The only thing on his plate at the end of dinner is his reflection. He eats like one of the animals we see on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Mom calls him the Dispos-All. “I was a Depression baby,” he says in his defense, before reminding us that no one gets dessert without first joining him in the Clean Plate Club.
He cuts the fat off the “family steak” that Mom buys at Red Owl and gives it to Tom, who likes to chew and suck the fat.
In 1971, General Mills introduces Hamburger Helper, a little miracle that Mom immediately embraces when Dad is traveling. If she is going to embrace anyone when Dad is traveling, we all agree that the Hamburger Helper mascot—a four-fingered glove with eyeballs—is better than the alternatives. But when Dad is home, the meal is always made from scratch, whether or not Mom partakes.
Mom is frequently “on a diet.” She eats a Dole pineapple ring that glistens on the plate like a halo. On top of it quivers a scoop of cottage cheese.
Dad enjoins us to sit up straight and put our left hands in our laps. When we forget our manners, he says, “Mabel, Mabel, sweet and able, get your elbows off the table.”
Dessert is our birthright. It appears unbidden every evening. We eat it three hundred sixty-five nights a year. It is seldom ice cream. Most often, Mom has made a peanut-butter pie or a carrot cake or some other baked confection, inviting us to lick the twin beaters of the electric mixer when she’s finished. Sometimes she makes a chocolate pudding with a rubbery skin on top. We skeptically tap our spoons on its trampoline surface before rolling the skin back like the lid of a sardine tin.
Before clearing the table, we’re required to say “May I be excused?” Other nights, we may only be excused after also saying—three times fast, and with proper elocution—“Afghanistan banana stand.” In return, we’ll challenge Dad to say “Fruit Float, Fruit Float, Fruit Float.”
When he’s in a good mood, Dad might summon me to his chair at the head of the table and ask me to hold my right thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “If you can catch it, you can keep it,” he says, removing a crisp five-dollar bill from his billfold and dropping it lengthwise through my fingers. He is also adept at removing and swiftly reattaching his own thumb and finding loose change in my ears.
Occasionally, he’ll ask to see my grip. He has the hands of a stevedore, the grip of a serial strangler. When shaking hands he likes to give me what he calls the Knuckle Floater, rolling the knuckles of my right hand around as if they’re a handful of marbles, only releasing his viselike grip when I’ve cried “Uncle” or “Mercy” or taken a knee.
He brings the same ferocity to Rock Paper Scissors. When his paper wraps my rock or his rock covers my paper, he licks his right index finger before snapping it across my wrist, just below the palm. We play a game in which I place my palms on top of his, and he has to slap the backs of my hands before I can remove them. The ensuing slap always sounds like a whipcrack.
If the dinner has depleted our family-size bottle of Heinz ketchup, Dad will open the new bottle, place the old one on top of it to form a ketchup hourglass, then watch the old one drain into the new one, saving a tablespoon of ketchup from the garbage can.
Every once in a great while, Dad arrives home, kisses Mom, sets down his briefcase, and announces with great solemnity that we are—and we can scarcely believe he is saying this—Going Out to Eat. The ensuing celebration rivals V-E Day. Tonight, we will not eat under the fruit-slice chandelier and fight for the last shred of Banquet fried chicken but instead will choose from a dizzying array of restaurants in which—as long as we don’t fill up on bread and have only water before the food arrives—we can drink pop and enjoy an hour or more of central air-conditioning.
We eat out so infrequently, and with such great ceremony, that it hardly matters where we go. Tom asks to go to Mister Steak, whose logo—the best thing about the place—is a cartoon steer in a chef’s hat. Dad will point out, after a rib eye whose chief attraction is its $1.98 price tag, that “Mister Steak” might better have been called “Miss Steak.” I get this pun and love it. Like wordplay, a sense of humor is a fraternity handshake, a shared secret, a radio signal sent out on a frequency that not everyone receives.
Jim wants to go to The Embers, chiefly for its commercial jingle, repeated endlessly on the radio: “Breakfast, lunch, or dinner! Every meal’s a winner! Remember the Emmm-bers.”
Any one of us would be happy eating at Perkins, which flies an American flag the size of the rain tarp that covers the infield at Metropolitan Stadium. Perkins also has a wishing well next to the hostess stand. You can reach into its depths like a magician into a hat and pull out a plastic prize. Perkins serves breakfast for dinner, though when my brothers and I talk about where we want to eat, food is seldom mentioned. The sense of occasion occasioned by Going Out to Eat is enough. Some nights we go to Red Barn, whose signature dish is the Barnbuster, a quarter-pound hamburger that is not quite a Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s, so that it’s the culinary equivalent of Sears’s four-striped shoes.
Country Kitchen serves fresh strawberry pie and a signature sandwich called the Country Boy. Its mascot is a hayseed in a straw hat holding a hamburger, in the hope that maybe we’ll mistake it for Bob’s Big Boy. Mom has an irrational aversion to “hillbillies,” so we seldom eat at Country Kitchen, though she remains perfectly comfortable eating in a reproduction red barn at Red Barn.
More often than not, we pile into the Impala and drive to Shakey’s Pizza on Portland Avenue in Richfield, with its player piano ghosting out ragtime songs and a waitstaff wearing straw boaters that diners can take home. They can take home the boaters, not the waitstaff, though that may be true too, for these are the 1970s and this is suburbia and Shakey’s serves alcohol in copious quantities.
At home, the complimentary “straw” boater—the hat is actually made of Styrofoam—has a twenty-four-hour life span before it’s sat on or has a hole punched in its crown or Tom takes a bite out of its brim for a cheap laugh. But so what? It’s enough to be here, among waiters in red-and-white-striped jackets, hustling to and fro amid the Olde English décor. There are jokey signs that I don’t quite understand but seem to make Dad smirk. WE HAVE A DEAL WITH THE BANK, reads one. THE BANK DOESN’T MAKE PIZZA AND WE DON’T CASH CHECKS.
Shakey’s offers twenty-one varieties of pizza, and we can watch each of them being made in the kitchen display window. There are imitation leaded windows in the bar—Ye Public House—from which Dad can get a cold beer delivered to the table. There are “sarsaparillas for the li’l darlings.” The whole place is a shotgun marriage of Dixieland and Henry VIII. Every outlet in the Shakey’s empire makes a mockery of mock Tudor, and I never want to leave its cool, dark sanctuary for the parking lot just beyond those brown bottle-glass windows.