Food provides shelter. While it isn’t the great equalizer, it does equalize. Everyone chews. Manners, on the whole, can be mimicked to satisfy even the most critical doyenne.
Or so I thought.
It always seems to be like this. You assume—let’s forget about what that spells—that people will demonstrate a modicum of decorum, a certain level of human politeness required when dealing with death and the dying.
Instead, what you should wait for is the other shoe to drop.
The three of us, Ann, Lance and myself, went to an established (read: old and dilapidated) eatery on Gloucester’s Main Street. It was a tavern, really, with a few booths encircling a very old and rather sticky bar. No view, just a few tattered prints adorning otherwise faux-paneled walls.
We three slid, well, sort of since the naugahyde was a tad sticky, too, across the curved bench. I sat in the middle while Ann and Lance were directly opposite each other in a not-accidental stance of antagonism. That is actually one of the first lessons one learns as a graduate student in Psychology: that in group therapy, those whom you sit next to feel most comfortable with you and those who sit opposite? They feel threatened. Pretty simple, really. Try it next time at Thanksgiving dinner and you’ll discover how accurate this small insight is.
So while they were poised for fight, I was trapped and thus prevented from flight. We examined the menu and I immediately decided upon a burger. My reasoning is that with a disc of hamburger meat encased in a pair of buns, it’s hard to go too wrong.
Did you hear that other shoe drop?
Yes, I was wrong. Really wrong.
Because it turns out that you can get a hamburger really wrong. You can dry it out, use extremely cheap, possibly even a combination of mystery, meats on top of hamburger buns that should have been consigned to the “bird food” pile weeks before. I am not a big fan of ketchup on a hamburger. I like a nice, brown, English-style chutney with some blue cheese and arugula on my burger, but I’ll settle for mayonnaise and grilled onions. Or just mayonnaise and cheese. This facsimile of a hamburger, however, was not accompanied by such amenities, so I settled for ketchup, mayonnaise, and American cheese.
Nothing, however, could help this sandwich. Absolutely nothing. The French fries were also a dismal imitation: crinkle cuts—I really dislike those—that had been clearly refried more than once. Oh, In-N-Out Burger, where art thou? For at that moment, I felt positively desperate and even medieval, in my desire for a bit of red meat.
Ann, however, was eyeing the rice pudding. After, that is, doing her imitation of “Sally Albright.”
“I’d like water, but don’t put ice in it.” Don’t even think they had bottled water because they didn’t. “And then could you bring me another glass with water, and a third with ice. And some lemon.”
An annoyed look appeared on the older waitress’s face, “Okay, so let me get this straight. You want two glasses of water, one glass of ice, and then some slices of lemon?”
The question hung in the air: Why can’t you just have a single glass of ice water with a slice of lemon?
And it was asked as soon as the waitress left.
“So, why so many glasses?”
Ann giggled. At 57, she was still convinced that giggling and flicking her hair would compensate for the sagging breasts and the broken front tooth which incidentally gave her the appearance of being buck-toothed. Her mother had never bothered to have her children’s teeth straightened.
“Well, I don’t want to contaminate the water with the ice, and the other glass of water is to rinse off the lemon. You know that they don’t rinse off the outside of lemons before they put them in drinks, don’t you?”
“And the ice?”
“Well, I can rinse that off, too.”
“Won’t that be contaminated too?”
“Not if I rinse it off.”
“So, why all the bother?”
“Welll,” she giggled again, “I think there’s something in the water that makes the people crazy. Have you noticed Mom and Marshall and Doreenie?”
If that is not the calling the kettle black, I really don’t know what is. That, and crazy much?
Because there was not much left to say on the subject—who am I kidding? There was nothing left to say short of, “You, my dear, are certifiable,” Lance and I decided to move onto other things.
Like dessert.
“So that was about the most unsatisfying lunch I have had in quite some time. How about dessert?”
“Ooo! Look! They have rice pudding!”
“Rice pudding,” I said. “Hmm.” Of course, my idea of a good dessert, one that I can make by the way, often involves multiple moving parts and lots of rich ingredients. A butter-and-cream-rich caramel sauce and a few judiciously sprinkled raisins in an apple pie, for example. Or a sugar cage basket holding the accompanying blueberries for a zabaglione parfait set on a sugar plate. That sort of thing. Rice pudding? What I could think of was along the lines of Bread pudding: jazz it up with some caramel sauce and perhaps a ribbon of streusel in the middle, a little more streusel on the top and Voila! A dessert fit for a queen.
“No! That’s not right! You can’t do that!”
“Huh?” In my defense, I do believe that this is a completely appropriate response to the rude rejoinder Ann offered me.
“You have to taste it first.”
“Really?” I attempted, futilely, to keep doubt out of my voice.
“Yes! Of course!”
The disproportionate anger made me, annoyingly, become even more conciliatory.
“Okay, if you say so.”
Alright, perhaps I was a tad condescending, too, but can you blame me?
Appropriately, the rice pudding was served, to prove my point.
The dish served resembled the remains of a toddler's glue project.
I waited for a minute as she tasted a spoonful.
“So,” I asked, “how is it?
For an answer, she offered some to my husband. “Here, try some,” she urged with a smile that looked rather tentative and tight.
Lance reached gingerly over to the small bowl with his spoon. “Eww. Yuck. Tastes like over-cooked rice and sugar.”
Ann refused to look at me. “It’s alright. This is the way it should be.”
“Well, if that’s the way it should be, I think I’ll try Lane’s any day.”
I forebore any further observations. Unlike Ann, I know how to check my own churlish impulses.
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