The Pork Chop Incident

My mother raised me to marry a diplomat, “just in case,” she said. At the same time she pushed me to become an engineer, because the only way to make any money was in a man’s job, and even then I’d get paid only half as much. She gave me a romantic middle name—Arlis—to use if I wanted to become a romance novelist. She seemed to want to prepare me for everything.

I had ballet lessons for eight years so that I would become graceful.  She taught me Latin dances so that I could use my hips properly to take all the bounce out of my walk, and I had to carry a book on my head for weeks as I walked in the house. From infancy I was forced to speak properly, in full sentences, with correct pronunciation and no grammatical errors. As my voice matured, I was taught to modulate it properly to better express what I was saying or reading aloud. Manners at the table were taught from the day I graduated from the highchair.

I had hostess lessons; handshake lessons; look-a-person-in-the-eyes lessons; pay attention, listen well, remember people’s names, and pronounce them properly lessons; and lessons to graciously accept and eat with a smile anything I was served—oh my, what an adventure that became: smoked oysters, raw oysters, chocolate covered ants, deep fried locusts, octopi, squid, sardines, rabbit, okra (ugh, slimy). Mother involved her friends at work, and they brought her more things to bring home and challenge us with. My brother got to tag along on the eating part, but my Mother somehow limited her efforts to turn him into a gentleman. He was forced only to take tap dancing lessons and to learn to play the clarinet.

Going to the movies used to include world news, a movie, a cartoon, and a second movie. One time, in a newsreel, Mother saw a young Chinese girl using chopsticks. “If a three-year-old Chinese girl can use chopsticks, so can my ten and twelve year old children.” She hid all the silverware except spoons, and we used chopsticks instead. She made sure that everything on our plates arrived in bite-sized pieces and even started serving rice, which had been seldom on the menu before. I had to help cut up everything before it came to table. It was the usual routine: eat properly, sit up straight, chew with our mouths closed, keep our elbows off the table, use our napkins as needed; except we did it all with chopsticks. Dinners took a very long time at first and involved eating cold food while laughing at ourselves and each other. Hunger, however, is a good motivator, and I’m still proficient with chopsticks.

And then Mother came home with a very old book about manners. The book explained how to cope when you sit at a table with six forks, five spoons and five knives lined up around your plate. Sadly, those numbers were not static and couldn’t be trusted, but varied based on the courses being served. There were photos of each utensil along with written instructions: what sort of food it was used for; how to hold it; whether you were allowed to cut anything with the edge of it or not; where to place it when not in use; which direction to move a spoon through the soup; and also, where to place each item when setting the table. Mother said we had to learn all of this. She went to our neighbors and borrowed all the extra forks, knives, and spoons they could spare. Of course, these were just the common flatware pieces, not the ones in the illustrations. We had to pretend. We employed saucers as bread plates and coffee cups for various more esoteric uses.

Mother arrived home from work at 6:00 p.m. and was not up to any gourmet cooking that late, so our ordinary fare became part of our pretend. The first half slice of meatloaf was beef, the second half slice was fish. The book came to table with us and was passed around to remind us of the shapes we were pretending the forks to be. We worked at this for several weeks, but it was difficult and complicated, and without the actual utensils in our hands we never gained confidence. Mother solved it for us. “Watch your hostess. Never pick up anything until she does, and then you pick up the same thing.”

As the lessons progressed I turned 13 and grew suddenly tall, 5’10”, so when Grandmother was asked to make a nice dress for me to go to a formal dinner, she insisted I wear the proper foundation garments: corset and girdle. The fashion at that time was fitted bodices and gathered or circular skirts with bouffant petticoats. The dress she made me was sleeveless, pale blue, glazed cotton with white lace daisies all around the scooped neckline. Naturally I also wore nylon stockings (with seams), white gloves and a small, white hat. With my height, deportment, and dress, I looked old enough to be starting college; inside I felt like a little girl playing dress-up.

At that point, Mother announced a surprise. We had all been invited to a formal dinner at the Captain’s table on a cruise ship that would be in harbor. I never learned how this invitation was wangled, but on the night, we dressed to the nines and went. When we arrived we discovered that we had each been seated at a different table, and my family disappeared. My table included four ladies and a man—all strangers. I sat straight, learned the names and how to pronounce them, listened well, and asked or answered questions when it was my turn to speak. Above all I watched the other ladies at the table to learn which fork, knife, and spoon to use. And all went well until the pork chop. It was served all by itself on an 8” plate. I privately thought it was a humble sort of entrée for such a glorified affair, but I knew how to eat one. I carefully picked up the correct fork and knife. As I touched them to the chop, it leapt off the table and landed perfectly in the high center of my chest. It fell to my napkin and didn’t make a second mark, but upon my chest was the full, greasy-brown imprint of that pork chop, carefully seasoned. It looked like a professional photograph of the perfectly cooked chop.

The ladies were kind, “Oh, never mind. It could have happened to anyone.” 

Sadly, I wasn’t yet old enough to laugh at myself. The best I could do was refuse to crawl under the table and hide; Mother would have killed me. I put the chop back on the plate and cut it into dainty pieces and ate it—and sat straight with a smile on my face, course after course, to the very last bite. And then we had to mingle. I was younger by two or three generations and taller than every woman there and half the men. I stuck out like a clown at a funeral, so naturally, all the adults wanted to talk with me. But I managed to last it out, bluff it out, and keep smiling—agonizingly aware of the pork chop mark of shame glaring like a neon sign on my chest. 

Mother was disgusted with me—after all that preparation.  But her main concern was to hope I hadn’t ruined the dress.