MAYONNAISE

I learned very early that there was no good way to tell my mom anything negative about any food item she put before me because she always took it as a failure to provide instead of a culinary error. To this day, at age 52, I STILL don’t tell my mom I don’t like something she made.  It started with our school lunches.  When I was young my mom was obsessed with mayonnaise and its alleged ability to improve on the discount bread we bought for our school lunches. 

Our lunches weren’t like the other kids.  I remember having a lunchbox when I was in kindergarten and first grade but because my younger brother could never remember to bring his home and would leave it in a cubby or in the play yard for days on end, the lunchbox with its matching thermos was replaced with brown paper bags and disposable bottles of “juice drink.”  This was because my Mom thought that it would look like she favored me over my brother if I had a lunch box when my brother was reduced to brown paper sacks.  Better to punish me than to attempt to train my brother to remember his goddamn lunchbox. 

Other kids had lunchboxes, though some had brown paper bags like us.  They also sandwiches wrapped  in crisp sheets of wax paper with thick cuts of meat, stuffed with lettuce and cheese, or just cheese.  Or fluffy mounds of white bread with jam and peanut butter oozing out the sides.  They had little cans of pudding or fruit cocktail, or little packets of crackers with spreadable cheese, or little bags of chips.  They almost always had a cookie or three.  They had thermoses full of cold milk or little cans of apple juice.  Compared to the other kids, ours paled in comparison.  We’d have a sandwich, a box of raisins or an orange, and that wretched “juice drink.” I can assure you they held no juice.  They were plastic bottles of colored sugar water and they were horrible. 

My mom had never been an American child.  Vietnamese children didn’t eat sandwiches and pudding cups.  Vietnamese children in the 1950’s lucky enough to be in school ate Vietnamese food provided by the school or if they went to a French school they were sent home for lunch. Everything my mom learned about American lunches and American food came from my father and television.  She also didn’t understand what a lunch said about you.  She didn’t know that your classmates knew who had money and who didn’t by the contents of their lunch.  She didn’t know how kids flaunted the contents of their lunch at us and asked why we never had anything good.  And that’s something my brother and I were smart enough to never mention.

It wasn’t my mom’s fault our lunches were so spartan.  We were on a strict budget and my father decided he was going to follow the Atkins lifestyle.  Most of the budget went to buying him steaks, tuna, very specific salad vegetables and protein powder.  She complained about it every Friday night when we went grocery shopping.  We spent forever in the meat section while my mom checked prices and weights on every cut of steak in the place.  Does that make it his fault?  I haven’t decided, but I will call it selfish.   If mom had found good deals my brother and I got to pick one treat and it would usually be a pack of pudding cups or crackers and cheese; the things we coveted from other kids lunches.  We would try to save our treats for lunches the following week, but never succeed.

The most expensive things in our shopping cart after Pop’s food would be bread and lunchmeat.  These were bought SOLELY for our lunches and were not to be eaten at any other time.  When I say lunchmeat, I mean the cheapest bologna in the store that day or these horrible thin sliced meats that came in little plastic bags.  They had about 6 slices in them, each one so thin you could see through it and you’d need all 6 to make a decent sandwich but we were given two slices each on two slices of bread from the mark down section.  

The cheapest loaf of bread was usually the stalest loaf of bread.  Somewhere along the way my mom heard that mayonnaise was the savior of stale bread and she was set on saving some bread.  Too bad I hated mayonnaise. I still do.  I’m not sure if that’s because she put me off it by drowning that single slice of bologna in it or because I’ve always been smart enough to know that an oozy goop made of raw egg left in a paper sack all day in a warm classroom was a recipe for disaster.   Every day I would beg, “PLEASE NO MAYONNAISE” and every day I’d pull my sandwich out of the bag and feel my stomach turn as I spied the thick streaks of mayonnaise smeared along the inside of the baggie it was in.

 “You HAVE to have it.  Or the bread too dry.” 

“The bread is dry with it but it doesn’t matter I just don’t like Mayonnaise!”

“You know we have little money! I do the best I can!”

“Mom, I know.  I just don’t like mayonnaise.  Just give me the bread without it.”

“You have to have the mayonnaise to make the bread soft so you can eat it!”

“No, mom, it’s BETTER without the mayonnaise.  Don’t use the mayonnaise.  Please.  Then we’ll save more money!”

“You need the mayonnaise!”

“I can make my lunch.  You don’t have to.”

“No because you won’t use the mayonnaise and the bread will be too dry and you won’t eat it.”

“I LIKE DRY BREAD”

“YOU STOP LYING!  Go get the stick!”

My younger brother didn’t like mayonnaise either, but when he saw that my attempts at reasoning only lead to a spanking with the dreaded stick he opted for a different route.  His grand idea was to just throw them away. But this was Daryl and his grand ideas always suffered from…well…having been formed in his questionable brain. 

We had moved into the house on Falcato Drive in November.  In early spring we suddenly had an ant problem in the house.  Initially, no one thought anything of it because everyone had ant problems in the springtime.  There had also been an odd smell developing near my brother’s bedroom.  As this was a newly built house the new paint, new linoleum, and new nylon shag carpeting made the house reek of petroleum based newness so weird smells were just part of our existence.  Further, my brother had suffered from horrific foot odor from the time he started wearing shoes, so everyone assumed, and Daryl often claimed, that the foul smell coming from his room was simply his shoes and it was managed with many cans of aerosol air freshener and an ever-changing supply of odor eater insoles in his shoes. 

Until we saw an ant superhighway that was running in and out of his room.

Turns out that Daryl decided the best plan for disposing of the sandwiches was to drag them all the way to school, then home again, and stuff them in the toy chest in his closet.  For months he had been cramming these mayo laden sandwiches into this wooden trunk in his closet.  MONTHS.  When Pops opened the chest he recoiled in disgust.  The smell sent me straight out of the house.  The entire trunk had become a colony of ants and whatever new life form was created by the unholy union of time, darkness, mayo, bologna, cheap white bread and raisins.

Pops sprayed two cans of insecticide on the chest before carrying it out of the house.   I thought we should just burn everything in his room but saying that out loud only lead to me being remanded to mine.  I was actually fine with that as Mom dragged Daryl out to the kitchen with the stick.

I don’t know if mom was angrier about the lying, the waste or because my brother had attacked her at her core.  What we didn’t realize being just 8 and 7 years of age is that any time we complained about something…food, clothing, boredom…she took it as a failing.  Our complaints were never heard as complaints, they were received as attacks.  My complaining about mayonnaise got twisted into a message about how she wasn’t a good enough mom.  In her mind a good mom would be able to give us lunches with little cans of pudding and soft bread, bad moms gave dry bread, and moms who wanted to be good but couldn’t afford “good” used mayonnaise.   Based on the screaming coming from the kitchen I’d wager mom was angry about all of it in near equal parts. 

The mayonnaise never stopped, by the way.  We continued to get those thick-with-mayonnaise sandwiches every school day for the next two years until our tiny little school moved to a new location with an extra room that was our cafeteria.  The school was also now able to get lunches delivered from the public school district at an exceptional deal (I’m fairly certain they told the district the school was a charity) so my mom put us on the school lunch program.  Those meals were horrible, by the way.  We almost missed the mayonnaise some days.  The rolls that came with the spaghetti were so hard one kid cracked a window with one. 

…And when I say “one kid” I mean my brother.

But what none of us missed was the silent drama that unfolded every morning when two tired and sullen kids reluctantly grabbed their lunch bags from the counter while their tired and sullen mom watched to make sure they went into their bags.   No one missed starting the day filling or departing with a brown bag full of disappointment.  And everyone (each through their own myopic thinking) was happy that, at least when it came to lunch, she was a good mom and we were just like the other kids.

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