Frydaddy

Written December 2008.

The city is large today. Waiting in line for tea in late December? Where did they all come from? It couldn’t have been far, could it?

Children everywhere. Murmur and bubble. We almost throttled one of the joyful innocent throats for his insistent slurping, purposely holding his straw just above the line of the juice in its grubby burgundy cup. Parents sitting by, continuing to chat. At what age is it appropriate to educate children about the health risks posed by pushing adults to insanity with repetitive noise and motion?

There was the time when I ate dinner at a boyfriend’s house and realized that there was no way he could have helped ending up with a smacking problem. I sat quietly chewing my steak and tried to tune out the maddening cacophony of a family of six all smacking loudly with open mouths and slurping iced tea. I tried blurring out all the distinct sounds and focusing on the overall cadence, but that only caused an image to swell in my mind of a giant lump of half-digested meat rolling around in a room-sized mouth, and I was inside.

I excused myself and made my way to the bathroom, where I remained until I thought they had had a reasonable amount of time to finish their feeding trough ritual. When I came out, my boyfriend’s huge, surly father asked me through a soggy lump of biscuit that moved up and down on his tongue as he spoke, “Whassa matter? Upset stomach?” He gulped down the wad in his cheek, and then passed gas loudly.

“Yes, I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me this morning,” I replied, after courteously cursing the dog for the foul smell that now hung in the stale air of the dining room.

Pushing the greasy, wax paper-lined basket of fried shrimp towards me, he insisted that I eat because “I didn’t pull out that goddamn frydaddy and sweat my balls off for the last hour to watch you push food around your plate.”