How to Grow an Addict

by J. A. Wright

  Over dinner one night, just after I arrived, Uncle Hank and Aunt Flo told me about a month-long cooking competition they were about to begin. “I read an article in Reader’s Digest about a couple in Rhode Island who have a cooking competition every year and I convinced your uncle that we should do it too,” Aunt Flo said.

  They wanted to know if I’d be willing to give them a hand in the kitchen when they needed help. “What we need is a reliable and honest kitchen assistant. One who doesn’t offer advice or play favorites, and one who would never do anything to sabotage a meal,” Aunt Flo said.

  I knew she was referring to Uncle Hank when she said that, because he was always offering her cooking tips, but I pretended I didn’t understand and so did he.

  “What do you say? Do you think you’re grown up enough to handle the responsibility of being our assistant?” she asked.

  “I suppose so,” I replied.

  Uncle Hank laughed and promised they wouldn’t be too tough on me. “You might even enjoy our little project,” he said.

  I hated competitions, especially between adults. They scared me, probably because of my Dad’s competitions. Every so often he’d hold a poker game in his garage and invite his car club buddies. They’d shout and argue and compete about who could drink the most whiskey or pee the farthest. One time, Dad took a “Tom Bradley for Governor” sign off of our neighbor Mr. Kendrick’s front lawn and nailed it to our fence. Then he challenged his poker friends to drench the sign with their pee. Mr. Kendrick came over and told Dad to return the sign or he’d call the police. Dad laughed and said, “Take your black ass back to your house before I kick it there.”

  When one of Dad’s poker friends pointed out that Mr. Kendrick wasn’t black, Dad just said, “He might as well be.”

  Robbie and I had to wait until my dad’s friends left, and our parents finished fighting, before we could sneak outside to take the sign down and clean the fence.

  While Dad’s poker games and competitions didn’t always go that badly, I’d also seen competitions go south between Uncle Hank and Aunt Flo. It had only been six months since their last one, a Christmas decorating competition. I was staying with them over Thanksgiving weekend, so I was there for the beginning of it.

  There weren’t any rules, except about money. My aunt and uncle agreed not to spend more than one hundred dollars each. Aunt Flo got the front yard to decorate and Uncle Hank worked on the outside of the house. They had so many people drive by to see their winter wonderland that the community police had to put a sign up warning drivers about delays. Everyone wanted to see Aunt Flo’s snowwoman and her seven snow children. The local newspaper even put a photo of them on the front page.

  The snow children were made from several large bushes she had her gardeners dig up and move from the backyard to the front yard the day after Thanksgiving. It took them an entire day to transplant the bushes and another day to shape them using a hedge trimmer, garden scissors, and the hair clippers Aunt Flo took from Uncle Hank’s bathroom drawer. When they finished, Aunt Flo gave her gardeners, Carlos and Jorge, forty dollars and a bottle of whiskey each. Carlos said it wasn’t enough money and he’d have to add the extra hours to the monthly bill. That’s when Uncle Hank stepped in.

  “Sorry guys,” he said, “but this is between you and Flo.”

  I thought I should go to my room for a while so I left my wheelbarrow on the rose path and got to the front porch just in time to turn around and see Aunt Flo stomp her foot, throw Uncle Hank a vicious look, and say something under her breath that I didn’t catch. But Uncle Hank must have because he put his tools down, wiped his hands on a rag, and walked to his car. He got in and drove off pretty quickly, but I don’t think Aunt Flo noticed, she was too busy pleading with the gardeners, “Come back tomorrow and help me spray them with fake snow and string lights around them. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “You still owe us for the forty extra hours we worked last month, and besides, we don’t work on Sundays. We go to church,” Jorge said.

  “I know, I know, and I’ll pay you, I promise. Just come back tomorrow. Maybe after church,” Aunt Flo begged.

  They left without promising to come back, and Aunt Flo went to the kitchen to make a drink. I stayed outside and tried to keep busy and out of sight because I knew she was angry. I could hear her mumbling mean things about the gardeners, the kind of mean things my dad would say about Mexican people. I was relieved when I saw Uncle Hank pull up and get out of his car with a bag from Mickey’s Burger Barn.

  Aunt Flo was already sitting at the dining room table when Uncle Hank put the bag of burgers and fries down. I got the ketchup out of the fridge and joined them.

  “How much money do you have left in your decorating budget?” Uncle Hank asked her.

  “I haven’t got a cent left, and I owe the gardeners money for the extra work they did last month too,” Aunt Flo said. “But it’s okay. I don’t need your help. I’m taking a live modeling job at the art school and I’ll be able to pay my own bills in no time at all.”

  Uncle Hank’s face went blank, and he removed his glasses and stood up. He left the dining room table and returned a few minutes later with his checkbook in one hand and a pen in the other. “How much do you owe the gardeners, Flo?”

  “At least eight hundred, but pay them nine so I have a credit. I’m going to need their help to put the bushes back when Christmas is over.”

  That was it. They didn’t say another word to each other about it, and before I went to bed that night, I saw them hug and kiss and knew everything was okay.

  I stayed awake for hours thinking about them, wondering why Uncle Hank paid Aunt Flo’s bill and didn’t seem too upset with her for breaking the competition rules. I finally decided that he loved her so much it didn’t matter if she followed the rules.

  We waited for hours the next day for Carlos and Jorge to arrive, but they didn’t show, and they didn’t answer when Aunt Flo called to tell them she had a check waiting for them. I had to help her with the lights, but I wasn’t tall enough to string them over the top of the snowwoman bush and I was too big to crawl underneath the snow children to wind the lights up the middle the way she wanted.

  After a couple of hours of getting it wrong, Uncle Hank took over. He said he had concerns about the electrical extension cord we were using, but I knew it was because he wanted Aunt Flo to stop bossing me around. He did a great job, and even though his Santa sleigh display on the roof of the garage was just as good as Aunt Flo’s snowwoman and children, Aunt Flo said the photo of her work on the front page of the newspaper was the winning vote and he agreed.

  While the Christmas decorating competition seemed like a cool thing to do, especially since so many people enjoyed the results, I couldn’t figure out why Uncle Hank and Aunt Flo now wanted to hold a recipe competition in the summer. It seemed to me they were too busy to do much more than take care of their house and garden. I thought perhaps they had money riding on it, because the night we all sat down to go over the rules I noticed they both had the same crazy look in their eyes that my dad got when he watched a horse race.

  I asked them why they were doing the competition, and Aunt Flo said there was absolutely nothing wrong with competitions. “Everyone should participate in competitive activities. It keeps the creative juices going and helps a person learn about being a good loser, and there’s nothing better in this world than a pleasant loser, in my book, anyway.”

  Uncle Hank looked up over his reading glasses and said, “Nothing better in this world than a pleasant winner, darling.”

  The competition would run from June 20 to July 19, and they would alternate cooking days. The only day they wouldn’t cook was Wednesday because Magnum, P.I. and Dallas were on that night. On Wednesday nights we’d eat burgers, fries, and strawberry shakes from Mickey’s Burger Barn.

  They agreed not to use, or even look at, cookbooks, or to ask advice from anyone, even each other. They could use anything they f
ound in the pantry, could spend up to thirty dollars on a meal, and could use discount coupons for supplies. The coupon thing was a big deal, and they discussed it for hours before Aunt Flo finally came out and told Uncle Hank she wanted the coupon collection for herself because she found them, cut them out, and sorted them into categories. “I spend hours every week clipping coupons and writing to manufacturers for their free stuff, so I shouldn’t have to share,” she said.

  “And I’m the one who goes to the store to buy the newspapers and magazines, and I’m the one who takes your mail to the post office. If I didn’t, there wouldn’t be a coupon collection,” Uncle Hank replied.

  Later on, after Dynasty was over and Aunt Flo had finished her drink, she handed him a bunch of coupons and kissed him on the forehead.

  It was pretty tense around the house for the first week, and I thought they were going to have a big fight the day Uncle Hank found a Betty Crocker cookbook in the bathroom, hidden under a stack of towels. Aunt Flo swore she didn’t know a thing about it, and I was surprised to hear Uncle Hank say he believed her. I knew he didn’t, and I also knew he pretended not to see her when she took four copies of Good Housekeeping magazine out to the garbage can.

  Neither of them ever wrote down their recipe until after we’d eaten and voted. If it was a worthy recipe, Aunt Flo wrote it out in longhand in a book she kept under the Yellow Pages—a book she’d been writing recipes in since before I was born. My vote was often the deciding one, especially when it was Uncle Hank’s night to cook (Aunt Flo rarely voted to keep his recipe), and because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, I always voted yes, even for Aunt Flo’s poached grape and albacore tuna pasta bake. It was terrible. Neither Uncle Hank nor I could eat it. I filled up three napkins with the dish and put them in my back pockets to flush them down the toilet later. I watched Uncle Hank fill his mouth with pasta and grapes, then get up and leave the room, returning a few minutes later drinking a glass of water and smiling.

  Aunt Flo agreed it wasn’t her best work, but she claimed the grapes she used were too bitter for the tuna and that Uncle Hank was to blame for that. “By the time I got to the vines, all the juicy ripe grapes were gone,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you were planning to use grapes. If I had, I wouldn’t have harvested any last week,” Uncle Hank replied.

  Two weeks into the competition, it was pretty clear to me that Uncle Hank was winning. The night he made a roasted four-cheese (Havarti, mozzarella, Gruyère, and Gouda) and five-onion (red, white, yellow, green, and leeks) casserole, Aunt Flo was visibly upset, and after taking just one bite she said it was way too rich for her and she wouldn’t be eating any more. Instead, she ate a piece of the pine nut, zucchini, and whole meal cracker loaf she’d made the night before. Uncle Hank and I finished off the cheese dish the next day for lunch. I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. A few days later Uncle Hank served curried cod with grilled prawns; avocado, tomato, and celery salad; a side dish of string beans; and green salsa topped with fried sage leaves (in sesame oil); and a dessert of cornbread pudding that had a warm cinnamon cherry relish inside and topped with orange curd. It was so good I asked for seconds and thirds.

  Before I went to sleep that night, Aunt Flo came into my room, sat on my bed, and said, “I want you to go to the store with Uncle Hank from now on. I need to know who he’s talking to, and what they talk about, because someone is helping him, that’s for sure. Can you do this for me, please?”

  She gave me a little notebook and a pen so I could write down the things I noticed. I didn’t want to spy on Uncle Hank, but I took the notebook and pen because I didn’t want Aunt Flo to be upset with me either. I was so worried about what to do that it was hard to stay asleep that night.

  I went to the store with Uncle Hank the next day and explained to him on the way what Aunt Flo wanted me to do, and when I finished he just chuckled, threw his head back, pounded the steering wheel, and said, “Oh, she’s a real piece of work, my Flo. God, I love her. Do whatever she wants you to and don’t tell her I know. It will ruin it for her if you do.”

  I felt so much better after that, and I tried to do what Aunt Flo asked, but it was hard because Uncle Hank spoke to everyone about everything, and I couldn’t tell if they were talking about cooking oil or motor oil or the weather. When I gave her my first report, she told me I hadn’t been very helpful. “You should’ve written more about what the butcher told him rather than all this stuff you wrote about the shopping cart’s broken wheel,” she said.

  Uncle Hank went to the store almost every day and he always invited Aunt Flo, but she didn’t like to go with him. She said she didn’t want him to see what she was buying because he’d spend the entire drive home trying to guess what she was planning to make. A couple of times she got a ride to the store with their neighbor, and even though she had to sit in the backseat with two little kids, she said it was better than getting the third degree from Uncle Hank. I asked her why she didn’t drive herself to the store and she said she didn’t like driving a stick shift. “It makes me nervous and I miss gears all the time,” she replied.

  Uncle Hank told me she wasn’t a very good driver. “She gets the driving jitters pretty bad,” he said. He told me Aunt Flo quit driving a few years after they got married, after she was pulled over by the state patrol for driving twenty miles per hour on the freeway and changing lanes without signaling.

  I suggested we take the bus once, so she didn’t have to ride in a backseat with little kids, but she just made a face and told me she didn’t like buses. “They’re so dirty,” she said.

  The one time we took a taxi to the grocery store she asked the driver to wait while we shopped, and he charged her fifteen extra dollars for the time he spent waiting. When we got home Uncle Hank had to come outside and pay the driver because Aunt Flo didn’t have enough money with her. From then on Uncle Hank drove us to the store and waited in the car while we shopped. She was happy about that because she liked his driving and he didn’t nag her about wearing a seat belt (she never did). She also stopped worrying about him seeing her purchases after she sewed herself a couple of black canvas shopping bags with drawstrings at the top, which she pulled closed before Uncle Hank put them in the trunk.

  There was a lot to do around the house with the competition going on. I was in charge of several things, including clearing the cats from the dining room chairs (one of their favorite places to sleep) and using masking tape (rolled around my hand like a mitt) to pick up whatever they’d shed that day so it wouldn’t get stirred up and contaminate the food. It was also my job to set the table, which I’d try to avoid doing until the last minute, usually when I’d heard either my aunt or uncle say, “Final call or no dinner for you.” Only then would I crawl out of the pool, change into something appropriate for the dinner table, and make my way to the kitchen to hear from Uncle Hank, or read (if Aunt Flo was cooking), the list of items to be put on the table for the meal. I appreciated Aunt Flo writing it down because I often forgot the soup spoons and could never remember the kind of mustard she wanted, Dijon or American.

  Aunt Flo’s specialties were pasta with cream sauces and almost any type of dessert. She was big on using flower petals and lavender blooms in or on her cakes, pies, and custards. She was also messy, took over the entire kitchen, and listened to loud music when she cooked, mostly soundtracks from Broadway— shows like Westside Story and Man of La Mancha. I liked the music; I’d even sung “Dulcinea” at my school’s talent show. My teacher thought it was an odd song for a kid to sing but she said I sang it pretty well.

  When Uncle Hank was cooking he liked silence and he only used one counter and the butcher block. He always had the doors and windows open, even if it was raining, and he cleaned up as he cooked. He was big on garlic, onions, herbs, and mustard. He also liked fish, but he didn’t serve it too often because they both hated the smell of it in the house. Overall, his meals were more flavorful, while hers were always b
etter looking, though I never got used to eating rosebuds and pansy petals in my desserts.

  Dinner was served every night at five minutes past six, and we had to be seated by six. Once the food was on the table, my aunt and uncle would spend too much time, in my opinion, asking each other questions about the meal, or smelling different components to try to guess what spices were in it. I didn’t have many questions, I just wanted to eat, but I wasn’t allowed to until they were done talking and we’d given our prayer of thanks. Uncle Hank loved God and tried to do good things every day because he said God wanted him to. He knew my family wasn’t godly because neither of my parents would close their eyes and bow their heads and pray when we had Christmas dinner at their house.

  I was probably in the third grade when I noticed my dad eating while Uncle Hank was saying a prayer of thanks. I thought it was odd, so when I was helping clear the table I said to Uncle Hank, “You know, my dad and mom don’t think there is a god.”

  “It doesn’t matter if your parents believe in God or not because God believes in them. God is here to help everyone and everything.”

  “Really? He wants to help me?” I replied.

  “Of course he does. You only need to ask Him,” he said.

  The more I prayed before dinner with Uncle Hank, the more I got to like it. It felt good when Uncle Hank, Aunt Flo, and I held hands, closed our eyes, and said thanks to someone (somewhere) for helping us. It was peaceful, and when we all smiled afterward it felt like we were connected in some nice way. I once tried to get my parents and brother to hold hands before dinner and pray but Mom just looked at me with a squished-up nose and said, “Sweetheart, we don’t pray and we don’t believe in God.”

  Dad looked over at me and said, “There’s no God. God is just a fantasy of lazy people with no ambition.”

  I got a sick feeling in my stomach and excused myself without eating any of the awful spaghetti Mom had made.