WALDORF SALAD, PART ONE

The other day I made my first Waldorf Salad, a simple concoction of apples and walnuts and celery and mayonnaise.

This is significant.

Waldorf Salad was a staple of my childhood. My grandma, and sometimes my mom, would make it whenever there was a potluck-type family gathering. I don’t ever remember having it for an everyday meal. It was special.

I didn’t eat it. I don’t remember disliking it per se. It just seemed like adult fare to me, like filet mignon or a cocktail.

But I loved watching it being made. My grandma would stand at the counter, half dressed for the event — usually in her hose and slip. It seems like her skirt was always somewhere being pressed. If no men were around, she’d walk around the kitchen in her bra — some super lacy D-cup contraption that really played up her cleavage. Her Tabu perfume would mingle with the smells of roasting turkey or freshly baked dinner rolls.

The Waldorf Salad involved a lot of chopping. She would line up several stalks of celery and with machinelike precision cut them into hundreds of tiny, remarkably uniform, pieces. Then she would work on the apples. I was completely amazed that she could peel an apple in one long, unbroken red spiral — which I would admire and play with for several minutes before devouring. My other grandma, who was more likely to don a plaid shirt than a lacy bra, could also perform this remarkable peeling feat, but in her case it was complicated by having to squint over the smoke of a Benson and Hedges cigarette dangling from her lips. As the peel of her apple got longer and longer, so did the ash on her cigarette. Sometimes I’d tell her the ash was about to drop, but she never seemed concerned. When the apple was bare, she’d hold it in one hand and ash her cigarette with the other. Then she’d take a big drag and wink at me.

Both my grandmas used to say the peel was the best part. They also said this about carrots and potatoes, and I remember being really confused that the best part was always being thrown away. The same was true of the fat from meats and the crust from bread. This still confuses me.

After all the chopping was done, my grandma would find some pretty glass bowl and assemble all the ingredients. Then she would stick it in the fridge and go finish getting dressed. It always happened in the same order. Usually I would go watch her complete her toilette. I’d sit on the commode and rummage through her giant bag of costume jewelry, making bold fashion suggestions as she finished her makeup and doused her jet black hairdo with a can of Aquanet.

Once we were at the event, the men and women would inevitably segregate — the former to watch a sporting event on TV, the latter to chatter in the kitchen. I loved these all-women groupings as a kid. I would usually sit quietly near my mom or on her lap and just take it all in — a crazy klatsch of recipe sharing and mothering tips and soap opera gossip and husband complaints. It was magical.

As I got older, though, I grew to dislike the segregation by sex. As I started to notice male privilege everywhere, the charms of those gatherings wore off. Why do the women have to do all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the nourishing, all the child-rearing while the men sit on their asses in the living room? my 13-year-old self began to wonder. Why did I have to do "girl" chores and my brother "boy" chores? How did taking out the trash once a week compare with dusting the whole house? How did occasionally mowing the lawn shirtless on a beautiful summer evening compare with washing and drying a sink full of dirty dishes every single night? How could these beautiful women who could peel an apple in one stroke tolerate this injustice? How could my mother ask me to clean the bathroom while my brother lazily tinkered with his erector set? She wants me to polish the toilet so he can pee all over it without so much as a thank-you?

The beautiful women had started to seem like enemies.