Tripe

As I plodded up the back steps, I could already smell it through the screen door. My stomach churned. I knew what I was going to have to eat for dinner. It was my Dad’s day off before switching shifts at work, and he was making one of his favorite meals. As I opened the door, a steamy blast of putridness, the smell of tripe, from the steam loudly hissing out from the pressure cooker rattling the regulator. For those of you who don’t know, tripe is the muscle wall of a cow’s stomach. Disgusting, right?

Spaghetti with tripe in tomato sauce. I felt nauseous as I climbed the stairs to my room to do my homework, but instead read Isaac Asimov’s Science-Fiction Magazine.

Finally, the call came, “’S’eat!”, my Dad yelled, thinking that a clever contraction. Crap! I had to eat what was put in front of me, whether I liked it or not. Even if it was disgusting. My Stepmother would tell me that plate would stay on the table until I finished it. Didn’t matter how long. Even if it got moldy, she threatened. This was coming from a woman who grew up during the depression. Something she was fond of reminding me, usually prefaced with something like “you don’t know how good you have it nowadays”. She would eat anything. When we would have her chicken cacciatore, the chicken pieces with their rubbery, gelatinous skin which we were also expected to consume, she would snap the brittle leg bones and and loudly suck out the marrow, or crunch the gristle from the joints. “We didn’t have chewing gum when we were kids, so we chewed on gristle”. Yeah, right. chewing gum, chicle, had been around for like a hundred years.

I slouched down the stairs and into the kitchen. There it was on our plates, that putrid pile of steaming reticulum tripe, with it’s obscene honeycomb texture doused with tomato sauce, on top of the white spaghetti. Oh, man…the smell. I can’t even describe it. Maybe a combination of boiled skin, bile, and shit. 

I picked lethargically around the rubbery bits, eating the tainted sauce and pasta. Fortunately, there was some italian bread to go with it, which I slathered with a think layer of butter. I ate as slowly as I could as my Dad and Stepmother eagerly devoured the abomination before them. I felt a little gag in my throat every time they lifted the fork, put it in their mouths and chewed. 

Then, an opening. My Stepmom, “Did you feed the dog yet?”

I wasn’t suppose to eat until I fed the dog. It was my job was to feed Butch, a brown german shepherd/doberman mix, who ran on a leash connected by a pulley to a cable between two oak trees along side the driveway. I was suppose to put the kibble in a big aluminum pot with a long handle and add hot water two it, until the dry food absorbed all the water. My stepmom told me that I had to do that  because if a dog ate dry food, and then drank a bunch of water, it would expand in his stomach and it would explode. That’s what she told me. I’m not making this up.

Noticing that they were almost done eating, I had a plan.

“No, I forgot.”

“I bet if there was some ice-cream in the freezer, you wouldn’t forget about that”, she quipped, pointedly. “Well, you better go feed him!”

I acted dejected, hanging my head, “OK”.

I pushed myself away from that foul plate, and got up from the table, and went out to the yard to retrieve the dogs dish. I walked languidly from the back porch to the dog run, and back again. I scooped the kibble out of the green plastic trash can it was stored in and poured it clattering into the aluminum pot. Opening the screen door cautiously, I looked into the kitchen. Yes! They were already in the living room watching the Channel 6 Action News. My heart was racing, afraid they might come in at any moment. I filled the pot of kibble with water, and let it soak in. I don’t want to explode the dog. The dry food puffed up, finally absorbing the water. I quickly grabbed my plate, looking down the hall toward the living room, and scraped it onto the dog’s food, and went out to deliver the food. Butch was really going to like this!