By Bob Frazer
As with so many other questions I’d been asked since I arrived as a new immigrant to this country, I had no idea what a PB&J was, far less whether I’d like one. Being hungry had been mentioned, so I thought it could have been food-related, but then we’d also just had sex and were still lying quietly in the afterglow, so there was the possibility that she was proposing some sort of kinky, sexual deviation to which I might later regret having agreed. (And wouldn’t the best option be to say no to such a thing beforehand than to endure the awkwardness of stopping it after I’d consented?) I’d learned, though, that in these situations, the best thing was to say nothing, in the hope that a follow up question might give me more of a clue about what I was being asked; it must be better to appear momentarily addle-brained or indecisive than to appear to be either ignorant or stupid. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what she’d said – unlike that time at McDonalds when I couldn’t translate “Zitfer herert’go?” into anything and had to ask the server to repeat it an embarrassing number of times before the person in line behind me asked if I wanted to eat my order in the restaurant or to take it home with me – no, this was quite clear: Did I want a PB&J?
I waited, silently, in the hope that further information would be forthcoming. When she finally broke the silence, it was to ask if I’d prefer a BLT instead. Americans and their damned acronyms! “What are the other options?” I ventured. “Well, we’d need to go out for a BLT or almost anything else, but I have bread, and there’s peanut butter and jelly in the fridge.” My initial reaction was to think “At last, I know what we’re talking about!”, but it was soon followed by the realization that she was suggesting putting peanut butter and jelly together between bread. Sure, I’d seen Americans in hotels in Europe do things like put marmalade on their bacon, or sprinkle sugar and syrup on French toast, but the mere thought of combining these two ingredients – each of which I enjoy individually – to form one entity was entirely repugnant to me.
Since then, I’ve had a wife who was sick and hadn’t eaten for two days tell me that she’d like a PB&J. I got two slices of bread, put peanut butter on one slice and jelly on the other, but I just couldn’t bring myself to slap the two together, so I delivered them, open faced, and left the room before she could complete the heresy. I have kids who will occasionally request a PB&J, and if I can’t persuade them to make it for themselves, I make the same, open-faced delivery, and let them decide whether to ruin a perfectly good peanut butter and a perfectly good jelly sandwich by attaching them.
I don’t know if there’s a word – some sort of phobia – for those who have an instant and visceral reaction to even the thought of a PB&J, but if there is, I most certainly suffer from it.
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