Brownies, Oyster Crackers, and One Mean Old Dead Lady

One Thanksgiving about 20 years ago, I made brownies.

“They taste like….” my younger brother said, chewing around a piece carefully as he furrowed his brow in concentration, hoping to find just the right word, “…they taste like paint.”

I snapped my fingers and nodded because he’d done it.  He’d found the right word.  Even though I had never actually tasted paint, not even one tiny lick of the wall when I was a little girl, they did.  Those brownies tasted like paint.

There were a lot of excuses made for me that day from well-meaning members of my extended family:  the oil was probably bad; the butter might’ve been salted; maybe the chicken that had laid the particular egg that I’d used in the recipe had been feeling a little “off” that day…

“Or maybe she just sucks at baking,” my older sister suggested as she floated through the kitchen to refill people’s drinks.

Well, of course she would say that.  She was the one hosting Thanksgiving that year and, like any good guest, I had waited until I’d arrived at her house to make the brownies, using ingredients I’d found in her pantry along with the box of brownie mix.  She didn’t want people to know she was the type to have expired oil.

I once had a friend who was kind of an alcoholic.  I ran into her at a Mexican restaurant at lunch one day with my kids. She was seated at the table next to us waiting for her friends to arrive, and she’d placed an order for a beer.  The waitress walked away to grab it for her and my friend stared at me blankly, her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides.  “I’m just not sure what to do with my hands when they’re not holding a beer,” she explained.

I don’t know if she ever accepted the help she so desperately needed, but excuse me if I thought what she said was hilarious, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t stolen that line and used it a few times myself.

Thanksgiving in my family has always been a beer-drinking holiday, but I was on a health streak the year of the brownies, so I’d been trying to stay busy so I wouldn’t grab a beer from the fridge. The brownies had been a disaster, so I moved on to washing dishes. That’s when my older sister shot me an exasperated look. 

“You’re making everyone uncomfortable,” she said.  “Grab a beer. Your job at these parties is to be the drunk aunt.”

Fair enough.

The brownie incident brought me back to a time even earlier in my life when I was meeting my (ex) best friend’s grandma for the first time.  I had always been good with old people (I was the kid they placed at the feet of my cigarette-smoking, 97-year-old Polish aunts at all holidays because I was the only one who would patiently listen to their stories about working in the city bakery literally 100 years ago when they were kids), so when my best friend said she was going to run to the kitchen to fetch us all some lemonade, I assured her that her grandma and I would be fine on our own for a few minutes.

Plus her grandma’s name was Shu Shu.  How sweet was that?

My best friend looked a little bit worried as she left the room, which I thought was kind of weird but, like I did most things back then, I shrugged it off.

Her grandma began talking about the sandwiches and pastries she had made us for lunch, and when it was my turn to talk, I made what I thought was a jovial, innocent comment: 

“Oh, I’m horrible at baking,” I said, laughing.

She swiveled her head toward me, narrowing her tiny birdlike eyes into slits as she fixed them on me.  “What, you can’t READ A RECIPE?” she spat.  “Are you stupid or something?”

My mouth was hanging open in horror as my best friend turned the corner back into the dining room.  When she saw my face, she got a panicked look on her own, but she played it off, setting the pitcher of lemonade onto the table in front of her grandma, whose gnarled old fingers grabbed at it greedily.  My best friend motioned me back into the kitchen with her.

“Shu shu’s kind of a witch,” she whispered, but she didn’t use the word witch.

“Oh my GOSH,” I sputtered.  “Why didn’t you WARN me?”

“I—I tried—“

Somehow we made it through the lunch, and honestly we were thankful for the story because it provided so many laughs as we re-told it for at least 20 years…all the way up until the last day of our friendship, in which I swore I would never talk to my ex-best friend again.  And I haven’t, but that’s a story for another post (or not) and it had nothing to do with Shu Shu.

I WILL say that when Shu Shu ultimately passed away, I didn’t send a card or anything because she was awful.

Don’t be like Shu Shu, kids.  Whatever you do, don’t be like Shu Shu.

The other night, we had some old friends we hadn’t seen in a while over for dinner.  I asked my husband to make chili.

My kids love my husband’s chili.  They have raved about it for years, and while I’m not a chili person myself, I know it must be pretty good because they beg for it all the time.

The night we were having friends over, my husband had it warming in the crock pot and my younger son kept asking when it would be time to eat.  “Man,” he would say, “I can’t wait for some of Dad’s chili. When are they getting here so we can eat?”

When our guests—plus an extra teenager, my older son’s good friend—finally arrived, we all dug into the chili.  My younger son piled it up with oyster crackers which I glanced at for a moment quizzically before continuing my conversation. I had been the one to buy the ingredients for the chili that morning, you see, and I hadn’t grabbed any oyster crackers.  I had gotten Frito Scoops instead.

Then my older son’s friend walked by on his way to the table, and I smelled something really funny.  It was not a pleasant smell, but I didn’t want to embarrass the boy.  I enjoy when my sons’ friends come over, and I don’t want to be like Shu Shu. I want to want them to come back, not sneak into the other room to talk about what a witch I am and then “forget” to send a card when I die.

My son’s friend had just had a big knee surgery, so briefly I thought maybe his cast had gotten kind of stinky or something.  Again, I shrugged it off and continued my conversation with my old friends.

Suddenly, though, my younger son started clutching his stomach. He’d been really hungry and had already made it halfway down into his deep bowl of chili.  “My stomach hurts…”

My husband rolled his eyes.  “You just don’t want to eat what’s for dinner,” he grumbled.

One thing you have to know about my husband is that it’s in his blood to be a grumpy old man—just like his dad and all of his uncles.  From the stories I’ve been told by his family and childhood friends, he’s been salty since the day he was born.  His nickname as a little boy was Oscar as in Oscar the Grouch.  And my kids and I accept it, I guess, but that doesn’t mean we won’t call him out when he’s just complaining for the sake of complaining.

I scowled at him.  “That doesn’t make any sense at all. This kid has raved about your chili for years—“

“I don’t give a damn if he likes my chili or not!” (That’s a lie.  He puffs up with pride and struts around like a peacock every single time our kids talk about his chili.) “But if he likes it so much, why isn’t he eating it?  Entitled.  He probably wants bagel bites or something instead…”

“Entitled? He’s looked forward to your chili all day. Something’s not right…”

I looked over at my teenage son’s friend. He was all set to take a bit of the chili, but then suddenly something dawned on me.  “JAMES!” I said to the friend. “Put your spoon down NOW!  Do NOT take that bite!”

He’s 16.  He could tell I was freaking out, and it amused him a little bit.  So, very slowly, he moved the spoonful of chili—which had an oyster cracker propped right atop it—to his mouth and took a tentative bite. 

Then he spit it out. Let me tell you something: A 16-year-old hates to admit when a mom—any mom—is right.  So he didn’t say it, per se, but the look on his face was all I needed.

“It’s the oyster crackers!” I yelled. 

Everyone’s gaze turned slowly to the oyster crackers in question.  The package sat opened on the island, several crackers spilling out. My older son took one for the team, bending down to move his nose closer and take a deep sniff.

“Oh, wow,” he said, screwing up his face in disgust.  “They smell like…they smell like paint.”

Oh, what a wonderful, beautiful, full-circle moment that was for me.  You see, my husband had been present at that Thanksgiving at which I’d made the brownies so many years ago.  And he had never let me forget it.  Do you know how many times over the last 20 years he’s randomly taken a bite of something and said, “It tastes like…it tastes like paint” to me?  A lot, that’s how many times.  At least 7 million.

“Are those oyster crackers from the old house?” I asked.  We moved this past summer.

“Yeah, I guess I moved them with us when I packed up the pantry,” my husband said.  “Why?”

“Because they’d been sitting in that basket in the pantry at the old house for at least a year.  Probably longer.”

“Why didn’t you throw them away?” my husband asked.

“Because I never eat chili so those oyster crackers were none of my business. Why didn’t you throw them away?”

Anyway, luckily nobody had lost their appetites from the oyster crackers that smelled of paint, and fortunately there was more than enough chili for everyone to dump their first bowls and eat another bowl or two as I popped up over their shoulders repeatedly and said, “It smells like…it smells like paint.”

It was a good night.