucumber slices from slipping off her eyes. "More water, please," she says, flapping her hand toward the electric kettle on the dresser. She huffs with pleasure as I add hot water to the basin, and I feel in my own feet the pain loosening its grip.

My aunts have undeniably beautiful legs—long, slender, and shapely. Showgirl legs, my mother says—incongruous, considering. She lifts the cucumber slices from her eyes and hoists herself up a bit to take stock of mine. I note with anxiety that the puffiness is not yet much reduced. "Good heavens—why are you wearing that thing?" she says. "Isn't that the same dress you were wearing yesterday? It makes you look like an orphan!"

I hang my head. The dress is my favorite, a hand-medown from Mary Margaret, who is big for her age as well as two years older but who spends time with me because, as she says, she lives next door. Or because, as my mother says, she's limited. I have been wearing the dress all week. Its length and amplitude, in my opinion, cloak me in a penitential holiness, as though I were being led to the stake.

"I seem to remember that you were wearing it yesterday. Do I have to tell you again that's not nice? Go change. And be sure your underwear is clean, too, in case you're run over."

Excerpted from "Cross Off and Move On" (pages 73-83), one of the stories in Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg. Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Eisenberg. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.