by Ron Singer.
Mr. Peavis was a fussy eater. Everything had to be just so, or he simply could not eat. Furthermore, his fussiness was of an unusual type: each meal of the week had to be a different color. On Wednesday nights, for instance, he had his red supper, which might consist of tomato soup, red meat, cabbage (red), watermelon, and red wine. What is more, the table service had to be the same color as the food: red plastic cutlery, plates and cups; red paper napkins and tablecloth. Ketchup was the condiment on Wednesday night —no mustard or mayonnaise.
The regimen was hard on Mrs. Peavis. For one thing, red meals tended to cause heartburn; green ones, gas. Much of the time, the only way she could herself manage to eat “normal” meals was by using food coloring. On Wednesday night, this meant red dye number two. Red dye number two on rolls, on potatoes, on string beans, in coffee, on layer cake. Fortunately, for all his color fussiness, Mr. Peavis was also imperceptive about color. It did not take an artist’s eye to see that the dyed cake was a brownish purple.
Besides the carcinogenic possibility, which she knew about and feared, Mrs. Peavis could not be said to enjoy these dyed meals. The eating experience had become confused for her. After seven or eight years of marriage, she had lost even the ability to enjoy an occasional restaurant meal with a friend. She had long since ceased complaining: anything for domestic tranquility. She was a thin, hard-bitten woman, in contrast with her short, plump, bald, florid husband. Once, by the way, Mrs. Peavis had suggested to Mr. Peavis that she color his food along with hers so that he, too, could enjoy normal variety (and so that she would only have to make one meal!). He had flown into a rage. He did not believe in food coloring. What could be more unnatural?
Saturday night was the technicolor meal chez Peavis, the one to which guests could be invited. Since the rule for this meal was “one, only, of a color,” the guests were less likely to suspect that anything was amiss than they would have been at a monochromatic meal. Even Peavis was sensible enough to grasp this.
The guests this week were old friends, the Trilbys. Mr. Peavis rubbed his hands together proudly and greedily as his wife put the final touches on the cake, a chocolate layer with white icing. The meat was red, the wine pink, the vegetable yellow. The appetizer was a carrot mousse, molded to the shape of Mr. Peavis’s favorite animal, the Bengal tiger —without stripes, however, to avoid color duplication problems.
“Wonderful, honey, wonderful,” Mr. Peavis beamed, reaching up to pat his wife’s shoulder. She smiled and started to say something, but just then the bell rang. Mr. P. bustled to the door.
“Bill, Phyllis,” he said, shaking hands with the tall, stout Mr. Trilby and patting Mrs. Trilby on the shoulder. “Let me take your c… ”
He noticed the brown paper bag in Mrs. Trilby’s hand.
“Here, Wally,” she said.
“Oh, thanks, thanks,” he muttered, snatching the bag.
And that should have been the end of it, for in a moment he would have spirited the gift away, to be produced again at the appropriate meal or, if necessary, even thrown out. But Mrs. Trilby was too fast for him.
“It’s ice cream, Wally. Dinah said she was making a chocolate cake with white icing, and we thought vanilla ice cream would hit the spot.”
With the announcement of the flavor, Mr. Peavis’s last, slim hope melted into the air. The rule for the technicolor meal might have gone unbroken had the ice cream been any of a number of fruit flavors. Even raspberry might have been winked at —called a purple— in such an emergency.
He fished desperately for an excuse not to serve the ice cream: too many sweets (everyone knew he loved sweets), his wife’s dislike of ice cream (she had eaten it often with the Trilbys), the harmfulness of artificial flavoring (this brand used natural flavors exclusively). He was stuck. Come to think of it, why hadn’t this happened before? All those dinner guests, and never a contribution to a meal? Finally, he fell back on his first idea: to forget about the ice cream. So, without saying anything to his wife, he put it in the freezer, and only then did he remember to take his guests’ coats. He also recovered his tongue.
“I won’t offer you drinks because we’re having wine with dinner.”
The meal might have been pleasant, but Mr. Peavis was fairly dripping with anxiety over the ice cream. Now the dishes had been cleared, the cake and green herb tea (both couples were anti-caffeine) set out. He started to cut the cake, hoping his guests would be too polite or full to mention the ice cream.
“Big or small, Phyllis?” he asked by way of camouflage.
In the event, the betrayal came from an unexpected quarter. For, with a horrifying scrape, his wife pushed back her chair and uttered the dreadful words:
“Oh, we forgot the ice cream, Wally. I’ll get it.”
And, before he could recover, she was on her way to the kitchen.
“Delicious slab, Wally,” Mr. Trilby remarked conversationally, leaning back and stretching. Beads of sweat appeared on Mr. Peavis’s visible parts, and he clasped his hands tightly. He said nothing.
In a moment, his wife was back, carrying the ice cream in its original container, a blood-red little tub. She stood behind Mr. Peavis’s chair. All eyes were on him.
“Big or small, Wal?”
Now the room began to spin, and he placed his trembling hands over his eyes and emitted a small cry not unlike a meow. Then, he ducked, because he saw a giant roast beef hurtling through the air right at him. It looked like a bottom round, or maybe a rump roast, and it must have weighed a good six hundred pounds. Closer and closer it came, hissing, its juices dripping, until at the very last moment it veered, and shot out of his field of vision.
Then, one on each side, coming from the walls, there materialized two huge pieces of toast: eight-foot square slices of lightly- browned Wonder bread, the normally appetizing odor of which was magnified ten-thousand fold until it might have been the collective reek of history’s atrocities. Closer and closer the big slices came, slowly, ever so slowly. Mr. Peavis was not aware that he had begun to shriek.
All the while, his wife stood behind his chair, the ice cream and scoop in her hands, a peaceful little smile on her lips. The Trilbys watched with detachment. Two minutes later, the room a shambles, Phyllis Trilby walked out to the foyer with measured tread and picked up the telephone.
–Originally published in big bridge, Issue #12, 2007