Word: ma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ma and Pa Dufresne came to Indo-China as schoolteachers. When Pa died, Ma was left with two small children to support, and she took a job playing piano in a café. For ten long years she pounded the keys and squeezed the centimes until she had enough money to get a farm-and then bought a plot of lowland that the sea invaded every summer, carrying off the harvest before it could be gathered. Indomitable, Ma built a wall of mangrove logs to keep the sea away, but a storm came and broke the wall in a single...
...watch her take a shower, and a diamond if she would spend a weekend with him in the city. "I guarantee I won't touch you," he assured her, gasping with excitement. Suzanne contemptuously accepted his diamond but declined payment, and Joseph stirred worms into his coffee. But Ma led the suitor on, in hopes he would lend her money. When he didn't, Joseph ran him off the place with a shotgun, and then ran off himself-to the city...
...vents his heroic belches, he sounds like Charles Laughton playing Henry VIII. Pop is little seen in the strawberry fields, for he roams the countryside on a spivishly freewheeling enterprise called "the scrap iron lark," which nets him a 600% profit, a margin Pop regards as "perfick." Spacious, sportive Ma Larkin furnishes a groaning bed and board, fills her voluminous pink nylon nighties like two nudes by Rubens. Wed only in the sight of the common law. Ma and Pop have six children, only one of whom causes them a smidgen of concern...
This is where the tax collector comes in. Cedric is a toothbrush-mustached city mouse with "office-pale hands," as limp as "tired celery." But in Ma and Pop's peasant-shrewd eyes, he is a potential husband, if only they can take his mind off his tax forms and put it on Mariette's still flawless figure. Ma starts fattening up Cedric with goodies from the "frige." Pop rechristens the tax man "Charlie," and plies him with a Rolls-Royce ("half vermouth, quarter whisky, quarter gin, dash of orange bitters") followed by a Chauffeur ("one-third vermouth...
...National Elf Lark." Pop urges the hung-over tax man to put in for sick leave ("the National Elf Lark"), and before long Charlie beds down with Mariette in a field of buttercups. But it is the strawberry-sweet juice and joy of life with Pop and Ma Larkin that truly seduces Charlie. One day it is Pop piloting a real, if secondhand, Rolls-Royce into the yard and grandly announcing, "Ourn." Other times, it is Ma wolfing fish and chips and baying "Turn up the contrast!" toward the ever-playing...