I, Claudius (Huffaker, Psy.D.), have a casserole recipe to share with you in this Internet forum, but I understand that it is poor form to simply list the ingredients and preparation and cooking instructions without sating not only the reader’s physical hunger but also his or her appetite for backstory. Those few who prefer just the recipe may skip to the end of this post but I must warn you: you may thus hasten the filling of your belly, but your mind and soul will henceforth have a gaping hole bearing the label: Things I’ll Never Know. Personally I would find that unendurable, for when I read a new recipe I demand at least some cultural notes if not a full genealogy of the author. But to each his own: embrace your ignorance and skip the appetizer if you prefer.
Having issued the warning as to length, I shall now tell my story in full, unapologetically.
The preparation time for this dish is one hour, but actual development of the recipe took several months and required me to exercise every one of my physical and mental faculties and those of my children to the utmost. Fear not: you will not have to duplicate my marathon effort. In the kitchen you may simply perform the single hour of work as described near the end, with guaranteed results. My own much lengthier and less certain effort began not with a vision of corn, nor of foods with the word corn in the name, nor did I originally aspire to cook anything at all; nay, Online Reader: my original goal was simply to obtain my fair share of pizza at the potluck dinners held at my children’s high school.
And what, you may ask, prevented me from doing that?
In a word: Gertrude.
You see, the tradition at the high school potluck dinners was that the children who were the honorees or performers at these events were allowed to visit the buffet first. This practice was tantamount to the adults declaring a hunger strike, for teenagers are not known for their restraint in the presence of bounteous food. Where adults have learned to take a dab of this and a dab of that and to not take two of the same type of thing from different dishes (e.g. don’t take both squash casserole with crispy fried onion strings and squash casserole without crispy fried onion strings and for God’s sake don’t take half a pound of whichever one you choose), teenagers wield the serving spoons with abandon, so practiced are they in not caring a whit whether the grown-ups get a fair shot at the victuals.
Have you ever tried to fill your plate from a potluck buffet after a large high school marching band and the flag team and the dance squad have all had their ways with it? If so, then like me you are quite well acquainted with the dispiriting sight of an acre of practically empty serving dishes and the pathetic image of the progenitors of those uncaring eating machines trying to smile as we pick through the scraps and dollops left behind by the ravening horde of youths.
Some parents gamely make light of the situation, saying things like, “My Billy sure likes his smashed pertaters!” and “Where they gonna put it? Them kids must have a hollow leg!” and “Land sakes! That little girl’s plate is bigger than she is!” and countless other defeatist witticisms. I, on the other hand, evidence my own defeat by saying nothing. That is, now I say nothing, for my pithy observation at my first such buffet—“How exquisitely rude and selfish these children are”—was met not with parental nods of agreement but with shocked stares and trembling lips, for the absolute primacy of their children in all—I repeat, all—matters and in all venues was a religion with most of the parents of that time and place. Sensing that my view was in the minority and not wishing to make a scene, I thereafter kept my heretical thoughts to myself.
My resolve to not let my less charitable opinions show was motivated by a desire to get along with the crowd as well as by professional considerations. I was then, as I am now, a successful psychologist in a small town in the Southeastern United States. At the time I was a single parent of three high school age children, or two high school age and one college age but nevertheless in high school. That is, two of normal…leaving their ages aside, I was a single parent of three high school students. I was doing the best I could in raising them without their dear departed mother (she had departed via taxi one day some years before the events recounted herein, but that’s another story) and that included all of us attending the dinners held throughout the year by their many school teams and clubs. As a member of the community and of the PTA, and as a practicing psychologist whose business depended on word-of-mouth referrals, it would not do for me to be labeled a grouch-a-louch. And so after that one careless comment I had made sure to mentally go to my Special Place whenever I watched children ply the serving spoons. But my Special Place was not, to borrow a term from Br’er Rabbit, a Laughin’ Place. It was a Broodin’ Place.
Where in all this, you may ask, is Gertrude? She’s coming right up. Read on! (I understand that pausing to delay the readers’ gratification while simultaneously exhorting them to keep reading that which they are already reading is, like recipe backstory, also de rigueur when writing for online consumption. Tolstoy et al. didn’t have to say read on—in their day it was assumed that the reader would simply know to continue reading until the words ran out even if the book was so massive as to justify a little authorial cheerleading from the page. Come to think of it, the battle scenes in War and Peace may have been just that—a little sis-boom-bah, a reward for plowing through all the drawing-room stuff. In that light, read on comes off as extremely lazy. What, you can’t be bothered to make your story compelling, so you resort to just coming out and saying you want the reader to keep going? Such a lack of confidence and craftsmanship. I like to think that if Tolstoy had not been able to pony up a battle scene or at least a skirmish, and if he had then resorted to exhortation, at the very least he would have used a more literary and evocative phrase than read on...perhaps a brisk Alakazam!)
The one possible saving grace—the one thing that stood between us parents and absolute starvation—was the last table. No, not the dessert table. Do you really think the kids would leave even a single spoon-whack of pudding or a molecule of cake in their wake? Don’t make me laugh. The last table to which I refer was the one on which all of the fast food was piled. Some parents chose not to prepare homemade dishes for the potluck, preferring instead to bring buckets of fried chicken, salvers of hamburgers, and...wait for it (another online writing trope, duly served up)…egad, I have distracted myself; where was I…read on?…no…oh yeah, wait for it…pizza. Boxes and boxes of pizza. This last table was our salvation because even the largest group of children (the band and its associated troupes of leapers and wigglers) could not eat their way to the absolute bottoms of every one of the bags and boxes and platters on this last table. While deprived of all but the dregs of the home cooking, each adult may expect to find at least one item of some kind of fast food. As backward and as deplorably permissive as this situation was, that one random item might have been enough.
Except it wasn’t enough because if I could not have politeness and consideration, I at least wanted my choice of fast food item, and my choice would have been pizza. I write would have been because not once in my first year of attending such events, nor in my second, did I ever find a single slice of pizza remaining on the last table. There were burgers and fries and chicken parts and jalapeno poppers galore—strewn about but still in decent quantities—but every single pizza box was slap empty by the time I reached it.
Spoiler alert (online trope, check): here comes Gertrude.
You might think, “Well, those teenagers really liked pizza so they took all of it, bless their holy selves, please don’t let them ever hear a discouraging word. Amen.” And you would be correct up to a point. The kids did feast on the pizza. But there was usually at least a whole pizza left by the time I approached that table in my habitual position in line after the last child and before all the other adults (it was children first but I observed no other priority rule; we were not filling lifeboats on RMS Titanic, after all). So why didn’t I ever get any pizza? Because Gertrude Goode was routinely last in the line of children, and she just as routinely piled all of the remaining pizza onto her already-mounded plate, thus denying me the one little thing I craved. It didn’t matter if there were just two slices left or a whole pizza—Gertrude would take all of it, every time. And off she would waddle, leaving me fuming as I stared at the empty boxes. Only then would I grudgingly grab a greasy chicken drumstick and place it alongside the lone lima bean and half of a crouton which were the typical fruits of my foraging among the preceding tables.
Now that I have introduced Gertrude and her role in my recipe saga, allow me to also observe that while her habitual taking of all the remaining pizza was quite enough to motivate what I eventually decided to do, that was not the end of her offensive behavior. She made it immeasurably worse by not even eating the pizza! She would sit there among her friends, talking non-stop as she shoved and ladled food into her insensate mouth. The food might as well have been sawdust for all the good it did during the scant second it spent on her tongue before making its way, barely chewed and certainly not tasted, down her gullet like a pig through a python! She would save the pizza for last, tormenting me as I glowered from afar, finally snapping a few bites from one piece after another, spitting each bite out before taking another, before tiring of it and then piling her napkin and her now-empty paper cup onto the desecrated remnants. On more than one occasion I saw her take an especially large slice of pizza, surreptitiously fold it crossways and nibble at it so as to make two holes in it, then hold it up to her face as one would a mask, to the delighted mock fear of her tablemates. Oh, how their silver braces flashed in the fluorescent light as they made merry over this obscene waste of what could have been—what should have been—my slice of pizza.
Many were the times that I saw Gertrude carry a plate of uneaten—but effectively ruined—pizza to the trash can, toss it all in, then turn with a belch and stride back to her seat, her bearing and her self-satisfied expression announcing to the world, “I am Gertrude, destroyer of pizza.” That young lady was the whole package: gluttony combined with casual wastefulness combined with uncovered oral emissions of digestive gasses. Get in line, teen boys, before that dance card fills up!
You might think that my dilemma would be easily solved by my saying in the buffet line, “Excuse me for asking, Gertrude, but tonight would you consider leaving me—I mean us—one single slice of pizza? That is, spare a thought for we who as a group gave you life and continued support and whose property taxes fund your education, including this swell building? We who crave not only mere sustenance but who, like you, appreciate a treat now and then? One effing slice? Please?”
To anyone who does think that, may I say a hearty Welcome, my time-travelling reader from the nineteenth century, that bygone era when children were not only amenable to instruction but were also attentive to polite requests from their elders! But this was the late twentieth century and I have already written of the primacy of children and of the necessity at that time of shielding them from anything resembling limits or, God forbid, mild disapprobation as they steam along their chosen course looking neither right nor left nor scanning ahead for smaller craft in their way. No, the erstwhile direct approach would not work, nor would prevailing upon the other parents or the administration to simply change the order in which the generations were allowed to serve themselves. Oh…wait for it…hell naw.
You might also suggest that I could have simply asked one of my children to bring me a slice of pizza since they enjoyed the privilege of hitting the buffet first and they always preceded Gertrude since she always brought up the rear of the youth line. Why sure, I could have done that. And while I was at it, why not declare my years spent carefully constructing our family’s power dynamic a complete and utter waste of time: I was wrong, children: Daddy is NOT capable of dealing with the world, and big bad Gertrude is keeping him from getting his pizza. I know I’m supposed to be an authority figure, but could you bring me a piece of that pizza, and while you’re at it my diaper could use a change. After we take care of all of that, let’s find some other societal institutions to bring down, lest Gertrude’s unfettered right to all the pizza be disturbed in any way. That’s another hearty…you guessed it (online trope, check)…oh…wait for it…hell naw.
I was left to either accept my lot or to find an indirect way to achieve my goal of getting one measly slice of pizza. I had not become a successful psychologist by accepting my lot or by simply shrugging at the aberrant behavior of others, so you can imagine which course I chose after two full school years of suffering at the hands of Gertrude. Read on!
Still with me? You guessed it…wait for it (in case you didn’t guess it)…and breathe: I chose the path of indirection.
I began my attempt to modify Gertrude’s behavior as I begin treatment of most of my patients: by blaming her parents. This is Plan A for most reputable clinicians even before the new patient has set his or her vehicle’s parking brake outside before the first consultation. However, given Gertrude’s age and the fact that she was not my patient, I could not use my doctorate level of insightful, layer-peeling conversation to alter her behavior. But I could go straight to the source, as the girl was still under the direct daily influence of her mother and father. I would talk to her parents.
My first chance came at the fall music festival. The cafeteria was decorated with construction paper chains and papier-mâché centerpieces in a low-key riot of browns and oranges and reds and yellows, evocative of turning leaves and redolent of Elmer’s Glue-All. The various music groups would perform for an hour before the potluck buffet would commence. I spotted Gertrude’s mother, Grace Goode, seated among other parents at a table not far from my own.
I saw no Mr. Goode with her that night, and come to think of it I had never espied him at other school gatherings. I imagined he must have had to work late or else he was indulging himself secretly at a pizzeria in another town, having made sure to cross at least two county lines so as to prevent word of his transgression reaching his family. Gertrude probably intercepted all pizza slices intended for him at home and on family visits to restaurants. I felt a kinship with the man, but only up to a point. His absence told me that he practiced avoidance. Avoidance equals weakness equals surrender. I would neither surrender any hope of pizza nor would I skulk about in the night furtively partaking of smorgasbords in distant towns. I would stand in the light and I would have my rightful portion of pizza.
Gertrude and my own winsome daughter Matilda were in a choral group together. In the break when their group was leaving the stage and another was preparing to mount the risers, I sidled over and tapped Grace Goode on the shoulder and said in jocular fashion, adopting the phrasing of the Puritans (a whimsical treat for the observant listener, neatly matching the seasonal theme of much of the music at this event), “Greetings, Goody Goode! Our daughters hath performed well!”
Grace did not return my smile. I could not tell from her apparent bafflement whether she was overwhelmed by my humor or intimidated by my intellect. Perhaps it was both—a heady mixture indeed. She said, “My name is Grace, not Goody. But yes, they sang well. Beautiful harmonies throughout, and great clarity in the contrapuntal passages.”
Aha. Her obvious appreciation for music was something I could exploit—a channel, as it were, into which I could tune (as it also were). I said, “Indeed, though I found it lacking somewhat in spots that positively cried out for more of what I like to call basso profondo.” Upon saying those last two words I made my voice very deep and I puffed myself up like an opera singer and held one hand out before me with palm upraised and quivering as if cupping a nervous medium-sized juvenile pigeon.
Grace said in a dismissive tone, “It’s the girls’ advanced chorus. Girls. You won’t find much basso, profondo or otherwise, in their repertoire.”
Shit! Who was this woman? Leonard Bernstein in drag? I had best change the channel, perhaps sneak up on my subject from another stand of tall grass as would a puma stalking a gazelle. I dropped my operatic pose and prowled forth carefully, discommoding not a single blade of grass, and said, “Touché, Madame. Speaking of stout notes, Gertrude seems to have put on a growth spurt over the summer.” The puma leapt from concealment: “She eats well, I take it?”
Grace loosened up and said fondly, as though unaware that blood was about to be drawn by the predator clinging to her back, “It’s true. She does still carry a bit of baby fat. Her sister was the same way, then one year, boom, she lost it all and now she’s putting herself through college as a swimsuit model. Daughters: one day you’re dragging them to festivals just so they can be the base of the cheerleader pyramid, crawling around like a human airbag while the smaller girls hog the limelight, then you turn around and suddenly they’re all over the magazines, commanding high dollar and wearing a thong bikini.” Ah, yes: that age-old story, so oft told. She went on, “National accounts—you’ve probably seen her work.” Great was her motherly satisfaction as to this sundae of braggadocio she added the cherry, “Regular sizes, not plus.”
Sidestepping this titillating thrust, I parried with, “Goody Goo—that is to say, goody gumdrops! I thought baby fat was a condition exclusively of infants, not of high school juniors.”
Grace said, “Are you a pediatrician?”
I said, “Why no, but I am a doctor—a psychologist.”
Grace said, “With a pediatric or bariatric specialty?”
Hubba-hubba and also bingo! I had struck gold! My probing had activated her latent maternal instinct. She knew that Gertrude had a problem and she wished to find professional help for the girl!
I said, “Your interest flatters me, but no, I pursue neither specialty. I treat adults, specializing in their phobias, compulsive behaviors, and depression. Curing and preventing of course, not causing, ha ha ho! But I know many worthy specialists who might interest you.” Visions of pizza slices swirled and capered in my mind’s eye.
Grace graced me with her first smile and said, “Oh good, then you will understand.”
I did understand, but my method involved give and take and speaking the unspoken so as to banish all doubt. Even when I reached perfect knowledge far ahead of my patients it was my practice to lead them gently to a place of self-awareness, then let them take the final step unassisted. I granted them the sense of achievement that I had in fact earned. I am, if nothing else, a giver. And so in my egoless fashion I prompted the good Goody Goode by nodding and saying with feeling, “Understand what, Goody—gum—no—I mean, your Grace?” I clarified (still with feeling), “Understand what, Grace?”
Grace said, “When I tell you to get the hell away from me. Now.”
The puma was gutted by the horns of the unaccountably hostile gazelle. I bowed and made my retreat. Somehow, in some subtle way not yet apparent to me, I had misplayed my hand. That night I dined on a cold hamburger—from Krystal, so really just a fraction of a true hamburger—from the buffet, and three string beans that had somehow escaped the swarm of teens. Gertrude, as usual, variously nibbled at and played with and otherwise destroyed one and one half pizzas as my empty stomach snarled and convulsed.
My attempt at indirect manipulation via the mother having failed, I would have to resort to other methods. Since any overt approach—verbal, psychological, or otherwise—to Gertrude by me was out of the question, I needed to find some other indirect route that would not raise any legal or moral red flags. I needed help from a benign person or persons who could move freely in Gertrude’s world. Fortunately, I had an ideal team of helpers immediately at hand in my own home: my three children.
Lest you accuse me of overpraising my own offspring in a manner similar to Grace Goode’s pimp-like rhapsodizing over the commercialized semi-nudity of her now-svelte elder daughter, I should make it clear that no single one of my children was in fact an ideal helper either for Operation Get Daddy Some Pizza or for any other endeavor. Each of them was in fact quite limited in crucial ways. Individually they would have been no help at all. It was as a team that they excelled—a team with a visionary leader to devise a master plan and to best exploit the unique talents and mitigate the deficiencies of each team member (think The Guns of Navarone but with pizza, not Nazi mega-artillery, as the objective).
My eldest, Brutus, was gifted with brutish strength and great athleticism. These traits were balanced by a near-perfect void between the ears. No intellectual, he. But he was fantastically good-natured and obedient to a fault. Set him to a simple physical task and you could consider it done so long as it did not require more than ten minutes of focused concentration. In the year when these events took place he was performing an encore of his senior studies at the high school. I did not know it then but just over one and one half years later he was to prove the adage “the third time’s a charm” by finally graduating.
My other two children were fraternal twins. Matilda was notable for her obsession with emotions—both her own and those of other people. She could be serenely happy one moment, morose the next, and she would also provide running commentary on her own shifting state of mind, both aloud and in a notebook she carried for that purpose. As a psychologist I understood these traits all too well and also how difficult they can be when present in the young, untrained mind. Among her myriad self-diagnosed conditions, she claimed to suffer from an extreme case of Middle-Child Syndrome, compounded by being the only female in a male-dominated household.
Given that she was born just thirty seconds before her twin brother (and that was only on paper—the doctor said it had been a chaotic and very slippery photo finish in the delivery room, and so after things settled down he had said “Ladies first,” and had given her an arbitrary half-minute victory), I inwardly disputed her claim to her primary ailment. Yes, she was led to believe that she was technically the middle child, but if there is any syndrome attached to that position, I firmly believe it requires there to be at least one year between the middle child and the youngest. An alleged half of a minute is not long enough for differences in attachment to develop and to lead to unequal treatment.
Matilda, however, does claim that her receiving a reduced portion of parental affection began immediately after her birth, for she was the only child to not receive a fine Roman name. For that I do blame her mother. While by spousal compact I was allowed to name the boys, I relinquished female naming rights. Although her mother did not choose a Roman name, she did name our daughter for a strong female from history: Empress Matilda (who in fact married a future Holy Roman Emperor, so almost a Roman); however, nowadays the name smacks of nineteenth century Americana, or maiden aunts, or the name one would give to a favorite plush toy. I sometimes try to cheer Matilda by reminding her that her name means “mighty battle” and that her namesake was quite the tyrant, but she frankly despises her name and no amount of cajoling can change that fact.
I do not openly dispute her claim to the mark of the middle child, though, for I am practical and I do try to look ahead. At that time I could clearly see that in two years Matilda’s propensity for claiming disability status on tenuous grounds would be invaluable come college and scholarship application season. Also, her observational skills and her note-taking habit would serve her well were she to follow in my professional footsteps. Whereas I had had to study hard to learn how to pay attention to the emotions of others and to at least appear to jot a few notes, Matilda was doing both of those things spontaneously from age four onward. If I therefore exacerbated her tendencies it was only with the best of intentions. Besides, she is a girl and you know how they are (Kidding! I could joke around with Matilda, and her firmly enunciated “Ha, ha, ha,” always reassured me that she was kind of alright).
The younger (on paper) twin was Publius. Where Brutus (strength) and Matilda (all things emotional) had very definite specialties, Publius was more of a generalist. He made friends easily and thus could fit in with any group, at least for a short while. You see, while he had inherited my own easy charm, he was also morally bankrupt and his friends always figured that out eventually and shunned him because of it. Publius’s immorality was not due to any lack of instruction at home, church, and school, but as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him not urinate in that water and then not hide nearby and then not watch other horses drink it and then not laugh and laugh (or whinny, to carry the horse metaphor across the finish line). And so as a father, while I did and still do lament Publius’s bad behavior, his habits were so reliable and he was so certain to misbehave whether or not it was at my behest that it would have been foolish of me to not use his dark side for my own purposes when in extremis.
And in extremis I was. I had suffered Gertrude’s unconscionable hogging of the potluck pizza for two full school years, plus one fall festival so far this semester. With Gertrude and my two younger children just starting their junior years I would suffer for nearly two more full years unless I—unless we—took some kind of corrective action.
After my failure to influence the impervious music maven, Grace Goode, I knew that I would have to use some method on Gertrude so indirect that it not only could not be traced back to me, but it might also be so subtle as to escape public notice at all. After all, the only observable result I sought was for young Gertie to either skip the pizza altogether or to just not take all of it. Given her sister’s history of conversion from tubster to professional beach bunny, might this not be seen as a natural step in the girl’s maturation? Would her gluttony’s slightest diminution—so important to me—even register in her own mind, much less in her mother’s or in anyone else’s? I thought not. And so while some may question my methods, none can say that deploying my educated brain and my three children to cause one specific girl to not chew and spit out, or wear on her face, or discard one four-ounce wedge of pizza was in any way a violation of any laws, professional standards, or commonly accepted behavior. Anyone who was exactly like me and in my exact situation would have done it.
Forgive me, Dear Online Reader, for having so long neglected the exhortations; one hopes you have not suffered undue uncertainty as to what to do next. You guessed it…wait for it…read on!
I am a behavioralist by training and I am therefore very practiced in sussing out the underlying motivations of my patients and in devising practical ways to encourage the good behaviors and to reduce or even eliminate the bad ones. The concept is simple but the diagnosis and execution can be quite difficult (and lucrative if you draw it out a bit and charge by the hour). Many books have been written on the subject of behavior modification and some individual case studies have gone on to span multiple volumes. However, since I do want to eventually give you the recipe that is the sole reason for this tale, I will not burden you with the vast amount of theorizing I performed on my own nor with the many field experiments my team and I conducted over the next few weeks. I will instead sketch for you the key breakthroughs we achieved and our execution of the resulting plan.
The first breakthrough came at the winter sports banquet, which in recent years had had as its recurring theme, “Wait Till Next Year.” Those were some woeful football teams. At the earlier fall music banquet, I had heard the band teacher lamenting how the band had to practice playing “Mr. Touchdown, USA” in closed sessions behind soundproof barriers just to be ready to play it during compulsories at band competitions, for they had not had reason to play it from the stadium bleachers during a game for at least three years and playing it in any other context anywhere within earshot of the traumatized football coaches, players, or parents might be mistaken for sarcasm. Even losers like to eat, so the sports banquets were held regardless of the team’s record. They were consolation banquets, not victory banquets. We attended because Brutus was a two-way player occupying the middle of both the offensive and defensive lines. He was great at his positions but he could not cover the whole field. Opposing teams had learned to give him a wide berth.
Sitting at my table at the winter banquet, my plate devoid of pizza as usual, I deployed Publius. Using his supreme social skills, the boy managed to infiltrate the table at which Gertrude sat surrounded by her chattering besties. Eyebrows were raised when Publius sat across from Gertrude and tucked into his food, but his raffish smile and his well-timed jokes soon won him acceptance into the group. This was good but it was only the first part of that night’s mission. Publius was a crowd-pleaser, not one to plumb the psyche of an individual. No matter—nothing so delicate was expected of the lad; he was the delivery vehicle but my daughter was the payload. I deployed her next.
Matilda, with her unconventional clothing, her rapid alterations of mood, and her habit of scribbling in her notebook, had her own set of friends but she would never have been able on her own to simply sit down and fit in with Gertrude’s rowdy, gossipy gang. But now I sent her and her own plate of food wandering near their table, seeming to scan the whole room in search of a place to sit. Publius completed the next phase of his assignment by waving and saying, “Hey, Sis! I’m over here!”
There were more raised eyebrows as Matilda joined the group, but once again Publius banished all resistance with his casual charm, draping his arm across his sister’s shoulder as they laughed together so that all would see that this unhip girl was actually pretty cool. With Publius greasing the wheels, Matilda was soon fully engaged in the group’s conversation. I watched them for long minutes, waiting, hoping, almost holding my breath. I was ready to give up when…yes! Matilda suddenly reached for her notebook, made a few emphatic notes, and shoved it back into her purse. She turned and when our eyes met across the crowded room she nodded once and then resumed her rare display of convivial giddiness with the group.
Later that night I debriefed my agents in my home study. I sat behind my big wooden desk, with Matilda and Publius in the two guest chairs facing me. Brutus sat on the large sofa with a foldaway bed against the wall. He had had no part in that night’s operation other than accepting condolences along with his football teammates, but I wanted every member of my own team to have the same level of knowledge every step of the way.
I knew that Matilda was dying to reveal what she had written in her notebook but I insisted on a chronological review. I said, “Tell us, Publius—was infiltrating that group as easy as you made it look?”
Publius, slumped casually in his chair, waved one hand as though shooing away a gnat and said, “Nothing to it. They act like a stuck-up girls-only group, but it’s just that: an act. I got no pushback at all. They were dying to have a boy—any boy—sit with them.”
I said, “Good, good. And what did you learn before Matilda arrived?”
Publius said, “Three of them have boyfriends, sort of. Not Gertrude, if that matters. Several of them gave me their phone numbers.”
I said, “Really?”
He nodded and held up his right palm upon which many digits were scribbled, some in blue ink, some in black, in all directions and overlapping as on a palimpsest. He said, “They got to fighting over my hand, so I have no idea who belongs to which number. Shoulda got a sheet of paper from Mattie.” He studied his palm ruefully, turning his hand this way and that.
Matilda said with over-the-top vigor, “Thanks for that stellar report, Publius!”
Publius jumped a bit but then regained his slack posture and said, “Sure thing, Sis. Dad.”
I said, “Yes, thanks, son. All right now, Matilda? What can you share with us?”
Matilda said, “Finally. I have the key to Gertrude right here.” With a dramatic flourish, she produced her notebook and plopped it onto my desktop blotter. She used the built-in ribbon bookmark to open it to the page she wanted, then rotated the book so that I could see what was written in it. Or drawn and written, I should say, for in that moment of triumph I had witnessed from afar, Matilda had rapidly sketched a very realistic three-dimensional representation of a tombstone, the face of which bore carved letters spelling “R. I. P. GRAMMY GOODE 1911 - 1995”. The level of shading and the spooky hillside and grass and a slumped skeletal figure in the distance morosely regarding a full moon led me to believe that Matilda had taken the time to enhance her original sketch sometime during the few hours since she had sat at Gertrude’s table. There’s no way she could have drawn all of this, especially the photorealistic blood on the tombstone and the many airborne dead leaves, with the few strokes I had seen her execute earlier.
Matilda said matter-of-factly, “I just guessed at Grammy’s birth year. I thought it would be weird to ask Gertrude that.”
Thank goodness she hadn’t done anything weird. I felt a tingle at the back of my neck. I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, well, this is very…interesting, Matilda. But you do know, don’t you, that we don’t want to actually harm anyone?”
Matilda balled her fists and spat, “Oh. My. God. Publius scores a bunch of dates and he’s a hero! I bring you actual useful information and it’s ‘Oh no, Matilda, no killing allowed’ like I’m a psycho or something!”
Brutus, who by this time was fully reclined on the sofa, laughed and wagged a finger and said in a passable imitation of my voice, “No killing, Matilda!”
I had disturbed the delicate balance of the middle-child chip on Matilda’s shoulder. I started to respond but she stood up and jabbed one forefinger into the center of her drawing and said, “Dad, Grammy Goode is already dead. She died last month. Publius and I got everyone talking about food at the dinner tonight and we kept saying stuff about our favorite foods. I thought Gertrude would say something about pizza but she kept going on and on about how her Grammy had been the best cook in the whole wide world and how they had dinner at her house every Sunday since she was born. It was ‘Grammy made this,’ and ‘Grammy made that,’ the whole time.”
Publius, still stinging from Matilda’s scathing reference to him, said, “Hey, I wasn’t bragging, and I did get you into the group, you know. I was just playing my part.” He shoved the hand with the indecipherable phone numbers under his upper thigh.
Matilda turned, ready to engage him in one of their patented spats, but I raised my voice enough to interrupt and silence them, saying, “Stop! Publius, Matilda, you both performed splendidly tonight. Mission accomplished, one hundred percent. And Matilda, please excuse my initial reaction. This drawing is…evocative.” It evoked in me a wish to wear Kevlar pajamas and to lock my bedroom door at night but she did not need to know that. I said, “Let us sit quietly for a moment. I have the germ of an idea.” I sat back and made a steeple of my forefingers and tapped my upper lip in thought. Then I smiled and leaned forward and closed Matilda’s notebook and handed it back to her.
“Brutus,” I said, “would you please fetch me today’s newspaper from the living room?”
As their elder brother bounded off, happy to finally have a physical task to perform, I shared my plan with the twins. They nodded and asked questions and offered suggestions, our thoughts combining to form a serological reagent that allowed my original germ of an idea to flourish into something more grand. Brutus returned with the newspaper and casually dragged the enormously heavy sofa over to the desk so he could join in. I didn’t want that sofa in that awkward spot, but I let it go. Family togetherness was more important than feng shui at that moment.
My ex-wife had made cutting comments about my parenting skills on her way out to the taxi, but I think I had done quite well, considering. Look how far we had come, we happy few, and how well I had let each child develop his or her own special personality while also working together toward a common goal. I will always treasure the memory of the hour we four spent in my study that night, sitting together around my desk in the pool of light from my lamp. It was a moment worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting, though how he would have conveyed the fact that we were plotting an intricate way to rip the pizza from the mouth of an oblivious teenage girl, I do not know. Diagrams on the wall, or something on a piece of paper visible to the viewer? Not Matilda’s creepy drawing, of course, but something equally obvious—we’re talking Rockwell here, not some mysterious Cubist who makes sure you’ll never figure out what you’re looking at. Anyway, regardless of how the late, great Norman Rockewell would have depicted it, all I know is that it was a good time.
And in case you were beginning to wonder what you should do: read on!
The following weekend I looked down into the large cardboard box I held in front of me as I stood in line. Anyone seeing my selections would assume I was an aspiring chef or perhaps already a talented amateur. But what I saw when I beheld the cookbooks, serving dishes and utensils in my box was a toolkit for finally getting the potluck dinner pizza that had been denied me for so long. What was so special about this particular collection of kitchen paraphernalia? Why, it had until recently been used by none other than Grammy Goode to prepare the dishes that had so delighted young Gertrude every Sunday for the past fifteen years.
You see, at that family gathering in my study, upon hearing Matilda’s report of Gertrude’s fond remembrance of Grammy Goode’s cooking, I had immediately wished that I could obtain one of Gertrude’s favorite Grammy Goode culinary creations and use it to tempt her away from the pizza. But then it had occurred to me that I could do that very thing if I could just get my hands on Grammy Goode’s cookbooks and her serving dishes. That thought had led me to sit back with my fingers steepled like those of a James Bond movie villain, or of the Pope during a real wowzer of a confession from a senior cardinal, as I fantasized ways to infiltrate the younger Goode household where Grammy Goode’s goods would likely have been moved after her tragic passing. But then I realized that timing could be in our favor, and so I had sent Brutus to bring me the newspaper.
Sure enough, in the classified section among the many yard sale and garage sale listings was a single ad for an estate sale. The address was not farm from our home. If luck was with us and if Grace Goode had had neither the desire nor the space to move all of Grammy Goode’s belongings to her own home, and if this ad was in fact for Grammy’s estate sale, then I could implement my plan by simply buying the things I needed. There was no need to infiltrate anyone’s household! A good thing, too, because I had seen restraining order written in the look that Grace Goode had flashed at me when she had sent me packing at the fall music banquet. Chances of infiltration were slim. I would have to limit myself to what Einstein, speaking of quantum entanglement, had called “spooky action at a distance.” Not Matilda-spooky, but definitely something in the PSYOPs line.
Luck was with us. The advertised estate sale was indeed at the home of the late Grammy Goode. The house was a precious brick bungalow with a steeply pitched roof and a yard overflowing with shrubs and flowers. I would not have been surprised to see Hansel and Gretel come skipping along the curving stone walkway that meandered around the property, so scrumptious were that house and environs. Several large folding tables had been set up in the front yard, for Grammy Goode had accumulated much in her long life. I arrived shortly after nine AM, well into the second wave of shoppers. The first wave would have arrived before the sale officially opened, for the professional purveyors of antiques and bric-a-brac know better than to dawdle over breakfast while their competitors are out there buying up all the Franklin Mint coin and figurine collections, green glassware, and vintage vinyl recordings that are the prizes at such sales.
While shopping for my Gertrude-centric items I had noticed that the early birds had not bought all of the viny records. I caught a glimpse of Grammy Goode through her music selections as I flipped through her albums in their plastic milk crates amid a solid quarter-acre of belongings.
Here were three albums by Engelbert Humperdinck. They were from very early in his career when he was working the fertile fields of rabid teenage girl fans that Elvis and The Beatles had cultivated in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. These albums were original issue. Grammy, who would have been middle aged but not yet a Grammy when Engelbert came on the scene, had bought these steamy records with the lustful long-haired English kid on the cover for reasons of her own. Did Grammy’s mister approve of this purchase?
I was relieved to find even more Perry Como albums, most featuring a sedate, non-lustful Perry in a tasteful sweater, sitting in a nicely-appointed den. Music to Uncle By. There was plenty of Doris Day in her impossibly blonde, impossibly happy-looking heyday. She looked like someone who, if you came alongside of her unannounced and hooked an elbow and started skipping, would skip right along with you, no questions asked. The woman had range. On one album she was in top hat and tails and sporting a cane; on another she was in buckskin and brandishing a rifle; on both, her smiling mouth was opened wide to belt out that high note. Rounding out the collection were the many moods of Jim Nabors. Actually just three moods: worshipful, in love, and of course in a Christmas mood with sweaters to rival Perry Como’s.
It occurred to me that with minor changes—subbing Bing Crosby or Dean Martin in for one of the male singers, perhaps—Grammy Goode’s record collection was a lot like my own mother’s had been. The singers of their younger days were, to look at them, people you might invite into your home without fear of them trashing the place. In fact, Grammy Goode and my mother and millions of other women had invited them into their homes, first via the television and the radio and then by buying their records. Was the music that good? What were they really buying? Not a momentary thrill, as I had first thought upon seeing Engelbert with his shirt unbuttoned on one album. They were buying a permanent record, so to speak, of the feelings they had experienced when they had first heard that music, when their families were all together at home: their husbands, their children, visiting relatives, friends.
If we listen to these old records today, we might hear high-quality retro schmaltz. But I can easily imagine Grammy Goode and old ladies everywhere, sitting alone night after night, cueing up the record player and inviting irascible kid brother Engelbert, comforting cousin Perry, cheerful sister Doris, and favorite nephew Jim over for yet another night. The women sit or perhaps try a slow dance step or two in the dimness of evening as the old familiar voices remind them of other times—times when they were not, perhaps, dancing alone.
I nearly shed a tear while picturing Grammy Goode and my own late mother and so many other women like them sitting by their record players by the light of a table lamp, the music triggering memories and conjuring the illusion of family. Poor old ladies! Then I thought about my own family, with my own children approaching the age when they would leave the nest. Was I, too, destined to dance alone? Egad. I put one each of Engelbert, Perry, Doris, and Jim into my shopping box, and hurried away from that table.
I had timed my arrival at the estate sale so that I would be shopping with a crowd, lest I attract unwanted attention from Grace. As it turned out I was bound to be seen by Grace, for she was manning the cash box. When my turn came I stepped up and placed my box of items on the table. Grace showed no sign of recognizing me. While I do consider myself to be pleasingly memorable if not extraordinarily noteworthy, it was understandable that she and her family loomed much larger in my psyche, and thus in my memory, than I in hers. She stood and extracted the items one at a time so she could see the price stickers. I watched as cookbooks, casserole dishes, large serving spoons, pewter picture frames, cushions decorated with needlepoint images of kittens and puppies, and a pair of grass-skirted figurines from Hawaii—one a man strumming a ukulele, the other a woman performing a dance with red flowers in her hands—emerged and were arrayed between us on the table. I had selected the non-cooking-related items as camouflage to hide my intent from anyone analyzing my purchases.
Grace smiled as she added up the prices. Did I detect a hint of nostalgia, that bastard child of happiness and sadness, in her face? I realized then that preparing for and then holding this sale must have aroused quite a lot of sentiment in her breast, and I was glad; for, given the fact that Grammy Goode was her mother-in-law, fondness and sentimentality were not guaranteed. How fortunate that they had apparently had such a good relationship, and that Grace could handle these items one more time as the final act—the sale would end at sunset today—approached. At last, closure. I thought that a word or two on the subject might soothe the good (but not Goody, never again from my lips) woman, so I offered, “Um...my condolences on your loss.”
Grace looked up from her sums, her bafflement matching that provoked months earlier by my ill-advised Puritan-speak, and said, “What? Oh, yeah. No, I was just thinking how the old battle axe kept so much dusty old junk, and I was dreading having to pack up what we don’t sell to cart off to Goodwill. I begged her to have a yard sale herself years ago so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. She never did, obviously. But if everyone buys as much random crap as you, we’ll be done by noon.” She jabbed at a few more keys on her large desktop calculator and said, “Cha-ching! That’s thirty bucks even.”
The woman amazed me at every encounter. Making allowances for the loss she had suffered, and the stress of soothing the surviving family, and the added effort of organizing this sale, I nevertheless concluded that Grace was a champion, gold-plated bitch of amazing magnitude. But it would not do to risk antagonizing her before making off with what I had come for, so I merely chuckled and said, “Glad I could help,” as I paid. I then hurried away with my box of precious loot.
It is well that I had said no more, for as I departed, I distinctly heard Grace utter a sentence containing the words girls’ chorus and basso profondo to the woman who had been sitting next to her behind the table, and their laughter followed me to my car. Unless she was given to random Bernstein-esque disquisitions on music (which her unfeeling words about Grammy led me to doubt) she had remembered our encounter after all, and she considered me to be not a threat worthy of a restraining order, but merely a joke.
No matter. I had what I needed. I sped home to work on the final phase of my plan. I might be a joke to Grace Goode, but when the punchline came I would have my potluck pizza.
Six months later I stood in yet another line at yet another school dinner. I was right behind Gertrude, who was busily scooping heroic helpings from every nearly-empty serving dish as I and the other parents continuously recalibrated our expectations. I was down to thinking I might be able to assemble one eighth of a plate of side dishes by being willing to work at the crusted corners of the rectangular dishes. But on this night of nights, those other dishes didn’t matter at all, because this time I was sure I was going to finally get at least one slice of pizza from the fast food table. It had taken half a year of trial and error, but I had finally weaponized Grammy Goode’s cookbooks and produced a casserole that was guaranteed to distract Gertrude and prevent her from taking all of the remaining pizza.
I had made three similar attempts already, but they were experiments whose goal was to observe and gather data, made with no expectation of success. Starting with the Christmas concert and banquet, and moving on to the Fling into Spring dinner and the spring sports banquet (victorious, not funereal like the winter sports banquet), I had put on the table one casserole after another, each one made following a recipe chosen from Grammy Goode’s collection of cookbooks. I had placed them strategically so they would be the last dish before the fast food—the prime Gertrude grazing spot at which her attention, heretofore focused on scraping out every casserole dish, normally turned toward the inviting pizza remnants.
At the Christmas banquet I erred by putting the dish out before the line formed. As a result, the dish was empty by the time Gertrude reached it. I had made the damn thing too appealing; everyone had found it irresistible. It was still a valuable experiment, though, because I noticed that Gertrude froze for a few seconds at the sight of Grammy Goode’s serving dish and spoon before moving on to corner the pizza supply. I knew then that those dishes and utensils had been imprinted on her subconscious. Her reaction had been so strong that I knew I had been right to choose the oval ceramic dish with cartoon teddy bears dancing around the outside. Those bears would have been at eye level for Gertrude at every Sunday dinner during her formative years, cavorting into a permanent spot in her mind’s eye. In addition to a large quantity of food, that dish carried a heavy emotional payload for young Gertrude. It would henceforth function as the Enola Gay to transport all of my future casserole bombs to the Hiroshima of Gertrude’s psyche.
At the next banquet I withheld my second special casserole and had Brutus place it at the end of the serving table when I signalled him from my place in line. It worked—there was plenty of my casserole left by the time Gertrude reached that spot. She froze again at the sight of the dish, and this time she picked up the spoon. She was going for it! She dug in and pulled out a heaping spoonful. Yes! The familiar dish had triggered her childhood gluttony for all things Grammy! But then she paused with the spoon almost to her plate, then lifted the food to her nose and sniffed deeply. She made a face and dropped the loaded spoon back into the serving dish and then turned and moved like a homing missile toward the pizza. It would seem that Gertrude was not a fan of canned tuna.
So the timing of my dish placement was right, I had the right serving dish and spoon, and all I was lacking was the right recipe. By the time I learned all of this, there was only one banquet left: academic awards night. Grammy’s recipe collection comprised hundreds if not thousands of recipes. Trial and error would not work—there simply were not enough banquets left in my children’s high school careers. Even if Gertrude and Publius and Matilda were to mimic Brutus by staying in high school on into early adulthood—not likely, given their decent grades—that would only provide a few extra casserole tests. I needed another breakthrough.
The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: Matilda and her boyfriend. What’s that you say? There was no mention of her having a boyfriend before! That’s true, and she had made nothing but disparaging remarks about boys during her entire freshman and sophomore years and for most of her junior year. But then along came Harbhajan Singh Makhija.
Harbhajan was a senior, but he was Matilda’s age because he had been double-promoted at some point. Smart kid, active in the math and science clubs. Harbhajan once told me that he, too, had sneered at the opposite sex, right up until the moment he rested his ocular orbs on Matilda. And for her part, Matilda had exempted him from disparagement the moment she clapped her peepers first on his neat turban and then on his dreamy, aquiline face (her words—I’m not being creepy). He even had someting that might someday be a cute little tickly mustache (again, I merely report her words). His wit and intelligence had sealed the deal with Matilda: boys—this boy, anyway—might not be entirely execrable.
In mining Grammy Goode’s cookbooks for something with which to tempt Gertrude, I had come across a looseleaf binder that had triggered in me a massive, multi-faceted allergic reaction. First, I knew immediately that Grammy Goode must have owned cats, for this binder and its pages were absolutely coated with dander which caused my eyes to redden and swell nearly shut and my sinuses to open like the spillway of the Grand Coulee Dam. I had to stand under a hot shower and take extra antihistamines just to restore my vision and recover my breath.
Then, as I studied the volume while wearing a stocking ski mask, rubber kitchen gloves, safety goggles, and a backwards raincoat, the sappy contents of the binder triggered in me a mental spasm. This binder, apparently, had been where Grammy Goode kept the recipes given to her by friends, or clipped by her from newspapers and magazines, and many simply written on notecards. All well and good, but she also had been a sucker for the worst sort of lame, obvious cartoons of the type you find in Readers’ Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Cat Fancy, Women’s Day, and others of that ilk. So to my physical reaction was added a gagging, retching response to the cartoons, which I could not help but see and read, try as I might to focus on the recipes glued to sheets of notebook paper. I am both blessed and cursed with the ability to take in whole pages of text at a glance, which meant that there was no way for me to study the recipes without also absorbing the horror of the cartoons and snippets of so-called jokes that infected every page. After just a few pages, I shoved it aside with a cry of frustration.
Matilda, who had been studying in her room with Harbhajan, heard me and yelled down the hallway, “What’s wrong, Dad?”
Removing my homemade hazmat suit, I yelled back, “It’s this damned notebook! It reeks of cat hair and folksy humor. I can’t take it.” Seeing that Matilda and Harbhajan had joined me in the breakfast nook, I lowered my voice and sighed, “How am I going to find the right recipe if I can’t look at that book? I was hoping maybe the recipes in it would be extra special—you know, more so than the cookbooks. I mean, I didn’t get a whiff of cat off of all the other books, and some looked like they had never been opened. Makes me think people had given her those nice books but she had put them away and was only cooking from memory and from this one binder.” I pointed at the evil tome from several feet away rather than brandishing it or even resting my hand on it during this speech, lest I send another cloud of cat dander into my own face. Overcome with the futility of my task, I leaned back against the kitchen counter and hung my head.
“Is proximity to the book the only obstacle, sir?” asked Harbhajan in his always-on formal way.
I shook my head and said, “Even if I could tolerate being near that book, what good is it to try one recipe after another? I need to get it right, right now. The academic awards banquet is my last chance this year. I don’t know if I can take another year of not getting pizza at these things.”
Harbhajan said, “Sir, I wonder if I might make a suggestion?”
I said, “Oh, Harbhajan Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Harbhajan Singh. Believe me, I have considered double promotion to get Publius and Matilda out of that high school and straight into college. That would end my agony. Matilda could handle it, I’m sure, but Publius? It’s not that he’s not smart enough, but it would take extra work. And who knows how long dear Brutus will be in high school? I don’t want to wait all summer to face another year of failure. I need to make this work now.”
Matilda started to say something but Harbhajan put a calming hand on her shoulder and said, “No, sir, I was not going to suggest anything so drastic as promoting your children out of high school. I was going to say that you might consider combining your expertise in behavioral science with my expertise in statistical analysis.” He rested his other hand on the graphing calculator holstered at his belt.
Now this kid was speaking my lingo. I said, “You mean combine the soft and the hard sciences?”
He nodded.
Matilda giggled and said, “He’s good at that.”
Ignoring the implication of her words and the fact that my formerly aloof daughter was actually giggling, I said, “Harbhajan, I think I see your point. Given enough time, I could try every recipe in that book. But since time is limited, random trial and error won’t do. But how would statistical analysis help, with food?”
Harbhajan said, “I cannot guarantee that it will help. That is the nature of statistics. But until you collect and analyze the data, you will be consigned to randomness and…I am sorry to say…failure.”
I spared a second to notice that Harbhajan, like so many boys his age, had a dramatic streak. I laughed inwardly, remembering how flighty I had been before I had so smoothly aged into my own completely mature state of mind. I said, “So you think you could dig up numbers that would point me to the right recipe?”
Harbhajan said, “That is one possible outcome. But I was thinking of something even better than that. That binder must contain only those recipes that Grammy Goode first selected and then thought worth keeping; ergo, they are the favorites of her and her family, including Gertrude. Suppose you perform a frequency analysis—that is, look for recurring elements across just those recipes. You have been trying to guess the best single recipe. Instead, you can create your own recipe by combining the most popular recurring ingredients with a sampling of others that might, singly or in combination, trigger the response you desire.”
He had said this so matter-of-factly that at first the brilliance of his words escaped my notice. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized that he had come up with the only possible approach, given the fact that I had only one more chance if I was going to make it work this year. I said, “Harbhajan, you amaze me. I’m a practicing psychologist, yet I was basically stumbling along using only the control aspect of behavioralism. You have reminded me to use the predictive aspect, and to use hard evidence to inform that prediction. With one recipe I could combine the effects of many recipes. Would it taste good? Irrelevant—but it needs to smell good. No tuna—we know that much by now. I just have to get Gertrude to load up her plate and skip the pizza. Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!” He accepted my praise with a grin, and Matilda squeezed him around the waist and jumped up and down in place. First giggling, now this. I said, “There’s one major problem, though. I can’t get within ten feet of that book.”
Harbhajan, still in dramatic mode, stepped over to the breakfast nook and lifted the binder in both hands. Ignoring my shouted warning, he held the book to his face and inhaled deeply. He coughed only once and said, “It is dusty, indeed. But you see I have no allergy to cats. As for the folksy humor—“ He opened the book and spent a minute scanning a page. I saw his eyebrows rise slightly and the skin under one eye twitched a few times and the corners of his mouth turned downward slightly, but that was it. No retching or gagging. The kid was like a machine—a beautiful, cat-proof, Marmaduke-resistant automaton. Closing the book, he said, “It fills me with dismay. Hagar is indeed horrible. And The Lockhorns—how can one joke be repeated so many times; why, one wonders, has that couple not divorced? But I can tolerate it. I will get the data for you.” He turned and marched down the hallway to Matilda’s room. He stopped at the door and turned and looked back at Matilda and extended his open hand into her room, inviting her to join him in his new task.
Matilda hugged me and said, “Don’t you just want to marry him right now?” Then she scampered down the hall to her room. First the giggling, then the hugging and jumping up and down, and now the scampering. Maybe that boy was marriage material. Her words, not mine.
And then, just a day later, Alakazam!
(For the record, that was not an exhortation to continue reading. It was a naturally-occurring exclamation. Sorry for any confusion caused by my earlier commentary around exhortations in online posts, especially my purely coincidental nomination of Alakazam! as a potentially more literary incitement. Do you now see how the use of meaningless exhortations can use up the exclamation space, making it difficult to recognize genuine interjections and/or ejaculations? I’ll bet Tolstoy had a mental image of his future readers bundled up in a bear robe by a roaring fire, snowed in with nothing to do all the Russian winter long but read his book. No urging needed there. You could be sure that any expression of excitement was in furtherance of the story, not telling the reader to…you know…read. But, since it has been a while and since I suppose I did condition you to expect certain modern niceties: read on!)
To make a long story short, in collecting data from the toxic binder, Harbhajan and Matilda had found the true Rosetta Stone that would allow me to read and understand Gertrude. The pattern had emerged after just two pages: Grammy had marked all of Gertrude’s favorites for us! It had apparently been her habit to write an upper-case letter G in red ink next to selected recipes. Furthermore, within the recipes so marked, individual ingredients had one or more exclamation marks written next to them. In many cases, she drew a red circle around the entire recipe, to make sure we didn’t miss her point. It was almost as though the dear lady had purposely left behind a map to her precious granddaughter’s stomach, and thus also to her heart. What love! How touching! And how useful to anyone who might come along wanting to manipulate the girls psyche! And so, rather than laboriously collecting and collating ingredients from the entire book and then using statistics and educated guesswork to combine the right ones into a new whole, all I had to do was concoct a dish using the highlighted ingredients from the recipes noted as especially suited to Gertrude.
Even better, once they had made that astounding find, Harbhajan and Matilda had taken the binder to school the next day and had used the office’s copying machine (Harbhajan spent some of his math and science club officer trustworthiness to steal supplies for me—truly son-in-law material, to paraphrase Matilda) to run off a dander-free copy for me, even taking the time to block out the offensive cartoons using paper cutouts. This they presented to me that night in a fresh new binder, along with a neatly-typed list of names and page numbers of recipes marked as Gertrude specials. All I had to do was combine selected ingredients from those recipes into something that would trigger Gertrude to pile it high and wide onto her plate.
And thus was born Grammy Goode’s 4-Star Korn-‘O’-Kopia Kasserole.
You may ask: why such a horrendous name? Well, the dish itself is horrendous, and so must the name be. Just as I chose the ingredients with a purpose, I devised each element of the name for reasons ranging from scientific to sentimental. 4-Star is obvious: make a superior rating part of the name. It’s Psychology 101. The idiomatic spelling of several words or syllables with the letter K is my tribute to Grammy’s deep-seated love for cornpone—or should I say kornpone—humor, as evidenced by the types of cartoons and jokes I had glimpsed during my short look into her foul, unredacted recipe binder. The Korn states the theme of the dish which is, in fact, corn, both physical and metaphorical. The separation of the misspelled version of the word cornucopia into three segments, separated by dashes and with the connecting letter O bearing apostrophes both fore and aft as though it is part of an Irish name writ by someone who doesn’t understand the function of apostrophes, is a nod to the ignorance (or, more charitably, the determinedly kutesy style) of the writers and editors of the publications from which Grammy’s cartoons and her recipes had been variously torn and clipped. Oh, how they abused the letter K, and punctuation marks! But who am I to judge? I am now one of them, for I could not, after going that far, baldly spell the word casserole correctly. It would look like a rebuke, luring the reader in with whimsical spelling and then dropping the facade and declaring the party over before it truly began. Consistency—or should I say konsistency—was, for the sake of the mission, my watchword.
And so it was that six months after acquiring Grammy Goode’s cookbook, I found myself in line at the annual academic awards banquet, mere minutes away from picking up, for the first time, a slice of pizza from the fast food table. It was fitting that my triumph should occur at this, the only event that celebrated the purported main function of the school: academic achievement. For my own achievement was a perfect illustration of how a superior mind armed with hard-won and intelligently analyzed data could devise a subtle yet devastating weapon in the form of a casserole.
In an earlier age, say before the Enlightenment, brute force would have been brought to bear. Let there be no doubt: I was still using force. The force of intellect is, however, vastly superior to cudgels and swords. With it, one may accomplish previously unimagined aims without striking a physical blow and even without seeming to have done anything at all. After all, a hundred other households had also placed dishes on the tables tonight. The main criterion for inclusion in the buffet was edibility, with no policy against food crafted with extra-nutritional intent. My intellectual masterpiece was perfectly camouflaged by appearing among foodstuffs of lesser IQ; it was a veritable Scarlet Pimpernel of a dish.
Despite the dramatic background and buildup, the execution of the plan was banality itself. Having learned lessons about timing and proper placement during the earlier attempts, my team and I baited the food trap at just the right moment. As Gertrude applied her full attention to scraping the last spoonful of mashed potatoes from the last dish on the last table of homemade main courses, I gave my now-familiar shrug and head roll as though working out a kink in my neck. Upon that signal Harbhajan approached from where he had been stationed, bearing Grammy’s casserole dish. My own children had gladly yielded to him the honor of delivering the dish in recognition of his part in decoding Grammy’s recipe notations. Harbhajan had come up with yet another idea: using the Bunsen burners in the science lab to keep the casserole piping hot until just before serving it up. That would ensure that its enticing odor would not be locked away in unappetizing permafrost, as was the case with so many dishes at these events. For that reason, Harbhajan, slightly winded by his trek from the lab, gripped the dish carefully with two thick oven mitts as he smiled and nodded his way between the people a few spots ahead of Gertrude and me, and placed the dish on the table. He set a ceramic spoon rest (also from Grammy’s estate sale) next to it, and then placed Grammy’s oldest, heaviest serving spoon onto the little glazed oval that, now that I looked at it from a slight distance, might have actually been an ashtray. No matter—it held the spoon well. Then, with a flourish, he removed the lid from the dish, releasing an aromatic cloud of steam.
This was the moment of truth. In Pavlovian terms, the bell had been rung and all that was left was to sit back and wait for the dog to slobber.
The dog did much more than slobber. The effect on Gertrude of that cloud of steam arising from that dish, with that spoon at hand, was immediate and visceral. I had hoped, of course, that my dish would have an odor so pleasing that she would not reject it, untasted, as she had done my first attempt those months ago. Beyond that, I had only dared to hope that the odor and sight of the casserole would trigger such happy childhood memories that she would load up her plate to the point where even she, the master piler-upper of pizza, would realize that her plate could bear no more, and then take a pass on the pizza, leaving me to fall on my prize like a patient hyena who swoops in on the lion’s leavings. She did, as I had hoped, pick up the spoon. She did, as I had feared, dig out a heaping spoonful and bring it to her nose. I held my breath.
She did not reject the food this time. Oh, no, she did not. Seeing the back of her neck redden, I could tell that her face had become flushed. She put her plate on the table, braced herself with the hand that was now freed, and took a deep, deep whiff of the scoop of casserole held up to her nose, and held it in for a long few seconds. She turned her head slightly as though listening to a voice that only she could hear, and I could now see that her eyes were closed tightly. I had seen similar reactions in some of my patients when, under hypnosis, they had relived meaningful episodes from their pasts. For a moment, I feared that my casserole had worked too well and that Gertrude, left unguided, would not arrive at a safe place in her memory. My professional ethics asserted themselves and I started to put my own plate down and prepared to go to her aid. But then Gertrude’s eyes opened and she smiled broadly. I made no move to intervene.
Finally, Gertrude let her breath out in a great whoosh, jammed the spoon into the casserole, and picked up the whole dish. She cried out and dropped it back down so quickly that I feared that the dish would crack, but it held (all thanks to Grammy for never having seen fit to replace her 1950’s Cold War cookware, as thick and solid as a nuclear containment chamber). She blew on her singed hands as she shook them in front of her, but her eyes never left that dish. Harbhajan, who had stayed nearby, stepped forward and reached over her shoulder, placing the oven mitts next to the hot dish. Gertrude treated the mitts’ arrival as her natural due and put them on and picked up the dish and walked away with it without a glance or a word for Harbhajan. She left her fully loaded plate where she had dropped it on the table.
In imagining this moment, I had seen myself strutting to a boogie beat—September by Earth, Wind & Fire would be ideal—then spinning in place and using my paper plate as a spatula to scoop up a slice of pizza right when the horn section hit a big note. I had not gone so far as to practice those moves, for I knew that claiming my prize in that fashion would be the opposite of the invisible intellectual subtlety that I had employed to this point. Not to mention that if I danced for too long, another pizza-deprived parent—of which I am sure there were many, though none so well-equipped as I to do something about it—might slide in and take what was now rightfully mine. And so I merely stepped forward like a normal person, no longer gnashing my teeth in defeat, and simply picked up one slice from the whole pepperoni pizza that Gertrude had bypassed, her head enshrouded in the steam that continued to rise from my kasserole, her mind surely still at Grammy Goode’s table on a halcyon Sunday afternoon of yore.
It occurred to me then that while my plan had been completely self-serving, I had managed to also bless the child to whom I had formerly done nothing but curse.
You’re welcome, Gertrude!
All was well in my world, and in hers.
A non-musical ceremony of sorts greeted me when I returned to the table where my children sat. Brutus pumped one fist in the air and Publius and Matilda clapped quietly like garden club members after a lecture on the care and maintenance of rhododendrons. Harbhajan, now seated next to Matilda of course, nodded and gave me a thumbs up. I smiled at everyone in return, but then I nearly wept, for they then whisked their napkins from what I had thought were their empty plates to reveal that they had each saved a slice of pizza to enjoy with me. For the first time in three years of high school banquets, we would all eat pizza at the same time, in the same place. Publius had obviously jumped the gun, for his piece already had a large bite missing, but I did not hold that against him. I felt an urge to make a speech, but I realized that our achievement deserved a true post-mission debriefing and celebration at home, so I merely nodded thanks all around as I sat down and we all picked up our slices and took a bite. Oh, how good that cold, dry, way too doughy pizza was! Not actually good flavor-wise or texture-wise, but symbolically great because of the magnificent family effort it represented. We all chewed, and chewed, and resorted to glugs from our drink cups so that we could finally swallow.
Read on.
(By which I mean do keep reading, for…spoiler alert…things are about to…you guessed it [possibly as soon as I spoiler-alerted]…take an…wait for it…unexpected turn.)
I was happily debating whether to eat the crust of that awful pizza, and also wondering whether what I had done amounted to a mere psychological parlor trick or a new branch of science, when Publius said, “Great job, Dad.”
I said, “Thank you, son, and you too. It was a true team effort.”
He laughed and said, “Yeah, ol’ Glutie Gert didn’t stand a chance against the Huffakers—and Harbie too, of course. He’s an honorary Huffaker.” Publius handed out nicknames to everyone he met, and Harbhajan didn’t seem to mind his.
I couldn’t help laughing at first, but I did like to encourage civil speech, even about those upon whom we practiced psychological manipulation, so I said, “She really didn’t stand a chance, did she? But listen, son, I know she’s a plump girl, but let’s not go making fun of her body parts.”
Publius looked genuinely puzzled, which he was good at doing as a form of denial so I didn’t know whether it was sincere or not. He said, “What body part?”
I said, “You called her ‘Glutie Gert,’ which obviously refers to her gluteus maximus.”
Publius shook his head, still supposedly not understanding.
I said, “Her sit-upon.”
Another head shake.
I said, “Her rear end.”
The light finally went on. Publius said, “Oh! No, Dad, I called her that because when Matty and I talked with her and her friends about food that night, she was all ‘I can’t eat this because of my gluten allergy’ and ‘I can’t eat that because of my gluten allergy.’ It was a real pity part. Gluten, gluten, gluten—“
Alakazam! (Make of it what you will.)
A horrific realization hit me.
The G code in Grammy’s binder did not stand for Gertrude—it stood for gluten! The exclamation marks did not flag favorite ingredients—they flagged ingredients containing gluten. The red circles around recipes did not mean “make this one for Gertrude”—they meant “maximum danger for Gertrude!” Dear, loving Grammy had modified her recipes, strategically leaving out the gluten so that her precious granddaughter could enjoy Grammy’s best recipes along with everyone else.
And what had we done? No, what had I done, as mastermind and the only adult on the team, the only one with a doctorate in psychology, the only one too stubborn to go buy himself a whole pizza on the way home after these events? I had misinterpreted the code and I had not only combined all the “best” flavors from all the “best” recipes, but I had then increased the percentage of all the specially-marked ingredients. I had led a mini Manhattan Project to design, build and deliver a magically flavorful, memory-stimulating, high-yield gluten bomb to a young girl with a severe gluten allergy!
Why had this happened? Why had so many seemingly unrelated events brought us to the brink of mortal danger? Not to point fingers and name names, but if only Gertrude Goode had not been such a pizza hog, and if only Grace Goode had not been so eager to cash in on Grammy Goode’s cookbooks, and if only Grammy Goode had written out whole words instead of using a secret code for God’s sake, and if only Harbhajan Singh Makhija had not come along and cracked that code, and if only my kids (Brutus Huffaker, Matilda Huffaker, and Publius Huffaker) had not been so willing and able to help me!
Again not to name names, but if only all of the forenamed had not done those things that they did! Plus—I guess, if you want to nitpick—if only I hadn’t done this or that little thing here and there along the way as events unfolded on their own in a more or less natural yet unforeseeable way!
There would be plenty of time for blame later, especially if I wound up in a prison cell. But now I had to save Gertrude. I stood abruptly, sending my chair sliding behind me and into the concrete block wall. I looked toward the table where Gertrude usually sat with her friends, but I could not see her through the many people walking about in the vast cafeteria. I turned and stepped up onto my chair, and now I could see her a good hundred feet away. Thank God! She was still wearing the oven mitts and cradling the kasserole. She was not chattering with her friends as usual but was instead diligently blowing on that first big scoop that she had dug out of the hot dish. She had not taken a bite yet. Harbhajan’s Bunsen burner may have saved her life by making the food too hot to eat!
But even as I prepared to climb down from the chair and work my way over to her table, I watched with horror as Gertrude raised the spoon to her lips, her eyes closing as she opened her mouth wide. The blissful look I had seen on her face when she first smelled the kasserole had returned. If the mere odor of the dish had that effect, I knew that one bite could send her into a fatal feeding frenzy.
I yelled, “Gertrude! Stop!”
The loud, echoing burble of hundreds of voices in conversation in a vast room with harsh acoustics stopped abruptly as every head in the place turned to stare at me in shock—except for Gertrude’s. The kasserole had subsumed her mind so completely that she was oblivious to my yelling, and she took one of her patented gigantic bites of the poison I had prepared for her.
I yelled frantically, “Stop her! Don’t let her eat that!”
Grace Goode now stood on her own chair halfway between me and Gertrude. She yelled, “Leave my daughter alone, you nut! It’s potluck! She can have whatever she wants!”
I had jumped down from my chair, but realizing that I needed Grace on my side I climbed back up and yelled, “Who takes the whole dish? Never mind!” I channeled John Brown in the painting of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, my arms spread wide and one fist and finger pointing across the room toward Gertrude, and I shouted, “That! Kasserole! Is! Pure! Gluten!”
To her credit, Grace instantly shifted gears. She turned and began screaming, “Gertrude! Stop! Missy! Brunhilda! Bethune! Oghenekevwe! All of you girls, get that food away from her!”
But by now, Gertrude had an iron grip on the spoon, and she was blissfully chewing—actually chewing and tasting—the kasserole. Her friends tugged ineffectually at her arm and hand. Would the gluten harm her before it hit her stomach, or only after? I didn’t know but I didn’t want to find out, and she was shoving in an awful lot of it. I looked down and saw that my children were staring up at me in horror, and I would have given anything if none of them had been smart enough to justify attending the academic banquet. But two of them had made straight A’s and Brutus was there to collect his sixth consecutive perfect attendance award and Harbhajan had won every math and science award, so we were destined—no, doomed—to be there that night. And now Gertrude was doomed…to die.
Unless—my children! Us! All of us! Just as we had worked together against Gertrude, we could all work together to save her! Not exactly the same way, because if we took six months this time she would be long gone (and I don’t mean in a taxi). If we acted right now we could do it! A plan formed in an instant.
I jumped down and said urgently, “Brutus, Gertrude doesn’t get another spoonful of that casserole. Go!” He took off instantly like the well-coached football player he was, at first trying to weave between the people who by now were standing up and looking around in concern and confusion, then crashing through a knot of people, and finally leaping up onto the long cafeteria tables and running along them, jumping from one to the other.
I turned to Publius and shouted, “Grace Goode will have an EpiPen—I know she will! Get it and take it to Gertrude.”
He said, “What’s an Epi—“
I shouted, “Do it—now! It will be in her purse! Make her give it to you!” He took off, skipping the weaving and crashing part and taking to the table tops, his graceful moves evoking dancing chimney sweeps on rooftops where his brother’s brutal but fast moves had evoked Quasimodo on a burning cathedral.
I turned to Harbhajan and shouted, “Harbie! Take this change, run out to the payphone in the hallway and call 9-1-1!”
Harbhajan took the money and said urgently, “Sir! I must tell you one thing.”
I wanted to yell at him to just do as I said, but I couldn’t expect him to react instantly as my own children did. Perhaps one day we would be close enough for him to do my bidding upon a shouted command, but such conditioning takes time. Besides, he had a way of seeing important things that others missed. I took a deep breath and made myself say, relatively calmly, “What?”
He said, “Emergency calls are free. I do not need these—“
Irrelevant factoid! Let the conditioning begin. I smacked the proffered quarters out of his hand and said, “Just do it! Now!” I was gratified to see his turban swivel away from me as he turned and ran for the door to the hallway. I noticed that he used a chair as a stair-step and ran width-wise across an empty table, even though there were no people in his way. My heart went out to him, for he always strove to fit in with us, just as his immigrant father, Jimmy Abraham Washington Roosevelt Nixon Singh Makhija, made every effort to fit in with all of America.
I prepared to make my own run along the tables, when Matilda tugged at my sleeve and said piteously, “Daddy!” She only called me that in her moments of most extreme middle-child anguish. “Why does everyone but me get a job? I want to save Gertrude too!”
Time was running out but I couldn’t save one girl at the expense of ruining my own daughter. I grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her square in the eye and said, “Matilda, I thought you knew.”
She said through tears, “Knew what?”
I said, “You’re with me. Who else but you can let Gertrude know that we’re actually saving her, not assaulting her?”
Matilda’s years of self-absorption and running commentary and journalling about her own emotions suddenly, under unfathomable stress, morphed into complete empathy for Gertrude. She could see how terrified the other girl would be if she were jolted out of her kasserole coma to find our crazed family bearing down on her like the bulls of Pamplona. She pulled her shoulders back, dragged a sleeve across her wet face, and said, “Let’s go.” She jumped up onto our table and turned to where I was frozen in amazement at her transformation, her hair now wild like Medusa’s and her tautly poised shape backlit by the long fluorescent lights above her. It was her turn to shout, “Dad…now!” She turned and ran. I followed.
Pandemonium reigned throughout the cafeteria. I saw it all as though in slow motion as I sprinted along the Formica highway in my children’s wake. Some people ran toward Gertrude, while others cowered against the walls or even under the tables.
Brutus had reached Gertrude’s table and I saw him launch himself to slide headfirst along it toward the girl, who still had her eyes closed as she crammed bite after bite of the kasserole into her mouth. Brutus slid through plates and cups like a lead blocker demolishing a goal line defense. He plowed into the kasserole dish at full speed, carrying it and himself on down the table until he slid off onto the floor with a loud crash. That was going to burn and leave a mark, but he had completed his part of the mission. Gertrude would not get another spoonful of that dish of death.
Publius was still wrestling with Grace Goode when I first started my own run, but he soon won the tug-of-war over her purse and resumed his dash. He, too, launched himself headfirst onto Gertrude’s table, using the large purse like a cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive against the mess of food and drink that Brutus had left in his wake. He used the toes of his sneakers artfully to stop his slide right in front of Gertrude. He hopped off the table and began rummaging through the purse.
Now Matilda made her own unique slide, seated and leaning back with her feet raised slightly ahead of her. She timed it so as to reach the far end of the table without sliding off onto Brutus, who was still lying amidst the shards of the shattered ceramic dish, covered in kasserole as though he had been dredged in batter in advance of deep-frying. She nimbly dismounted from the table and walked behind Gertrude, who by now was blinking and staring in bewilderment at the oven mitts on her hands and the now-empty serving spoon. Matilda arrived just in time to catch her as Gertrude slumped from her chair to the floor.
Was it emotional shock brought on by the hypnotic influence of that bewitching dish, or was she going into anaphylactic shock from eating the gluten? I sped up and then launched myself toward the now-clear table, but my foot caught the end of it and instead of a graceful slide, I tumbled down the table in an awkward roll. I would have crashed, but Brutus jumped up and used his solid frame to gather me in and give me a soft landing on my feet. I slipped and crunched my way through the kasserole debris and hurried to Gertrude.
Matilda was seated on the floor with Gertrude’s head resting on her lap. I quickly knelt alongside and I could see that Gertrude’s neck was swollen, her face was red and she was perspiring heavily and gasping for breath. Anaphylaxis—if it got worse, she would not even be able to gasp. I saw that Matilda had already loosened the collar of Gertrude’s blouse and she was keeping up a stream of reassuring words into the girl’s ear. I held my hand out like a surgeon and said, “Publius! The EpiPen, now!”
Publius smacked a black tube into my hand and I broke it open then flung it away and said, “That’s a fountain pen! Hand me that purse!”
I was pawing through the purse frantically when I heard a thump. I looked up in time to see Grace Goode sliding toward us along the table on her belly with her arms spread wide and her legs raised behind her like the tail of an airplane. Everyone but me was earning maximum style points. Brutus caught her, too, and helped her to where we worked over her gasping daughter. Grace grabbed the purse from my hands and said, “I keep it in this pocket on the outside.”
Finally she held up the EpiPen and turned toward Gertrude. She lifted Gertrude’s skirt on one side, exposing her upper leg. I reached for the EpiPen. Grace smacked my hand and said, “She’s my daughter, I know how to do it!”
I persisted and put my hand firmly around Grace’s and said, “I know, but you’re shaking. We need to hold it steady. Come on now, together.”
She nodded and together we administered the injection, holding it for the prescribed ten seconds and then some, all the while channeling our desperate hopes in along with the medication.
Gertrude continued gasping for another minute and then, gradually over several minutes, her breathing and her color returned to normal. Her eyes fluttered open and the first thing she saw was Matilda, who had held her head and stroked her hair and face for the entire time as Grace Goode held one hand and I held the other. Gertrude said, “Hey, you’re that weird girl.”
Before this event, a comment like that would have sent Matilda into a tailspin for days, during which she would have filled two notebooks with intense scribbling. Now, though, she laughed and looked up at me and Grace and I saw that her earlier tears and subsequent heroic action had smeared her makeup, and her hair was even more Gorgon-esque than before. She was, perhaps, weird at first glance if you were just awakening from an oxygen-deprived faint, but knowing what I knew about the various demons with which she always wrestled, and how she had exorcised them instantly to save someone else, I found her quite beautiful.
Matilda said, “We did it! She’s back!”
Led by Harbhajan, several firemen arrived at that moment, followed closely by a paramedic team. We moved aside to let them tend to Gertrude. I joined my kids in a group hug but it was bittersweet, for I knew I had to face up to what I had done. I broke our huddle and turned to Grace Goode with my eyes downcast and my head bowed in shame. I said, “Grace, I really don’t know where to begin. I am so sorry—“
Grace scoffed at me, as usual, and said, “What are you talking about? You got to her as fast as you could and you didn’t care if everyone thought you were crazy at first. I owe you an apology. Several apologies. You saved Gertrude’s life. And you not even a medical doctor.” (Ouch.) “How you knew she was in danger from across the room I’ll never…I’ll never know but I’m just so glad you did! You and your wonderful family! Thank you all! And this guy too, I guess…um…gracias.”
Harbhajan pointed up at his turban and said, “Ma’am, I am actually—“ but upon receiving an elbow jab from Matilda he ended with a courtly bow and a weak, “—at your service, Señora.”
Whereas before I had always seemed to bring out the worst in Grace Goode, this trauma showed me a completely different side of her. Was she actually tearing up? Completely understandable, considering the fear followed by the flood of relief over Gertrude. As she cried she told me how Gertrude had always suffered from her gluten allergy, but ever since Mr. Goode ascended to a higher plane (he had ditched the family after earning his rating in jumbo jets and going from crop-duster to airline pilot) she had grown resentful and wanted to destroy the pizza that she could not eat, which was why Grace always made her go last in the children’s line.
I chastised myself for not seeing Gertrude’s pizza destruction as the psychological disorder that it so clearly was but, you know, I was off the clock and as you surely know by now I was blinded by my unfulfilled desire for the equitable distribution of pizza. I fibbed a tiny bit by telling Grace that I had not even noticed Gertrude’s pizza actions.
After spilling those sad details, Grace further surprised me by saying, “You’re nothing like that handsome, sexy, jet-setting rat-bastard ex-husband of mine. You may be a little strange, and you may not know your basso profondo from a hole in the ground, but you are my hero.” She then wrapped me in a tight hug with her wet face pressed into my chest. The people who still stood in a circle around us wondering just what exactly had happened interpreted that hug as a good sign, and they welcomed it with loud cheers and applause. I didn’t deserve the hug, or the accompanying poetic words, or the applause, but I went with it.
I have used and possibly abused several online writing tropes in telling this story, but I find myself wishing that I could introduce a new one. Its purpose would be to make readers aware that they are at or near a very significant scene, and that they should examine it closely and try to learn something from it. I suppose Tolstoy and other good writers would say that the reader should do that for every scene, without exhortation, but I’m starting to come around to the idea of the use of such signposts, just so they are used sparingly. The casual reader deserves a hint every now and then…amirite? (Online trope, check). The trope I would like to create would be something like frieze. I’m thinking of the type of frieze that is decorated with a bas-relief scene. But a frieze is too flat for real life—what I really want is a three-dimensional tableau. I don’t have the right phrase to signal that yet, but even as I accepted and returned Grace’s hug, I had a moment to frieze, or freeze, and to study the tableau of which we were a part, and to think about it. I have given it much thought since then, too, so if this seems impressively philosophical for the spur of the moment (kind of like implausibly diagnosing a gluten emergency at a spooky distance), please understand that I have had the advantage of time to look back on these events before writing this backstory.
In that moment with my chin resting on the top of Grace’s head, I realized the rarity and thus the preciousness of a good tableau featuring all of one’s loved ones. There are certainly many moments of ordinary togetherness where nothing dramatic is happening; even those may yield a small lesson or two, even if it is just repeating the foundational lesson about appreciating the people in your life. But a tableau on the cusp of or at the conclusion of some noteworthy event or achievement is likely to teach you even more because of the heightened stress and emotions of the occasion.
That moment after we had all saved Gertrude, when Grace Goode was embracing me, was, without a doubt, a frieze-worthy tableau. It was memorable, it was worth examining, and there was much to learn from it and everything that had led up to it. I was to study that tableau and to take many lessons from it. Not every lesson was good or flattering to me, but all were valuable.
Those lessons are worth sharing but I have crammed just about all the backstory I can into this one recipe. Stopping now would suit my sense of proper limits (surprise, I do have such a sense, nowadays), for I think each person and each major event deserves its own recipe. And I have in fact written those recipes, each with its own backstory. If you are curious, or just plain hungry for good eats, you may seek out those recipes either individually or in my omnibus edition of The Huffaker Family Storytime Cookbook. To avoid frustrating you completely, though, I will whet your appetite, so to speak, by telling you a bit about each recipe.
Brutus’s All-American Triple-Decker Spamburger With Chips, Just Plain Potato Chips Okay Dad sounds simple but it has unexpected depth. The backstory presents a father who stops soothing his own hurt over his broken marriage and rediscovers his responsibility for helping a young man emerge from childhood, and then embarks on a difficult but joyous ordeal of helping that young man become not just a star athlete but also an adequate student with varied career options. I speak so much of Brutus’s intellect, or lack thereof, that I know I do him a disservice. Brutus, more than anyone else I know, is a genius of strength, love, loyalty, and friendship. That moment when he rose from the kasserole wreckage to catch me when I fell—that is Brutus all over, maybe not included in the more intricate plans and not seeming all that engaged, but suddenly being there to casually save you in a way that no one else could ever do. I outshine him in exactly one area, but he has graciously and patiently allowed my dunderheaded self to learn other things from him. His spamburger perfectly captures his essence. And yes, he insisted on “plain potato chips” being not just an ingredient but part of the title, to counteract my tendency to complicate things.
Smart man, that Brutus.
Matilda and Harbhajan’s Naan Bread Fajitas With Lentil Gravy is a multicultural mashup. Its backstory also features a father who dropped the ball at a critical point in his child’s life, but it then focuses on the very strong young lady who somehow managed to make the best of the situation until she ultimately received the support she had been asking for for quite some time. Spoiler alert—though you may have gleaned this spoiler from the name of their recipe—in addition to life lessons and cooking instructions, the reader will also come away knowing how to properly wrap a Sikh turban for heads of all sizes, from adult down to small grandchildren (who arrived in due time, not with parents still in high school, but that’s all I’m saying about it here).
Publius’s Found Food Pizza is an undeserved tribute to a pizza-obsessed father who, upon the departure of his wife, let his home turn into more of a clubhouse than a place where children might expect nurturing and proper instruction. The backstory is about a boy with larcenous tendencies and a talent for betrayal finally hearing the words, “That is wrong,” and being held accountable. It’s an ironic recipe and an ironic backstory because the person performing the corrective discipline had only recently employed the boy’s dubious skills in service of a mad plot that resembled nothing so much as an elaborate robbery caper that ultimately endangered the life of a young girl. I won’t spill all the details of how the boy’s tilting ship was righted, except to say that it was, and that he grew up to work in law (on the right side of it, too). In fact, the program of correction began immediately after the caper (or the day after it, actually, if you include the time the boy spent, after the potluck dinner, disposing of all of the evidence of the caper, again at the behest of that on-again, off-again, but then (finally) on-again good father).
It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to see the common element in those other tasty concoctions: me, Claudius Huffaker, Psy.D. I can make no valid excuse other than human weakness for the way I treated my children like minor characters in my own drama when I became their only parent, and for some years thereafter. I had received full custody of all of them not only because I had dared to ask for it, but also because it was granted without being contested. I had seen that as some great public endorsement of my qualities as a parent and I had ridden that wave of high self-regard into the sunset, leaving them to tread water in the hypothermic deep water. I never stopped to think that, regardless of who got custody, the kids might have wished that there had been more of a fight over them. I continued thinking that I deserved the honor of full custody forever, just because I had won it by default. Like a dumb, stoned surfer who doesn’t realize that the gnarly wave has shrunk to a ripple, I rode along, congratulating myself long after the wave subsided. Meanwhile, my children sank.
Or they would have, except that at that last potluck dinner of that school year, instead of a life-altering disaster, I was granted the life-altering tableau. I made the most of it. My own changes began that night (okay, the next morning—evidence disposal and all that). My three children’s recipes tell it all in gory but nutritious detail. I hope I don’t sound triumphant over the way things turned out. I’m not. Every morning upon awakening, I open one eye at a time, slowly, and look around and get my bearings just to make sure I’m living the life that I worked to earn after that night, and not the one I had earned through laziness and inattention before. No one ever tells me they had a bad time during my bad years, but they don’t have to—I can so easily picture what they must have been doing, off on their own, while I was feverishly doing whatever the hell I was doing. It’s great stuff to remember if I ever start to get too full of myself, but by the grace of their forgiveness, I spare myself such thoughts. Most of the time.
Speaking of grace, observant readers will notice that I referred to a “tableau with all of our loved ones” and may wonder where Grace fits in, since she was right there in the middle of it. She was physically present in the tableau, but was she just an incidental figure or was she, eventually, a loved one?
Dr. Huffaker’s Upside Down Tomato Surprise Lasagna has the answers you seek. Its backstory is unique in the annals of romance, for it deals with the weighty question of whether it is possible to go from mutual disdain and dislike, to mild attraction, to dating, to love, to engagement, to a brief separation, back to engagement, and finally to marriage and hoping for deep and abiding love at last sight (love at first sight not having worked out). Yes, the opposites-attract, hate-turning-to-love story has been done, but has it been done with as much mutual misunderstanding of just what the heck each other is trying to say nearly every time they talk to each other, while also trying to raise a combined family? It has? Okay, maybe you have read such a story or seen such a movie. But did you also get a lasagna?
Grace’s Meatloaf is rather ordinary as far as ingredients go, departing only slightly from the recipe that is nearly covered with Hi and Lois and Family Circus cartoons in Grammy’s old recipe binder—the original, which I had laminated to entomb the cat dander so that the noxious binder could take its proper place in our kitchen bookshelf. But it is made special by the fact that Grace so seems to enjoy making the three pans it takes to feed everyone on Sundays. The backstory is not so ordinary, nor is she. There’s a reason she was able to slide down that cafeteria table with such, shall we say, Olympic style combined with military precision, with one hand in the proper position to grip a Ka Bar knife. You see, in her younger years, before meeting the crop-duster pilot, Grace…well, you’ll have to get yourself a top-secret clearance to fully appreciate that recipe.
All Huffaker Family recipes include gluten-free substitutions, of course.
I hope you are not disappointed, for I leave you not with a list of ingredients and cooking instructions for Grammy Goode’s 4-Star Korn-‘O’-Kopia Kasserole, but with a sincere hope that you will do as I did and find—or create—the dishes that make life meaningful for you and yours. Serve those dishes often, and be sure to savor them every time. When writing down your own recipes, make sure that you, at least, can remember what your special codes and notations mean. They will be different for every family.
If you insist on a recipe after my long backstory, there it is. I know my recipe sounds sappy, but hey, it worked for me and my three kids and my two swimsuit-model step-daughters and my last and best wife.
I will end this recipe-free backstory with all of us posed in that tableau in the cafeteria, and my reminder to you to be alert for tableaux in your own life: look for them, treasure them, learn from them, and if you don’t notice a tableau happening every now and then, why, you might just try to whip one up. Whether your tableaux occur spontaneously or you have to cook them up, just be sure to notice them and store away the memory, for like a good dish made from a good recipe, once served they are gone.
Finally, like a genie who bedazzles you with tales and miracles and who then leaves abruptly in a cloud of smoke, I leave you with a hearty…you guessed it (no fair, you can see the rest of this page already so it’s not much of a guess)…frieze! (and tell your friends about this new trope)…wait for it (but not for long, the end is nigh)…spoiler alert (really now, for something you can easily see by reading a few words ahead?)…read on (just one more word, though)…Alakazam!