The Fifth Guest at the Table
Love is a curious thing. We think we know what we’d do for love. We sing hokey songs about swimming rivers and climbing mountains. When push comes to shove, almost no one delivers.
I’ve not met a love-struck mountain climber yet. I don’t know of my own experience that love is a many-splendor’d thing. I do know that it has many shapes and forms and it’s measured by more than Valentine’s cards. Food is love for some people. It was for my grandmother. On the day of her marriage, my grandpa drove her proudly home in his Model A. She immediately took off her wedding dress, changed into work clothes, and fell right in with the work of the hour--helping the men of her new family scrape hogs.
Granny spent most of her life preparing food one way or another, from rendering it to planting it to cooking it. She could make killer chicken and dumplings and great fried squirrel. Every Sunday, her dining room was full of aunts and uncles and cousins and in-laws lining up to eat. When I was little, my uncles persuaded me that fried squirrel head was a delicacy. They showed me how to pop its jaws open and eat its tongue and brains. At the time, I ate it gladly. Delicacy or not, I don’t have the stomach for squirrel head today.
Old habits die hard. Granny never lost the habit of cooking enough at the noon meal to feed a log rolling. Long after the days of log rollings were past, she still continued to cook and people still showed up to eat. Two meats, four vegetables, and at least one home-made dessert (her specialty was jellyroll) drew people from all over to my grandmother’s house at lunch time.
Well into their eighties, Granny and Grandpa still grew much of the food that dressed the table every day. They even had their own particular mathematical formula for increasing the number of rows in their garden. I don’t remember precisely how it worked, but I remember listening to the discussion. Whenever somebody got married or had a baby, they’d work it out between them. One more person meant so many more rows of corn, beans, okra, tomatoes, and at least three kinds of peas--purple hulls, lady peas, and Kentucky Wonders. They dried and saved their own seeds, too. Monsanto wouldn’t like that a bit.
Before her marriage, Granny had the sole care of nine little brothers and sisters and her widowed father. She fed and clothed them and learned when she was just a child to make things last. Granny didn’t know how to operate any other way. This deeply ingrained trait was invaluable in sustaining large families on little money. Her philosophy of making things last ran the gamut from food to household goods to clothes. Granny was as good a seamstress as she was a cook. In the 1950s my aunt had the biggest collection of poodle skirts at her rural high school to prove it. In the growing prosperity of the Baby Boom years, my grandmother’s drive to make things last could be tedious. She even extended the principle to my doll clothes. She made their skirts with half-inch sturdy French-felled seams. I wanted elegance; I got strength. After all, it’s not like my Barbie was going to work in the fields. Occasionally, I’d pretend Ken was Flint McCullough, Indian scout, and act out a ‘Wagon Train’ episode, but beyond her occasional treks west, my Barbie was pretty much a stranger to hard work.
In fact, Granny judged all things by how well they’d last. On one occasion, we’d all driven to Ruston an hour and a half from our place in Grant Parish, to pick peaches. My parents, grandparents, and I spent the morning in one of the big commercial orchards. Driving home, we stopped by a little country store just south of Ruston. It was almost my mother’s birthday, and I wanted to buy her a gift. Daddy had slipped me a few bucks and Granny and I went into the little store together. We stood side by side in the center aisle, both of us covered in stinging peach fuzz and smelling of sweat. There were only two sets of glasses to choose from--one with a dainty floral and one with strong glass ribs. I can’t say that I argued with Granny. Granny was never a contentious person. To my knowledge she never once defended her own boundaries in her hundred-and-one years of life. But I can still see her hefting the ribbed glass in her hand. “This’ll last!’ she said. Her gentle insistence won out. I drank from the tumblers Granny picked out for the next thirty years.
You never knew who would show up at Granny’s for lunch. She fed God only knows how many Baptist preachers and other strays. On this one particular day twenty years ago, there were only four of us--Granny, of course, my aunt (the one with the poodle skirts), my mother, and me. Granny must have been in her nineties by then. She’d put out her usual bounty. I don’t remember the complete menu, but the table was full. She was especially pleased to have a big mess of fresh greens which she’d picked that morning. She’d washed them in her sink and cooked them down in her big Magnalite pot. They did look good. We all served ourselves, and as we sat eating, my aunt began to snicker. From across the table, she’d spotted something in my plate. There it lay—the fifth guest at the table, a stink bug nestled in my portion of greens, its chartreuse carapace just as bright and strong as when it was alive. And that had been only about three hours earlier.
I was younger and sassier then. As I see my sixtieth year on the near horizon, I feel even more deeply how my grandmother must have felt, frustrated by her own waning powers. She would have been deeply humiliated to find that her washing of the greens had been less than adequate, that she had overlooked a stink bug. There sat my sweet old ninety-something Granny looking from my laughing aunt to me, puzzled, anxious, wondering what the trouble was.
We should have called my aunt ‘Hawkeye.’ Or maybe just ‘Hawk.’ With her aquiline nose, especially when she arched her brow, she looked like a bird of prey. The arching of her brow telegraphed the attack. As she looked into my plate from across the table, she arched even as she snickered. I knew then that she was gearing up for a sortie. And that the person who’d take the brunt of it would be my grandmother. Granny had already received more than one strong message from her loving family that she was less than adequate, even though she could out-work us all. Certainly, none of her progeny could ever achieve her authentic sweetness and purity of heart. Fact of business, as Granny would have said, I once made a case-hard psychiatrist cry when I told him how my Junior League aunt had made Granny wear a Chanel-cut suit and a French twist to a family wedding. She’d looked humiliated beyond words in her exaggerated salon twist and her faux Chanel. Frankly, the Art Nouveau roll she wore at the nape of her neck and her little shirt-waist dresses were good enough for the queen of England, but the radical make-over she’d endured for a marriage that didn’t last as long as my doll clothes proclaimed more loudly than words, “You are not good enough as you are.”
As my aunt struggled to master her laughter so that she could speak and unveil the horror, I evaluated my choices. I could hide the insect on my plate and just eat around it. I could scoop it into my napkin and dispose of it later. Or, I could eat it. With the first two options, the damning evidence of the stink bug would still be around. I could see my aunt showing it off even if she had to dig it out of the trash.
I have a weak stomach. Always have had. I’m even a sympathetic barfer. If someone throws up, I do too. Weak stomach or not, that day there seemed no choice: eat the bug. I set my face and braced my gullet. I twirled that stink bug into the greens with my fork the same way you spin spaghetti. I took a deep breath and thrust it into my mouth. “Chew,” I commanded my jaws and miraculously they obliged. Few things taste exactly like they smell. But this was one of them. It wasn’t like eating the worm in a peach, which probably tastes exactly like peach and offers no dental resistance. The bug retained every last bit of its bugness. Remember: this was not just any old bug—something that might go to mush, but a crunchy prickly nasty sticky foul-smelling fouler-tasting stink bug.
My aunt turned from red to white. She pressed her napkin to her mouth and fled the table. “Swallow,” I commanded mouth and throat, and swallow they did. Granny watched my aunt’s mad dash with worried concern. I smiled reassurance at her. I’m sure she was just as puzzled at my look of nauseated triumph as she was at the retching sounds coming from the bathroom. “Must a been somethin’ she ate,” I said when I could bring myself to speak. And to my own considerable amazement, I remained seated at the table and kept on eating. From that day to this, no one has ever said the first word about that singular lunch.
Most of us only think we know what we’d do for love. But I’ve been tested and I know my full measure. I loved—and still love—that sweet old soul so much I’d gladly eat a bug! In fact, I did. For her, I’d do it again tomorrow.