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Consider the Cobb salad. A uniquely American staple, the darling of every diner menu from Hampton Bays to Honolulu. Consider its history, as rich as the dressing that drips from its lettuce petals like a leggy blonde off a tufted chaise longue. The story, if it is to be believed, stretches back to the 1930s, when Robert Cobb, ravenous after a long night as proprietor of the famous Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant, wanders into his empty kitchen to scavenge for a meal. He finds a little romaine here, a little leftover chicken there, and tosses it into a bowl. Whatever he can plunder from his stores gets added to the top of the heap: a lonely half of an avocado, some bits of bacon fished from the bottom of a serving tin, a handful of blue cheese crumbles, and a single hard-boiled egg. It is the work of a madman, a sinful creation that can be absolved only by chopping it until it repents and baptizing it with some red wine vinaigrette.
Before long, the Cobb earned its spot as a Derby mainstay, chewed ever so cautiously behind the tender veneers of the Hollywood elite, like so many of the best secrets. It even graced the lips of Grace Kelly herself. Because of its birthplace, its proportions, and its relatively expensive ingredients, the Cobb was a status symbol. Tourists flocked to L.A. with sacks of the silver dollars they’d scrimped and saved, all for the chance to darken a corner booth and share lunch with the stars. It wasn’t just a dish. It was a touch of decadence, the price of admission for an afternoon in nirvana. Wealth, salad-ified.
Nirvana, however, is not du jour here at Crystal’s Casual Dining. Not that I can see. There are no linen-covered tables, no wandering waiters grating fresh-cracked pepper, no celebrities. At Crystal’s, there are place mats advertising dental implants, a saltshaker to which someone has affixed a set of googly eyes, and a fly repeatedly attempting to ram its way to freedom against a windowpane.
I scan the bill of fare, as if I haven’t memorized its contents, holding it close to my face so as to not meet Mom’s eye. I know what I want to order. She knows what I want to order. We’ve done this dance before. But the ceremony calls for me to stare at the text until the letters begin to resemble hieroglyphs, upon which time I will relinquish the menu back to the land of orthodontia and slump back in my seat.
“Are we ready to order?” The waitress skids to a stop on the linoleum with her notepad already unfurled, and I proceed to dart my eyes around the room in every direction but hers. “No problem,” she says. “I’ll give you a minute.”
“Do you know what you’re going to get?” Mom asks from across the table.
I press a finger against the base of my dinner knife and begin to rock the blade back and forth as if it might hypnotize her into believing the words that follow. “Yeah, I think one of the specials.” You’re getting very sleepy. “Since it comes with a side salad and dessert, I figured you could take the rice pudding home and have it with your coffee later or tomorrow or …”
But she’s already frowning. “Why don’t you just get what you want?”
I admire the thought in the same way I admire a parent’s ability to make anything seem possible simply by cramming the notion into so many words. Say, you like movies. Why not write to that nice Steven Spielberg and see if he’ll hire you for his next project? It’s not pandering. It’s a tip from the last generation to wear hats. When people, armed with nothing more than shoulder pads and a can-do attitude, could march into any office building at random and walk home, that very same day, gainfully employed. How something so straightforward as “getting a job” could be rendered so complicated, if not entirely impractical, is hard for them to believe. Harder, still, when, in the great scheme of things, really not much time has passed. Yet, between us, across 3 feet of Formica tabletop, countless invisible walls—each one taller than the last—have been erected and electrified. And I’m sitting on the other end, no better able to convince her of their existence than I am to teach this knife to wave hello.
In the absence of an answer, I retrieve my menu off the faces of Dr. Teeth and the Women, in the hopes that maybe it’s rewritten itself. But it hasn’t. There, in the bottom left corner, it waits for me, as it always has. Crystal’s “Cobb” Salad: Fried chicken with diced tomato, red onions, cheddar cheese, egg, & crushed bacon doused in honey mustard dressing. It reads like an obituary. Beloved paragon of the luncheonette. Preceded in death by avocado and blue cheese. Survived by shreds of Sargento and enough Yellow 5 to poison a small town.
It used to be I wouldn’t think twice about taking the necessary steps to remove the “Crystal” from Crystal’s Cobb: asking for grilled chicken instead of fried, substituting the squirt-bottle French’s with oil and vinegar, and 86’ing the scraps of cheddar for blue cheese crumbles. Even with the $2 upcharge. After all, what was a couple of bucks if it bought a touch of decency? But that was in the before times, when my wallet wasn’t just a hunk of plastic that came with the Welfare Barbie expansion pack and $2 too indecent a proposal to entertain.
Having to eat a dirty Cobb is bad enough, but having to do so in a diner that doesn’t even have the decency to call itself one smacks of an insult. Say what you will about cracked vinyl, sputtering orange juice dispensers, and a perverse saltshaker who likes to watch. But they’ve found a way to get the job done while accepting the broken parts of themselves.
For me, it’s not so simple. Without “Minute Maid” stamped on my forehead, I don’t get a minute or the benefit of the doubt. I don’t get credit for trying. I don’t have any credit. Instead, what I get is another Saturday dinner where I can no better find an entrée than I can find an explanation for my prolonged unemployment. Where Mom is staring and the waitress is returning, and they both have questions. And where it no longer feels absurd to go looking for answers at the bottom of a salad bowl.
When I first got laid off from one of those marketing jobs no one’s ever heard of, the balance on my checking account didn’t trigger any immediate hysterics. Add in the severance I was owed and the weekly unemployment disbursements and I’d gathered that, with some light frugality, I could coast to my next opportunity with money to spare. So I dispensed with some luxuries. I canceled my shaving subscription and my gym membership, figuring scruff was in, running shoes were cheap, and the pavement was free. I started walking to the store to save on gas and burn a few extra calories. I lived by natural light during the day and, at night, wandered the house with an LED candle, shouting, “Fetch the governess!” As summer crept in, I threw off as many layers as legally permissible and threw open the windows, determined to subsist on cross-ventilation until my toes stuck to the hardwood.
This was all helpful on the margins. It turned a nickel into a dime. But when the monthly bills demanded thousands, it all amounted to kicking pebbles into the Grand Canyon. Once the cushion was gone and expenses began to eat into my reserves, I began to eat a little less. I skimmed a little off my portion sizes before deeming lunch a nonnecessity altogether. I switched from body wash to bar soap, applying conservatively to stretch its lifespan until it had to be lifted from the dish with a pair of tweezers. I used and reused dryer sheets and tea bags and threw away paper towels only when I’d worn them down to the point of translucence. At dinnertime, my routine consisted of riffling through the fridge and prioritizing whichever leftovers smelled the worst but still resembled a solid. If it’s not white, it’s all right. I lined waste bins with old shopping bags, watered down my hand soap and dish detergent, washed everything on cold, cut open toothpaste tubes and scraped out their innards with my finger. I even resorted to a little petty theft. Not much. But, at the odd lunch with a friend, I might leave with a pocket full of paper goods from the utensil station.
The only thing that passed, however, was more time. More dinners. More placations. “This is going to be my month, I feel it,” I’d say, before nicking a steak fry off my mother’s plate.
None of it was terribly amusing, but I’d swept it all under the rug, convincing myself that this wasn’t the new custom; it was all just to maintain, to hang on until the next job came along. And, as long as I didn’t wander into felony territory, I’d find a way to pay cosmic restitution, through either good works or an anonymous donation to my local Jimmy John’s. I’d struck these little deals with myself because I hadn’t expected to be out of work for very long. I lived near a major metropolitan area. I was skilled enough, young enough. I didn’t crack mirrors when I walked past. All this, in my head, amounted to a reasonably marketable individual. And yet, as months stretched into a year, I could feel the edges of myself starting to chip.
Like anyone might, I’d attempted to angle those parts away, breaking up the monotony by driving down to Mom’s every weekend and feigning fortitude. Over Saturday dinner, I’d talk about the fourth follow-up email I’d sent to the hiring manager who hadn’t responded in weeks, or the upcoming networking call a friend had set up for me with the Chief Whatever at a major magazine publisher, before quickly changing the subject. I’d order my Frankensalad with the upcharge and, when it would come time to pay, she’d tell me to “use Dad’s card,” the Amex I’d inherited because, perhaps, on some level, she knew it’d be easier to let a dead man pick up the check. As if I didn’t know who paid the bill on that account. Over time, though, the fissures began to work their way around to the front, evidenced by the Sunday send-offs, capped with an extra-long hug and the commensurate “This, too, shall pass.”
The only thing that passed, however, was more time. More dinners. More placations. “This is going to be my month, I feel it,” I’d say, before nicking a steak fry off my mother’s plate. It wasn’t long until it had become a common occurrence to find her pickle and side of coleslaw nudged against my plate while I’d been distracted. In time, it just became a brazen public gesture. It was around then, when I’d started scraping bits of red onion from the bottom of the bowl and fellating the tip of my fork, that the unspoken query found a voice. “Is everything … OK?”
The answer would come not from my mouth, but from my stomach, where a rogue, fascist cheese crumble gurgled, at once threatening to force everything I’d swallowed burning back up my esophagus. I’d succeeded in keeping my composure long enough to settle up with Crystal and make an escape. But as soon as I’d walked through Mom’s front door, it all came out. I was broke, I’d sobbed. My checking account was depleted, and I’d started to pull from my scant savings just to cover the monthly costs. After a gratuitous amount of heaving and gasping and emptying my sinuses down the back of her blouse, I’d regained what passed for composure and met my mother’s eyes to find what looked to be relief rather than disappointment. She slipped her hand over mine, and I walked her through the state of things, everything I’d done to trim incidentals and cut costs down to the bone. “How much do you need?” she asked, matter-of-factly, and by the time I’d answered, a recurring transfer had been set up between her account and mine.
I wanted to remain, to sit there and put our heads together and figure out some solution that I hadn’t yet thought of. But silence decreed that refusals were long since out of my price range.
As our new financial arrangement went into motion, I became quite skilled, for an average math student, at enumerating each flagrancy, immediately wondering what source of my mother’s modest income would have to account for it. If I ran the faucet too long while washing a glass, that was a little from her pension. If I threw away a half-filled garbage bag because some shrimp shells were stinking up the kitchen, surely her Social Security could buy some more. If I took a toll road or needed to print a few résumés at Staples or went to see a movie on $6 ticket night—now a mortal sin in this, my Book of Job-less—Mom’s meager VA stipend could cover it.
It’s all very cute when you’re 6 and you’re tossing a pack of Bubble Tape gum on the grocery conveyor belt and paying for it with a set of big, wet irises. But when you’re 30 and your mother is using her T.J. Maxx rewards points to buy you a new pair of interview slacks instead of that Anaïs Anaïs perfume she likes, no amount of Visine can make that a good look.
At some point along the way, I’d worked out that, should fate reveal itself to be a real dirtbag, my parents would always be the final firewall standing between me and full-on insolvency. Every used Dodge Caravan and skipped vacation made their dedication to my future clear. And I’d filed that nugget somewhere in the back of my subconscious just as quickly as it had materialized. It’s not so much a contract as a clause they started adding to the bottom of our birth certificates, in which they agree to protect us from financial collapse and we agree to help them recover their Netflix passwords and not use their inability to locate the End Call button as a case for eldercare. We agree to be each other’s extra insurance policies. Then, we agree to never talk about it because it’s too slimy a concern to examine.
Even when sentiments were sometimes clumsily expressed, never once had my parents ever made me feel like I was anything but a blessing. Even when our relationship was at its most strained, it had never been in doubt that I could rely on them. Which is why it didn’t take much effort to imagine the satisfaction my mother might find in not only having the resources to help her child but actually being able to deploy them. What a point of pride that might have been. Yet, I couldn’t deliver even that satisfaction for her. I couldn’t let her enjoy it. Because this was still America, where the inherent value of anything or anyone was vested in its ability to produce or turn a profit. And by either metric, I’d shown myself to be a bad investment.
Insofar as I could never, ever square myself with the people who brought me into the world and kept me from being carried off by a hawk, I could work within my means to not run up the tab.
I hadn’t anticipated how easy it would be to sell myself, or how restorative.
Between salads, I’d marked my weekends, looking for any way to minimize the damage I was inflicting. If there was a specialty item Mom needed, I skulked the back alleys of the internet and exposed myself to more spyware than a Soviet dissident in order to find her the best price. If something was broken or needed to be installed, I found my way around it with twee fingers, a YouTube tutorial, and a healthy amount of expletives. I became a call center’s worst nightmare, a cautionary tale with a quiver in his voice and endless time on his hands to be passed from representative to representative until “George” from Sling TV and “Priya” from AT&T miraculously found a way to shave 20 bucks off her monthly bill. In the summer, I discovered a rare wildberry bush and picked it until my hands were stained because I knew she loved them. In the fall, I took care of her fruit trees. All things I otherwise would have done. All things, firmly in the “good son” character description, reduced to a transaction as honor joined the list of things I could no longer afford.
The more I lost of myself, the less anything around me seemed to matter. Until it was all just a life cluttered with bric-a-brac I hadn’t any use for. But, then again, someone might. And I was open for business.
If it had an eBay category, nothing was priceless. If it fit in a flat-rate box, nothing was precious. Not even the two-piece suit at the back of my closet. The one I’d worn once, to my father’s funeral, then buried like everything else. It had no sentiment. It had a hole. Meanwhile, Sky Masterson in the local middle school’s production of Guys and Dolls had had a growth spurt. And, luck be a lady, their costume mistress paid cash.
I hadn’t anticipated how easy it would be to sell myself, or how restorative. In taking apart my bedroom—a collection of colorful wire baskets and wooden elephantery from my days desking at an African-themed resort—I was able to clear space for something new. At least someday. “It’s going to be like living on safari!” said the newest resident of the Hemlock Haven Retirement Tower as I’d herded a zoo into her trunk. True, I held no illusion of ever making myself whole. Yet, in every act of giving away—“enjoy! And, please, accept this ceremonial mask with my compliments”—I wound up getting something back.
By the holidays, I’d sold whatever necessary to cover about a month’s worth of bills, plus a little extra. I’d hoped to parlay that into a gift. But, in that I couldn’t place a bow on a reprieve, something about it felt deeply insufficient. There’d been a time when I would have arranged for a day in the city, a show and a nice restaurant. I’d have filled a gaudy Papyrus card with gratitude, stuck it to a bottle of that nice perfume, and delivered it to a curled lip. These relics from the days when I wasn’t a full-time taker weren’t so easily dispensed but, like everything else, had to be reconciled on an imbalanced balance sheet. I knew there was no adequate amount of thank-you’s I could stuff into something from Card$mart as much as I knew I couldn’t buy my mother a present with her own money just for the sake of symbolism. My need for that something extra would have to be satisfied with what I had on hand.
In the end, satisfaction took the shape of a simple ornament: two and a half inches of pewter script spelling out the word Joy, a thin red ribbon looped through the O. For a few dollars, I’d hoped it could say all the things I hadn’t been able to. That it could be both a hat tip and a promise. An apology never demanded and a down payment on a Christmas yet to come. That we could hang it on a limb and let the tree work its magic until, some years down the line, it was nothing more than a sappy little reminder. And if all that was too much to ask of a trinket, maybe, at the very least, it could say “This is not what I want, but it’s what I could manage.”
“Do you know what you want?”
The waitress stands there, clicking the end of a pen that hovers above her waiting notepad. Time’s up. In as long as it’s taken for the ice to water down my tea, she’s likely served dozens far more self-possessed. And yet, here, subject to a similar set of constraints Bob Cobb once used to make a name for himself, I seem to have forgotten my own.
When the forfeitures start happening, they’re so slight we don’t even notice them. It starts with the little extravagances, the vinaigrette, the fancy cheese, the Paramount Plus with Showtime. First, we scale back, then omit them altogether. Then, when our heads are turned, we flick the avocado off our plate and sell a pair of barely used hiking boots, convincing ourselves that it’s just needless fat and it’s not as if we’ll be scaling Denali anytime soon. Maybe we lose a few items from our closets and, while we’re distracted, swap out the romaine for iceberg because, come on, lettuce is lettuce and, if we squint real hard, it’s all green.
The only reason we don’t notice that our salad is collapsing in on itself is because, with each excision, there is a cheap substitution. When we yank the avocado, we add in tomato. When the sale of our mourning suit leaves a gap between the hangers, we stuff it with loose cheddar. The more we lose, the more we replace, with red onion, with honey mustard, with increasingly processed and pungent things to distract our taste buds from realizing they’ve been cheated. We may even trick our eyes for a while, trusting that they won’t pick up on minor alterations like breaded chicken. But when they do catch up—and, they always do—we barely recognize ourselves on the security camera over the Panera Bread drink station, filling our complimentary water cup with mango yuzu citrus lemonade like some soda fountain terrorist.
That’s all it is, really. The road from Hollywood to Crystal’s is littered with compromises. We accept the substitutions we can afford.
But say someone does come along and extends a hand full of blue cheese crumbles—everything we need to put ourselves back together. And we eat and we eat. Were there any justice, a fleck of mold might induce a light case of botulism. For, much as we gorge, we still cannot let our benefactor take heart in her own goodwill. Not because we don’t want it. Not because we resent her for having it. But, rather, because we resent ourselves for ever having needed it.
So instead of saying “thank you,” I say “I’ll have the Cobb salad.”
And when the waitress asks about the upcharge, in front of God, a concussed fly, and every dentist in southern New Jersey, I will consider it.
