A small digression about Marguerite's meatballs

I did not grow up in a home in which dinner parties were held. Dinner was the meal eaten at 6 every night when Dad came home, on a yellow formica-topped table in the kitchen and was most often something wet and bland, meat loaf, salmon loaf, spaghetti and meatballs, or my favorite Marguerite’s meatballs.

This is the kind of social networking my mother engaged in. Her best friend was Marguerite of Marguerite’s meatballs, ordinary meatballs, rolled in rice, and then covered in mushroom soup from a can on the stove. Mmm, wish I had some now.

Marguerite was my mom's best friend; I knew this because we ate the meatballs so often and because my mom said so. "Marguerite is my best friend." Only no one ever saw Marguerite and we just took it on faith that she even existed, let alone be a best friend.

This may seem odd to most people, but mother didn't have any friends to speak of, no one but the Kuhns next door and they were more like surrogate grandparents to me than best friends, and the Riddles, whom my mother felt were intellectually beneath her; Chuck Riddle, an American Legion buddy of my dad's, the mom Loretta and two kids, Terry, my age and Chuckie. My mom and Loretta had absolutely nothing to talk about, except the kids, and my mom did not discuss child rearing with anybody. So the dads would talk and the moms would, I don't know, pretend to talk. I played withTerry in her bedroom, although I secretly felt she was intellectually beneath me as well.

So, I could tell by the fact that she made meatballs more than once a week, named after somebody, that was likely to be her best friend. Social contact was not necessary.

There would be occasional phone calls. "Mom, it's Marguerite," I would call and mom would blush like a bride, she so seldem received phone calls, and rush to the phone. The calls were always short and were never followed up by visits. It didn't occur to me to wonder what they found to talk about, these best friends who never saw one another. Anyway, one day my mom was talking on the phone to Marguerite and I heard her say, “No! I am so sorry.”

What was she sorry about? Did someone die? When she hung up, she turned to me, her face a bright red, “Guess what, Marguerite’s name isn’t Marguerite after all, it’s Margaret. All these years I’ve been calling her Marguerite and she only just today corrected me.”

What I mean about it showing what kind of social networking she did was even if Margaret/Marguerite didn’t feel comfortable correcting her when she called her by the wrong name, there was no one else to do it; it was more like an unsocial network.

No dinner parties, no friends in the flesh. Only meatballs. After that, we didn't hear from Marguerite so much.