Spring 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 2

Rule 1: Don’t stick the napkin in your shirt.

If you are old enough to sit at the adult’s table, you can keep your clothes clean. Your grandmother snatches it from your neck and puts it in your lap like a lady.

But your hand slips when you’re slicing into a meatball and the gravy streaks down the blue of your Easter dress. Your grandmother pulls you into the kitchen and pours club soda on the dress while you’re still wearing it. Your aunts pull at handfuls of fabric, scouring them with napkins and wash clothes, but the red streak never completely fades.

Rule 2: No red gravy.

You dread Sundays. You fear chicken parm and cavatellis. You wear black to church and people think you’re making a statement but it’s because you won’t have time to change before dinner.

Rule 3: No red wine.

Your uncle creates a “two foot radius rule”-- nothing red within a two foot radius of your elbows. Once Sunday you come into the dining room to find he’s placed newspaper on the floor around your seat.

Years later, at a college party, a friend gives you a solo cup full of red boxed wine. It’s harder to knock over than a wine glass but you leave it on the kitchen counter when they aren’t looking.

Rule 4: When people ask about the gravy or the wine, tell them you have reflux.

They’ll find it easier to understand and the questions will stop.

Rule 5: Careful with the teacup.

When you turn twelve, your grandmother starts letting you drink tea from her china cups-- the ones with the pansy motif and gold on the rim and handle. Somehow, you never break these. Once, when she is out of the room, you put one in the microwave, not knowing the gold paint will make it spark. She runs back in and yanks it out with her bare hands, burning her fingertips. There is a little black mark where the handle meets the white porcelain.

Once the panic subsides, she laughs her crinkle-eyed laugh. Every time she serves tea in that cup to someone new, she tells the story. She tells it to your first girlfriend a few months after you come out, when she insists you bring her to Sunday dinner. Mercifully, it’s Chicken Marsala.

Rule 6: Aprons are acceptable.

You buy one for every holiday-- red tulips for Easter dinner and an ugly sweater apron for Christmas. It’s not rude like the napkins, and no one laughs like the time your cousin bought you an adult-sized bib for the family secret santa.

Rule 7: Thrift anything breakable.

You buy geometric glasses instead of round ones, and ones with interesting textures. They’re easier to grip. Plastic is too light and easy to knock over. It bends and slips from your hands when you

hold it too tightly. It doesn’t feel as bad when a glass breaks if it was only $2.99 and you never have the sad remains of a decimated set left over as a reminder.

You store them on a shelf in front of the window so the light catches the colored glass. You collect earth-tone ceramic mugs and bowls-- the kind with the tan on the bottom and brown on top. They’re easy to replace.

Rule 8: Plan any date but dinner out.

Go to the movies, or the museum or the god damned zoo but don’t let her see you eat until the fifth date, and only if you’re sure.

Your last girlfriend thought you had an eating disorder. She was constantly bringing over food, watching to make sure you ate it. You ended it after five months.

Rule 9: Never wear white.

You’re going on six weeks with a girl who claims she doesn’t mind that you’re “a bit klutzy”. Every Sunday the two of you go to the flea market-- there haven’t been any Sunday dinners with your family since you moved an hour from home and your grandmother passed.

One Sunday, you run out of excuses to avoid restaurants and the two of you go and sip daiquiris at a place with a patio facing a river. Your glass sweats in the humid air and slips from your fingers, hits the table and splashes down over the side onto her white 1970s-does-Victorian vintage skirt. You drive home in silence once the apologies have run out. She promises it will come out with bleach. You don’t believe her.

Rule 10: Don’t touch fragile treasures.

When your grandmother dies, each of you gets a piece of her tea set. The cup with the black spot by the handle sits on a shelf in your hutch. You never use it now-- one twitch of a muscle in your palm and you’d never be able to replace it.

The last time you went to the flea market, the day of the spill, your girlfriend bought a blue and white Willow Ware tea set. You were terrified when you helped her load it into the car but it was wrapped up tight.

There is a gap in texts since the daiquiri incident.

Rule 11: When she says she loves you, believe her.

She mops cranberry juice out of the carpet. You are in tears. She doesn’t understand why. She’s already got the stain remover out from under the sink while you’re apologizing again and again and again. You tell her about the Sunday dinners and the red gravy and the wine glasses. You tell her about never wearing white, and the jokes and the newspaper on the floor.

She holds your hands until the crying stops. She gets the stain out-- mostly.

The next Sunday, she takes you for a picnic with cookies and tea sandwiches and the Willow Ware cups. You are sitting too close to the ground to worry about dropping them. If you spill, neither of you notice.

Rule 12: Love is a chunky spoon.

She buys new silverware for the apartment when you move in together. They have thick, ergonomic handles. It takes her months to find a pair that aren’t hideous and she ends up paying someone to make them with ceramic handles painted with sunflowers. Your hand is steddier when you use them.

On the wall by the kitchen door hangs an apron, cut from an old, white skirt. Most things bleach out. The hem is covered in cutwork lace, 1970s-does-Victorian.