I Don't Know Why #11
I Eat Things That Make Me Sick and I Don’t Know Why. The eleventh installment of an occasional Oldster Magazine column by bestselling novelist Laura Lippman.
I grew up in a household with a lot of rules about food, which is why I have only one: “Eat what you want, when you want.” This includes everything in the snack drawer, the candy jar, the freezer drawer dedicated to ice cream and sorbet. There is, however, a corollary: “But if you’re going to eat a huge snack an hour before dinner, I’m taking the night off from cooking.” I don’t want to prepare a meal that no one’s going to eat.
The rules of my youth were forever changing. We had the clean-plate-club mandate for a while, then the take-one-bite-of-everything edict and even—how we loved this—the-kids-eat-in-the-kitchen-because-they’re-disgusting pronouncement. (We got to read during dinner, sheer bliss.) My sister and I could pick out any junk foods we wanted on the weekly Friday grocery-shopping trip, but once our treats were gone, they were gone, no refills until the following Friday. Unless you were my father, who often made intra-week trips to High’s Dairy Store to replenish his Cheez-its stash.
After five decades of a deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, I gave up dieting, jettisoned all rules, and tried to model sanity for my daughter. Overall, it’s been great—except for my selective amnesia, which destines me to return, again and again, to food that literally makes me sick.
Then there were the things we ate only when my grandparents visited at the Christmas holidays. Bowls of nuts in their shells—walnuts, pecans, almonds, Brazil nuts. Bags of peanuts from Hickory Farms, which came in an edible shell. I gorged on these because scarcity engenders desirability. (I still can’t believe I thought I wasn’t smart enough to take economics in college.)
At any rate, after five decades of a deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, I gave up dieting, jettisoned all rules, and tried to model sanity for my daughter. Overall, it’s been great—except for my selective amnesia, which destines me to return, again and again, to food that literally makes me sick.
I’m not talking about allergies or anything serious. But there are foods I love that make me feel as if gremlins are in my stomach, gleefully slicing up the lining with little knives. The sensation always reminds me of a passage from Goodbye, Columbus when the main character, intoxicated by the abundance of fruit in his girlfriend’s home, over-indulges and “cracked his fragile bowel.”
My first ill-advised snack is found in Central American grocery stores and known as “cacahuetes estilo japonese” (peanuts Japanese style), a Mexican staple that I discovered while living in Cuernavaca. They are uncannily like the Hickory Farms peanuts my grandfather bought, except I do not remember the Hickory Farms peanuts making me feel as if there were gremlins in my stomach, stabbing me with tiny knives. Also, the Hickory Farms peanuts did not have problematic wrappers.
My other amour fou is a neighborhood pizza slice. It is huge, greasy, and delicious—and I am doubled over in pain within two hours of eating it. Interestingly—blessedly—other pizza slices do not have this effect on me because I cannot imagine a life without pizza. Pizza will be my Death Row meal. Still, I really like this particular slice and I succumb to it every four to six months or so. The body may keep the score, but would it kill the brain to jot down some notes?
It’s not just food that I return to once I’ve forgotten how much pain it causes me. Somewhere in my draft files is an unfinished letter in which I tried to explain to someone that they were like my beloved slice of pizza. Through no fault of their own, they were bad for me and I needed to jettison them from my life. I never sent the letter because the intended recipient, per Shakespeare, exited pursued by bear, or, more accurately, exited and was kind of a bear. The details are not important. What is important is that I keep forgetting certain things are not good for me. Gremlins in my stomach, gremlins in my heart. But I’m trying to change.
In the middle of this masochistic idyll, I went to see my sister, who lives in the memory unit of an assisted living facility. She has Parkinson’s and while my sharp, funny older sibling is always present inside that frail body, she struggles more and more in conversation. She suddenly volunteered, apropos of nothing: “I went to one of those everything stores. And they had the Japanese peanuts AND Beer Nuts.”
I relapsed recently. An errand took me perilously near my favorite Central American grocery store and I picked up three cellophane sleeves of peanuts to enjoy during cocktail hour over a long weekend. Martini + cacahuetes at 5 p.m. for three blissful nights, followed by stomach aches so severe that I couldn’t eat dinner.
In the middle of this masochistic idyll, I went to see my sister, who lives in the memory unit of an assisted living facility. She has Parkinson’s and while my sharp, funny older sibling is always present inside that frail body, she struggles more and more in conversation.
She suddenly volunteered, apropos of nothing: “I went to one of those everything stores. And they had the Japanese peanuts AND Beer Nuts.” (We both adore Beer Nuts, which are increasingly scarce in Baltimore and—bonus—do not tear my stomach apart.) I tried to guess what store she had visited because I know of no paradise in Baltimore where one can score this peanut exacta, but she kept saying, “No, no, that’s not it.”
I realized later—my sister has hallucinations and, chances are, she never went to a store, never ate any peanuts. I could ask my brother-in-law if this outing happened, but I’d rather pretend that my sister did, in fact, go to an “Everything Store,” where they stocked both Beer Nuts and cacahuetes estilo japonese. It’s her best hallucination since she told me: “Laura, two men here have taken an interest in me and I do not like it.” It’s “funnier” with the visual—my 70-year-old sister, gaunt in her stained nightgown, unwashed hair standing up like a rooster’s coxcomb, her backbone curved into a C shape—fretting over her sex-bomb status.
Nothing I’ve read or seen has prepared me for my sister’s dementia. When she first entered assisted living in the fall of 2021, I clung to the belief that my sister’s good days were normal and the bad days were an aberration. I’m resigned now to not knowing which version I’ll encounter on my weekly visits. When she struggles for a word or speaks utter gibberish, I smile and nod as if I understand everything. I sort of do. It’s family canon that no one could understand a word I spoke as a toddler—except for my sister. The pediatrician told our mother that we had a secret language, like twins, and that once I went to nursery school, the other students would tease me and I would start speaking normally. He was right about the first part, but I needed a year of speech therapy in order to be understood. My sister, who increasingly gropes for common nouns, still remembers the name of my speech therapist. I do not.
Nothing I’ve read or seen has prepared me for my sister’s dementia. When she first entered assisted living in the fall of 2021, I clung to the belief that my sister’s good days were normal and the bad days were an aberration. I’m resigned now to not knowing which version I’ll encounter on my weekly visits. When she struggles for a word or speaks utter gibberish, I smile and nod as if I understand everything. I sort of do.
I’ve gone eight months now without the slice of the pizza that wrecks me; there’s a frozen pizza with a Cheez-its crust that I use as a substitute. Disgusting, but not debilitating. The peanuts are harder to resist because there’s no alternative; five months is my record for abstaining.
As for my heart—well, to echo the penultimate verse of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” the one that so many singers skip, that particular organ is downright antiseptic.
My heart is clean as a surgical suite right now. But it will eventually forget, too. Lord knows what will happen then.
So interesting, what gets forgotten, what doesn’t.
So unfair, who gets to remember, who doesn’t.
Laura is the best. I love her writing so much - how she can go from corner pizza to her sister's dementia, connecting everything so perfectly, sidesplittingly, heartbreakingly, is such a gift for us readers. And that kicker sums up exactly how I felt about my mother's dementia. I just couldn't verbalize it as succinctly. Gosh, thank you for this post.
God I love these Lara Lippman posts. I can't wait to find out in the comments the sickening things other readers are eating. My own contribution: my beloved grandmother used to eat a salad of iceberg lettuce, sweet pickle relish and cold chopped-up hot dogs. I think she thew in some Thousand Island dressing when she had it, too. Thanks, Laura Lippman and Sari!