Rebecca
I agreed to the theme oil and/or vinegar (or maybe it was my idea, I can’t remember now) despite the fact that I didn’t want to write about salad (too much chewing) because I thought there were other alluring dichotomies at home in that /. Specifically there are the abundant analogies to be crafted from the dirty and the clean, slick and squeaky, the soiled and the spotless. Unfortunately that just brings me back to salad:
Oil/Vinegar:
Before we even got to the show they told us to call her Grandma. All of our cousins called her Nanny but we had a Nanny on the other side and due to the failing mental acuity of our parents and/or some complex family politics they insisted that we use distinct names for discrete people. Which was cool except it regenerated those politics into child-factions. Maybe we didn’t call The Grandma “Nanny” because she wasn’t our real Nanny, they all thought. We were the pity, adopted, cousins, the kipa-free, country kind. We didn’t get holiday gifts because the rest of the family favored the cheaper kind of We-Don’t-Even-Know-What-You-Celebrate passive aggression instead of the Here-Take-This-Because-Hanukah-Is-Truer-Than-The-Epiphany-You-Goys kind. In fact, the only gift The Grandma ever gave us was one she gave me. After a prolonged visit to her retirement apartment in New Jersey she forked over the putative “toy” with which I had been amusing myself. It was a closed ring of curved plastic tubing that rotated at the joints so it could be formed into an at first seemingly unlimited set of abstract shapes. It was Compaq gray and I wouldn’t see anything like it again until I started therapy and grew accustomed to frustratingly boring waiting-toys. “You can take that with you,” she told me.
This was before that though. We were meeting her for dinner after surviving the Broadway rendition of A Christmas Carol. A tale of glut and future and so, as many of you probably know, one of the most terrifying programs in the world for someone surviving her first throes of homosexual lust upon a girl four years younger.
By the time we got into the taxi to go for dinner I was suffering from nauseating, crippling guilt. It was the tautological kind of guilt against which the guilt-traditions of both my parents’ programs of faith paled in comparison. Accordingly: I was really hungry.
I pled my case but my mother told me I had to wait until we got to the restaurant. No snacks to spoil the dinner we had coming. That seemed like forever. The ride to New Jersey, the seating, the water, the decisions, the bread we couldn’t eat because it would ruin our appetites, the plate of unsatisfying sour greens– it was going to be hours.
The Grandma sat in front of my sister and I. I was embarrassed that she had overheard my begging and picked on the bubblegum pink hearts on my white tights, head down. We were only on the road for a few moments when I felt her overly moisturized, dinosaur hand sneak through the crack between the seats. She banged my knee with the side of her awkward wrist, keeping her face forward to conceal her intrepid movements. Ensuring some plausible deniability she continued the grown-up talk. Out of the bottom of her pocket book she had retrieved some pretzel pieces and was now foisting them upon me which, in addition to being sort of gross was also totally against the rules. I had to take them from her floundering hand but knew as soon as I did I would become the guilty party. As if following suit I casually rolled down the window as I accepted the contraband. Maybe I was just perpetuating my own lonely-kid project. My whole body went cold. My stomach seized up. This wasn’t food. It was the perilous fruits of the Ghost of Hanukah-Plenty and eating it would be tantamount to robbing the mouth of Tiny Tsvi.
I inched my hand casually up the glass and let the pretzel slide into the North River.
Heather
The first time I saw you, you had oil stains all over your light blue jeans, thin grey continents floating in a thread-bare sea. The hood was up on the white farm van, packed full of fresh bushels of corn you had picked that morning before dawn by the headlights of your Bronco. Twirled tassels poked out from the splintering wood baskets, some scattered on the floor, making the van a sort of mobile silo. Your head was under the hood and you were yelling to your uncle. Wally, do you have any more oil? It was a sunny day and I had just gotten in from picking broccoli, my shoes still wet from the grassy dew of the low-lying field carved out of a forest. After calling once a week on Sunday mornings all summer, something that had become like a church obligation to me (a tiresome thing that you keep doing just in case something happens this time), your uncle had finally hired me.
The van never worked just right and the prophecy of broken down vehicles scattered across his farm made it seem like you were fighting against something inevitable.
But you could fix anything with bailer twine and an extra bottle of 10W-30.
I’d later find out that this was a ritual, trying to make sure the van would make it the 35 miles into the city so you could sell his corn at one of the daily farmers’ market. He always sent you because you were good with numbers and never complained. And you weren’t afraid to undercut the prices of others farmers, flirting with their help in a way that I used to think you weren’t aware you possessed, popping a raspberry or two in your mouth as you sauntered past their pop-up tents, counting their inventory like the munitions of a camped enemy army before going back and adjusting the slate boards that held your uncle’s price per dozen. A dozen was a dozen too. None of this baker’s dozen bullshit, you used to say.
The summer went on and we used to make out by the abandoned cars in the emptied field, having already lent its secrets to the bales. Sitting atop the broken down box truck, we twirled bubblegum kisses in between bites of slush from down the street, and I wonder how something that used to feel like a Seventeen magazine vignette could now sound so type caste and even trashy. Maybe because once you pass twenty, you realize Seventeen magazine really is type caste and trashy.
I still drive by there sometimes and it looks like an abandoned fair ground, compressed into smudged colors and the smeared green look of trees out my window as I hit the gas to crest the hill. I always turn the music down, as if this will help me to see something new this time. That pale blue box truck is sitting in the same spot with the cracked windshield, weeds choking the tires. The insignia of a long lost function on its side is faded by years of pointed sunlight and drifts of unshovelled snow. It is one in a still growing village of four-tired pre-21st century beasts. With a junkyard up the hill I could never understand why your uncle just let them take up farm land, fallow soil underneath the hanging bumpers, dark oil stains on the grass giving off the false allusion of good loam from the road.
LCooper
I.
Who could remember the exact details? It was a dinner party on Wild Duck Rd–there was great food and someone had brought their kids for me to romp with while the adults (my older siblings included) engaged in sensible conversation. I was making a sharp turn, tearing through the kitchen–coming up from the porch, the deck and the back yard–and in an attempt to assure my balance and footing I held onto the bars on the back of my dad’s chair. I did not see it coming: his arms reached behind and grabbed me by the waist–not because I was creating a scene and disrupting the flow of dialogue–which I most certainly was–but because he wanted me to taste this gorgeous olive oil that a guest in attendance had brought as a gift. Despite having little patience for olives themselves–at this point in my life at least–I did love dipping fresh bread in the dark, rich olive oils that my dad’s Greek clients introduced me to. In the years to come it would become something of ritual for us, my dad and I, to size up the olive oil in restuarants. We would turn to each other upon just seeing the color and know immediately what we were looking at–they were either holding back their good stuff or ignorant of the fact that salad oil is not synonymous with bread oil. They were either cheap skates or philistines. But back to the dinner party: “Lynn” he said after getting my attention, “you must taste this.” He handed me a lump of Arthur Avenue bread still dripping into the pool on his plate. I winced. It was strong, much stronger than any I had tried to date. It may have been infused with rosemary or basil or it may have just been curiously rich. But I can remember being surprised, caught off guard by its intensity. I wish that I had loved it. That I had impressed the table of adults with my sensitive, mature pallet. But I couldn’t. As much as I hate to admit it, I didn’t quite have it in me yet to love the taste of this olive oil.
II.
There’s a lot of things that never made sense to me. This was just one of them but it took until I was a freshman in college to discover just how poorly, inaccurately i had read the story. its supposed to be a a story of mercy. i always heard it as as story of malicious intent. And of all people, the women. Why was it the women–the only people who really took care of him. the women who loved him–who stood at his feet as he suffered and died. Where’d they get the sponge anyway (it must have been a natural sponge from the sea) and how should i have ever read the intent any different? To give a dying, thirsty man a sponge full of vinegar. As a kid in the 1980’s, how was i supposed to know that vinegar was a good thing. Better than whatever polluted, polio ridden water that may have been laying around. I mean, one of his last words was thirst–but vinegar? It seemed cruel. Something was lost in translation.
Now its so damn obvious: a great example of interpolation. To fulfill some prophecy, some scriptural allusion from Psalm 69:21 “And in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink” Besides, you don’t get the “Its finished” without someone finding a rod, a sponge and a bowl of vinegar to stick it in.
III.
“Jill makes the best salad dressing” Grandma Cooper would say.
