My Aunt Dot (my father's sister) was a sweet, often confused lady. I was very fond of her but around the time I hit age thirteen, my mother told me something chilling that involved her sister-in-law.
My parents had saved up for and were about to embark on a two-week trip to Europe. I think it was the only time either of them went overseas in their adult lives and the only time my father crossed an ocean in his life. My mother had been to England once in her teen years before she met him.
It was not the most pleasant of trips. I don't remember specifically where they went but it sounded like one of those "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium" expeditions that crammed way too many cities into way too few days…so way too much of the time was spent packing, unpacking, checking in, checking out, getting onto buses, getting off buses, etc. I think they had one day — and not even a full one — in Paris. They liked that city or at least thought they might if they'd been able to experience any of it.
I know they came back disappointed. My father also had a lot of problems with the food and there were unexpected expenses and they never did it again. After it was over, he remarked that for what they spent for one two-week trip to Europe, they could have gone on fifty of their three-day jaunts to Las Vegas where they never had anything but a great time. He said, "There, I always know what I'm eating, plus I can gamble and see Shecky Greene."
That was true. When you go to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, you rarely see Shecky Greene. You could attend for months and not see anyone named Shecky.
That was the only time they left me alone for two whole weeks. After that, it was a lot of those three (occasionally, four) day Vegas expeditions. I looked forward to their trips because it meant I had the house to myself. After I started dating, I really looked forward to them being away because I could bring a girl friend over. I'd say to my folks, "Hey, you ought give that two weeks in Europe thing another try" but they never did.
Anyway, before they left that one time for Europe, my mother said, "We've asked Dot to check in on you in case anything happens."
I said, "Name me one thing that could happen that I couldn't handle and where she'd be of any use whatsoever."
My mother thought for a second and said, "Okay, you have a point. But we asked her because she'd feel insulted if we didn't." That, I was sorry to admit, made sense. What didn't was what my mother said next…
"I don't know if we ever told you this but we've left you to her in our will."
I gasped, like the wacky neighbor in a bad sitcom, "What?"
She said, "Well, if something happens to us, like if we were both killed, you need a legal guardian. You're thirteen. So we specified that Dot would adopt you or become your guardian or whatever it is that happens."
I said, "You left me to a woman who can't heat up a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti?" That was a true accusation. Years earlier, when I was too young to be left alone for a day, they'd parked me for an afternoon at Aunt Dot's. For that occasion and any such that might follow, she'd laid in a supply of the easiest food in the world to prepare — i.e., Chef Boy-Ar-Dee canned spaghetti.
In case you're unfamiliar with the procedure, I'll spell it out for you. You may wish to print this out, just in case…
You open the can. You empty its contents into a sauce pan. You heat the sauce pan on the stove for about four minutes. You turn off the stove, transfer the contents of the sauce pan into a bowl and serve with a side of fork.
Congratulations! You have just cooked spaghetti and are now eligible for a job in the kitchen of an Olive Garden near you.
I still don't know how she did it but Aunt Dot somehow managed to serve me Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti that was inedible. I think she'd studied the instructions on the can and somehow thought there was something in there about stirring in a full bottle of Lysol.
Reminding my mother of that legendary repast did not change the fact that Aunt Dot was poised to inherit me. "We have to designate someone," Mom said. "It's either her, your Uncle Nathan or someone on the East Coast." Maddeningly, she was right. My mother had a tendency to be that way: Maddeningly right.
So off they went for two weeks and I was fine alone. I could keep my own hours. I could fix food for myself. I could even heat up a perfectly-edible, Lysol-free can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti. Then one of those days, instead of just phoning to make sure I was alive and hadn't sold the house, Aunt Dot said, "I'm coming over tomorrow night to fix you dinner."
I said about fifteen times, "That won't be necessary" but she said about sixteen times, "You must be starving for a real dinner." I wasn't but if I had been, that need would not have been sated by what she brought over the next evening. It was not a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee canned spaghetti. It was — get ready to cue the horror movie music sting — a box of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Pizza Mix in a box.
(Okay, here's the horror movie music sting…)
I took one look at it, heard that music in my head and thought, "This is not going to end well." I don't claim to be able to see into the future but sometimes, you know. You just know.
Making the Chef's pizza was more complicated than making his spaghetti. Then again, just about everything was more complicated than making his spaghetti.
This is from distant memory so it may not be 100% accurate but as I recall, you had to mix hot water, the envelope of flour and the envelope of yeast mix and let the dough rise for a while. Then you took a cookie sheet and applied a thin coating of oil to its surface. Then you molded the dough into a ball and put it on the cookie sheet, then flattened it out into a thin, pizza-like circle. Aunt Dot made it almost to this step before things began going horribly, horribly wrong.
Try as she might, she could not get the dough into the proper shape and thickness. She did it over and over and over again, each time wadding the dough back up into a ball and starting anew. Of course, every time she rewadded, the dough was oilier and therefore harder to manipulate.
Some interesting shapes emerged. One looked like the letter "R." Another resembled Dabbs Greer. Yet another called to mind a Rorschach test image of two dogs having sex. At one point, some odd configuration emerged and she asked me, "Does that look like a pizza?" I said, "No, it looks like a pancreas." I had never seen a pancreas but I would have bet my entire comic book collection that what she'd made looked more like a pancreas than it did like a pizza.
Finally, she had something on the cookie sheet resembling the state of Florida and we decided that was as close to round as we were going to get. I pressed another cookie sheet down on it to make it properly thin and she poured on the sauce mix and sprinkled the cheese mix.
All this time, the oven had been preheating so it was ready to receive the "pizza." When she took it out, one-half was seriously overcooked and the other was seriously undercooked…and I detected the faint aroma of Lysol. We ate what we could of it and within the next week, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee changed his name to Chef Boyardee. I can't say how but I just know that Aunt Dot cost him his hyphens.
After the putative pizza was gone, one way or the other, Aunt Dot sat me down and gave me a speech I was to hear every time I was alone with her for years to come. "Mark," she said. "Everyone needs someone to confide in and I want you to know you can confide in me."
I was confused. "Confide what?"
"Problems you have, things that are going on in your head…the kind of private things you don't want to discuss with anyone…"
I was more confused. I didn't really have any problems — or at least none unrelated to my Aunt and a certain, soon-to-be unhyphenated chef. And if I did have private things I didn't want to discuss with anyone, wouldn't I not discuss them instead of discussing them with her?
But I would rather have hurt myself than Aunt Dot. You'll notice that I waited a good 34 years after she died to tell this tale in public. I said, "Uh, yeah, sure. Whenever I have something to confide in anyone, I'll confide it in you." That made her very happy. It did not escape me that she'd never had children and that I was about as close as she was ever going to get to that.
Every time I saw her after that, she'd get me alone and ask me if I had anything to confide. I honestly never did. I was the kind of kid who, if he had a problem, would solve it himself A.S.A.P. instead of running to someone else for help. And if I had had to run to someone else, I couldn't imagine her understanding the problem, let alone being able to contribute.
One time she asked me when I was around eighteen and at that moment, the big problem on my mind was this: I was going out that evening on my second date with a cute lady named Janey and I was pondering whether I should "happen" to have a condom or two along, just in case. If she got into a properly romantic mood, I could imagine her being really glad that I was prepared. I could also imagine her being really offended that I'd come to the date expecting to need one.
This is not the kind of problem you confide to your aunt unless your aunt is Dr. Ruth Westheimer. (As it turned out, I left a box of them in the trunk of my car, where it remained sadly untouched all evening. Just like Janey.)
I forget if it was my eighteenth or twenty-first birthday but at one of them, my mother said to me, "Congratulations! You no longer have to worry about being raised by Aunt Dot if you become an orphan!" That was almost as big a relief as getting a high draft number. But I still had to deal with Aunt Dot asking…practically begging me to confide in her.
I finally started making up phony problems and asking her advice. She was delighted even though, no matter how simple I made them, she never really came up with more of a solution than, "Well, you have to try harder" or "Well, you have to not let that bother you."
In 1980, she went into the hospital and it didn't look like she'd be leaving there alive. She went in on a Wednesday and because I was working on a TV show that was taping Thursday and Friday, I couldn't get over there until Saturday. I'd been told flowers were not allowed so I went to a store near me that sold silk flowers and I got her a small arrangement in a cute vase.
When I got to her room, she was asleep and the nurse suggested I let her stay that way. I left the flowers, went down to the cafeteria for a bite and returned an hour later. She was still asleep. I waited around a while, thinking up new bogus problems to "confide" to her but she was still dozing when I had to go. I told the nurse on duty to tell her that her nephew Mark was there and that the flowers were from me and I'd be back later.
That evening, I went back but she wasn't in her room. The same nurse told me she'd had an attack and had been rushed down to Intensive Care about an hour earlier. Then she added, "But she was awake for a while and when I told her the flowers were from her nephew Mark, she told me all about you. She said you were a very successful TV writer but she couldn't remember the name of a single show you worked on."
"Yeah, that's my Aunt Dot," I said.
The nurse said, "She said the two of you were very close and that you always confided in her when you had a problem."
I went to a pay phone and called my father to tell him Aunt Dot had been rushed to Intensive Care. He told me he'd just gotten the call that she had died there.
A few years later, I noticed in the newspaper that Ettore "Hector" Boiardi had passed away at the age of 87. Mr. Boiardi had changed the spelling of his name to become Chef Boyardee and the obit said that he was very proud that his canned foods had made it possible for anyone to prepare tasty Italian food in their own kitchen.
I don't believe in an Afterlife. At times, I have some trouble believing in this one. But it does please me to think of Chef Boiardi or Boyardee or even Boy-Ar-Dee entering the pearly gates. And there's St. Peter welcoming him, looking slightly ill with the faint aroma of Lysol on his breath saying, "Uh, Chef, there's a woman here I think you ought to meet…"