Jessica Harper Uncanceled

“Jess, do not take a bite,” said my mom, “you must try it with the horseradish.”

Arrrghhhh. Help.

I had been sitting in my parents’ garden in Athens, Georgia, about to sink my gnashers into some smoked salmon and cream cheese on rye bread. But mom had stopped me mid-chomp to advise me what I was doing wrong. As usual, I was being instructed to eat food the way my sister Ashley and her husband John ate it.

“You add a dab of horseradish but just a dab,” said Ashley. Mom and Dad were slavisly following this diktat with a huge deal of concentration, like they were performing brain surgery on someone important who needed to be kept alive to save the planet.

I grabbed the horseradish jar and did as I was told. It did taste good but that was hardly the point. Ashley and John had always been seen as Keepers of the Flavors and Mom and Dad looked to them as if they were food gods. You can imagine how irritating that could be, I’m sure.

“And now you need to take a micro bite,” said Mom.

“Micro bite?” I said.

“Oh yeah,” said John, demonstrating. “You see, like this? Just with your front teeth. It unleashes the flavors in increments that only the brain can detect. A wise old fisherman told us.”

Oh God. A whole weekend of hearing stories about their recent Thailand vacation awaited us.

I took a “micro bite”, just to keep the peace, but my patience was getting pretty micro, too. 

“Jessica, that bite was massive!” shrieked Mom, like I’d dropped a baby.

“Maybe John can tell me how to breathe, too?” I said.

“The best way to breathe is the four-seven-eight technique,” said John, my sarcasm sailing over his head as usual. “You breathe in for four seconds, hold it for seven and exhale for eight. It’s a form of pranayama, the practice of breath regulation. The fisherman told us that, too.”

“Did he ever catch any fish?” I said.

“He doesn’t have time to now,” said Ashley. “Not with the YouTube channel.”

“Do you want to try the breathing, Jackson?” said Mom. 

“I’m good,” said Jackson.

“Brandon?”

“I’m on the three-six-nine breathing method,” said Bran, trying not to avoid my gaze so he didn’t start laughing. “I’d rather not mix.”

“Prosecco anyone?” said Dad, who was crossing the lawn with two bottles of the stuff, plus a carton of something else.

“Yes!” screeched Mom. “Jess, wait ’til you try this.”

Oh brother. Hopefully it was cyanide. Make mine a double.

“Prosecco with an extra twist that Ashley and John got us hooked on last night,” said Dad.

“Lychee sorbet,” cooed Mom.

“I can’t believe we drank it any other way,” said Dad.

This always happened at family weekends: Ashley and John arrived on the Friday night and by the time we, the Harpers, rocked up on the Saturday, the die had been cast and The New Flavors had been embedded. Our job was then merely to sample them and heap praise on the perfect couple who had introduced them.

Dad poured the drinks and we all got a scoop of lychee sorbet dumped in our fizz. Dad raised “To Ashley and John, our intrepid explorers of the world.”

“To, er, Ashley and John? “ I said.

I was waiting for us, the Harpers, to get a mention next (“To Jess and the other two, who are also here”) but we didn’t even get that.

“Mmmm,” said Ashley. As she savoured her drink I studied her and thought: apart from the fact we look very much alike, do we have anything in common?

“Mmmmm,” said John. He gave Ash a loving look, like: yep, we did it again, babe. We do all right.

“Always making our culinary lives a little better,” said Dad, putting an arm around Ashley. Don’t get me wrong: he loved me, too. But his – and Mom’s – people skills could do with some work.

This was all so stressful. I knew that things would get more stressful later when we retired to the house, where I would live in fear that I would disturb some detail of mom’s palace, like a scallop-trimmed lampshade or row of perfectly spaced cushions on the velvet sofa she’d shipped in from an absurd New York boutique.

“Jess, do you have a bruise around your eye?” said Ash.

Finally. The bruise around my eye was pretty massive but I think that was the first time any of them had noticed it.

“Oh yes,” said Mom. “So she does.”

“The sorbet really sets it off,” said Dad.

“No, really, Dad, I’m fine,” I said. “I just bashed my head on the side of a car.”

“What?” said Mom.

“I was concerned,” said Dad. “Why am I in trouble?”

“Yes, I got severe concussion,” I said.

“The sorbet is fruity and sweet and the Prosecco is dry but somehow it just works,” said John, holding his glass to the light.

“What happened, Jess?” said Mom.

“I was on a dumb training course and they made us go on a hike and I slipped on some mud and whacked my head on a Chevrolet Equinox.”

“That’s awful,” said Ashley. “We have to sue them.”

“The Equinox is so sluggish when passing,” said John.

“There was a storm and the roads to the training center were flooded so they couldn’t take me to hospital,” I said. “They drove me there the next morning and I had an X-ray. Brain still visible, apparently.”

“Mmm, more Prosecco for me, please, David,” said Mom to Dad. “Ashley, have you tried it with any other flavor sorbets?”

“Blood orange is pretty good, too,” said Ash.

“So that’s my concussion chat over?” I said. “Have I had my allotted time?”

“You said it wasn’t serious,” said Mom.

“I said I still had a brain,” I said. “A few supplementary questions wouldn’t have killed you.”

“You sounded all breezy about it,” said Ashley. She was probably right. Now I’d wasted my fully justified anger with a misfire about sorbet. Damnit, I wasn’t going to back out of this one. I was completely in the right and this had been brewing a long time.

“I just thought that might warrant a couple of minutes of discussion, a bit of concern about Jess, a few questions, which – let’s face it – hardly ever happens when we all get together, what with you and John being Keepers of the Flavors.”

Everyone went silent. The bugs went silent. Clouds stopped moving. Babies about to be born at the nearby hospital took five. Even a plane passing overhead cut its engine.

“The what?” said Ashley.

“Nothing,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

“Keepers of the Flavors? What is that?”

“Ashley, don’t,” said Dad. “Jess has brain damage.”

“I want to hear this,” said Ashley.

Oh well. My toes were in the water, I might as well fight the shark. I looked to Brandon to see how he was taking this and he looked terrified. I thought his fingers might shatter his champagne flute, showering us with green sorbet like we were in Alien or something.

“I just mean that you and John are both so expert cooks that sometimes I struggle to…”

Everyone at the table leaned forward. How could I go any further? This was tantamount to saying my family drove me nuts. I struggle to resist the urge to strangle Ashley and John? I mean, where was this sentence heading?

“I struggle to… fully appreciate the expertise involved, due to my limited knowledge of cooking.”

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. I’d snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, perhaps for the first time in my life.

“We understand, it’s hard for all of us living in Ashley and John’s shadow,” said Dad. I smiled at him as I pictured grabbing a knife and plunging it into his neck.

“You do many things well,” said Mom, far from convincingly.

Ashley was staring at me, like she knew that’s not what I had wanted to say. Was this the end of the matter this weekend?

I suspected it was not.

The above is an excerpt from The Re-Education of Jessica Harper, which will be published in March 2024. It is the sequel to Jessica Harper Is Not Woke.