If not sacrosanct, Sunday dinners were nearly compulsory — unless you had supplied Mom with a sufficiently grave excuse to mollify Dad. They were the one occasion in the week when the family gathered for a formal dinner, meant to promote manners and introduce us children to the habit of adult conversation. My dad clung to this ritual like the Victorian father he’d always wanted to be, even in the face of the more casual 60s.
For us the food was much more important. Dad was a good cook and would routinely make rotisserie chicken, barbecue steaks, spare ribs, or some other delicious animal part with sufficient protein for growing teenagers. Mom made the side dishes, often Rice Pilaf from a box or baked potatoes, with dinner salads and garlic bread. The garlic bread always provoked the same argument with Dad.
“Honey, just put Parmesan on all the bread.”
“But not all the children like it.”
“Tough! They can either eat it or not!”
“But it’s no trouble for me to separate them at the two ends of the basket.”
“It’s way too much trouble,” Dad would bitch, “You’re indulging them.”
Although Mom got her way, invariably one of us would pull bread from the wrong side of the basket. If this happened to Lisa, she would scrunch up her face and look to Mom for help — and Mom would surreptitiously scrape the Parmesan off of her bread and firmly whisper to her not to complain. Sometimes Dad would grumble when he grabbed a piece without Parmesan. Still, no matter how much he bitched, he lost the garlic bread war, because for the sake of peace Mom would institute any compromise she thought fit. I liked my spaghetti without sauce, for instance, so she would save some hamburger on the side for me to put on top of my pasta, though this exception was only allowed when we ate by ourselves before Dad got home from work.
Whenever Dad served steak, he would always ask everyone anxiously, “It’s not too rare, is it? I can always put it on a little longer.”
Except for the infrequent too-rare offering, we would assure him the steaks were fine, though sometimes he would snatch them up and put them back on the grill because he judged them too rare. This made for an interruption in the formal dinner but it couldn’t be helped. To have a really formal dinner you needed servants and we were just middle class.
I should mention here one devastating experience that had occurred about a year before, when Chad had taken downers and in his stupor shared them with narcs. He was busted. For his court appearance Dad bought him an ugly green suit that seemed too short in the sleeves, and that was the last we heard of it. The behavioral deviation was blamed on Chad hanging around with his old hoodlum friends from La Mirada, the lower middle class suburb we had tried to escape by moving to Huntington Beach. (Little did my parents know that Chad’s best friend at our new high school was also the biggest dealer.)
On the night in question we got on to the subject of drugs, not the most comfortable topic between parents from an alcoholic culture and nascent members of the counterculture. I was 14 at the time and Chad was 16, and we were expected to contribute to the conversation instead of being lectured about the virtues of Atlas Shrugged.
Dad was halfway lit as the subject turned to drug use in general and its popularity among musicians, Gene Krupa for one, when suddenly, out of character, he became personal, fixing Chad with a stare and demanding: “Do you smoke marijuana?”
“Of course not, Dad,” Chad said, shaking his long blond locks on his green suede jacket.
Apparently satisfied, Dad turned to me. “And you, Eric?”
“Well…. I have,” I said rather nonchalantly.
A desert wind blew through the dining room, sent by the prophets, bringing a dry chill to our lips. Sunday dinner was not a place for truth, (indeed, our family had little use for truth); it was a time for pretense, when my father could bloviate to his captive audience and simultaneously absorb praise for his cooking and munificence as the great provider.
My answer rendered Dad’s face completely blank. Recovering, he frowned at me in his terrifying way, bushy black eyebrows bunched over dark eyes fiercely attempting to pierce his boozy haze. He looked away then stared back as if I was some alien who had just appeared at his dinner.
“You have?” he said. “How many times?”
I stared up at the acoustic ceiling and tried to arrive at an approximate number. “About 30, I guess.”
A silence fell, a silence louder than any silence from any awkward moment from any dinner in memory. Lisa squirmed in her chair and scooted closer to Mom.
I, Eric Griffin, had dared to utter the bald truth without apology, with no respect for the polite deceits our Mom had taught us to practice for the sake of peace, which meant avoiding anything that might ignite Dad’s wrath.
Dad could truly be a monster, not that he physically beat us. He was college educated and such behavior was for amateurs. Instead he just stripped the flesh off of us verbally until we walked around in our bloody bones looking for a place to die.
But clearly my admission confounded him. He didn’t know how to respond to something that by our family’s unwritten rules should never have been uttered. I glanced at him as he stared at his plate and played with his potato skin. Mom shot him a urgent look begging his restraint but I don’t think he saw it. Lisa leaned against Mom while Chad stared across the table at me in pained incredulity. We were waiting for the explosion! The explosion didn’t come.
The dinner just seemed to end there. I can’t remember any more conversation. We finished our plates and asked to be excused while Dad still sat at the head of the table, nursing his scotch, saying nothing. Mother busied herself in the kitchen. As soon as the coast was clear Chad motioned me angrily up to our room.
“What did you have to do that for, you frickin’ idiot?”
“Do what?” I said.
“Tell Dad about us smoking pot!”
“Well, he asked,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean you have to tell him, you asshole!”
“Hey, I was just telling the truth,” I said.
“Jesus!” Chad turned away in frustration.
We stayed in our bedroom the rest of the night, afraid to go downstairs or anywhere near Dad. We thought ourselves lucky that he hadn’t barged into our room, bellowing put-downs and threats, but he never came. And like Chad’s drug arrest a year earlier, we never spoke of it again, as if it had never happened.
