CHAPTER TWO
When the Biggest Portion of All Is the Love
OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS my hometown of Myrtlewood, Mississippi, has enjoyed a little bit of a building boom. A new mall at the edge of town spurred all sorts of development in the surrounding area, and what was once a commercial no-man’s-land is now a bustling shopping hub for four or five counties. Compared to when I was growing up, Myrtlewood has become very hip and with it and now. And also fancy.
A sure sign that it was the dawn of a new retail day was the arrival of three popular chain restaurants: Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and Outback Steakhouse, which my mother-in-law, Martha, likes to refer to as “the Outbacks.” Martha, who’s every bit of five feet tall and wears a size next-to-nothing in her beloved three-quarter-sleeve jackets, enjoys the occasional trip to the Outbacks. She thinks their food is out of this world, but the portions throw her for a little bit of a loop. After all, she is a person who is absolutely stuffed after a lunch of half a ham sandwich and two Pringles, so it’s understandable that she feels a smidge overwhelmed by a plate of Alice Springs Chicken. Especially since it’s, you know, the size of her head.
As a person who grew up in a family whose attitude about food was “If a little bit is good, then more is so much better,” I’ve always been somewhat mystified by Martha’s aversion to a big ole plate of, well, anything. However, when I was about twenty-eight, I realized that Martha’s disdain for large portions was the real dadgum deal. At the time, my husband and I were newlyweds, and Martha and her mother—an equally petite woman named Lelia, who was affectionately known as Sissie to her family and most of her friends—came for a visit. David and I were living in South Louisiana, and we were excited about having company for the weekend and eager to take them to a few of our favorite restaurants. Granted, Martha and Sissie each weighed every bit of a hundred pounds soaking wet and weren’t exactly known for putting away the food. (However, woe be unto you if you tried to get between Martha and a slice of really good wedding cake—she’d stab you between the knuckles with a dessert fork before she’d share even the tiniest bite.) Even so, we thought they’d enjoy a little bit of Cajun culinary flava.
Because Martha and Sissie, as I’m sure you can imagine, were all about the flava.
So that Saturday we took them to lunch at a restaurant close to our house. Once we were settled at our table and had talked our way through all the menu options, Martha and Sissie ordered some kind of chicken plate, David ordered a hamburger, and I ordered a big salad with fried chicken on it.
(Because do you know what makes lettuce better?)
(Listen, and I will tell you.)
(FRIED MEAT.)
Our food arrived not too long after we ordered, and as soon as Martha saw everyone’s plates, she couldn’t contain herself.
“Sophie! My word! Have you ever seen such portions? I’ve never in my life seen such portions! I can’t imagine who could eat these portions! I mean, Sissie and I—well, we just don’t eat like this. I mean, sometimes we might split a hamburger from the Wendy’s or maybe order a snack pack from Kentucky Fried Chicken, but my word! These portions! I’ve just never seen such!”
I wanted to take it all in stride. I really did. But the truth of the matter is that I was borderline offended. I understood where she was coming from, and Lord knows I had loved her and Sissie to pieces since I was a child in Myrtlewood and our families sat on neighboring pews during the 10:55 service at Mission Hill United Methodist Church. That being said, I still wasn’t in the mood to sit there and feel self-conscious about the size of my salad just because I happened to be eating lunch with two precious women who typically felt full and completely satisfied after they’d eaten a tablespoon of potato casserole and four English peas.
And that’s why, a few seconds later, when Martha wrapped up her mealtime observations with one final chorus of “Who could possibly eat these portions?” I responded the only way I knew how. I grabbed my fork with renewed determination and cheerfully replied, “Your daughter-in-law can!” And then I stuffed approximately a fourth of my salad into my mouth on pure principle.
Oh, I could do more than just eat those portions, mind you.
I COULD EAT THEM WITH AUTHORITY.
Given our experience at lunch that day—and, if I’m honest, at every restaurant we visited over the next ten years—I wasn’t really surprised by Martha’s reaction to the Outbacks once it made its debut in my hometown. It was so much food, just so much food! You’ve never seen such food! And even if Martha and her friend Rubena, who was her favorite buddy when it came to all things shopping and dining, went to the Outbacks and split something (even if they split something!), it was still just way more food than they could possibly eat. I mean, there was just no way they could eat those portions!
HAVE YOU SEEN THOSE PORTIONS?
Besides, if Martha had to pick a steakhouse that was going to be the subject of her undying devotion, there’s no question that the winner was situated about a quarter of a mile away, just up the road and on the other side of the highway.
The Western Sizzlin.
Truth be told, I can relate to Martha’s fondness for the Western Sizzlin. As a matter of fact, I have Sizzlin-related memories that go back to my childhood. When I was growing up, our family didn’t eat out very much, mainly because there weren’t a whole lot of places to go. Combine that with the fact that my daddy is perhaps the most frugal man alive (and when I say frugal, what I really mean is cheap, but I don’t mean that as an insult, and OH, BELIEVE ME, my daddy wouldn’t take it as one), and the end result was a family that ate out maybe two or three times a year.
On those rare occasions when we did eat out, we’d always go to a steakhouse, and back then the two options were Bonanza and—you guessed it—Western Sizzlin. I usually voted for Bonanza because I liked to visit the salad bar and fill up my bowl with bacon bits, croutons, and Thousand Island dressing. Perhaps that’s where I first developed my sophisticated culinary taste—I’ll ponder that possibility the next time that I find myself dipping Ritz crackers into a jar of peanut butter and then washing them down with an ice-cold can of Diet Mountain Dew.
Bonanza closed about twenty-five years ago, but Western Sizzlin is still alive and, well, sizzlin’. Martha is one of their most loyal diners, and I think the main reason for that is because the employees there have always been incredibly kind to her. For years Martha drove Rubena to the Western Sizzlin on Thursday nights, and they always ordered the same thing: the petite sirloin with a baked potato, and peach cobbler for dessert. According to Martha, if you don’t time it just right, the Western Sizzlin might not have enough peaches in their cobbler (she doesn’t mean to complain! she wouldn’t want to complain! and it’s still delicious!), but the portion sizes are absolutely perfect.
That is some high praise, my friends.
Martha and Rubena’s bond went far deeper than those weekly trips to Western Sizzlin, though. They had been childhood friends in Myrtlewood and forged a friendship that carried them through all the stages of their lives. They played dolls when they were little girls, navigated high school together as teenagers, and shared the journey of raising children and taking care of their families as adults. Since Martha grew up Methodist and Rubena grew up Baptist, they didn’t go to the same church, but they loved to visit the fifty-plus luncheons at each other’s churches whenever they could. Their devotion to one another has always been inspiring—to this day, I’ve never heard Martha say an unkind word about Rubena, and I strongly suspect that the reverse is also true.
About fifteen years ago Rubena was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a disease that causes a gradual loss of peripheral vision, but Martha and Rubena both took the vision-related changes in stride. Martha would hold Rubena’s elbow as they walked through “the Dillards,” and whenever they’d split up to look at dresses (Martha had to look in the petites’ section! the petites’ section! otherwise she’d spend a small fortune in alterations trying to get the shoulder seams moved! so she shopped in the petites’ section!), Rubena would inevitably call for Martha to come read a price tag or a brand name or the fine print at the bottom of a coupon.
They’d usually shop for an hour or so, then leave the Dillards with one or two new things each: a skirt for Rubena, a jacket for Martha, some cute clip-on earrings to match that blouse Martha had found in the Goody’s a few years ago—you know, the one she thought would be perfectly wonderful with her black slacks, only they didn’t have the blouse in her size? So she got the manager named Kevin to call another store and the other store had it in her size so the next time she was in Piney Bend with her friend Mary Ann they stopped and picked it up? Only now, do you know—DO YOU KNOW—that the Myrtlewood Goody’s is closed and she worries sometimes about the manager named Kevin? And how he’s doing and if his family is well? Not to mention the fact that you can hardly find those Alfred Dunner separates now that the Goody’s is closed, you really can’t! you just can’t! oh, no, you can’t!
Sorry. Apparently I was overtaken by a Martha Moment.
If you ever have the privilege of meeting Martha, you will find that you start to experience Martha Moments within thirty to forty-five seconds of the introduction.
These Martha Moments, they are contagious.
Over a period of several years Rubena’s eyes continued to get worse, but the girls’ shopping trips didn’t stop. “The girls,” by the way, is how Martha refers to her friends, who range in age from seventy to eighty-five. And let me tell you what: the girls are absolutely darlin’.
There’s no telling how many miles Rubena and Martha walked in that mall over the years—with Martha holding Rubena’s elbow all the while—and Martha always liked to recount their latest shopping finds whenever I was in town and would stop by her house for a visit. I never knew what to expect when Martha would launch into the tale of their latest adventure at the Tulip Creek Mall, but one of the most memorable was the long, involved saga of trying to find a housecoat for Rubena at Belk. Or, as Martha calls it, “the Belks.”
The housecoat story was an epic tale involving crowded sale racks, charmingly uninformed clerks, and unattractive housecoat patterns. Martha relayed the details with such passion—and was so insistent about Rubena’s desperate need for a housecoat—that I started to feel like I must have missed a critical piece of information that would explain the urgency. So about fifteen minutes into the story, I stopped Martha to try to clarify.
“Hold on,” I said. “I think I missed something. Why exactly were y’all looking for a housecoat for Rubena? Was she getting ready to go out of town? Or go to the hospital?”
“No, nothing like that!” she exclaimed. “She just needed a new one! She needed a new one! Because, well, she still likes to cook her breakfast every morning, and she cooks breakfast in her housecoat, but, you know, she can’t see very well!”
“Okay,” I replied, still feeling a little clueless.
“Well, she gets in front of her stove and can’t really see what she’s doing and she has just scorched her housecoat sleeves to pieces! Just scorched ’em to pieces!”
I sat perfectly still for a moment, unsure of how to respond, but after a few seconds I decided it never hurts to go with sincerity.
“Well,” I responded, “I surely do hope y’all found one. Sounds like Rubena really needed that new housecoat.”
“Oh, she did,” Martha answered. “And there was a darlin’ one on the sale rack. It was perfectly adorable. PERFECTLY ADORABLE. But I never could get a price for it. COULD NOT get a price. For all I know, it’s still there, still just hanging there, and you’d think that the Belks would like to sell it, wouldn’t you? I guess they just didn’t want to sell it! At least not to us!”
Not too long after that—less than a year after the Unfortunate Housecoat Incident, as my husband and I refer to it—Martha called to tell us that Rubena had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. It was the first time in my married life when I could remember hearing sadness in Martha’s voice. Oh, she remained upbeat and positive and unfailingly cheerful when she and Rubena were together, but make no mistake: she was absolutely devastated. On top of the other challenges of the last few years—taking care of her mother, dealing with Sissie’s accompanying health concerns, eventually coming to terms with the fact that Sissie needed to be in a nursing home—the news of her lifelong best friend’s terminal illness hit Martha hard. Whenever we talked and I asked Martha how she was handling it all, she always responded the same way:
“It’s a lot, Sophie. It’s just a lot.”
And it was.
Martha and Rubena continued to get out and about as much as they could, and once a week or so, if Rubena felt up to it, Martha would still drive them to the Western Sizzlin. It was their little tradition. All the waiters and waitresses knew them by name—so did the cooks in the kitchen, for that matter—and they always made sure “Miss Martha” and “Miss Rubena” had plenty of sweet tea with their meals and plenty of coffee with their desserts. From time to time the young girl who worked at the cash register would even wrap a hot cinnamon roll in a napkin for Martha and hand it to her after she’d paid for her meal. Martha always tried to press an extra dollar or two into the girl’s hand, but she wouldn’t take it.
“It’s just for you, Miss Martha,” the cashier would say. “We know how much you love our cinnamon rolls.”
I don’t know if that sweet girl had any idea how Martha’s heart was breaking as she watched her oldest and dearest friend battle cancer. But I can promise you that, in the simplest and most profound way, those cinnamon rolls meant the world to Martha. They really did.
The shopping trips and dinner trips slowed down as Rubena’s condition worsened. And about six months after she received her diagnosis, Rubena went to be with Jesus. She was like a sister to Martha until the very end.
Martha would tell you even now that she would have never wanted her dear friend to suffer, that it makes her smile to think of Rubena in heaven. She would tell you how grateful she is for the blessing of having a lifelong friend who, for the better part of seventy years, had been a supportive, encouraging example of Christlike love.
But she would also tell you that she misses her friend every single day, that she feels lonely sometimes when she goes to the Belks and doesn’t have to run over to the dresses section to check a size for Rubena. And she would tell you that she’d give anything if they could leave the mall together and eat dinner at the Western Sizzlin just one more time.
A couple of years ago I was sitting at the bar in Martha’s kitchen, eating a piece of caramel cake while Martha was on the phone making supper plans with a friend. When she hung up, Martha walked over to where I was sitting, and she had a smile as wide as Texas on her face.
“Well,” she said, “that was Mary Ann. I think some of the girls and I are going to eat supper at the Western Sizzlin tomorrow night.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, pushing away my plate and wondering if it would just smack of irony if I asked Martha for a post–caramel cake Diet Coke.
“Yes! We are!” Martha answered. “You know how I love their petite sirloin. And sometimes after I visit Mother at the nursing home, I like to swing by the Western Sizzlin and pick up a to-go plate and bring it back here. And do you know that darlin’ cashier still wraps up a cinnamon roll and gives it to me? I try to pay! I really do try to pay! But she always says, ‘Miss Martha, I know how you love them, and I know . . .’”
Martha’s voice trailed off at the end of her sentence. I didn’t really understand why, so as I opened the cabinet to grab a glass, I said, “What? She knows what?”
Martha cleared her throat. “‘I know how you miss your friend,’ she says. She says, ‘Miss Martha, I know how you miss your friend.’”
We sat in silence for a second, and I wondered what that would feel like. I thought about Emma Kate and Marion and Daphne and the rest of my friends—friends who have been a part of my life for so long—and I thought about how hard it would be to lose them.
“But,” Martha piped up, “tomorrow night I’ll go with the girls. It’ll be so much fun! Just more fun! And I know that some of them would rather eat at the Outbacks, but I do like the Western Sizzlin. You know how I like it there! Their portions are absolutely perfect! Oh, I surely do like it there.”
Then she grinned and said, “They don’t always have enough peaches in their cobbler, though.”
But don’t tell anyone that she said that.