The Dinner Winner

We were all sitting around the dinner table. Dad at one head, my sister at the other. Me beside my brother fighting over leg room with mom opposite us. I was ten or twelve.
Dinner that night was chili and a salad. I hated chili. In fact, I pretty much hated anything that wasn’t a hot dog or a White Castle. I have no idea how I didn’t actually turn into a solid before the age of fifteen. It may have helped that I spent many nights sitting alone at the dinner table, staring at a plate of peas. 

“This doesn’t taste right.” Dad said, the spoon hanging from his hand and a look of confusion and disgust on his face. He was a chili-lover. And it showed. He looked at mom. “Did you do anything different?”

“No. It’s the same old recipe.” Mom hadn’t tasted it yet. A somewhat lazy cook who couldn’t be bothered with fine ingredients or the delicacies of flavor, I sometimes think her taste buds are damaged. Now in their seventies, dad has completely taken over the kitchen. In fact, a few years ago he went on a mad rampage, opening and closing cupboards and showing us all of mom’s inferior forty-year-old cookware that he hated having in his kitchen. Dad with his indestructible All Clad and Le Creuset and Viking range. He had shouted in mock anger over a hideous pot, nearly injuring himself to bend down into a low cabinet. Mom had countered with a litany of excuses for keeping the warped and rusted tin saucepan. Everyone else was clutching their stomachs in laughter.

But back to the chili.

“Oh my god, it’s disgusting!” This from my sister, who was never opposed to great drama. She could turn a bug on the wall into the largest arachnid anyone had ever seen scaling the wall in an attempt to land on her face so she would jump maniacally, bang her head on the canopy post, cause an oversized and painfully embarrassing bruise on her face that would not only remove her from Saturday night’s cheerleading stint, but also cause her boyfriend to take Laura Pettinger out for soda and, ultimately, leave her single, alone, and living in a cardboard box by the age of 73.

I had no opinion, as I had refused to even touch my tongue to any item that had been within five feet of the pot of chili. My brother, too, was silent.

“It’s too spicy!” Dad was starting to get excited. He always told us never to fuck with the mafia or the IRS, but food was a very close third.

“It tastes like bark!” my sister again.

“Well, I can’t imagine what happened…” Mom stood and walked over to the stove. She examined all of the ingredients and noticed a change in the pepper that was still sitting beside the pot. The container was nearly empty.

“What? Did I put the whole…?” Her voice trailed off. She looked from the pepper to the pot and back again. She turned to us, shaking her head.

“I guess I somehow put too much pepper in. I don’t know how that happened.”

This entire time, dad was staring at my brother. My brother’s eyes were cast down as he very, painfully, unnaturally slowly pretended to eat his chili.

Dad, in his deep intimidating voice. “What did you do?” He was staring at my brother and with just a little more energy, he would have been growling.

The only thing that moved was my brother’s eyes. He glanced at dad so quickly, he might not have actually done it.

“What. Did. You. DO?” Dad leaned in a bit, still staring. He didn’t even blink. My brother cowered.

Then, quietly, innocently, “I added a little spice.”

“You added a little spice?” Dad was rising from his chair.

“I thought it needed more pepper.”

“You thought it needed more pepper!?”

Meanwhile, I was between the two of them. I looked at mom whose face was beginning to contort as everything she assumed about her trash-taking-out-without-being-asked son suddenly did a double back flip. My sister looked smug. She never minded when someone else got into trouble. In fact, she tried to cause it as much as possible.

“You put an entire container of pepper in! Why would you do that?!”

My brother broke.

“I hate chili! I couldn’t stand to eat it one more night! I knew if I ruined it, we would have to get something else!”

“So you ruined an entire meal because you, personally, don’t like chili!?” There was probably some talk of people starving in Africa at this juncture.

“Yes! I can’t stand it! I don’t ever want to eat it again!” My brother stood, near tears, and raced up to his room. There was a lot of shuffling about and we ordered a pizza. I watched the sad, tragic look in mom’s face as she poured the giant pot of chili – enough for two or three meals for everyone – down the disposal. Her son wasn’t who she thought he was.

My brother was punished and grounded and probably lost his allowance for a week or two.

We never had chili again.