dvora wolff rabino

Tossed Salad

“You’re moping,” Ruthie’s father pronounced from his seat at the head of the long, heavy walnut dining table. He was looking not at Ruthie’s mother, who had deposited a large wooden bowl beside her husband’s plate and then taken her own seat at the foot of the table, nor at Sari and Becca, who were whispering to each other across from Ruthie, but at her. And all Ruthie had been doing was sitting there. Frowning, maybe, or sighing—she couldn’t help it these days—but still. “You need to stop.” He took the wooden tongs in hand and helped himself to a generous portion of salad.

Ruthie, as this week’s assigned table setter, had watched her mother assemble the dish just moments earlier. While Ruthie retrieved five blue-rimmed dinner plates from the kitchen cabinet, her mother was pouring a jar of marinated three-bean salad into a sieve and rinsing the contents under a stream of cold water. While Ruthie opened the cutlery drawer and counted out the forks and knives to line up, soldier-straight, one inch from the table edge, as her mother had taught, the older woman was peeling the skin off each chickpea. While Ruthie accordioned each blue paper napkin and folded it into the shape of a fan as Sari, the family artist, had recently modeled, their mother was thoroughly draining and flaking a can of tuna in water, chopping half an iceberg lettuce, tossing the ingredients together in her wooden salad bowl, and adding just a few drops of vinaigrette for flavor. It was one of her standby dinners, economical but nutritious, full of roughage and protein and low in fat.

Why didn’t Ruthie’s father just focus on his salad instead of telling Ruthie how to act and feel? What did he know? Ruthie wasn’t moping; she was grieving. Her mother understood that. Her mother got her. Ruthie’s Prince Charming, the handsome, funny, charismatic Rob, a year ahead of her in college, who (and this her parents would never know) had taken one look at her shy, naked body in his dorm room and told her, in a growl, “Oh my God, you are beautiful,” had dumped her just one month later. There would be no happily ever after for Ruthie anymore.

“Why don’t you join the temple youth group and meet some other boys?” her father went on.

Eww, gross. “Mind your own business,” Ruthie blurted out.

Oh, no. How had she let those words escape her mouth?

The silence that followed was deafening. Ruthie’s mother and sisters seemed to be holding their breath. Ruthie certainly was. She looked down at her still-empty dinner plate. She tried not to move, not even to blink.

“God Almighty!” her father bellowed. Even without looking up, Ruthie could feel his eyes boring into her. “Respect thy father and mother!” His voice thundered so loudly that Ruthie’s heart jumped. The glasses on the table shook. A high C on the grand piano in the living room let out a faint, sad tinkle.

Her father picked up the bowl of salad and flung it across the room.

The bowl and tongs flew just past Ruthie’s head. Shards of tuna, glistening discuses of lettuce, pointy yellow wax beans, chickpea projectiles, and blood-red kidney beans went hurtling through the air in multiple directions, scattering among three different rooms.

The bowl landed with a thud in the kitchen behind Ruthie.

No one spoke. No one moved. No one dared.

Ruthie felt sick. She wasn’t hungry anymore; she just wanted to get out of there, climb back into bed. But she couldn’t. Not until her father’s rage blew over. That could take minutes, or it could take hours. There was no way of knowing.

Sometimes Ruthie despised the man. How did her mother put up with him, anyway? Shouldn’t her emotionally intelligent parent, the mature and appropriate one, put the bully in his place?

It felt like the silent purgatory would never end.

Finally, her mother got up. She walked to the kitchen and returned to the foot of the table with the empty wooden bowl. She placed it on the floor, then got down on her hands and knees. One at a time, she picked up a tuna flake, a chickpea, and a kidney bean, and dropped it into the bowl.

From across the table, Sari cleared her throat. “Mom,” she said. “Why doesn’t the person responsible for the mess clean it up?” Her voice was quiet but her words reverberated. Sari was almost three years older than Ruthie, but it seemed to Ruthie then that she had thirty times her courage.

Their mother looked up from the floor at her eldest daughter. “I agree with you, Sari,” she said. She stared at Ruthie and shook her head. “Unfortunately, she is just sitting there.”