Mr. Blotter

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Peter had a problem with grease. He thinks it started when he was in high school and on a traveling hockey team. Often after the game, the team would stop to get a burger or pizza. The hamburgers he could handle, the pizza he usually couldn’t. Peter realized that it was the pepperoni’s fault. Whenever he ordered a slice, the pepperoni would curl up like a suction cup and thus become the perfect cradle to hold the grease. He remembered one place in particular, outside of Albany, when the slice of pepperoni he was given was so greasy, he asked the guy behind the counter for a napkin. The pizza guy wasn’t cool about the request though. He looked at him like he had a huge boil on the middle of his forehead or something, until he reluctantly handed him half a piece of paper towel. Peter grabbed it and tried to gently dab the grease off of each piece of pepperoni. Unfortunately, soon thereafter, the paper towel he was holding was saturated with grease which when he looked at it, just made him queasy. All he wanted to do was salvage the slice of pizza! Unfortunately, his actions at the time just made it worse.

One afternoon he came home from school and found his mother standing on a step stool in the dining room, painting one of the walls.

“I’m trying to make it look like marble,” she said.

“Faux marble,” she added. “That means fake in French, by the way.”

He had no idea what she was talking about, but he stood there and watched her dip a sponge into a bucket of water and then dab the wall with it. She must have started to work on the room while he was in class, because now the whole house smelled like paint. He watched for a while as she continued dabbing the sponge in random spaces. And he realized it was kind of like what he’d do to his slice of pizza. Her dabbing though resulted in splotches of white showing through the coat of green paint which didn’t look like marble or even fake marble at all. He wondered why she was doing this though. They never ate in the dining room, so he didn’t understand why she would even attempt to paint it.

He was once told that he hadn’t been a picky eater.

“Green beans?” he remembered his mother saying. “You were the only kid that liked green beans right off the bat. Most kids start out okay with carrots, you know because those taste kind of sweet. But you went right for the icky stuff.”

Peter guessed that his mother wasn’t a big fan of green beans either and perhaps reluctantly fed them to him. Bizarrely, he thought that was the only time his mother had ever talked to him about what he liked or didn’t like as a child.

18 Years Later

Peter is sitting in the kitchen of his old house watching the real estate agent blow up balloons for the open house being held that afternoon. His mother had died last year, and he and his wife, Shari, decided the house would be easier to sell than to renovate and try to live in.

“What happened in this room?” Carolyn, the real estate agent, had asked him when she had seen the dining room and the very strange paint on the walls.

“Faux marble, I was told,” he said.

Carolyn had nodded and suggested maybe he’d want to paint over it so that potential buyers wouldn’t immediately run out of the house.

He didn’t think it was that scary, but apparently, she did. “We are selling the house as is,” he told her.

Peter looked at Shari and saw her trying to play “airplane,” while feeding their 6-month-old daughter, Abigail. Peter didn’t like the name they had given her, but Shari thought it would be nice to honor her grandmother by naming their daughter after her. Peter, however, thought the name Abigail sounded old, like a name someone would give a child during the American Revolution. So, he decided to call her Abby instead.

Today’s “airplane,” a red plastic spoon with wings and a tail that Peter, unlike Shari, found difficult to hold, was trying to feed Abby some lunch. Shari was also making “woo woo” sounds as she fed her what looked like sweet potatoes, or was that squash? In any case, it was something orange that she was trying to spoon into Abby’s mouth.

“Want me to take over?” Peter asked.

Peter knew that Shari would say no, but Peter didn’t want to be one of those dads who just stood around while the wife did all the work, so he asked her anyway.

“I got this,” Shari said.

Peter watched as Shari opened a different jar of something puréed, this one looked green.

“Oh,” he said.

“What?” Shari asked him.

“Has she tried green beans yet?” Peter asked.

“No,” Shari answered.

“My mom said I loved green beans growing up.”

Shari barely glanced at him as she tried to shovel a spoonful of what looked like green sludge into his daughter’s mouth. Abby, however, looked at him with these big brown eyes that suddenly were overflowing with tears as she spit out the green stuff.

He watched as the green beans slid down the bib she was wearing onto the plastic tray of the highchair she was sitting in. Finally, both mother and daughter had had enough for lunch – both in the feeding and in the consuming.

“I was going to order pizza before we start,” Peter heard Carolyn say to him. “Cheese okay? Or did you want toppings?”

Shari looked at him. When he had first met her, ten years ago, she had watched in horror as he ate pizza. The request for some paper towel, or at least a couple of napkins, and then this fierce determination to get every last bit of grease that he saw on a pie off, confused her. She also didn’t understand the amount of time it took to accomplish this task, since inevitably, the pizza was cold by the time he had finished this very methodical procedure. Plus, if she and Peter just ordered slices, well, Shari would have already finished eating before he had even started. Consequently, she had forbidden him to eat pizza in public, which was fine with him since he was self-conscious about this strange habit of dabbing as well. She had even told him that he can’t be “Mr. Blotter.”

“You want me to introduce you as my husband, Peter? Or as Mr. Blotter?” she had asked him sarcastically. He didn’t know how to respond to that remark, and wondered if he should try to make a joke about it. But he couldn’t think of anything to say that she might find humorous.

That’s why he decided to ignore his wife’s self-imposed ban on public pizza consumption today since he said, “Cheese is fine.” He wondered whether he should forewarn Carolyn of what might transpire. But then he thought about Shari’s strange habit of eating pizza, even if it was only a slice, with a knife and fork. He wondered which affectation Carolyn would find weirder – the blotting of the grease, or the use of silverware.

Peter went over to the dining room wall and started running his hands over the paint. It was surprisingly smooth, all the sponging his mother had accomplished years ago, even though the wall still looked like the paint job had never been completed.

“I’m going to put her down for a nap,” Shari said to him. She was carrying Abby in her arms and had cleaned her up and the highchair without Peter even noticing.

Peter nodded and went back into the kitchen. He saw the open jar of green beans that were still on the counter and suddenly he had the urge to eat some. He opened the old kitchen drawer, found a spoon, and helped himself to a bite. If Shari had walked in just then, she would have seen his mouth pucker as he tried to get his head around the taste of those beans.

“Uck,” he said out loud.

And then Shari did walk in. “You ate that?” she asked.

Peter could only nod.

“Why?”

Peter shrugged.

“Do you not want to sell the house?” she asked.

He was surprised by the question but understood it.

“Childhood home and all,” Shari continued.

“I do,” he said.

“I thought you said you liked green beans as a baby?” Shari asked.

“Maybe not,” Peter replied.

“Then why would your mother say you did?” Shari asked.

Peter looked at Shari. “Maybe my palate has changed,” he said.

Shari snickered. “Doubtful,” she said.

And then she whispered. “You can’t do that thing with the pizza here, okay?”

Peter was hoping Shari wouldn’t make a big deal about the blotting today, but he guessed she didn’t want Carolyn to wonder “why am I even trying to sell this house for these strange people.”

Peter went to check up on Abby. They had brought along a pack and play crib, and she was lying on her back with a little stuffed animal next to her. Peter picked up the animal and couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a bear or a pig, or something in between. He bent down to put his hand on Abby’s chest and felt her heartbeat. Then he noticed there was a big green stain on her shirt. He rubbed his thumb over the stain, but it wouldn’t come off. He wondered why Shari hadn’t changed her shirt, since on other days she seemed to change Abby’s outfits multiple times.

Peter stood there for a while watching Abby’s lips occasionally break into a little smile as she slept, which made Peter nostalgic and sad at the same time. Then he heard some noises in the kitchen, so he went to see what was going on.

“I decided to get calzones instead,” Carolyn said.

“Oh?” Peter asked.

“Hope spinach and cheese are okay,” she added.

Carolyn had found a knife in a drawer and was cutting two of the calzones in half. Peter watched as the spinach and the cheese oozed out of each slice.

“I just don’t like grease on my pizza,” Carolyn said. “This seemed like a better alternative.”

Peter looked at Shari. She was staring at him and then she started to laugh. Peter watched as Shari picked up half of a calzone with her fingers and started eating it.

“Oh, hot, but good,” she said.

Peter suddenly felt very happy. Happy that Shari was eating with her fingers. And happy that they were selling the house and that there would be no grease to contend with that day. He wondered if Abby would ever like green beans, or even the spinach in front of him. He wondered if she would ever like anything green. And then Peter thought, the day that Abby had her first slice of pizza, would she eat it with a knife and fork like her mother? Or spend an insane amount of time “blotting” it dry?

Peter reached for the calzone and watched as a piece of the spinach he was eating fell out and landed right on his shirt. He now had a big green spot, too. Just like his daughter.