Salad

I had my first salad in the fall of 1976. I was 13, the standard age when American girls have their dietary privileges torn away from them - their All-Access Passes to the Universal Amphitheater of food abruptly voided, if you will.

I'd spent that last summer of unconditional self-love with my friends Audrey McNulty and Heather Hodge. We were grotesquely unpopular, sure. We were of odd size, odd shape, odd color. We tried out for the talent show and didn't get in. Our act was Heather lip-synching Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" while Audrey and I walked on and off the stage bearing illustrative props. "You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht . . ." (I walk by in a white "yachting" cap.) "You had one eye on the mirror as you watched yourself go by." (Audrey walks by holding up a metal garbage-can lid. Upon it is carefully taped an eye.)

And yet, during this last golden year, these last pre-salad days, we were constantly collapsing into giggles. Everything in life was hilarious. Possibly because we were high - and I mean absolutely flying - on Snackin' Cake. You remember Snackin' Cake, don't you?

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Delmonico's Steak and Lobster House

16358 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, CA 91436

Category: Restaurant > Seafood

Region: San Fernando Valley

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Maria's Italian Kitchen

13353 Ventura Blvd.
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: San Fernando Valley

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Just add water, even the pan is included. The flavors were rich, fabulously seductive, suggesting roots in the deep, mysterious lexicon of Nabisco: Banana Walnut, Chocolate Fudge, Wild Blueberry, Raspberry Swirl. We'd make a new flavor every hour, read Linda Goodman's Love Signs, run, scream, do cannonballs into the pool: boom, boom, boom!

But in September, darkness began to fall. And the very first signpost was my mother's semiotically loaded introduction of the idea of the Salad. It was a Saturday afternoon. It was just the two of us alone. I can still picture it as though it were yesterday - sun slanting through the window, laundry thrumming in the wash.

"Sometimes," my mother was intimating, "I find I don't want hot dogs or Spaghetti-O's or chocolate cake for lunch."

"Uh-huh," I said, shifting my weight in my sneakers, waiting for the punch line.

"Sometimes," she continued, pausing a moment to look within herself - and, in so doing, seeing a thing that surprised her - "I find I just want to have a Salad!"

She said it as though Salad represented freedom from one's earthly cares. As though sometimes a woman just wanted to shake her hair loose in a private moment and run unfettered through a breezy little field of Salad. All around one was the drudgery of pot roast, ham, sausage, pigs in blankets, Sloppy Joes, clawing one down. "Ooh, it's all so heavy. What would really pick me up is some Salad!"

I heard that telltale upswoop in pitch, the voice cracking with false cheer, and my blood went cold. I recognized this, with an unerring sixth sense, as my mother's Treasures of Womanhood tone. Experience indicated that Treasures of Womanhood were generally Treasures one wished to return to the sender. It was always your mom gently taking you by the hand, leading you down the hall, reaching into a secret drawer scented with treacly verbena or potpourri, and pulling out some hideous object that said: "Your life is over. YOU CAN NEVER SWIM AGAIN."

"It is something we call . . ." (bright smile) "a menstrual cycle!" Or, "This is what is known as . . . Kotex! I find I just snap it in . . ." (hands fly up, waggle whimsically) "and forget about it!" Again images of the field, the breezy running.

Until this point in time, Salad-y things in the Loh household had posed little threat. Salad was not something a person took seriously. Salad was a thing that existed only in my mother's fevered imagination. But not anymore.

That afternoon, out came the iceberg lettuce and brand-new bottle of Kraft Thousand Island dressing. My mother's new weapon - she flourished it with pride, defiance. "See? It's Kraft. This is a real food. It's a real thing people eat. It's not something I just made up."

In short, my iceberg had arrived . . . and I and my runaway acne and size 12 behind (in my favorite horizontal - that's right, horizontal - striped bell-bottoms) were being ordered to get on it. Sensing there was no choice, I stepped on, the rope was cut, and, with only lettuce to bolster me, I began my polar drift toward an unwanted Womanhood.

Life in my barren Salad kingdom, the colorless tundra, was dull but not uneventful.

Grandly remote from the whims and pleasures and taste sensations enjoyed by ordinary people, I got huger and huger. In college, as I toiled miserably at an a impossible major (theoretical physics), my weight approached 170 pounds. Stretch-waistband ethnic skirts appeared. A Jane Seymour natural wave was attempted, a spongy Jackson Five 'fro the result.

All around me, it seemed, in a 360-degree circle, were people eating fried chicken and pizza and steak as fast as they could 24 hours a day. But not me. I was in exile from that sunny land. Like a lonely dog with a bone, I ritually chawed my way through Salad. Salad Salad Salad. At the Salad bar, I had my routine. I'd begin with a wooden bowl big as my head. Into it went iceberg lettuce. Kidney beans. Garbanzo beans. Sprouts. Bacon. Cheese. Croutons. Raisins. Sunflower seeds. Ranch dressing. Bleu-cheese dressing. Eggs. Chili. Macaroni. Yogurt. Car keys. Tampax. Signed photo of the Bay City Rollers . . . Salad became a psychic purse into which I threw my woes. Soon there was no Salad bowl big enough to house the theater of Me. Others would have finished their burgers and run them off already. Still I'd sit in the corner in my sweaty batik tent, carrying on an exhausting two-hour relationship with my Salad.