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___mayo culpa
___________A DAUGHTER PROBES HER
BY ELINOR LIPMAN | as parental offenses go -- the sort that damage children and give them material for a memoir -- my mother's are barely worth mentioning. She and my father raised two daughters, loved us, educated us, doted on us. I can say easily, "We had a roof over our heads. We had clothes on our backs and shoes on our feet, vacations, library cards, Ginny dolls, Sunday school." But when I get to "food on the table," I stop. Of course there was food; plenty. Supper at 6. Milk, eggs and orange juice delivered to the back door, and four trips a week, minimum, to Demoulas' Supermarket. So how ungenerous am I to say, "Look closer." Peer inside my childhood refrigerator, to the shelf where normal families keep bottles bearing labels that say "Heinz" or "Hellman's" or "French's." See none. Sit down at our kitchen table and view our marginal dysfunction playing itself out on my plate, my hamburger, my hot dog. Hear my mother telling us that lemon juice and paprika are dressing; that sour cream on diced potatoes is potato salad. Say hello to a woman with a lifelong, unshakeable condiment phobia. I didn't catch on until I was 9, the year my sister came home from school to announce that tuna dressed with mayonnaise was the way of the world. Ours, moistened with a few drops of white vinegar, didn't bind, wet our brown bread, stained our brown lunch bags and didn't taste good. We protested: No more smelly, soggy sandwiches for the sake of values not our own. My mother purchased the smallest jar of mayo manufactured and, with us exhorting her and nostrils quivering, added a dainty dollop to a whole can of chunk light. That was the pattern: discovery, lobbying, acquisition, grudging accommodation. "Not good for you," she would say, her chief argument. Or, more potent, "I noticed it makes your face break out." In short, anything that came from the condiment aisle or lubricated a sandwich never crossed my mother's lips. She has never eaten a luncheon plate featuring scoops of tuna, chicken, turkey, potato or macaroni salad; has never tasted a lobster roll, a chili dog or a submarine sandwich; never stuck her fingers into a pickle jar, dipped a chip or had a Big Mac; never stood next to a sneeze shield at a salad bar; never uttered the phrase "with the works." In 1964, my sister began to date Alan Slobodnik, the first person to ask for ketchup at our table. My sister persuaded my mother to buy a small bottle, which was stored "down cellar," as we New Englanders say, in a rusty but still-functioning refrigerator, to be brought above ground only for company, and then only if we were eating outside. Before Alan, cookouts featured chicken (chastely marinated in oil, lemon juice, soy sauce and sherry) or steak, or plain hamburgers and hot dogs, preferably with Coleman's dry mustard. No raw onions, which were vulgar and mannish; my father ate big chunks of them along with his vinegared tuna. No salad dressing, although oil and vinegar separately carried no stigma. Jell-O molds were suspect as potluck contributions because their opaque layer may have been achieved through mayonnaise. Sauerkraut, however, was inexplicably one of her favorite foods, allowable under a mysterious dispensation, like horseradish. People ask why. When did it start? Was there a trauma involved? Is there order here, or logic? Vinegar but not vinaigrette? "She used to have to sit at a separate table when Bubbe served her homemade piccalilli and pickles and sour tomatoes," explained my late Aunt Marion, who consumed everything and, unlike my mother, had meat on her bones. On the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I found out how truly irrational my mother's prejudice was. We were at cousin Marcia's house for a barbecue, always a precarious event, foodwise. My mother complimented our hostess on her delicious hamburgers. "What's in them?" she asked. My sister and I froze, having been to college and learned about Worcestershire sauce and Kitchen Bouquet, about the sleazy world of condiments. The unknowing Marcia answered, "Oh, nothing special: ground round, bread crumbs, salt and pepper ... ketchup." My mother did not say, "Isn't that funny? All this time I thought I hated ketchup, but here, in this manifestation, I find it delicious." Time stood still. Finally, she pushed her plate away, literally, and ate no more. The specter of condiments still makes every restaurant meal with my mother a potential crisis: the unannounced coleslaw, an unwitting gherkin, the dreaded condiment caddy, a thimbleful of tartar sauce on her scallop platter. Even breakfast outside the home is fraught -- the unsuspecting waitress approaching with our scrambled eggs and home fries, a ketchup bottle cheerfully tucked between bosom and biceps. "We don't use that," my mother sniffs. If only I didn't notice the tone of her voice, and the squeak of the waitress's shoes as she is stopped in her well-meaning tracks. My teenage son says, "Let's analyze this, Nana," reading to her from the ketchup bottle he likes to place between them. "'Ingredients: red ripe tomatoes, distilled vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, salt, onion powder, spice, natural flavoring.' What don't you eat there?" I say to him, "Don't bother. It's irrational." When she comes to my house for dinner, I meal-plan and edit recipes. I leave the ketchup out of my college roommate's mother-in-law's excellent brisket recipe, substituting tomato sauce even though my mother would never know -- even though in some perverse way I would enjoy the deed, like a downtrodden kitchen worker who spits into the soup. I name the ingredients, carefully chosen for being on her narrow list of approved foods. She laughs her you-silly-girl laugh and says, "You talk as if I'm so fussy." Before last Thanksgiving, I leafed through a half-dozen fall Gourmets and was drawn to the "Warm Green Bean Salad with Dill" from November '93. The condiment devil on one shoulder argued with the submissive-daughter angel on the other. "Do it," the devil said. "It's easy enough to withhold eight plain steamed beans and put them aside for her. Besides there's plenty of other food." I imagined the scene I could make -- like the climactic tantrum in a movie about a homecoming gone awry: "What don't you like in here, Ma? Can't you even take one bite? Out of politeness. Like a good guest and a regular guy." In the end, I didn't rebel. Thanksgiving fell on her 87th birthday, which annually I think will be her last. I chose the chaste "Lemon Rosemary Green Beans" from November '92 and assigned the actual cooking to my sister. I told her it gets harder with time, not easier, and my little bird of a 90-pound elderly mother enlarges as she shrinks. The week before the holiday, it was my sister who encouraged me to make that red onion relish I was flirting with (November '96) and to practice some Zen detachment. I told her, without reflection, that I couldn't. That I was a sad case, cowed by that ... look, by the way Mom holds her hand up to ward off a side dish, and thereby me.
My sister is older, braver, an organizational consultant, and she's been
married to Alan Slobodnik for 28 years. "You're to make what you want," she
ordered, "then sit where you can't see her face."
Elinor Lipman is the author of three novels, "Then She Found Me," "The Way Men Act" and "Isabel's Bed," and a collection of short stories, "Into Love and Out Again." Her novel "The Inn at Lake Devine" will be published in May 1998.
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