'No Thank You, I Don’t Care For Artichokes,'

decreed my mother-in-law as my husband passed the platter of inward-turning soft-skulled Martian baby heads around the table, and they were O so shyly slyly jostling each other with their boiled- green sardonic gossip (what was the news they told?) when he sharply answered, “Mother, have you ever eaten an artichoke?” “No,” she said, majestic, “but I just know I don’t care for them, don’t care for them at all”— for truly, if they weren’t Martian they were at the least Italian from that land of “smelly cheese” she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily curves and stalks, unnerving pots of churning who knows what, and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx, had fattened on her Russian- Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher chicken, good rye bread .... Bearded, rosy, magisterial at forty-five, he laughed, kept plucking, kept on licking those narcissistic leaves, each with its razor point defending the plump, the tender secret at the center, each a greave or plate of edible armor, so she smiled too, in the flash of dispute, knowing he’d give her ice cream later, all she wanted, as the rich meal drew to an end with sweets dished out in the lamplit circle, to parents, children, grandma— the chocolate mint she craved, and rocky road he bought especially for her, whose knees were just beginning to crumble from arthritis, whose heart would pump more creakily each year, whose baby fat would sag and sorrow as her voice weakened, breathing failed until she too was gathered into the same blank center where her son at sixty bearded still, still laughing, magisterial (though pallid now) had just a year before inexplicably settled.