Scribbles & Munch

I promised something inspired by this article on contemporary reactions to 1950's American cuisine (if you can call it that). This is the vignette that came to mind as I was contemplating the fare on an early morning stroll.

      Harvey Todd unconsciously strained his back against the gentle slope of the chaise lounge. "I think my wife is planning to kill me." One fingernail flicked against the cuticle of another as he said this.
      His therapist took a note, the tip of his pen making a patronizing scraping sound against his pad of paper. "You think your wife is trying to kill you?"
      "Yes," came Harvey's reply, both irritated and irritating.
      "Tell me more." The therapist looked down at his pen, poised expectantly in the air, as though this action, too, made a distinctive sound.
      A sigh. "I can tell. She's sending me signs. They're subtle - just hints - but I know the way her mind works."
      Paranoia, the therapist thought, almost sympathetically. He saw it a lot in his patients who had fought in the war. Harvey Todd had been discharged almost ten years ago, so he hadn't gone on to Korea, but time fighting the Germans left its mark. The Cold War wasn't helping. The therapist looked over his patient's face, still youthful in appearance despite a new beard. He had already determined the beard was an unconscious rebellion against the controlling father-figure that had been his commanding officer in the army, where they had demanded all soldiers be clean-shaven.
      Harvey was used to his therapist not saying much, so he kept going. "It's the food, it's always through the food. When I forgot our anniversary two years ago? She made all my least favorite dishes for a week, and then forgot to put the salt in the meatloaf and made me sandwiches out of it. When she wants to communicate something, she does it with cooking."
      Afraid of poisoning, the therapist guessed.
      "And now she keeps making all these foods that are covered in toothpicks. Toothpicks! She made a cheese ball on Tuesday for bridge club, and then covered it with olives pinned into place with toothpicks. And then she made fruit kabobs on wooden skewers and stuck those into a pineapple. As if a pineapple wasn't already spiny enough!"
      The therapist had to hold himself back from making an "ah ha" noise. Sputnik, he jotted in his notes. The Russians had sent up the distinctive-looking satellite only a month ago, and it had taken root in people's minds as a source of fear. It had become a contemporary archetype: the symbol of technological terror. But of course, a man couldn't admit to being afraid of a few pounds of space metal beyond the atmosphere, so it was manifesting in unconscious associations. He wrote some of this down, his pen now making smug twists and turns in his cursive script.
      "It's only a matter of time before she skins me," Harvey whimpered.
      The pen stopped. Skin him? Well that was new. Some kind of symbolism? "You think your wife is going to skin you?"
      "Yes."
      "You think your wife is going to skin you, because she's putting toothpicks in a cheese ball?" The therapist said this gently to make it sound like a clarifying question instead of a vote of incredulity.
      "Yes!" Harvey shifted on the chaise lounge, flopping a little. "It's like that fairy tale, Hans, My Hedgehog!"
      H-E-D-G-E-H-O-G, the therapist wrote slowly.
      "Hans looks like a hedgehog from the waist up. He does a service for the king, who promises Hans can marry his daughter. On their wedding night, Hans takes off his skin, and looks like a normal man underneath, but at dawn he has to put the skin back on."
      Normal underneath, the therapist carefully noted.
      "You should see the way she plucks out those toothpicks," Harvey went on, his voice now trembling. "One...by one...she pulls them out...and then she eats whatever's on them...."
      For some reason, the therapists mind suddenly went to a recent meal his own wife had prepared. For a vegetable, she'd served something she called "Real French Cauliflower Supreme." It had been cauliflower, boiled, slathered in mayonnaise, and covered with canned olives, pinned in place with toothpicks. He had vomited openly after attempting to choke some down. "Food presentation with wooden skewers is in fashion," he heard himself repeat his wife's defense of her creation.
      Harvey actually sat up on the chaise lounge and turned to stare at his therapist; it was the longest sentence the psychoanalyst had ever spoken that wasn't word for word repetition of something Harvey had said.
      Now the therapist was thinking of another meal, one where his wife had put canned asparagus and sardines in lemon Jell-O, molded in the shape of a fish. She had painstakingly ringed it with parsley. The therapist tried to think of a fairy tale that had something to do with fish, and could only remember the one where the fisherman caught a golden flounder, which kept granting wishes from an increasingly stormy sea until the fisherman's wife got too greedy.
     "She's going to kill me," Harvey Todd insisted quietly. "Why else would she ask me to take her knives in for sharpening?"
      Symbolism, the therapist starting thinking furiously. A real man underneath. "She wants you to shave," he announced confidently. He started the wonder what his own wife would be making for dinner tonight. His palms began to sweat, and his pen became slippery in his grasp.


That's what I got. This may get re-worked and transformed into a short story, but for now this little scene is the sum total of my efforts. It was very amusing to create, I hope you find it amusing to read.