One-Sentence Story: Licorice Pizza, Eskimo Pies, Scallops, and Capers

Sometimes it takes me quite a while to “get it,” if you know what I mean, like for the longest time I thought the name of the record store where I used to shop in Los Angeles, Licorice Pizza, was just a wacky nonsense name, something like the name of the rock group Moby Grape, until someone explained it to me—

a record is round and black, get it?—

and how many years passed before it dawned on me why Eskimo Pies were named after Eskimos—

it's a frozen pie, get it?—

so it’s not too surprising that I ate scallops all through my childhood without having any concept of what they actually were— 

we’d be driving home after a day at Venice Beach in our VW convertible, the cool, late-afternoon breeze blowing our damp, frizzy hair into our faces and tingling against our hot, salty, sunburned skin, and our parents would stop at an outdoor seafood restaurant called The Patio, where I would always order the basket of fried scallops because they were crisp and chewy and sweet, and the only thing on the menu that I thought of as “not fishy”—

even though the enormous yellow plastic scallop shell that was the well-known logo for a chain of gas stations loomed over us as we zipped down the streets of Santa Monica, and it wasn’t until I was an adult and moved to the east coast, where I saw the wreck of a 75-foot wooden scalloper in Woods Hole— 

two young men, 19 and 24, sailing through the Hole during a fierce Easterly gale, were pushed onto the rocks by the heavy swells, and when they radioed for the tug, the tug company refused to venture out after them because the two scallopers had fallen behind on their tug bills, and by the time the Coast Guard arrived, the younger man had been washed overboard , and although the scalloper was pounded to fragments over the next six weeks, the metal superstructure of the bridge remained sticking up out of the water, marking the site of the shipwreck—

that I put two and two together 

life is full of suffering and then you die, get it?— 

so don’t even get me started on capers.

by Nina Zolotow

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