Lettuce

“Did you know once upon a time lettuce was a sacred sex symbol?” She asks this while shuffling her fork through the plate of salad in front of her.

“Oh?” he says, looking with new interest at this rather plain creature across the small table from him, the one his brother insisted he ask out, the brother who had spent one whole New Year’s eve party manoeuvring the two of them together, often leaving them in uncomfortable proximity with nothing to say to each other. After that interminable evening of contrived encounters, they had both gone home saying never again would they agree to be in each other’s company. And yet, here they are, awkwardly making conversation, embarrassed by the long silences between topics, each wracking his or her brain for something, anything, that might possibly be of interest to the other.

“Yes,” she says, relieved to have thought of something that might carry them along for a bit, something she had read in the Smithsonian magazine somewhere along the line.

“Have you ever heard of Min, the Egyptian god of fertility? He’s the one always depicted with a boner sticking straight out.”

She blushes from her décolletage clear up to her hair line, her creamy skin now mottled and flushed. “I meant to say ‘erection,’” she says, and flushes again.

“I know the guy you mean,” Jeremy says, eager to keep this topic going, “he sports a kind of fez, only it’s pretty much as tall as he is, that fez.”

“That’s the one,” she says, thankful focus has shifted to Min’s head.

“So what’s the lettuce connection?” Jeremy asks, leaning in a bit, caught off guard by the pleasure her skin tones arouse in him as she fades from red back to pale pink. He’d never thought to look at her much beyond her mouth and maybe her eyes, but in this moment he’s enchanted. He glances up at her mouth and sees for the first time that her lips are a deeper, richer shade of pink than her lovely chest is. And look at that, one of her eye teeth is a little twisted and pokes out a bit in the cutest way. How had he never noticed this?

“Well, it’s all over the walls of the tombs in Egypt, lettuce that is, mostly romaine but also cos, so the romaine coming from Rome and the cos from a Greek Island, I think.” She’s madly throwing in details to keep it all going. “But regular Egyptians didn’t actually eat it because it was considered an aphrodisiac for Min, the god of fertility!” She says this triumphantly and sits back in her chair well pleased with herself. Then she leans forward and stabs a bit of her salad, romaine lettuce by chance, and shakes it at him. “Fast forward a few millennia and we plebes get to eat it now,” and she daintily slips the fork between those rosy lips and chomps down with that cute set of teeth. Jeremy nearly faints.

He’s no prize, he’d be the first to admit. His own mouth is full of snaggle teeth and when he laughs he’s always been careful to keep his top lip carefully in place to cover them. This practice has lead to the need not to laugh too uproariously lest his teeth poke out of their protective covering and scare onlookers, or at least that’s been his reasoning since about age 12. It has also led to a reputation of not having much of a sense of humour, of being dour and hard to please. Many a young woman has given up trying to amuse him for this reason but Jeremy, not one for self-analysis, has always assumed it’s his looks that handicap him.

Katherine is on a roll now. She can see Jeremy seeming to soften towards her and she wants to take this further. Rarely in her life has anyone been interested in what she has to say, which she attributes to her general mousiness. Mousey brown hair, limp and straggly when long, plastered to her head when short, though her current pixie cut with it’s many shaggy layers seems to have achieved a bit of buoyancy that becomes her. Mousey and timid, those have been her hallmarks throughout her life of high school, university, and now the workplace, a mid-tier provincial government placement where she is both accepted for her general competency and ignored for her lacklustre personality. But tonight she feels a bit of dazzlement at play and combs her memory banks for more tidbits about Min the ancient Fertility God.

Feeling a feistiness entirely new to her, she pulls her chair in closer and says in a hushed tone, “They thought lettuce would help him perform better, you know, be able to keep at it for a long time.”

“Lettuce?” Jeremy says, taking newfound interest in the green pile in front of him. “Was there any evidence this was true?”

“Well I don’t know if they had their scientists working on it but the article said that when you broke off a leaf or chopped it out of the ground at the root it would--and here she inserts air quotes, ‘ooze a white-ish, milky substance’ that supposedly looked like . . .” She stops, fearing she might be going too far.

“Semen!” Jeremy crows. “Who’da thought!”

“Exactly. They had vivid imaginations back then. I mean they thought romaine was a sex symbol because it grew up tall and rigid, and then, you know, when it was cut, it leaked. There was more about that in the article but it gets a little steamy.”

“How so?” says Jeremy, all ears, and all eyes now roaming over Katherine’s bodice, her face, her hair that makes him want to plunge his fingers into and ruffle.

“Are you sure you want me to go on?” she says, stalling, trying to remember more of the article.

“Absolutely,” he says, something beginning to stir in his own little semen factory.

“Well here’s another lettuce story involving Horus and some other god, sorry, can’t remember his name. They get to fighting over who should rule Egypt and in the process of this argument, only an argument at this point, the other guy tries to overpower Horus by, um, having intercourse with him. I guess things get hot and heavy because at some point--are you sure this is okay to be saying this?”

“Yes!” And here Jeremy has all but got his nose touching hers, “please, go on.”

“Well,” she says, not pulling back from him, “Horus reaches between the other god’s legs and catches his semen and flings it into a river. Then Horus himself comes, right into a lettuce plant conveniently near by, and get this, the other god eats the lettuce.”

They are both silent for a long moment, then Katherine reaches out and takes Jeremy’s hand resting on the table. He places his other hand gently on top. “Do you suppose that was the origins of salad dressing?” she asks. 

Jeremy moves closer till his nose and Katherine’s are touching, then their lips. The kiss is soft and promising.