What is “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas?”
from the Jeopardy! category “Acronyms & Mnemonics:”
You never really understood your generation’s obsession with space: not Star Wars, not Star Trek (the two of which you always confused), & certainly not actual space. Why would anyone want to go there—where the tethers were givens, more literal & restrictive than any tethers that bound you on Earth? (Full disclosure: you were a girl whose parents had walked her on a leash.) But in space, you might get lost forever. You might blow up like the astronauts on the Challenger, which exploded right before your first-grade eyes on a TV set they rolled in special for just that occasion. (Trauma, anyone?) Plus, there was no pizza in space, which you identified early on as a deal-breaker. “Bread crumbs floating around could get caught in sensitive equipment,” the guest speaker said, “so astronauts avoid crackers, sandwiches, really any food that crumbles or has crusts.” You raised your hand: “So—to clarify—no pizza, even in the form of a calzone?” He laughed, then said like it was no big thing, “There isn’t any pizza in the astronauts’ meal plan.” Okay, Crazy! And people trained to do this for years of their lives, to float around in a void, breathing through tubes, strapping themselves to bunk-beds & vacuum-toilets, & most appalling of all—foregoing pizza for the duration? When they taught your class a nifty way to remember the order of the planets, you couldn’t help but guffaw. “Don’t you think that’s a little ironic?” (They didn’t.) “You can only get a piping hot pie in one-ninth of our galaxy!” Nobody was ordering extra cheese on Venus, pepperoni & black olives on Mars, or a sweet Hawaiian style on Saturn. That was Earth-stuff, & you wanted it—even the Frisbee-thin (& Frisbee-flavored) pizzas your mother brought home on a 2-for-1 from Albertson’s. As soon as she left for her Garden Club, you & your father stuffed them in the microwave, doughy edges drooping over the tray, sausage bits scattering on the range below. (You ate those, too, cold & uncooked.) Your grandma treated you to DiGiorno’s, which was really a cut above. She baked these pizzas in her oven, & you could taste something resembling flavor. Thick crust, rising crust, stuffed crust—she let you choose. Take that, Space! And if the pizza had mushrooms & peppers on it, you even got to skip your vegetable. But best of all were the days your whole class traipsed through the West Seattle Junction to the Godfather’s Pizza buffet. Your parents had to sign a permission slip & provide—hardest part of the sell—$4.95 in cash. But for that price of admission, you could eat as much as you wanted for the span of an hour. By fourth grade, you & Carl Lull were competing for Pizza-Eating Champion, a title you claimed & went on to defend all through the following year. Your record unbeaten at 24 slices—20 savory & 4 “dessert.” Of these, you always opted for two cherry, one lemon, with a streusel as the encore. You never threw up. You never felt sick. And you were always hungry again in time for dinner. Pizza was perfect, unlike space, & the boys in your class conceded their grudging respect: “You gotta hand it to a girl who can put away that many pieces.” (Full disclosure: You never had a pizza delivered to your home, never knew the thrill of tipping the guy in the red cap & lifting the hot box from his hand.) When your teacher enrolled the class in Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program, students received coupons for free pizzas based on the number of books they had read. From then on, the personal pan was no longer hypothetical, no longer a commercial-fueled fantasy. Your father hung back as you strutted to the counter, presented the paperwork, then waited—one foot persistently tapping. Pizza was always worth the wait. Pizza was the antithesis of space. You still remember the way the small, cardboard square scorched your lap, the smell of onions & cheese fusing with your corduroy pants. There were always napkins in the glove box. Your father let you eat while he drove as long as you wiped off the grease before you got home. Space was stupid, & pizza was genius. Finally, a binary you could believe in! The belt cinched only lightly at your waist, you left not a trace in the Honda’s backseat.
Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History, out now from New Michigan Press, and Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize.
