Her mother was a slight, recessive woman with a number of serious dietary issues, some real, some imagined, one of which was the fact that she insisted she was unable to swallow any leaves, including leaves of lettuce. All vegetables had to a) be thoroughly cooked and b) take a more solid form — for example, a green pea or a floret of broccoli was fine, but sauteed spinach was not — and on the occasion when she had been coaxed or cajoled into trying to swallow a leaf of lettuce, she claimed, she had gagged so hard she was unable to swallow and had very nearly died of choking. Leaving aside, for a moment, the reality of this affliction, which I had neither heard of before nor met anyone who shares in since, I considered the possibilities for what had happened to this woman to produce such a condition. There was the possibility, given her upbringing of little means in an extremely desolate, extremely rural area, that she had not encountered a leaf of lettuce one way or another until she was an adult, and the leaf as a form consequently disgusted her. The other possibility is that she really did have some kind of condition in which her gag reflex was activated by the form of the leaf, but I rarely saw her eat a vegetable, leaf or otherwise, in any case.

She told a story, one that I was inclined to believe, about her father standing over her in high school, and, in a fit of rage about something or the other, something she said she remembered being completely unrelated to her eating habits, forcing her to choke down an entire plateful of greens. She had been sobbing, gagging on the lettuce, but her father was an incredibly stern man, a military man, and he had watched until her plate was empty, then left the table for his wife and daughters to clear. The one fact she mentioned about her father was that he always flew an American flag from a pole in the center of their otherwise barren front lawn. There was no indication of the origins of her mysterious condition in this story, as far as I could see, and when her mother retold it, she told it wide-eyed, assured of her role as the victim. But her mother always had something shifty about her, so I couldn’t be sure. She reminded me of a child; I always felt the capacity for lying hovering around everything that she said.