Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (12 page)

When it looks as though Raven and her father have a fighting chance of defeating the defending champions, their jealous competitors take matters into their own hands by spiking Raven's dish with mushrooms. Apparently, fungi are Raven's Achilles' heel. (I suspect the only reason the scriptwriters didn't go with peanuts was that it would have been too difficult to ensure continuity; odds are that at some point in the three seasons leading up to this, her character had been shown eating a peanut butter
something.
)

Once Raven ingests the mushrooms, the camera steps into her point of view so we can see her vision is blurring. Her father notices and diagnoses an allergy attack, declaring only “this is worse than last time!” When we switch back to an outside view, we see the actress's face is layered in bubbles of fake flesh, so that her eyes are squeezed shut and her cheeks are puffed out in a parody of allergy edema. Her actual hands are encased in cartoon gloves of inflated skin. Sight gag: check.

The team knows they have been sabotaged, which makes Raven all the more determined to keep cooking. Her father, otherwise portrayed as a rational adult, okays this after a two-second hesitation. No pause for Benadryl. No mention of penalizing the opposing team. Raven's allergies are Raven's problem.

The contest comes down to Victor's ability to execute the
“quadruple flip” of a pan-fried fish. The best their competitors can accomplish is a triple. Of course, in the crucial moment (heroic action alert), his daughter must step in and complete the trick for him. She does so not in spite of her allergies but because of them. When the filet of trout looks like it might not make its last midair rotation, Raven claps her obscenely swollen cheeks and—as if expressing air from a bellows—
blows
the fish through its final turn.

When she must catch the fish to win, her pan is out of reach. No problem! She sticks out her hand, which thanks to her allergies has grown to the size of a dinner plate. She catches the sizzling fish in her bare but conveniently numbed-by-hives palm.

This is what personal victory looks like on the Disney Channel.

This isn't late-night sketch comedy. This is not an art house film. The bottom line is a big issue for shows like this one. If anyone thought there would be enough outcry to injure an actor's brand or lead to a boycott, scenes would have been rewritten. They were not. Actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, and dozens of others sign off on these projects before they make it to the screen.

The good news about all the activity galvanized by those with peanut allergies is that we've become a blip on the cultural radar. The bad news is that food allergies have the dubious honor of having joined a long line of diseases—gout, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome—for which that blip doubles as a moving target.

CHAPTER FIVE

King Soy and the Body Politic

S
o much rides on empathy, at the end of the day. Mothers find (or fail to find) a way to relate to their allergic children. A classmate forgoes his peanut butter sandwich so he can sit with his best friend at the nut-free table in the school cafeteria. You'd think, given all the times I rely on empathy from the world around me—from teacher to chef to airline stewardess—I'd have a heightened empathetic instinct of my own.

You'd be wrong. When my eleven-year-old sister announced that she had decided to become a vegetarian, I didn't applaud her philosophical stance. I didn't look forward to commiserating over restaurants that couldn't (or wouldn't) accommodate her. Instead, I thought,
Of course. Of course, when I would give anything to have her options, she voluntarily gives them away
.

The little snot
.

From the vantage point of being ten years older, I thought Christina's choice of a meatless diet was a self-indulgence, no more rational than the six months when, at age three, her favorite snack was Heinz ketchup dipped out of a bowl with her bare finger.

Her vegetarian stance would later complicate a trip to Fort Worth, Texas, for the Beasley “cousins” reunion. My father was going back as something of a hometown hero, to share pictures and stories of his troops. The army had promoted him through various leadership roles all the way up to brigadier general, commanding army reserve soldiers in six of the largest Midwestern states. My childhood had been peppered by periods when he had returned to active duty, then deployed.

It had been years since our family had visited Texas, back before Christina had even been born. I recalled the seven-year-old me's impression of Houston: a hangar-sized warehouse with
BINGO
painted on its silver roof (which surely housed row after row of gaming grandmas, as far as the eye could see); the smell of cigarette smoke laced with spicy Shalimar perfume; winning an oversized pink bear at the Six Flags amusement park; chatting with surprised truckers via Grandpa Joe's CB radio.

The flight from Washington, D.C., to Dallas's Love Field airport, and then the drive to Fort Worth, left us all exhausted and starving. My father parked us at the first upscale restaurant he saw on the way into town. Leaving us in the car for a few minutes, he stepped inside to speak with the manager.

He returned and assured my mother, “The chef says it's no problem.”

Meaning, no problem for me. As we walked in, my mother said, “I wondered if he asked about the vegetarian options?”

We should have been tipped off by the fact that every chair in the place was upholstered in leather. Christina balked, but, realizing she didn't have a choice, we sat down. Texas: 1, Vegetarian: 0.

I had easy if limited options in the form of an appetizer of asparagus wrapped in prosciutto (west of the Mississippi,
prosciutto
means bacon), a grilled chicken breast, and a plain baked potato. Christina's options consisted of an appetizer of mixed greens, followed by a second course of more mixed greens and a plain baked potato.

She looked to me for confirmation that, yes, the salad dinner is a lousy deal. But I avoided her gaze. I was still envious of how casually she could take a corn bread muffin, along with everyone else, from the bread basket placed on the table. So I played the poor allergic girl. When my asparagus came, I adopted a joyful tone, worthy of any Dickensian orphan, at the luxury of a straight-off-the-menu appetizer.

“So good! You have to try it!” Pause. “Okay, not you, obviously.”

The next day, we gathered at the house of George Marvin, a cardiologist and that year's reunion host. Beasleys are equal parts eccentric in their interests and meticulous in their craft. Our ranks include Charles, a renowned geologist and snake expert; Lola, a University of Texas at El Paso business professor emeritus whose legal blindness has not kept her from paddling the Amazon; and Ray Olachia, a full-blooded Apache who travels the state advising on flint napping and basket weaving.

We call it the “cousins” reunion because of the difficulty everyone has keeping track of how we're related. One couple
that has been attending for years—she always in a floral shirt, he in a navy blue cap—has no blood tie to the family that anyone can figure out. But they're such nice people that no one can bear to question them on it.

Midmorning, as people were still arriving, George Marvin called on everyone to form a prayer circle before our first meal. Christina and I hung back until we realized that this was not an optional exercise. We joined hands, the chain of people squeezing to fit around the sofas and chairs that crowded the living room.

“Look,” one of the cousins said, “we've formed a heart.”

George Marvin eyed the group with a doctor's precision. “A heart with a collapsed left ventricle,” he pointed out. We prayed.

When the buffet lunch was unveiled, I realized I was in serious trouble. Chips with the cheese already melted on; salad with the cucumber and egg already diced in.

“What's that?” my sister asked, though she already knew the answer, pointing to a sliver of pink nestled among the romaine.

“Ham,” answered our hostess, George Marvin's longtime girlfriend.

Oh, come on
, I thought, watching as my sister stiffened. My mother moved into the kitchen to scavenge for us, gathering whatever chips she could find in their original bag and whatever greens remained in the fridge.

Years before, our grandmother had gotten over her skepticism regarding my allergies. But she couldn't understand Christina's new mission, or her subsequent frustration. She looked at my sister's empty plate.

“Honey, you know God gave us animals so we could eat them,” she said.

The day loped along as a series of conversations with family. We moved from hanging out in the living room to chatting on the driveway (where beer waited in someone's car trunk, hidden from Lola's disapproval), to lounging out by the pool. Ray arrived and set up his weaving under the tent that was intended for smokers. He palmed a flat disk that would serve as one basket's base, curled the rest of the reeds into a bucket of water where they could soak into pliancy, and went to work. I stayed close to him, pretending the cigarette smoke didn't make me sneeze.

My Houston memories were not serving me well. I tried to figure out which grandaunt was Ruth, and which was Elaine, but their faces blurred in recollection. Elaine, it turned out, was the woman who would later remind me with great affection, “My God, you were such an annoying little know-it-all twerp when you were seven.”

With no other teens in the house, Christina took refuge in one of the several five-hundred-page paperbacks she'd crammed into her suitcase. Every invitation seemed designed to offend her vegetarian ethic. No, she didn't really want to tour the taxidermy collection. No, she'd skip the stockyard cattle drive, thanks very much.

My sister's reticence made me ever more determined to prove that I was one of the Beasleys. In the kitchen, I got into a discussion of hot salsas and bragged that I had inherited the Texan tongue. George Marvin dared me to nibble on one of the peppers growing on his windowsill. I grabbed the whole thing and popped it into my mouth. It turned out to be a Scotch
bonnet, which measures about 325,000 Scoville Heat Units. A jalapeño is only 5,000 units.

My tongue felt as if I'd French-kissed an electrical socket. My eyes welled with tears. I tried to gulp water nonchalantly, which only spread the fire down my throat.

“Milk?” a cousin offered. “You know, milk's the only thing that really helps.”

I shook my head and retreated, coughing, to a deck chair out back. Twenty minutes later, the pain had lessened to a dull throb. As the sun began to set, I stared blankly at the far edge of the pool and counted the number of blue-tailed skinks that ventured along its concrete lip.

After a while Christina came outside and walked back and forth along the edge, periodically dipping her toes into the water.

“So,” she blurted out all of a sudden. “Dad had another wife?”

Good lord. Someone had posted an overly complete family tree by the washroom. I tried to explain that this wasn't some major branch of his past that we had hidden from her; it was barely a twig, a brief marriage with no kids. I told her how I had found out, also on my own, also at fourteen, by noticing our father was labeled
Divorced
on our parents' marriage certificate. She was not comforted.

In every family, at some point you must face your ability to disappoint one another. But our family seems to have a special knack for minor facts made major in their suppression—and the subsequent ambush of truth. Before I could find the right thing to say, we were called inside. Some of the cousins had made dinner.

“Beef brisket,” the boys announced proudly, “slow cooked.”

Christina and I fixed yet another plate of chips and salsa, and made a space for ourselves on the living room floor. They put on the old home movies, black-and-white reels of people I knew to be great-grandfathers and grandaunts. I wanted so badly to feel a flash of kinship. But no matter how hard I squinted, I did not recognize their faces.