[...] but Fergusson's grandmother had no interest in Laurel and Hardy, her passion was for cleanliness and domestic order, and once she had given her grandson his post-school snack, generally two chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk, but sometimes a plum or an range or a stack of saltines that Fergusson would coat with dabs of grape jelly, he would go off to the living room to turn on his program and she would busy herself with scrubbing down kitchen counters or scouring off crud from the stove burners or cleaning the sinks and toilets in the two bathrooms, a dedicated destroyer of filth and germs who never grumbled about her daughter's shortcomings as a housekeeper but nevertheless sighed often as she went about these tasks, no doubt changrined that her own flesh and blood did not adhere to her rigurous standards of sanitary living. (252) Ferguson was looking down at the floor by then, pretending to examine a loose thread in the carpet as a way to avoid his mother's eyes...