Stories. Good for Me

Unknown Allegory with a Man Dancing in It
Brian Kershisnik 2008

Sunday I cooked some brussels sprouts. Or, Brussels Sprouts. There's a disagreement as to whether they must be upper case Brussels. But they are not brussel sprouts, as I thought when I was a child. I tried, as a child, not to think much about them. My daughter, the older one who is more vocal about her foodities, swept into the kitchen to tell me how glad she was I was making "sprouts." "Sprouts," she called them. On a first name basis. "I love them like this! I love it that you fry them with bacon!" She swept away, but not to set the table. She had a school assignment to create a cityscape on paper. She had been drawing every tiny window, every architectural doodad for as long as...recent memory. She was, apparently, required to work at our dining room table (funny, because we don't have a dining room, just a table) and I was going to throw her and her labors off of it so our guests could eat with their plates off the floor. She needed to work every moment till the eating began and would therefore be unable to help. Obviously.

I know she likes it when I tell her about my childhood, so I did.

One time, my mother served us Brussels Sprouts.

Like every other vegetable I ever met before I was eight, they had been blanched in a processing plant somewhere, frozen with probably one half pound of their fellows into a block the shape of the box bearing a three by five glossy of said sprouts, purchased by my mom, dumped (still in their block form) into a pan of boiling water, cooked till, well, soft and served on our table where we were expected to eat them up with margarine and salt. Pepper, in those days, was a dangerous spice reserved for fathers. If you accidentally got some pepper on you plate you could exchange that now spontaneously combustible food for new, safe food, no questions asked.

This cooking arrangement did not show the sprouts to their best advantage.

To be fair, it did not show much of anything well. It was not a time or place (brand new California housing development, 1970) that valued interesting or witty presentation of veggies. Or toothsome presentation, for that matter. I think my very early love of green beans and peas may stem (heehee) from their amenability to this cooking method. Carrots and potatoes were good because they were raw when they went to hang out with roasts. And potatoes are hard to kill anyway. Baked, boiled, fried, they smile kindly upon us. And winter squash and artichokes went into the boiling bath fresh so they came out yummy. But frozen, broccoli suffered. As did cauliflower and spinach. And peas when mixed with carrots and Lima beans. And most everything else.

To be even more fair, my mom does not like to cook. I didn't find this out till I was in college. It explains a lot. Tuna Rice Pie, Tuna Roll, Tuna Loaf, Tuna Casserole, Creamed Tuna on Toast and many recipes with the word "Surprise" in their titles (i.e. "Tuna Surprise"). My mother wasn't in any way looking for more or better things to do with veggies. They were good for us, it was our duty as prosperous Americans to eat them and we ate them. Dutifully. I remember eating green salad with just some salt on it, as fast as I could, sort of holding my breath, because I had to since it was good for me and Ranch dressing hadn't been invented yet. Ranch dressing would probably have helped me through the duties of many family dinners. I know it works great for kids nowadays.

So this one time my mom severely tried our duties with Brussels Sprouts. Note the use of the upper case.

My dad just ate them. He had had a lifetime to get good at holding his breath and besides, he was slinging pepper like crazy. My mom seemed to either eat after we left the table or before we got there; the normal rules didn't apply. One sister was a baby who was still being encouraged to form a fondness for food whether it was good for her or not and one sister had so recently stopped being a baby that she only got one required sprout. That was the rule. There was a number of veggies on your plate, a minimum mealtime requirement that equaled "good for you" and if you didn't eat those...something terrible. Once you had eaten them you could have more. As if. I think my middle sister cried so much she started spitting up and was excused from her sprout. That left me and my duty.

I had tried to eat one but when it came to the swallowing part I couldn't master myself even when I was holding not only my breath but my actual nose and the chewed sprout came springing out of my mouth. Fortunately my gallant napkin sprang forth, ready to receive it. I was alone at the table at the time and no one had witnessed that singular moment. The napkin and its cargo now reposed damply and quietly by my plate. I was six and not yet the food cheater I would become. It simply did not occur to me to toss the other sprouts over my shoulder into the living room or hide them in my pockets or my napkin, for heaven's sake. That first one had been an accident. Orchestrating more accidents was a learned behavior that would have to wait a couple of years to flower. My mom came to the table from wherever she had been keeping herself to inform me that I could eat them or sit there and that was a relief. I was sitting there so I felt I knew the worst.

She hadn't been too rough on me. I had I think three sprouts or possibly five but not four because my mother's sense of design would not have allowed that. Subtract the carcass in the napkin and it leaves me only two or four more.

My dad was watching TV right behind me and I don't think my mom would have allowed me to watch while I sat there dutifully, but I can't imagine being tempted. It would have been Sixty Minutes. Whenever my dad turned on the TV it was always Sixty Minutes. Magic.

After a very long time the margarine I had applied to assist me in my duty hardened into little discs that I could push around with my fork completely independent of the sprouts themselves. This was a nice pastime and interesting, too. Sixty Minutes turned into The Nightly News. The little sisters became ready for bed. I watched my parents perform closing-down-the-house-actions that I had never seen before. I don't remember that it was interesting, only that it was new. As a matter of fact, so was The Nightly News. It was time to kneel for prayer. The sister who was old enough to be any good at thinking was looking at me from the rug where we prayed every night and I was looking at her from the table. My dad was looking at my mother.

My mom came and sat across the table from me. She looked at me for a long time and then asked me how long I was planning to sit there. That was not what I was expecting and was a real poser. My "plan" was not to ever eat the sprouts and she had said I could eat them or "sit there." I didn't think it was my turn to make plot.

My dad sighed and my mom took away my plate with the sprouts and that was all. They never came back. She threw away some sprout blocks that were in the freezer (she had invested, apparently) and we ate peas and beans for a while. Spaghetti sauce, too, because that was a vegetable.

Now my daughter sighs too, gustily, over her cityscape. "I've heard that story. Lots of times."