Marigold's Dressing

A lovely question, Marigold. It reminds me so much of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed a man could simply say what he meant.

You wrote to ask whether it is rude to bring your own salad dressing to a dinner party if you don't care for the host's choice, and I want you to know right away: no, dear, it is not rude. It is survival. I have not attended a potluck without a thermos of my own vinaigrette since the Wentworth Harvest Social, and I will tell you why, though I suspect by paragraph three you will wish I hadn't.

His name was Foster. He ran the falconry demonstration booth at the county renaissance faire two towns over, and I want to be clear that I did not fall for the leather bracer or the way he called his kestrel "a good girl" in a voice usually reserved for infants. I fell for the dressing. He made it himself — a champagne shallot vinaigrette he kept in an unmarked glass cruet he referred to, without irony, as "the good bottle." At every gathering, every picnic, every quiet Sunday lunch on his mother's porch, out came the good bottle, and out came his hand resting briefly on mine as he poured it over my greens like he was blessing them. I thought: this is a man who takes care of things. I thought: this is a man who has decided, on some deep cellular level, that I deserve the good bottle.

Do not make my mistake, Marigold. The good bottle was for everyone. I watched him pour it, that same tender hand, that same blessing motion, over the salad of a woman named Deb from his hawk-handling certification course, at a picnic I was specifically not invited to but attended anyway, from behind a rented Port-a-John, with binoculars I still own and keep in a drawer I do not open casually. He gave Deb the hand-on-hand pour. He gave Deb the voice he used for the kestrel. I understood then that the dressing had never been a gesture of love. It had been a delivery mechanism for a shallot vinaigrette he was, and I cannot stress this enough, extremely proud of.

I confronted him at what I believed at the time was our engagement dinner and what I now understand, through years of therapy I conducted primarily with myself and occasionally with a very patient snapping turtle I used to feed on my old dock, was merely a dinner. He said, and I quote, because I have never once let myself forget it: "Priscilla, it's just salad dressing." As though the word "just" could launder what he'd done. As though a man cannot commit an act of profound and calculated intimacy using nothing but oil, vinegar, and a shallot, and then hide behind the smallness of the vehicle. It is never just the dressing, Marigold. The dressing is where they show you who gets the good bottle and who gets the bottle from the door of the refrigerator, the cheap one, the one with the crust around the cap.

I want to say this happened once, and cleanly, and that I moved on with the dignity of a woman who has learned a lesson and closed a chapter. But the timeline gets complicated here, and I've made peace with the fact that it will never fully resolve. Because I have also told you, in a previous column, that Foster left my life for good at my cousin's wedding in the spring of 2003 — the year he stood up during the toasts to announce he was "not a jarred-dressing kind of man, symbolically or otherwise" and walked out into the parking lot never to be seen by me again. And yet I have just told you Deb, and the Port-a-John, and the engagement dinner, which by any reasonable accounting happened after that. I do not know how both are true. I have stopped asking the timeline to behave. Some men leave you once, cleanly, and some men leave you in installments, for years, retroactively, and Foster, God keep his falcons, did both.

So: bring your own dressing, Marigold. Bring it in something with a good lid, something that won't leak in your bag, something that is yours alone and was never poured by a hand you mistook for permanent. Better yet — and I say this with the full weight of my own hard-won peace — consider not attending the dinner party at all. Consider a small home, ideally moated, ideally reachable only by a single retractable footbridge you control personally. Consider befriending a tortoise, who will never pour vinaigrette over anyone but you, because a tortoise, Marigold, does not know how to perform tenderness it does not mean. This is not loneliness. People confuse it for loneliness because they have not yet done the work I have done. I have a moat. I have my own dressing. I have a battery-powered lantern and three changes of alias for the county fair circuit, should Foster ever again attempt to demonstrate falconry within a fifty-mile radius of my person. I am, by any honest measure, thriving.

Learn from me, dear, and you will not need forty years and a snapping turtle named Gerald to get there. Bring the dressing. Trust the tortoise. And you will be every bit as happy as I am.

With love and my own good bottle, Priscilla