The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [76]
“Hey, Dwayne, come over here and try some of this Spiced Liver ’n’ Candy Corn Upside-Down Casserole,” one of the Mabels would say. “Mabel made it. It’s delicious.”
“Upside down?” Dwayne would remark with a dry look that indicated a quip was coming. “What happened—she drop it?”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she did,” Mabel would reply, chuckling. “You want chocolate gravy with that or biscuit gravy or peanut butter ’n’ niblets gravy?”
“Hey, how about a little of all three?”
“You got it!”
The main dishes were complemented by a table of brightly colored Jell-Os, the state fruit, each containing further imaginative components—marshmallows, pretzels, fruit chunks, Rice Krispies, Fritos corn chips, whatever would maintain its integrity in suspension—and you had to take some of each of these, too, though of course you wanted to because it all looked so tasty. Then came at least two big tables carrying tubs and platters of buttery mashed potatoes, baked beans and bacon, creamed vegetables, deviled eggs, corn breads, muffins, heavy-duty biscuits, and a dozen types of coleslaw. By the time all these were loaded onto your paper plate, it weighed twelve pounds and looked, as my father once described it, distinctly postoperative. But there was no resisting the insistent blandishments of the many Mabels.
Everyone for miles came to the suppers. It didn’t matter what the denomination of the church was. Everybody came. Everyone in town was practically Methodist anyway, even the Catholics. (My grandparents, for the record, were Lutherans.) It wasn’t about religion; it was about sociable eating in bulk.
“Now don’t forget to leave room for dessert,” one of the Mabels would say as you staggered off with your plate, but you didn’t have to be reminded of that for the desserts were fabulous and celebrated, the best part of all. They were essentially the same dishes, but with the meat removed.
On the few nights when we weren’t at a church social, we had enormous meals at my grandparents’ house, often on a table carried out to the lawn. (It seemed important to people in those days to share dinner with as many insects as possible.) Uncle Dee would be there, of course, burping away, and Uncle Jack from Wapello, who was notable for never managing to finish a sentence.
“I tell you what they ought to do,” Uncle Jack would say in the midst of a lively discussion, and someone else more assertive would interject a comment and nobody would ever hear what Jack thought. “Well, if you ask me,” he’d say, but nobody ever did. Mostly they sat around talking about surgical removals and medical conditions—goiters and gallstones, lumbago, sciatica, water on the knee—that don’t seem to exist much anymore. They always seemed so old to me, and slow, so glad to sit down.
But they sure were good-natured. If we had a guest from beyond the usual family circle somebody would always bring out the dribble glass and offer the guest a drink. The dribble glass was the funniest thing I had ever seen. It was a fancy-looking, many-faceted drinking glass—exactly the sort of glass that you would give to an honored guest—that appeared to be perfectly normal, and indeed was perfectly normal, so long as you didn’t tilt it. But cut into the facets were tiny, undetectable slits, ingeniously angled so that each time the glass was inclined to the mouth a good portion of the contents dribbled out in a steady run onto the victim’s chest.
There was something indescribably joyous about watching an innocent, unaware person repeatedly staining him- or herself with cranberry juice