It's been a slow process, but I've come to the realization that I did High School wrong. The world did High School wrong when I was there, in fact, and I'd like to do it over again. Not Junior High, though. I inadvertently managed to do Jr. High just fine with the help of a friend who knew intuitively what I didn't acknowledge at all: things were askew. Her name was Pat Ross, she was singularly committed to set the world right and my mother hated her.
My parents owned a bowling alley and I worked there every day after school when business was slow so that my parents could take a greatly needed break. In spite of the bowling alley, I suffered from an almost terminal case of "Ozzie and Harriet." Life had not been so kind to Pat. Her mother divorced when Pat was little; when "nice" women didn't get divorces in our town. It wasn't socially acceptable, financially prudent or feminine. She raised Pat single-handedly without benefit of child support. It made Pat the only latch-key kid I knew even before the phrase was coined. It also gave her a very cynical view of how the "real" world actually functioned. Since she didn't have better options, Pat spent a couple of hours with me every day after school in an empty bowling alley. We played cribbage and she infused me with not nearly enough of her philosophy. She had red hair and a ton of freckles, was pudgy in a Twiggy world, believed that we should be vegetarians and in most other aspects was a non-conformist as well. I still thought Ricky and David's lives were real.
We lived in a time when "girls" were encouraged to aspire to the Miss America tiara. It was the pinnacle of existence. We were not permitted to wear pants in school and our skirts had to cover our knees. We were forced to take "Home Ec" where they wasted precious school time teaching us the proper way to scrape burned toast so that it would still be acceptable. Our grades and our chances to enter a good university suffered in direct proportion to the number of tunnels found in our muffins. They taught us how to iron. How to boil water. The proper order in which to wash dishes. How to maintain good posture wearing high heels. They judged and graded us on these tasks and poor grades could nullify any excellence we showed in geometry or physics if we were brazen enough to disregard counseling and enroll in such classes.
Pat loved Home Ec. She viewed it as an opportunity to carry out her vendetta in a sanctioned atmosphere. She always burned the toast and refused to scrape it "properly." "I like it burned!" she'd tell the teacher, eye to eye. "That's the way my mother always makes it." She burned holes in two dish towels as well while timing to see how long it would take an iron to ignite cotton. And she loved to boil eggs. Boiled eggs were to be works of art. No darkness around the yolk was acceptable and they must be boiled gently enough to prevent the shells from cracking. Pat, however, liked to turn the heat up to watch the water roiling and the steam coiling toward the ceiling. She had a macabre streak that I was drawn to. I remember her standing over the pan of boiling eggs, wringing her hands together, contorting her face into a wicked grin and laughing. "Look," she turned to me then turned back to point into the pan, "we've finally broken through! A breach clear to the core. They're spilling their guts! Quick, turn the heat down just a little so we can keep them just like that. It's too keen and I don't want to turn them into 'flowers' for gawd's sake!" I dutifully turned the heat down. "Miss Henry," Pat called across the noise of the room, "I think we've done it wrong here. Our whole pan is full of little floating egg guts. They're a nice color, though, kind of pale yellow entrails all curling around each other in some kind of mass but they're not at all grey. What do think the proper way to serve them will be?"
Her coup de gras, though, was our cooking "final" the first semester. We had to prepare a simple entree using the cookbooks and food available in the class. We were allowed to modify recipes slightly to encourage our creativity in the culinary arts, but only within the limitations of what was in our classroom. Our teacher would grade our preparations, our table settings and taste our food for evaluation. Pat began searching the cookbooks a couple of weeks early. I was already a fair cook and considered the assignment a boring no-brainer. I was more than happy to spice up the occasion following Pat's lead.
Finals week rolled around and Pat plunked the cookbook down in front of me. "OK," she said," We're going to add some onions sautéed and dripping in bacon grease to these. The onions need to be room-temp before we add them, though, or they'll spoil the effect. Do you want to do the onions or the eggs?"
I looked at the recipe and gagged. Coddled eggs. Then I grinned. "I'll do the eggs so you don't burn them. You do the onions." A sense of excitement surrounded us. Pat peeled and sliced a big white onion then chose only the largest rings and made one cut through them so they were long curved pieces. I put a double-boiler on before setting the table. The linens and centerpiece were tasteful and very attractive. While Pat fried the onion strips, I whipped the eggs with a fork and poured them into the double-boiler. Pat burned the toast as usual and cut it into the perscribed little triangles. I added the onions to the barely congealed mass of warmed eggs, pouring blobs of grease into the still somewhat slimy mixture before spooning a mound of it over the burned toast tips.
"Oh, Miss Henry," Pat called, "ours is done and the cookbook says it's to be served immediately. Can you come eat it now?" We had the first finished product, completing ours in record time, and most of the class crowded around to see not only what we had made but also how the grading would go.
Miss Henry daintily sat at the table and spread the napkin on her lap. She smiled up at us but, taking in our beaming faces, her lips began to quiver. I added a small green sprig of parsley to the plate and, serving from Miss Henry's left, carefully slid the plate to the center of the place mat, exactly one inch from the edge and with the parsley to the upper right. It was perfect. I managed to whip it onto the table fast enough that the gelatinous conglomerate of eggs kind of swung to the right and then swayed to the left. It continued to move ever-so-slightly doing the famous "Jello" brand jiggly-wiggly.
Miss Henry blanched and flinched. Her eyes kind of bugged out as she looked at the plate. She cleared her throat and made a failed attempt to smile again. "What, exactly, is it?" she asked.
"I call it 'Coddled Onions a la Ross'. Here's your fork; dive right in!" Pat smiled encouragingly.
Miss Henry took the proffered fork and poked at the still-moving eggs. The onions were in the mass without being actually "integrated." Each strip possessed its own slim halo of brown bacon grease that prevented it from melding with the warm, glutinous eggs. She dutifully cut into the toast to lift a bite from the plate. The toast and eggs slid off with a soft "plot," leaving just one long strand of onion dangling in the air.
Pat bent low for a closer inspection. "That's funny. I didn't know the veins in the onions would turn darker like that in each strip when they cooked. Hmmm. They kind of look like segmented tape worms, don't they?"
It was then that I heard noises from the girls gathered around. I had been so focused on Miss Henry that I hadn't paid any attention to them. I turned to see two of them leaving the room. Several others looked sick. Some had returned to their own kitchens but no one looked like they wanted to do any more cooking that day.
Miss Henry was still sitting there with the onion swinging from her fork. "I don't know, Miss Henry. I mean, I know we followed the recipe. Are you sure it's right? It doesn't seem like the eggs are done enough. I mean, people could get trichinosis or something from eating eggs that aren't cooked all the way, couldn't they? I think the shells even had chicken-stuff on them. " I said.
Miss Henry still hadn't taken a bite. If fact, she hadn't moved and Pat wasn't done yet. "You're supposed to eat it while it's still warm or it isn't any good. The book says so. It says the eggs will congeal and turn kind of semi-solid if they get cold. And the bacon grease, too." Pat bent down to look more closely at the plate. She took a deep, audible breath. "Well at least it smells good. Kind of looks like something my dog puked up, though. Hope it tastes good." She smiled sweetly, innocently . . .
I no longer remember if Miss Henry ever did take a bite or if the rest of the class finished their cooking projects for the day. Suffice it to say Miss Henry's recommendation was that both Pat and I cooked well enough we didn't have to take her class the following semester. And I've noticed that coddled eggs are no longer in cookbooks since, as Pat knew back then, the really "are" dangerous!
Our free time after lunch we spent together in the Chemistry classroom where there was another class eating lunch. We dug out dissecting trays at the front counter and laboriously dissected fish for extra credit, carefully holding up, inspecting, commenting on, and cataloging everything we extracted. I remember making a big to-do over finding a whole, though partially digested, bird in the stomach of a bass. That may have been when we were told we could no longer dissect things during anyone else's lunch break. So we took to the back storage room where we experimented until we produced peach wine from home-canned peaches. Although it tasted awful, we were very proud of the accomplishment. The only extra acknowledgement we got for those experiments, though, was notes home to our parents.
Pat infused most areas of my life with her own special sense of "rightness" and self. At the time, I played an accordion. Pat talked me into drums. I read "Ann of Green Gables"; Pat bought me my own copy of "Guns of Navarone" and took me to a used paperback book store where I discovered "Carter Brown" and developed a penchant for black lace underwear. I was athletic and a cheerleader; Pat talked me into participating in a County-wide track meet with her even though she was lousy at sports. Our school didn't enter girls so we cut classes and entered ourselves representing our school. We pedaled our bikes three miles to the meet. I placed third County-wide. Pat clipped my ribbon to the front of her bike and sang rousing (if off key), gusty freedom songs all the way back to school where we were given suspension slips. Fortunately they were dismissed because it was a first offense but I think Pat would rather have battled them over the issue. She seemed a bit disappointed.
Our sophomore year we headed off to Senior High. Pat and I only shared two classes: Geometry and Biology. It was in biology, though, that she continued to encourage my imagination. While we drew sketches of the flora and fauna in a 10x10 patch of woods, Pat drew wild birds. She catalogued the "Queseegulk" and the "Fogoomoosh," both named for their distinctive calls. Calls I learned and can still duplicate. And some of her descriptions of protozoa are lodged in my brain as well:
Real friends are a source of inspiration until the day you die.
I must confess that a few of the facts of this story have been embellished upon . . . but none of the important ones *g* I apologize to Pat, wherever she may be, if she is offended in any way.
