Copyright © 1995 by Joel Rosenberg
It's all about control.
For my mother, Liver Night was part of it. There we'd sit under the harsh light of Mom's and Dad's glares every Wednesday, five kids, each trying to find a way to avoid eating six or seven horrid hunks of oven-roasted chicken livers, every bite so badly overcooked that all they tasted was bitter. If I wrapped it in bread and swallowed quickly, without chewing much, it wasn't too bad, until the aftertaste hit. Then I'd gag, and try to wash the taste out of my mouth with something else, anything else.
Milk didn't do it.
Then the recriminations would start. Not only was I a horrible kid for not eating this wonderful liver, but I once had the nerve to point out how lightly they ate on liver nights, and since I was the oldest, it was all my fault: I had taught the younger kids not to like liver.
Yes, liver.
Hell, I took up magic specifically to learn how to palm a piece of liver and convey it, sight unseen, into my pocket for later disposal, but I never was all that good and Dad caught me at it, and it was at the dinner table and not the poker table that I learned you always had to keep your hands above the table or get into serious trouble.
Mom was, at best, an indifferent cook. Indifferent was just the right word for it; it wasn't just that she wasn't very good at it; she just didn't much care about cooking. Why should she bother? For company, she had one dish she did very well (lasagna, of all things), or she could do a roast, which was just a matter of timing, but for day-to-day cooking for the family, the idea was to make it as easy on herself as possible, and not worry about the results. Easy and good? Why bother?
And dessert? That would just mean more work.
I can't blame her, not entirely; she had put her husband through medical school with the understanding that after he graduated he would do the same for her, but the two of them had never quite figured out contraception, and before she knew what had happened, she found herself with me, then Dale, then three, four, five, and eventually six kids, faced all the while with the increasing realization that she just wasn't cut out for this Mommy thing, and that there was no way out.
She was right about that. Another family would have had other options: By the she came up with the idea of Liver Night, my father was well established as a psychiatrist, and with all his many flaws, Dad was never lazy; he was billing forty-five, fifty hours a week. They could easily have afforded a full-time housekeeper/cook/nanny, at least financially, but they couldn't afford to let another adult live in the household. Some stranger might notice his or her intermittent storms of temper tantrums, the abuse and neglect (if you chase your teenage son down the street with a car and nobody reports it to the police, does it make any sound?) the latenight depression and might even misunderstand her drinking. Some stranger might talk about Private Family Business.
So my mother couldn't hire somebody to take over the work she despised, and she couldn't even go see a psychiatrist, because my father was a psychiatrist, and nobody, certainly not a local colleague, could know that there were Private Family Problems.
My middle brother made a medically miraculous recovery from the cerebral aneurysm that literally cost him close to half of his brain, and when puberty came on, he became less and less controllable, but as long as they could pretend that everything was okay, it didn't matter.
Pretense was the key to it. As long as they could control how things appeared, that was enough.
It was all my fault, anyway. The time he went after the baby with a bread knife, it was my fault for hurting him when I took it away from him. I wasn't supposed to hit him, not even in self-defense (I still carry his some of his scars in my flesh) and if he'd threatened the baby as a way of provoking me, I should have figured out how to prevent it. (They did put him away for awhile after that, but they had him released in time for a long-planned family vacation; It Might Look Bad if he didn't go.)
#
Liver Night finally ended.
The crying didn't do it, the whimpering didn't do it, the hitting didn't do it. My younger sister, Carol, did it, the night she quickly ate all of her meal, liver included . . .
. . . and then vomited all over the table in a stream like looked like something out of The Exorcist.
We never heard about Liver Night again.
#
We each make our own accommodations. My sister Dale never eats liver, never orders liver, never cooks it for her family.
Me, I make liver for myself and my family every now and then. It's tricky. I buy the very freshest chicken livers I can get, then sauté the sweet Vidalia onions until they're caramel-brown before I add the livers to the pan. The timing is critical: the livers have to be cooked all the way through, but no more, or they start to turn bitter. A bit of salt, and just a little black pepper at the end, and then quickly, quickly to the table.
Liver is always a side dish, of course. I'm hardly going to force it down my kids' throats or make them go hungry if they skip it. Goes well with roast chicken breasts, spiced with any number of seasonings; it's amazing how much variety you can find, if you just look.
Sometimes they taste it, and don't eat much. Neither do I; if it's overcooked, it's bitter, and it reminds me too much of Liver Night.
But when I do it right, Judy, my four-year-old, says very carefully, "Can I have more liver, Daddy, please?" and Rachel, my one-year-old, just reaches out over her tray and says "Mine, mine, mine," as she stretches for the serving plate on the table.
And I smile.