special chicken rolls." She turned to me. "You know how to pick a
chicken clean?"
"I sure do," I said. I hadn't had anything to eat all day.
"Well, show me, then," Ginnie Sue said.
I went for a wing first, pulling apart the spindly double bones and getting
all the meat trapped there. Then I set to work on the leg and thigh bones,
snapping them at the joints and peeling off the tendons and digging out
the marrow. Kathy and Ginnie Sue were also working on the bird, but
soon they stopped to watch me. From the tail, I pulled that nice piece of
meat that everybody misses. I turned the carcass upside down and
scraped off the jellied fat and meat flecks with my fingernails. I stuck
my arm elbow-deep into the bird to excavate any meat clinging to the rib
cage.
"Girl," Ginnie Sue said. "in all my days, I have never seen no one pick a
chicken clean like you."
I held up the spear-shaped cartilage in the breast bone, which most
people don't eat, and bit down with a satisfying crunch.
Ginnie Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and
Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She
spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each
slice into a cylinder and passed them to us. "Birds in a blanket," she said.
They tasted great.
"Mama, Jeannette lived in California," Kathy said.
"That so?" Ginnie Sue said. "Live in California and be a stewardess, that
was my dream." She sighed. "Never got beyond Bluefield."