She would say things like, ” Have a tuna sandwich, honey, I got to move the tuna.”
She would say it to guests in their home. To daughters-in-law and grandchildren. And he would too, not even thinking twice about it.
No offense was meant. They were a restaurant couple. That’s just how they thought. Her name was Sophie. His was Sammy. For years they ran a hole in the wall called the S&S.
The name had bilingual overtones. Undertones too. You pronounced it ess and ess - of course. In yiddish ess means eat - that shouldn’t have to be explained. So their hole in the wall had a name with a whole other meaning. The eat and eat.
When Sophie and Sammy surrendered their independence and let themselves be moved into the Chase House, they had grown sons, both of whom had worked in the hole in the wall growing up. One son, Harvey, was a money man, a broker in the private client division of a big firm. The other son, Lawrence, was a gastroenterologist who had performed over a thousand colonoscopies.
Lawrence was a profit maker for the hospital. He could have the endoscope in you and out of you, all five feet of it, in under twenty minutes. Harvey could tell you what a restaurant meal should cost. Lawrence could tell you that - plus where it goes after you eat it.
Every few weekends, Harvey or Lawrence, with their newest wives and various and sundry children, would pick Sophie and Sammy up at the Chase House and take them out to eat, just to break up the institutional routine. These experiences were always hopeful in the beginning and disappointing in the end.
“These people don’t know how to run a restaurant,” Sophie would say, turning up her nose at the nasturtium in the salad.
“It’s a 27 in Zagat’s,” one of the sons’ wives would say. “The highest is a 28.”
Then Sophie or Sammy would lecture the table about their proven expertise in menu efficiencies, which, to the sons’ new wives, as to the old wives, sounded simply like cheating the customer.
“One piece of meat,” Sammy would say. “That’s all I would cook. That same piece of meat we would sell as a pot roast plate. As a roast brisket plate. As a smothered beef plate. I would get five different menu items out of that piece of meat.”
“The fatty ends he would turn into beef stew,” Sophie would say. “The real fatty ends he would grind up.”
“Grind up for what?”
“What difference does it make - he would grind them up. We never threw away a thing. If he ever tried to I would have brained him with a frying pan. Can Zagat’s put a number on that?”
“What if a rat ever jumped in the pot with the meat - would you grind that up too?” one of Lawrence’s college-age sons once asked. He asked it right when they were serving Lawrence’s third and most luxurious new wife her pecan-crusted opa-opa - one waiter pulling off the silver dome, as though he were performing a magic trick, and the other waiter laying down a strangely shaped fish knife.
“Hey, it makes no difference to the small intestine,” Lawrence the gastroenterologist said, “assuming the rodent is cooked.”
“Listen, sonny,” Sophie said to the college boy. “When we had the house near the river I had a big tomato garden. The river rats loved my salt hay. Once I found a dead one in the cellar. So I tossed him right on top of the compost heap. That year was my best tomato year.”
“Never throw anything out,” added Sammy. “You never know.”
Sophie turned to Sammy and announced, “if you ever throw anything out I’ll throw you out.”
She glowered at him the way she used to glower at him in the hole in the wall. She could say anything to him in public. Berate him, browbeat him. He was impervious to it. His heart refused to feel insults the way his hands refused to feel heat. The way Sammy would take eggs out of boiling water was to put his hands in the water and simply remove them - the same way he would remove eggs from a cardboard carton or a refrigerator.
Lawrence envied Sammy’s thick skin. He felt his own skin was like the head of a wooden match. Highly unsafe, since the skin is the largest organ in the human body. “Tell them your secret for juicy tomatoes,” Sammy said. “Go on, tell them.”
“Dig a hole for every tomato plant,” Sophie said, “then spoon in one turd per hole. The fresh, wet kind, from the farmer - not that dried stuff in a plastic bag. Set in your plant, cover it with dirt and forget it.”
“How’s your opa-opa,” said Lawrence to his elegant alabaster wife of just seven months, whose name was Megan, just as Megan, with her long, slender fingers, was pushing away her plate, her slender nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Anyone who’d pay twenty eight bucks for a frozen fish is a dopa-dopa,” said Sophie. “That means you, sonny.”
She wasn’t talking to her wet-behind-the-ears grandson, Ricky, but to Lawrence himself. The big shot. Although Lawrence had wanted Megan to get to know his parents, the official purpose of the dinner had been for Lawrence to announce his promotion at the hospital. They had just made him Chief of Gastroenterology.
“Everybody’s a chief these days,” Sammy said. “That’s why everything stinks.”
“Chief cook and bottlewasher, that’s what I am,” Sophie said.
“You never even cooked a french fry,” Sammy said.
Sophie and Sammy must have been raising their voices. Out of the corner of his eye, Lawrence noticed the tuxedoed maitre d’ balefully looking their way. He also noticed Megan staring up at the puffy white clouds painted on the high circular ceiling, tapping those sculpted fingernails on the fine white tablecloth.
Lawrence wanted to make a funny comment about never throwing things out. He remembered Sophie and Sammy bringing home food from the hole in the wall, food they could actually never pass off on customers, not even for half price. He remembered dried-up ends of long salami cylinders, stale heels of rye bread, and egg salad that had sat around so long the mayonnaise had turned sour. This was what he and Harvey had taken to school in their lunch boxes. In September and October they had slices of fabulous tomatoes stacked in their sour egg salad sandwiches.
When he looked over at Megan, Lawrence wasn’t so sure she would take his funny comment as funny. Megan threw things out whenever she wanted to. Disposability was a principle of her existence. In point of fact, Lawrence was no slouch at it either. Lawrence recalled a cardiologist friend making a joke about him - that he went through latex examination gloves the way he went through wives.
The waiters cleared the dinner plates and brought dessert. Lawrence persuaded Sammy to order the flan.
“Twelve bucks for an egg and a little vanilla - not bad,” Sammy said.
“Don’t talk about vanilla or I’ll embarrass you,” Sophie said.
“I told you not to look at prices,” Lawrence said. “Now stop.”
But he was hardly upset. The fact was, Lawrence could have more fun with his parents than he could ever have with his medical colleagues. They made him feel fifteen again. At this point in Lawrence’s life, feeling fifteen was a better vacation than going to Paris or Rome.
Age fifteen had been Lawrence’s last year working in the hole in the wall. A lot had happened that year. He learned first hand about never paying retail when you could pay wholesale. He knew that when the food and drink bill was put down in front of him today - definitely retail at over a hundred bucks a person - Sophie and Sammy wouldn’t see it as a sign of his success, but proof of his stupidity.
For some reason, that was okay with him. Deep down, he knew they were right.
Megan picked at her anjou pear sorbet. She kept looking up, as though she wanted to disappear through the clouds in the domed, gilded ceiling. Lawrence felt like shaking her to make her pay attention. Didn’t she get it? Sophie and Sammy weren’t just his parents. They were his biography. These crazy conversations were important, and for a very good reason. Lawrence wasn’t born a gastroenterologist in the high six figures. He had a deeper, earlier life. The restaurant life.
Sophie went on as though Megan were paying rapt attention. Lawrence knew the story backwards and forwards but he paid extra close attention. He hoped his body language would cue Megan that she should be listening, not staring at the ceiling counting the minutes.
Along with her cronies in the garden and tennis set, Megan spent a minimum of an hour and a half at the club every day, toning her already taut physique. It occurred to Lawrence that if you physically put two and a half Megans together you would get just under one Sophie. Although Sophie was four inches shorter than Megan, her upper arms were thicker than Megan’s upper legs at their widest point. Even at the age of eighty three, Sophie would undoubtedly be cleaning Megan’s clock if they ever happened to get into an actual brawl.
Lawrence realized he was thinking like a fifteen year old, a real fifteen year old who still scrubbed dishes and scraped off griddle grease in the hole in the wall, not a seasoned doctor who had just been named Chief of Gastroenterology. But what did he care? Today, in the Zagat’s 27 restaurant, it was his dime. And back when he was fifteen a dime would buy you a good cup of coffee.
“Once I had a backache,” said Sophie, leaning over and shouting her story into Megan’s upturned nose. “So I let this joker, your father -in -law, come out front to the counter and wait on people. I should have left him in the back with the rats and his briskets. A cabdriver comes in early in the morning and asks for a glass of prune juice.”
“Here we go,” said Sammy, shaking his head.
“He asks for prune juice and your father-in-law pours some dark brown liquid into a juice glass. Only the brown liquid wasn’t prune juice. It was vanilla extract.”
Lawrence watched his second son, Jeffrey, wince and groan. Lawrence was pleased.
Sophie paused, waiting for Megan’s reaction. There was none, just a slight roll of the eyes, the goddess eyes that made Sophie’s look like fried eggs with wired edges. Lawrence wanted to wring Megan’s neck, the long, swanlike neck with the string of diamonds from Shreve Crump and Low.
The neck was so retail.
Lawrence knew the difference between wholesale and retail before he knew how to drive. The hole in the wall was located on the fringe of Boston’s Combat Zone. On his fifteenth birthday a Combat Zone hooker offered Lawrence a blowjob for ten bucks. He snuck her down to the cellar and they huddled behind the sacks of onions. The hooker wanted cash but Lawrence had other ideas. He got her to take ten bucks worth of corned beef. Not a story for this gathering.
“Well he drank it, didn’t he?” said Sammy.
“Of course he drank it. It was five in the morning and he was half asleep. When he realized what he drank he spit it in your face.”
“Not my face - I beg your pardon. Your mother-in-law exaggerates everything. He spit it on the counter.”
No reaction from Megan. Lawrence made himself keep his eyes off her neck, to keep from attacking it. He kept his eyes on Megan’s tapping, gorgeously manicured fingers.
Like a bull, Sophie kept trying to break through. To Lawrence, it was as though she were talking to glass. Baccarat crystal from Shreve’s.
“There was one time your father-in-law got an order for a tuna sandwich to go. Remember that one, genius?”
Sammy grunted and feigned shame. Ricky and Jeffrey shook their heads. Lawrence grinned in encouragement. Megan shimmered under the huge chandelier and spooned a microscopic amount of sorbet into her glass mouth.
“He spreads mayonnaise on the bread. He puts in the lettuce leaf. He slices the sandwich and wraps it with a pickle chip. There was only one thing he forgot. He forgot to put in the tuna fish.”
“I would have been ripped,” Jeffrey said. “Was the guy ripped?”
“Sonny, I don’t know what ripped means,” Sophie said. “The next day the guy came back to the hole in the wall. The guy was a mechanic from the garage around the corner. He wanted to crack your grandfather’s head with a tire iron.”
“Did he?”
“No lousy tire iron can crack my head,” said Sammy. “I got a head like a coconut.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Sophie. “He stayed in the back with his briskets, where he belongs. And I was out front at the counter, where I belong. I took care of that garage guy, sonny. I gave him back his quarter and shut him up like a clam.”
Finally, Megan spoke up. She stopped tapping her fingernails and looked Sophie straight in the eye.
“The one thing you never threw out was each other,” she said. In a tone that could have melted the sorbet cup.
Sophie’s mouth stopped moving, as though it had been zapped by a tranquilizer gun.
After a moment or two, the mouth cracked a huge smile.
Lawrence reached across for Megan’s hand. He kissed it. Right on the Shreve’s ring, where he could see the future shooting out rainbow sparks.