ANYTHING TO MAKE YOU HAPPY
A personal essay from the vault.
A version of this story was originally published online in “Lucky Peach” in 2015. A decade later, I’m still writing about watching “The Dead Poets Society” at SPACE camp when I was eleven…
ANYTHING TO MAKE YOU HAPPY
My mother raised me to believe that mayonnaise was for idiots. I’d been eating it out at restaurants my whole life, of course, mixed into coleslaw or chicken salad, on hamburger buns, in BLT’s, what have you. But actually having mayonnaise in the fridge at home was unheard of. Mayonnaise to my mother was like peanut butter to the French: disgusting, uncivilized, and impossible to find. On a scale of respectability, a jar of mayonnaise came in somewhere between a vat of pig fat and one of those plastic pails of Marshmallow Fluff.
When I was twenty-one, I explained all this to my boyfriend, who was from North Carolina and loved mayonnaise. He said he felt sorry for me for having had such a deprived childhood, without any mayonnaise. I loved that I could revel in his pity.
“My mother only ever bought us mustard,” I said.
It was so sad to say this out loud. I cried.
I’ve never told anyone this before. But my mother came very close to buying mayonnaise in 1992.
I was eleven years old and had spent most of my summer vacation down in the basement skipping rope in front of the television. The carpet was cherry red wall-to-wall mottled shag, but I had ripped out part of it so I could lie down on the cold wood floor when I got tired and sweaty. Also, it was easier to skip rope on bare wood than on a rug. On the shag, the fibers would get caught between my toes.
I skipped rope for hours in that basement, stopping occasionally to take sips of Coca-Cola. Nobody in my family drank beer, but we had a plastic beer mug that was very technologically advanced at the time. The walls of this mug contained neon blue refrigerant liquid, like in a gel pack for sore muscles. We had only one of these, and we kept it in the freezer. I found the mug disgusting—I associated it with chemicals and very old freezer-burn chicken thighs, etc. But I still used it for my Coca-Cola. It was great because I drank my Coca-Cola very slowly, and the mug kept it cold, obviously, but also kept it pure; the ice did not melt and water down my Coke.
We didn’t have air conditioning, so when I pulled the mug out of the freezer, it smoked against the hot air. Like dry ice. When I poured the Coke into the mug, it frothed up like the head on a pint of ale. It smelled like caramel and honey. A mug of Coke and a snack pack of Doritos was my favorite meal. As an adolescent, I prided myself on how much normal food I could successfully avoid. For a few months, I’d left a piece of toast on the VCR in the basement just to watch the ants swarm. The erosion was too slow for me to measure, and eventually the ants gave up. Maybe the toast had lost its nutritive properties. Those ants certainly never gave up on my Dorito crumbs, however.
It seems contradictory that my mother embargoed mayonnaise, and yet she supplied us with endless quantities of soda and junk food, does it not? No good characters are without contradictions, I suppose. And that is the way I prefer to think of my mother sometimes—how I handle the fact that she won’t live forever—as a character in a story, removed from my life just enough for me to make light of her.
One of my favorite shows to watch down in the basement while I skipped rope was “The Frugal Gourmet.” It was a cooking show on public television hosted by a middle-aged white man in a shirt and tie and striped blue apron who, some years later, would settle seven claims of alleged sexual abuse for an undisclosed amount of money. Was everyone a pedophile when I was a kid? Looking back, it seems that way.