T O D A Y

Drama Queen candidates
Gag me

Contestant No. 1
Contestant No. 2
Contestant No. 3

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R E C E N T L Y

I want your sex
By Lisa Moskowitz
Forays into sex selection could result in a nation of girls
(09/15/98)

Words that sing
By Polly Shulman
Children's books that make words sing
(09/14/98)

We're here, we're ... uh ... straight?
By Sallie Tisdale
Using prayer, therapy and makeup to help gays "return" to heterosexuality
(09/11/98)

Rain on the parade
By Jeffrey Obser
Youth march or media circus?
(09/10/98)

Monica's betrayal
By Jenn Shreve
When Monica Lewinsky told more than all, she sold her man down the river -- and violated the adulterer's code of honor
(09/09/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

Spaghetti weevils
By Leslie Goodman-Malamuth

No one in my family is naturally svelte, either on my mother's or my father's side. Not then, and not now. My mother battled the scale for her entire life, a struggle complicated by the fact that she craved alcohol as much as food. I think the time in her life when she was happiest was during the late '40s and early '50s, when she was a flight attendant -- "hostesses," they were called -- for TWA. What glamour! What prestige! The curling black-and-white photos with the deckle edges show my mother and her party-gal roommates, in halters and dark lipstick, perching decoratively on chaise lounges outside their beach-front rental house near Los Angeles.

Among the hostesses who clustered south of LAX, the gals from TWA were considered the elite. "Teenie-weenies," they were called, and they had to live up to their billing. They were weighed in like jockeys before each flight, and if overweight, they would be warned, fined, grounded or even fired. So my mother lived on three packs of cigarettes a day, black coffee and skim milk. Once she was grounded for good after marrying my father (in those days flight attendants had to be single), her desire for either a good meal or a stiff drink played itself out at the family table throughout my childhood. The drinks usually won out.

My mother defined herself as much by what she wouldn't cook as what she did. She tantalized us with memories of occasional, drop-dead-delicious meals, like stuffed cabbage, sour-cream enchiladas and lasagna. "I'll make that when we all lose some weight," she'd say balefully, lighting up another Kool. Our dinners typically comprised naked, broiled lean meat or fish and a green salad, with brown rice or a baked potato on the side if Mother really felt like pushing the boat out. As often as possible, I gravitated to my paternal grandmother's kitchen, where the pantry overflowed with treats seldom, if ever, seen in my mother's house. At Nana's, two slices of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread cradled a thick slab of sweet butter; at home, Wonder Bread was spread meagerly with diet margarine, the kind with such a high water content that beads of moisture lolled on the surface. The wrapper warned against using it "for cooking or baking purposes."

But one day I came home from school to the intoxicating aroma of a meat sauce simmering on the back of the stove. All afternoon, it sent thick ribbons of scent through the air. And there was garlic bread! I couldn't wait. I don't know what the occasion was, but when dinner was announced, we all dashed to the table and waited expectantly. My father opened the sliding plastic top on the green, foil-wrapped cylinder of Kraft grated parmesan cheese and shook a generous amount onto each plateful of spaghetti.

As I watched the steam rise, some of the crumbs of parmesan began to walk dizzily around on the mounds of pasta. The cheese was infested with weevils, in a fairly appalling weevils-to-cheese ratio. We all wordlessly took our plates to the sink and dumped them down the garbage disposal. "I put the same cheese on the garlic bread," my mother murmured.

We had Wonder bread and diet margarine for dinner. Green salad, too.
SALON | Sept. 16, 1998

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