Hard-Boiled

Thursday, Apr. 15, 2004 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

We're still recovering from Easter. Something rattled within one of my Converse hightops this morning; upturning the sneaker dropped a fuchsia-purple foil-covered chocolate egg into my hand. Yesterday the Fiend found a plastic egg filled with Boston-baked beans in the washer, luckily before he washed a load. (The signature gewgaws of our Easter egg hunts are gaudy plastic egg shells filled with old-fashioned candy, riddles, quotations, and the occasional rock for that classical Charlie Brown touch.) The day after Easter, an unfound "robin's egg" in the blender was deduced from the blue grit floating in our Ibarra chocolate�the crunching of the malt ball went unheard in the grinding of this Mexican cocoa that comes in hard hexagonal cakes.

And somewhere a hard-boiled egg is rotting.

Saturday night, my sisters Maritilde and Bert boiled three dozen eggs. Three broken and one eaten egg later, Maritilde's four children and Jacob, with help from various adults, dyed and decorated thirty-two eggs. Which were hidden by pagans, agnostics and one gaianish atheist (Bert, her friend Esme, Jer, the Fiend, and me) in our back yard on Easter morn while the Romans were at mass. Thirty-one hard-boiled eggs were eventually found and promptly made into sixty* deviled eggs, extrapolating by a factor of eight from a recipe in Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone.

Which left a single aberrant egg to its lonely fate in my backyard as a feast for the ants and earwigs.

~

If gay marriage was legal in the state of California (but it's not) and if the definition of gay marriage was broadened to include relationships like a male-threesome-(triple? triad?)-sharing-fucking-privileges-with-a-close-knit-group-of-friends (it could happen�maybe someday�like when pigs fly across the frozen landscape of Hell), I would be able to say we had a houseful of in-laws for Easter. We were only missing my brother, my sister Lolly and one of the Fiend's brothers. Oh, yeah. . .and Medea, aka Katherine, Jer's mother. But we had the Fiend's mom and dad, two of his brothers, the mater, two of my sisters, and Jer's father. Plus spouses and a whole crowd of the next generation.

And Jer's father's new girlfriend, Margot. (You must pronounce the "t".)

If all the rich, fifty-year-old, newly-divorced� men in Los Angeles got together and voted for their ideal girlfriend, she probably would be some bubble-headed, bulbous-boobed, bleached blond bimbo, but if they had any sense, they would elect Margot, or some gal who looked a lot like her. Leggy former model, former actress, current realtor in her undeterminable thirties (or secretly in her forties), naturally lustrous hair, unnaturally lustrous teeth, smooth athletic grace, slim-but-not-skinny, springy-but-not-bouncy, sharp-but-not-barbed, funny-but-not-Janeane Garofalo. "You didn't tell us your dad was dating Christine Baranski," was the Fiend's muttered comment to Jer, when Margot first hove into our view on the gallant arm of Jer's father.

"What," was Jer's snappy comeback.

"Circa?" was my query.

"Circa "Cybill", or maybe The Birdcage," said the Fiend, just before the happy couple came within earshot.

Jer is trying to be wary of Margot, but he's not very good at it. He really likes her. That's not too surprising, she's quite likeable. It was kinda fun to introduce her around and watch the men spark at her proximity. The women were too classy to glower and hiss, but I hoped they wanted to. Margot was either too smart or too smitten to flirt with anyone but Jer's father, and she abandoned him to chat with my sisters and the mater, an excellent strategy. She earned the mater's unqualified stamp of approval when she agreed with the mater's opinion of Richard Avedon, for whom they both had worked, Margot on one side of the camera, the mater on the other, but united in their affectionate contempt for the man. Margot won me over by mashing egg yolks with enthusiasm and at length, and then consuming at least six of the little devils.

"I eat when I'm nervous," she confessed to me between two precise bites that made short work of a paprika-dusted egg.

"You're nervous?" was my query.

"Oh, yeah. I've been worried that all of you might think I'm a gold-digger or something," she confessed. (Do all former model/actresses make conversations into confessionals?)

I admired her abrupt candor and said, "Don't worry. We think you're something." Quick, but perhaps too oblique. It earned me a short snort of laughter.

"You're funny," she said, but not quite sure.

"I hope so," said I.

~

* Hopeful in our belief in the Demigod Paas (Pan's gay cousin), praying that he would not damn our foodstuff with poisonous or inedible hues, we blissfully consumed deviled eggs whose whites were spotted and streaked with pink, yellow, orange, magenta, blue and green, but the white of one egg was heavily splotched with a queasy mixture of green and purple dye. I lightly salted it and offered it to the Moondoggie, who happily snapped it up and snuffled around for more.

� Jer's parents have not divorced, but have legally agreed to a permanent separation with a pre-approved option for divorce, should it become necessary, e. g., if someone wants to marry someone else. Jer's mother was first out of the gate with a lover, a very quick-footed filly. Jer has met his mother's boyfriend and, astonishingly enough, they don't hate each other. Jer and his mother do not speak to each other, they don't interact on any level, by Lady Medea's edict. Jer sez he's happy enough with their non-relationship. For now. Maybe when he reaches forty, he sez, he'll take the time to get all angsty about it and go into therapy.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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