Carrots and Artichokes

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I have a lot of artichoke stuff. It’s because of a carrot.

My mom had a friend I’ll call Anne, because that’s not her name. Anne’s husband dumped her for another woman. She was the first person I ever knew to use the c-word. I didn’t hear it from her; I heard it from my mom who said they called the other woman c-word-face.

Later, my mother would use that word in a game of Hangman while we sat endlessly in family court, waiting for the judge to decide how much money my dad was never gonna pay.

But I’m trying to get to carrots, and from there to artichokes.

Around 1971, my mom and some other women from the Unitarian Church decided to form a women’s group. Feminism was hipster trendy in the early 70s, like Kindness now.

They decided to include their husbands, and have an Encounter Group, also very stylish. They got together nearly every Friday night for years. It was my favorite night of the week, as long as it wasn’t at our house, when we had to stay in our rooms. Most of the time, it meant soda and chips and tv, first the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, later Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

Anne and her husband were in this group so it was kind of a thing when they split up. Two-thirds of those couples divorced before 1980. The women stayed friends.

But before all that, for years, they hung out and talked about their marriages and their friendships with each other, their ambitions and obstacles. They studied all the hot behavioral psychology of the era, reading books like I’m OK, You’re OK and Games People Play. Even the kids came to the transcendental meditation workshop. We had little individual meetings with the guru guy so he could listen to our energies and give us our mantra. We were not to tell anyone our mantras; it would make it so the meditation didn’t work. To this day, I have not told anyone my mantra. The adults had a Rolfing session and eventually most of them did the EST training, which should have been the end of it.

One Friday night, a couple years before c-face, Anne announced she was tired of the word “relationship”. It was overused; she was starting to tune out when she heard it. She said “obviously we still have to talk about them, but let’s use a new word, like… carrot. “ 

It didn’t really catch on at first, but a few years later, my mother and I were looking for a word we could both stand for girls who like girls. She said ‘lesbian’; I found it clinical and confining. I suggested “dyke” or “queer”, but this was the eighties and she was horrified.  

Then she remembered Anne and the Carrot. “I’ve got it! Artichoke!”

For her, it just had to be another vegetable to fit neatly in what was now a system. If you’re unfamiliar, an artichoke is kinda dry and spiny like a pineapple on the outside, but it has a highly edible heart, especially if it’s dipped in melted garlic butter.

I think maybe the reason Carrot didn’t catch on is that Anne balked at throwing out the idea of Relationship. Obviously types of relationships like sister, causal, opposite exist. But we have this idea that in addition to you and your beloved, there’s your Relationship. It’s this whole other mouth you gotta feed. 

Some ideas, like democracy or credibility, are cool; they help people live together. But Relationship is an idea that forces people to sign off on policy before they learn the job. We adopt artificial milestones and check its progress. We make rules; it has its own birthday. We give it a name and register it with the state. 

But it’s all in what you call it. It’s an idea and it changes all the time and you and whoever would never draw it the same way. Even if you both agreed it was a carrot, your carrot and their carrot would look different. And how is it best served?

People pay professionals to help them agree on how the carrot is or should be, as if there’s only one way to be a carrot. They quit jobs and break leases and make kids sad because one likes to dip those baby carrots in ranch and the other needs them sauteed in butter and white wine. 

I went to school with someone who went on an all-carrot diet and turned orange. There’s some kind of wild carrot that’s really poisonous. I’ve struggled to grow decent carrots my whole life. I love carrots all the ways. 

Artichokes, though? Most everyone thinks only of a pickled artichoke heart in a jar. Prepared properly, it’s a tasty lotta work for a snack. I like them all right; haven’t made one in years.

But I’ve been given pictures of artichokes, and artichoke towels, and dishes and a pinecone statue someone thought was an artichoke. Because my mom really did say Artichoke when she meant girls who like girls for the rest of her life, and a couple times I had to explain. 

I didn’t really want my porch and kitchen plastered with icons for other people’s labels.  But now every time I see an artichoke - or a carrot - I think about how it made my mom laugh, even when she had to talk about something hard.

The heart dipped in garlic butter.