Minced Onions by Christina Fisanick
The following piece is a work of creative nonfiction by writer and academic Christina Fisanick. Dr. Fisanick is a multi-media storyteller born and raised in northern Appalachia. In addition to being the author of more than thirty books and hundreds of articles, poems, and essays, Fisanick creates art and digital narratives. She is a writing professor who sometimes teaches literature. She lives with her son and two cats in Wheeling, West Virginia. You can find her writing, art, and videos at christinafisanick.com.
The work first appeared in “To Write the World: An Anthology of SE Ohio Writers.” The volume was a joint publication of North Meridian Books and Belmont County District Library. The anthology is an effort to promote the writings of local SE Ohio writers following the Summer 2023 Adult Writing Series. Patrons were given the chance to attend any of six workshops run by Wesley R. Bishop, editor at North Meridian, and then submit pieces for consideration. To purchase the anthology follow this link.
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We got together as we often did on the crick by Uncle Steve and Aunt Betty’s house. Steve would get a wild hair up his ass and invite the whole clan over at a moment’s notice. They lived in a trailer that Uncle Steve had expanded by adding on a pressboard living room and redwood deck. It wasn’t fancy, but they had a lot of land. It stretched down to the crick, where Uncle Steve and his brothers had created a pull-in spot under a weeping willow whose shadow kept us cool while we went swimming and pigged out on hot dogs and hamburgers.
The adults would load Steve’s Ford pickup with a charcoal grill and four or five coolers Aunt Betty had filled with beer, pop, and her homemade picnic grub: coleslaw, macaroni salad, pickled beets, deviled eggs, and all the trimmings. The pack of us kids, at least a dozen cousins, would race the truck from the trailer steps to the crick. I can still hear my mother, always fearful, shouting, “Be careful, youins kids! You’re gonna get run over!” We never did.
On this dog day afternoon that we all agreed was hotter ‘an blue hell, Aunt Betty didn’t want to come down to the crick for the cookout. Steve said she got up that morning on a tear. “She was in there slammin’ cupboards and bangin’ pots around meaner ’n a snake!” After she finished, he said, she made a sandwich with some of the last of the Reagan cheese and sat on her ass where she’d been ever since. My mom and her sisters felt slighted by Betty’s absence. “What? She thinks she’s too good to come down here?” they sang in side-mouthed harmony.
But seeing as how they were raised right, they made their sister-in-law a plate. Two freshly grilled hot dogs covered in mustard and minced onions next to a pile of potato salad, a recipe Betty refused to give up to anyone.
I went with Aunt Donna to deliver the food, its paper plate cover riding loosely on top. Our bare feet swished through the grass on our hike back up the long yard. Along the way I noticed the burn barrel was overfull and hoped we could light up the trash that night before we went home. It was always exciting for us cousins who lived in town to watch empty toilet paper rolls and crumpled milk jugs go up in flames. Just as we passed the rabbit hutch, we saw Betty looking out the living room window. We were too far away to see her expression, so we just kept comin’.
We walked up the few steps to the front door and Aunt Donna called, “Betty, we brought you a plate!” No one answered. Donna said out loud to me and herself, “Welp, we might as well go in.” The exquisite relief of air conditioning that hit us in the face as we stepped into the living room made me glad, I’d tagged along. We found Aunt Betty sitting on the couch watching the Saturday Matinee Movie, Ma and Pa Kettle. Her blue-flowered muumuu puddled around her, nearly covering the white couch cushions.
She didn’t look at us. She just kept watching as Ma tried to goad Pa into helping her fix a broken water pipe. “We brought you a coupla’ hot dogs and some tater salad,” Donna said.
“I’m not hungry,” Betty said, taking a long sip of her Stroh’s and then belching loudly, her eyes never leaving the screen as the characters lived out their madcap roles in black and white.
“Well, everyone misses ya down there,” Donna said, moving closer to Betty and holding the plate out for her to take.
Her view of the TV blocked, Betty looked up at Donna, reached out her free hand, knocked the top plate off onto the floor, and squeezed the two hot dogs so hard mustard and onions oozed onto her hand and into the potato salad. She flicked her hand to clear off most of the goop, wiped the remaining mustard on the couch cushion, and asked Donna to get the hell out of the way of her movie.
Stunned, Donna turned to me and said, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Donna huffed under her breath as we tramped back down to the crick, past the rabbit hutch and banged-up burn barrel with its evening promises now in peril. Before we were fully in earshot of everyone, who by this point had started drinkin’ and carryin’ on, Donna shouted: “Just look what that rip did to these hot dogs! She bawled ‘em up in her fist! What’s wrong with her?”
The women and some of the nibbier kids crowded around to see the evidence of Betty’s unladylike behavior and spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening crowin’ about how she was ungrateful and a bad wife to Stevie Earl, as Donna often referred to her baby brother. We saw neither hide nor hair of her again that day, and Donna patted Uncle Steve on the back as we were climbing into our cars to head on home, “You don’t deserve this.” We all knew that this incident was just more evidence, along with her unkempt hairdo and dirty kitchen floor, of her unwillingness to be a good wife; to be a good family member.
Decades later, I found myself chopping onions on a humid summer afternoon. The day before my husband had spontaneously invited twenty-three of his family members over for a barbecue. When he came home to tell me what he had done, I put my laptop away, lurched up from my chair, and cleaned all evening, well after he had gone to bed. I then spent the morning shopping for food, scrubbing the grill, and making sure I had enough of everything for everyone while he went bowling with some of his friends. As I continued chopping those onions, being sure to mince them fine, just like his sister Sue liked them, I thought about Aunt Betty and how that mustard squeezed up thick and yellow between her fingers and how the stain remained on that tired old couch well after Uncle Steve took it with him to his apartment following the divorce.