The line to order pizza was short, and I was ready. After fifteen years of marriage, Vic and I had the pizza order at our favorite shop down to a drill. Our order was always the same: half pepperoni with onions, half sausage with onions and bell pepper. Well, there were nights when we merged our order into one happy combination. We both enjoyed a wide variety of foods, so there were never serious problems about what to get. Only…
Only, for fifteen years I had longed for the taste of anchovies. I grew up in an anchovy family. The small shop where my father took us for pizza as kids was run by a rotund, happy Italian man who did magical things tossing pizza dough into the air and catching it with a twirl in his hands. He even let my sister Diane and me sit on the counter top and watch him add the toppings and cheese. And he always made our eyes wide in astonishment and delight, putting on extra anchovies.
For some reason, tonight, as I peered over the shoulder of the woman ahead of me in line and looked past the order taker and into the kitchen, the taste of anchovy began to beckon. Anchovy. Anchovy,… they seemed to call, as I conjured up the salty, meaty taste. For fifteen years, I had deprived myself of anchovies for the good of marriage and family. I didn’t even order it on half of the pizza. Ever since my freshman year at college I knew that nobody could ever figure out where the anchovies started and stopped. If anyone bit into the slightest piece of fish, I hated hearing stories about how nasty anchovies were and how they made people gag. It was disgusting, the way people spit out the slivers of meat pieces. Better not to even order them.
Maybe just this once, if I made the pizza man promise not to drip anchovy juice on the other half, and made him make a big mark in the pizza to show the pepperoni/anchovy boundary, maybe this one time Vic would let me put anchovies on my half.
“Vic, would you mind too terribly much, if he promises to be really careful and shows us where he puts them, would it be all right….if,” I took a breath, “….if I had anchovies on my half?” I asked.
Vic’s jaw dropped. He took a step back, “You like anchovies?” He almost shouted again, “You like anchovies?”
My eyes opened wide. Voices quieted, and heads turned to see what was wrong. Vic blurted out, “You mean all these years, fifteen years, I’ve been going without anchovies because I thought you didn’t like them? You like anchovies?! I like anchovies!” It was too much! We broke into hysterics. We rolled out of line and waved the others ahead, falling into chairs, laughing and giggling.
And people in the pizza shop stared. Fifteen years? These people were weird!
But tonight’s pizza was the best either of us had eaten in the longest time, slathered with anchovies, no holds barred, Mr. Pizza man done himself proud, anchovies crisscrossed, lying side by side, under the sauce and on top of the sauce, loads and lots of spiky, spiney, salty anchovies.
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Excerpted for Marriage Partnership, Summer, 2000, “You Learn Something New Every Day,” p. 12.
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