Fiction by Jim Parisi

The trouble started when my father said the spaghetti and clams looked like cat food. My mother said he was a real comedian and should be on “The Tonight Show.” He scooped mounds of spaghetti onto her plate and asked, “How about this? Is this funny?” She told him to stop being a pain in the ass. He kept adding spaghetti to the pile. She warned him to cut it out or there was going to be trouble. 

I focused on twirling spaghetti around my fork. My younger brother made slurping noises as he shoveled spaghetti into his mouth. I flicked a piece of clam into his hair. He whined for my mother, who was busy spitting words at my father.

“That’s it. I’ve had enough.” She slammed her hands on the table and pushed herself out of her chair. “Get out of the way, Bobby.” I was confused about what I was getting out of the way of, but I did as I was told. 

She yanked up the table. It landed on its side where I had been sitting. Plates, cups, and utensils clattered across the small dining room floor. Rivulets of Hawaiian Punch and Shop Rite cola coursed their way through mounds of spaghetti, clams, and salad. 

My brother yelped. I stared in disbelief at what had been my dinner. My father started to say something but stopped when my mother glared at him. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Let’s leave your mother alone for a few minutes.”

My mother grumbled in the dining room while my brother and I sat on the floor of our bedroom, watching “I Dream of Jeannie” reruns with our father. Major Nelson’s slapstick efforts to hide Jeannie from Dr. Bellows seemed more grounded in reality than what I had witnessed. I asked my father if we should help clean up. He said, “Let’s let Mom have some time to herself.” He told me to change my pants; they smelled like clams.

After putting on my pajamas, I crept out to the dining room as the “F Troop” theme blared behind me. The table was in its usual place; the rest of the room betrayed no signs of the wreckage. 

My mother was mopping the kitchen floor. “I’m almost done. Then I’ll come talk to you and your brother.” 

“Are you still mad because I hit Mikey with a clam?”

She laid the mop against the stove. “No, Bobby, I’m not mad at you. Your father was in a mood and did something that made me angry, and I lost my temper and went overboard. It’s the Sicilian in me.”

“Do I have Sicilian in me?”

“Half as much as I do. You’re lucky.”

“What’s the rest of me?”

“Neapolitan. So maybe you’re not so lucky.” She smiled. “I’m kidding. But I’m sorry for making you upset.”

“But this girl Denise in my class—”

“I know that Denise. She’s got a mouth on her.”

“She said her parents had a fight, and her mother cut up her father’s clothes when he left the house, and he had to move, and her mother has to work all day, and she comes to school with a key on a rope around her neck.”

“Cut up all his clothes? That woman’s something else.” She squatted to look me in the eye. “Daddy’s not going anywhere, except maybe the doghouse.”

“Where’s the doghouse?”

“Ask your father in a few days.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t worry, kiddo. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“But when I told Denise that we were having spaghetti and clams for dinner, she said clams were stinky and she was going to make macaroni and cheese out of a box all by herself when she got home. Then she called me a baby when I told her I didn’t know how to do that.”

“You tell Denise it’s not because you’re a baby, it’s because you’re Italian.” She ran her hands through my hair. “I’ve got an idea. Want me to teach you how to make macaroni and cheese out of a box?” She reached into the back of the cupboard above the counter. “I bought one a couple of years ago in case we had an emergency and I didn’t have any sauce in the fridge.”

She filled a small pot with water, placed it on the stove, and let me turn on the burner. Then she called to ask my father and brother if they wanted something to eat. My father yelled, “How about leftover spaghetti and clams?”

“Your father’s a real laugh riot.” She helped me tear open the packet of cheese powder. “I don’t understand why people eat this garbage. How hard is it to make a real cheese sauce?” It sounded hard to me, but I kept my mouth shut and focused on stirring.  

After declaring the pasta to be al dente, she poured it into the cheese mixture. Then she stabbed the macaroni with a fork and took a bite. “Not bad. Now you can tell that Denise to go pound sand.”

The four of us sat around the dining room table, eating the dinner I helped make. With each forkful the lingering aroma of clams and cloyingly sweet Hawaiian Punch grew fainter. My parents laughed as my brother speed-talked his way through a story that none of us could follow. The table remained upright.

“That was good,” my father said. “Almost as good as your spaghetti and clams.”

“Back away from the table, Bobby.” My mother pressed her lips together—in what I hoped was a smile—and shook her head at me. I stayed in my seat. 

“A regular Rodney Dangerfield, your father thinks he is.” She continued to look at me. “Someone let Johnny Carson know we’ve got a real comedian in the house.”

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Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. His flash fiction has appeared in FlashFlood Journal and The Good Life Review.