This Afternoon In Drama

There's More

I always pull up on the side of The Council Thrift Shop building, so I only knew of the featureless woman and the narcoleptic man.  On Sunday I passed by the front and gasped.  More.

Two more women, in fact, not donating but shopping.  One tries on a coat that makes her look like a fried tub of butter, and if her companion were a good, solid friend, she would tell the front-most woman so.  But look at how the artist renders the woman in the coat without a mouth and the one watching her with the most elaborate facial attribute he's attempted yet.  The other people just have dashes, commas, afterthoughts, but this woman has a distinctly articulated upper and bottom lip, the upper in an undeniable smirk.  She's going to tell her friend to get that coat.  "It does such cute things for your shape!" she'll say.  Bizarrely, there appear to be seven more of these coats hanging on the rack.  How unusual it is to find multiple quantities in a thrift store; this isn't Loehmann's.   Surely the woman with the malicious mouth will advise her "friend" to purchase the whole lot, dumped at the store by a fat camp for yentas (even the most tragic of campers refused to wear them on the "health hike.")  She will make this seem like a good idea, purring, "It just flatters you so much-- you wouldn't want to wear your only one out in the wash, would you?"

That the woman in the coat is missing her mouth is most likely a comment on her passivity, her inability to assert not only her own opinions (somewhere deep inside, she knows this coat is a mistake) but her own identity as well.  She clasps her hands in front of her hips.  She hates these hips.  Does this coat hide them?  No, this coat adds two hundred pounds to them, but she refuses to trust her truest instincts.  She gazes not at her friend, not in the mirror, but at the woman across the shop, the one carrying the box and wearing a similarly zig-zaggy sweater.  "She looks better in hers," thinks the mouthless woman.  On the back wall a framed picture of an idyllic, hillside cottage, sun shining as bright as can be, trees growing toward what would undoubtedly be a blue sky (had the artist decided to use color) mocks her.  The painting depicts the easiest sort of existence.  A lie that the world is nothing but a place of beauty.  That little house in the sunshine makes the mouthless woman want to cry.  Her friend senses this, and sadistically wishes she would.

With the expanded scope of the mural comes the knowledge that the man had better open his eyes because he's about to bump into a vase, sitting precariously on the edge of a dresser.  Although-- with the addition of the other women in the illustration, we now realize that everyone in this particular universe operates with his/her eyes closed, so perhaps the man has developed sophisticated, bat-like sonar abilities.  Perhaps he is clicking as he moves through the space, and he is able to piece together the interrelations of tangible things using this method.  The woman in the coat without the mouth cannot click.  Her hips bump into everything around her.

And we now see that it isn't just the clock, but the entire wall that's in a state of stress, those frenetic dashes like a marriage of the ellipsis and the hyphen, shrieking, "Well, now what?!  Now what?!  Now what?!"  Still, the clock continues to move at a faster clip than that which surrounds it, indicated by the longer lines shooting out to the right.  The clock drags time.  It races across the plaster.  It melts the seconds.  It tries to abscond from the store.

A Whole New World. A Dazzling Place I Never Knew.

My college boyfriend, Ryan, had many pet names for me (among them, "Shampoopsie" and "Toothpasty"), but the one I heard most often was "Food Bitch."  The name emerged during a carnival for the elementary school where his mom taught; In N' Out Burgers catered.  In order to serve the large number of people in attendance, the In N' Out workers pre-assembled the burgers, only separating them into a "pile with sauce" and a "pile without," and the "pile without" came with tomatoes nestled between meat and bun.  I was able to taste tomato on any food, even if the tomato had only kissed that food for a fleeting moment, even if the tomato had only whispered a sweet nothing to that food.  So I asked one of the workers if he would make an exception and assemble a pristine, toppingless burger just for me, and Ryan, both embarrassed by my holding up the line and horrified by my severely limited palate, exclaimed, "You are such a Food Bitch!"

And this was a good call because there was actually something very much like a little food bitch living inside my brain, sulking with her arms crossed and her middle fingers permanently extended.  She'd been around since I could remember putting food in my mouth.  There was the oft-repeated story of the family trip to Hawaii- at this point in my life, I only ate grilled cheese sandwiches, and so my dad ended up paying the restaurant an additional fee to remove the burger from the twelve dollar cheeseburger.  Ten years later I ate a grilled cheese sandwich every day in the Brown refectory.  Nothing else appealed to me.  Another seven years later, and for consecutive noons at Bennington I was assembling grilled cheese sandwiches from floppy bread and deli bar cheese as if the dishes in the hot line didn't exist.  Lest you think I only ate grilled cheese, there were a few other foods that spoke my name.  They all fell under the category of "What five-year-olds ask for on a Saturday night:" s'mores, plain spaghetti, Kraft macaroni and cheese, chocolate milkshakes, chocolate chip cookies, chicken tacos (only chicken plus tortilla- no toppings, no sauce or salsa surrounding the chicken), white rice, white bread, mint chip ice cream, and so on.  My inner food bitch was so innately American she should have been on a postage stamp.

But then this past December, without fanfare and without explanation, my Food Bitch got up from her corner, took back her middle fingers, raised her eyebrows, and asked, "Do you think I could get a zucchini and feta pancake up in here?"  Not only did she suddenly want foods she'd never wanted before in her life (as if she were pregnant with a junior Food Bitch or Bastard), but she wanted to try anything and everything in the culinary world in order to add to her rapidly growing list of likes.  Over the past decade there had been periods of time during which I hadn't set eyes on a fruit or a vegetable for months, but Food Bitch told me to buy bananas.  Food bitch requested broccoli.  Food Bitch especially delighted in these spongy half-dried apple rings they sell at Ralph's Fresh Fare, which mimic the consistency of the sweetest shark's cartilage.

Suddenly, the grocery store became a Wonderland, whereas before Food Bitch and I had rushed only four or five aisles, knowing exactly where the frozen pizza (plain cheese, naturally) and graham crackers lived.  Now we strolled like a pair of young lovers.  "Look, Food Bitch," I would excitedly say.  "This box says this burgers is made of vegetables?  Can you believe it?"  "Can we take it home with us?" Food Bitch would ask, blushing.  "A threesome!" I'd laugh.  Into the cart went scallops, Indian yogurt marinades, mandarin oranges, apple blintzes, curried rice pilafs, romaine lettuce, blueberry dressing, lasagna (which I'd never had in my life before January), tofu, pesto, onion soup, whole-grain bread, desserts with cinnamon and raspberry (previously I had not considered anything a dessert that did not feature chocolate) (and by the way, please try Betty Crocker's Warm Delights in "Cinnamon Swirl"- a cake emerges from water and powder inside a microwaved minute, and watching that shit will blow your mind!), and, most strangely of all, instant oatmeal and cereals.  I had not been able to even look at oatmeal ever since a nightmare around age four, when I dreamt of an oatmeal monster, clinging to the window of my childhood bedroom.  It scooped a glob off its oatmeal body with a silver spoon while gurgling, "You have to eat from me."  Cold cereal had been the root of many household wars throughout elementary school.  My mom designated Mondays "cereal Mondays"- each day of the week had a reoccurring breakfast food attached to it- and I'd spend Mondays waiting for my Cheerios, my Golden Grahams, my Life to dissolve into the milk so I could deceive my mom into thinking some of that volume had sank into my stomach instead.  Then I could pour the thickened mixture over my dog's chow or coat the sink's garbage disposal with nutritional mucus.  As I grew older, I narrowed in on the primary source of my cereal disgust: too many small, crunchy particles pretending to be part of a unified whole. 

So it was with immense shock that I found myself wandering toward the Rice Krispies dispenser in the Bennington Dining Hall.  And with even greater shock that I found myself delighting in the multitude of puffed rice pieces rolling across my tongue like a fragile army.  Now back at home, I keep a collection of mini-cereals underneath the counter, so I can eat them as snacks: Raisin Bran and Corn Pops and Corn Flakes and Frosted Wheat and one I've discovered tastes like fine lace giving way in the mouth: Crispix.  What's more, the multi-colored boxes of oatmeal flavors call to me like the M&M rainbow used to.  Sometimes it's "Cinnamon Roll" and sometimes it's "Apple Cinnamon," but the real cowboy has been "Banana Bread."  For years and years, I had both my parents and myself convinced that bananas triggered an innate gag reflex in me, and my body would not allow me to eat them, no matter how badly my potassium reserves might dwindle.

Because, prior to Food Bitch's gustatory puberty, all my foods were so unexotic they made the Denny's menu look avant garde, I'd always assumed that the dishes I knew were known by all.  It's not like anyone was asking, "Fascinating!  What does peanut butter and jelly taste like?"  And while I knew that everyone knew Jell-o, I also assumed that everyone knew a Jell-o dessert, the creamy 12-layer Jell-o Rainbow, my mom made for many occasions throughout my kidhood and adolescence.  It was a staple at the Thanksgiving table, the potluck dinner, the celebrations.   When Geoff told me that lately he'd been especially fond of Jell-o, I remarked upon the familiar dessert and was surprised when he said he'd never encountered it.  Couldn't even picture it.  So I asked my mom for the recipe and went over to his house yesterday (needing his kitchen for preparation because I have no kitchen of my own), and whipped that shit up in just a little over three hours.  Now I'm not just in the business of expanding my own tastes, but that of others as well.

I prepare the electric blue layer of the dessert:

Geoff's family greets the untouched dish:

A cross-section:

The party descends on Kate's tongue: