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LOVE
ON A PLATE
By PHOEBE KATE FOSTER Everyone was amazingly nice about the incident, really. It was the heat wave that made her do it, the victims all said. The heat can make you funny in the head. Even the arresting officer opined that folks were under all kinds of stress nowadays, and it was a wonder more people didn’t snap more often. Of course, the women in the Faulkner family knew what was to blame. “It’s the change,” they murmured among themselves, though Nancy Claire was only 45 and still as regular every month as clockwork. Their whispering made the menfolk nervous, because they always got nervous when women pizz-whizzed with each other. It reminded them that the docile and dutiful females in their lives were feral at heart, only minimally tamed, with a hunger for the wild and a nose for the hunt. Push them too far, and the claws will come out. Nancy Claire Faulkner Bynum’s claws came out one summer afternoon in the Pak-a-Sak. *** It started with the annual family reunion. “We’re going to put the big pot in the little pot and get all us Faulkners together,” Nancy Claire’s grandmother, who was known as Miss Maybelle, announced every summer. “Lordy, it’s been a month of Sundays since I last seen all my kin in one place at the same time.” The monumental job of hosting the party fell to one of the women in the family, chosen at Miss Maybelle’s discretion. This time, she selected Nancy Claire, whose last summons to this familial duty had been in 1988. Her mama had actually ended up doing most of the work, however, because Nancy Claire was seven months pregnant at the time and had ankles swollen up as big as water balloons. Though most of the Faulkners lived practically within hollering distance and ran into each other every time they turned around, Nancy Claire appreciated the importance of regular reunions. Geographical proximity did not necessarily insure closeness, and she took her responsibility to foster family solidarity very seriously. She decided that as a special treat, she’d fix all the authentic old family recipes, which no one else seemed inclined to do when it was their turn to organize the party. Her cousins and sisters always took the easy way out—hot dogs and burgers and chips and buckets of takeout fried chicken and the inevitable nasty old sheet cake from the Wal-Mart bakery. Last year, Aunt Louzie didn’t make a darn thing from scratch. She bought a pre-cooked spiral honey ham instead of a country one and served it with side dishes from the Food Lion deli without so much as batting an eye. Nancy Claire would procure a ham from a real old-fashioned smokehouse, not from a meat packing plant in Passaic, New Jersey, and prepare the dishes that had been handed down from generation to generation in the Faulkner family—peanut soup, crab cakes with remoulade blanc sauce, wild rice and mushroom casserole, spoon bread, sherry tomato aspic with shrimp mayonnaise, corn pudding, squash casserole, hot spiced fruit, chicken spaghetti, bourbon sweet potato pie, whiskey cake, three-chocolate cake, fresh berry trifle. As she shopped for the feast—which involved five supermarkets, four farm produce stands, three specialty meat shops, two package stores, one fishmonger and countless hours—Nancy Claire waxed philosophical on the subject of food. Advertising slogans floated through her head, imbued with new meaning—“Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven” and “Something good always comes from it” (she couldn’t remember the product—it might have been Lemon Pledge, for all she knew) and “Life tastes good” and “All you add is love” (oops, that was for dog kibble, she suddenly recalled, but it was the sentiment that mattered) and “Bring something special to the table—your family.” Food was the glue that bound people together, kept the past alive and gave stability to the present and offered hope for a happy, healthy future. Though trekking from store to store was exhausting—it was the second week of a record-breaking heat wave, and tourists had swarmed to the coast like locusts and taken over everything, causing gridlock on the roads and pandemonium in parking lots—Nancy Claire knew it was worth the effort. After all, she was giving her guests love on a plate with some family history thrown in for good measure. *** Mid-morning on the day of the reunion, a flock of female kin arrived at Nancy Claire’s house, ostensibly to pitch in with the cooking but in reality hoping for a few pitchers of mimosas while they lounged comfortably on the sidelines. “You be sure to tell us if we can do anything to help,” they all said as Nancy Claire mixed the drinks and resumed her slicing and dicing and stirring and mixing. Cousin Ashley lolled at the breakfast bar, watching Nancy Claire add Burpee’s Honey-and-Cream Hybrid to a skillet of roux. “My,” she remarked, “I can’t recall when we last had homemade corn pudding.” “I brought it a couple of years ago to Uncle Jimmie’s pig-picking,” Nancy Claire replied. “Lordy! You made that thing from scratch?” Aunt Evylene cried. “Why, I just figured you’d bought up a bunch of Stouffers corn soufflés when they were on sale at the Piggly Wiggly and baked them in that fancy ooh-la-la French casserole dish of yours so we’d think you’d slaved over a hot stove all day.” Nancy Claire glanced up, shocked. “Good heavens! That’s what you thought? Don’t you know I’m not the sort of person who’d stoop so low as to fool her own family?” “Whose corn pudding recipe is it?” Great-Aunt Lettie inquired. “Myra Lee’s, God rest her sweet soul.” Great-Aunt Lettie frowned so profoundly that her face ceased to be recognizable as human and resembled a blighted tobacco leaf instead. “My sister was a pain in the you-know-what, but she never put white-and-yellow corn in her corn pudding, that’s for sure. She always used Golden Bantam.” “Umm, she didn’t specify that in her recipe…” “I reckon she didn’t figure she had to,” the elderly woman retorted tartly. “Anybody who knows anything knows that them bi-colored hybrids are all sugar and no flavor and don’t have enough starch in ’em to make the pudding creamy and—” “I’m so sorry,” Nancy Claire hastily interjected. She desperately wanted the day to be memorable and everyone to enjoy themselves. “I’ll remember next time, I promise.” “Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now.” Lettie heaved a deep sigh and held out her glass for another mimosa. “What else are you serving?” “Oh, lots of old family favorites. Second cousin Alma’s wild rice casserole and—” Cousin Belinda groaned loudly. “Oh my God! We’ll be constipated for a week! I hope you put chocolate-y Ex-Lax in the icing on that cake you just frosted.” Nancy Claire ignored the remark. “It’s Aunt Annette’s special chocolate cake. She made it for your wedding rehearsal dinner.” “Annette was from up North,” Belinda sniffed, “and she wasn’t really a Faulkner—she just married into the family. Honestly, I never knew what Uncle Jed saw in her.” “Well, she sure wasn’t much of a cook, that much we know,” Nancy Claire’s sister, Becky Sue, added. “We all got food poisoning from the custard filling. Us bridesmaids barfed our heads off right up until we walked down the aisle with Belinda, who nearly urped all over Donny in his rented white tux and poor old Reverend Priddy.” That’s because all of you gals got plastered at the rehearsal dinner, Nancy Claire started to say, but stopped. She suddenly remembered Cousin Belinda hadn’t asked her to be one of her bridesmaids, making some feeble excuse about there being too many girls in the family to have every single one be part of the bridal party. However, Belinda had asked all Nancy Claire’s sisters—Becky Sue and Ginny Lee and Sarah Lynn and Georgia Mae and Eugenie Rose—to be bridesmaids, and Nancy Claire had felt just like the last pea at picking time. “Oh, don’t take on so,” Belinda’s mother, Louzie, had told her. “I swear, you’d complain if Jesus Christ Himself came down and gave you a hundred dollar bill.” As Nancy Claire recalled the episode for the first time in twenty years, she cut her hand instead of the ham with the antique carving knife. “You’re bleeding all over the cutting board!” second cousin Corinne shrieked. “Don’t get blood on the food, honey!” “Folks should never use a dull knife,” Aunt Lydie Jane remonstrated. “You get a much worse cut from a dull blade than a sharp one.” “Oh well, everyone knows Nancy Claire is about as handy as a back pocket on a shirt,” Cousin Charlene remarked loudly, and added, “Bless her sweet heart,” as an afterthought. Sarah Lynn burst out laughing. “Isn’t that ever the truth! Do you recall the time Nancy Claire made shoo-fly pie and confused the salt canister with the sugar canister…” *** By mid-afternoon, Nancy Claire was ready for a drink. No, not just a drink. A bottle of Wild Turkey. No, on second thought, it didn’t even need to be the good stuff. A bottle of five-buck Heaven Hill would do just fine. The women of the family had something to say about everything she made. They argued whether the sherry tomato aspic recipe actually came from Great-Aunt Ida Grace or last month’s Family Circle. And whoever in the world had given her that chicken spaghetti recipe? They’d never seen such a thing on a Faulkner family table in all their born days. Miss Maybelle’s mama’s cook had always used wild, not button, mushrooms in the wild rice casserole. They sure hoped that folks would be able to digest something as heavy as peanut soup on a day hot enough to fry spit. Had Nancy Claire remembered to get franks for the children?—they wouldn’t eat the stuff she was preparing if it was the last thing on earth! And had she included in her menu plan Tootie’s Cornbread made with whole kernel corn and bell pepper? No? What a shame! It simply wouldn’t be a Faulkner family party without it. If it was too much trouble for her to fix, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she asked one of them to bring it… “Well, at least I’m making Etta’s Famous Spoon Bread,” Nancy Claire volunteered as cheerfully as possible. “We haven’t had that since Miss Maybelle’s 70th birthday party. Remember what a lovely occasion that was?” “What do you mean—lovely occasion?” her sister Ginny Lee hooted. “It was the party from hell! Cousin Ray Jay got liquored up and fell into the boxwood hedge and we had to haul him out and he upchucked all over the place. And the next morning Miss Maybelle about near had a heart attack when she went out to feed the dogs and discovered Uncle Dooley under the porch with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.” “And Granddaddy Elton got in a swivet and tore into everyone at the dinner table,” her sister Eugenie Rose reminded her. “I can’t imagine how could you forget that awful night! Granddaddy told you that you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot. Everybody laughed, and you sat there, crying into your crawfish.” Nancy Claire hid her burning face in the refrigerator while she pretended to look for something. At that moment, cousin Charlene’s teenaged daughter arrived. “Why, Bethany Marie’s come to help out,” Charlene said. “Isn’t that sweet?” The girl slouched by without saying a word and plopped herself down in the family room to watch MTV. Nancy Claire’s sister Georgia Mae beamed. “Why, it’s just like old times—all us girls in the kitchen, putting our hands to good use!” Nancy Claire turned around and stared in disbelief at the women with their acrylic nails and shopping network jewelry lolling indolently around her house. Her sisters and cousins hadn’t spent five whole minutes in the kitchen their entire lives. Their husbands and children would have starved to death long ago were it not for Hamburger Helper and fast food establishments. Cousin Charlene fed her family takeout from Wong’s Golden Palace almost every night, and even the matriarchal Miss Maybelle never lifted a finger to cook a thing; she’d always had a black woman in the kitchen doing it for her. “Why, little Bethany Marie practically grew up in a potato pot on my counter, didn’t she?” Charlene was saying. Nancy Claire gazed sadly at the huge, apathetic, unattractive girl slumped on a sofa in the family room. No wonder the poor thing looked so lumpy and confused and unhappy. Was she human or vegetable? Would she be eaten whole at one time or simply picked at over her whole lifetime by the aficionados of dysfunction until there was nothing left of her? At that thought, tears sprang to Nancy Claire’s eyes. If anyone said anything, she was going to blame it on the onions she was peeling, but no one noticed. *** Nancy Claire had to make a last minute run to the Pak-A-Sak for the groceries she’d forgotten. Hot dogs for the kids. Miracle Whip for the sherry tomato aspic—somebody might be allergic to that shrimp mayonnaise, one of her cousins very kindly pointed out to her. And speaking of allergies, what about the peanut soup? “They don’t even give the children PBJs in the school cafeteria anymore, you know,” her sister Sarah Lynn reminded her. They all agreed she should pick up something else while she was out, just to be on the safe side. Cousin Ray Jay stumbled into the kitchen and said they needed more beer. Great-Aunt Lettie looked up and said, “Beer gives me gas. Can I trouble you for a glass of merlot, Nancy Claire darlin’?” Merlot?! Nancy Claire thought as she threw her apron across the room and grabbed her purse. Merlot?! she thought as her husband Farley suggested she buy some chips and dip because nobody was warming up to her crab cakes as an appetizer. Merlot?! she thought as she slammed out of the house. It was hotter than the hinges of hell that afternoon and that made her even madder. Why hadn’t she insisted Farley take that job offer out in the perpetually temperate haven of the Pacific Northwest? Merlot?! she thought as she screeched out of the driveway, nearly mowing down the mailbox and her next door neighbor, Vester Lanning. Goddamn tourists! she thought, as she sat in bumper-to-bumper crawling-like-a-garden-slug traffic for forty minutes on the normally five-minute drive to the Pak-n-Sak. She stared at them in their cars overflowing with children and dogs, having their happy vacation at the seashore in those big pretty rented beach houses with spectacular views, and suddenly realized she hadn’t had a proper vacation in—how long? She couldn’t even recall. “We don’t need to take a vacation, honey,” Farley always told her. “We already live at the beach! Where on earth would we go?” After driving around the parking lot at the Pak-A-Sak for fifteen minutes because a convertible with a New York license plate beat her to the last empty space, Nancy Claire stomped into the store and had to wait ten more minutes for a shopping cart to be available. When she finally got one, she had nowhere to go with it: the aisles were so crowded with tourists that she couldn’t get anywhere near the things she needed. Everybody in the place stank of salt water and dead fish, and nobody knew what the hell they were doing. They all stood, staring up stupidly at the shelves and gazing down with addled expressions into the meat counter and engaging in the most annoying and idiotic conversations. “Do your kids like steak?” “No, let’s have burgers.” “Maaaaa! Not burgers! You make burgers all the time at home!” “Let’s get hot dogs and burgers and steak.” “Jesus Christ! We ain’t a goddamn restaurant.” “How about baked potatoes?” “Naaah, baked potatoes taste like dirt.” “Is one case of beer enough?” “Do we want Coke or Pepsi?” “God! Get something without sugar or caffeine—the kids are hyper already from all those Popsicles they ate at the water park this afternoon.” “Orange juice with pulp or without? With added calcium or with added vitamins A and D? From concentrate or fresh squeezed? Store brand or name brand?” “Yuck! Orange juice makes me puke!” “Kids! You put that box of snack cakes back! You don’t need that crap.” “Why are we getting a steak? We’re at the seashore. We ought to buy seafood.” “I don’t see anything here that looks good. Let’s eat out instead.” And that’s when it happened. Nancy Claire Faulkner Bynum—daughter of a minister, wife of a banker and member of the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Women’s Auxiliary—snapped. “Haven’t you people ever been in a goddamn grocery store before?” she shouted at the shoppers in Aisle 5 who were frozen, seemingly for an eternity, in a tableau of indecision and confusion. “It’s just stuffing mix, you moron!” she screamed at a fat woman in pink shorts with thighs as white and curdy as cottage cheese who was bending over and studying the Stove Top boxes like they contained the secret of life. “You better get your plug-ugly asses out of my way or I’m going to render you a grease spot on the floor of this damn store!” she shrieked at three disagreeable children in swimsuits who were blocking the cereal aisle and eyeballing her defiantly, daring her to make them move. “Maaaaaw! That lady cussed at us!” they whined at their mother who had been staring blankly at breakfast food for the last five minutes. “Don’t they have friggin’ corn flakes where you come from?” Nancy Claire roared at her. “And you better check the heads of those hellions of yours for the number 666,” she added, seizing an obnoxious youngster and poking around in his hair. “They look like the devil’s spawn to me. If I were you, I’d drive wooden stakes through their hearts while they slept—you’ll find hammers on Aisle 12, if you forgot to pack one.” Then Nancy Claire rammed her shopping cart into two women debating the merits of Rice-a-Roni or Noodle-a-Roni, a loutish teen badgering his mother to buy him a body board, a man in Bermuda shorts with no shirt (he wasn’t blocking an aisle but Nancy Claire nailed him anyway because his hairy back was disgusting to behold), a worthless-looking youth carrying a case of beer, a sunburned family getting hot wings and macaroni salad at the deli counter and an old lady buying a bottle of wine (“She kept screaming, ‘Merlot! Merlot! Damn you, Aunt Lettie!’ as she came after me with her shopping cart,” Mrs. Sadowsky from Ohio told the police later.) Then Nancy Claire knocked down an enormous display of watermelons, a pyramid of canned pork ‘n’ beans and a rack of suntan lotion. She would have done more damage, but the store manager wrestled the shopping cart away from her after she slammed it into his backside and then the police finally showed up to arrest the alleged assailant. Because of the traffic, it had taken them over twenty minutes to drive the five blocks from the station to the supermarket after a frightened stock boy had phoned them. *** Though everybody was very nice about the whole thing—no one pressed charges, everyone agreed that no real harm had been done and expressed pity for the poor woman who’d lost her mind because of the heat—Nancy Claire spent the night in jail. She had to beg Sergeant Thisbe to keep her there. “Don’t make me go home tonight!” she wailed, and treated him to a blow-by-blow description of her horrible day getting ready for the Faulkner family annual reunion. “If you release me now, I’ll just go right on over to the Piggly Wiggly and do the same thing there. And then I’ll drive to Food Lion and do even worse. And when I get home, God knows what I’ll do…” she warned, with a wild glitter in her eye. Sergeant Thisbe had a wife and he knew exactly how dangerous a look that was. “And there’s no point remanding me to the custody of my family. By now, they’re so drunk they can’t even be responsible for their own awful damn fool selves,” Nancy Claire added. The sergeant sighed sympathetically; he had to endure both the dreaded Thisbe family reunion as well as his wife’s horrific Munson family get-together every year, and that’s what convinced him to detain Mrs. Bynum overnight. That evening, Nancy Claire sat blissfully by herself in a cool, quiet cell so no loved one could get at her, consuming the corn dogs and chili cheese fries that the sergeant had brought in for her. It was a fast food nightmare of trans-fats and preservatives, too much salt and too many carbohydrates, prepared by complete strangers who probably hadn’t washed their hands recently, but it sure beat love on a plate and family history any day. |
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