NON-FICTION: Meditation on Tupperware

Published in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, v. 3, 2005


Photo: Stephanie Kays

Meditation on Tupperware

I don’t know exactly when I lost touch with Tupperware, but it occurred to me today to ask, “Is Tupperware still going strong?”

When I was a teenager, my mother tried to get me involved with Tupperware. The daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend of hers was selling the stuff, and apparently the product was wonderful and the money was good. And when you sold it, you got all sorts of freebies, including a hostess set, and I think that was what my mother was after. My mother wasn’t looking into this for herself. This was her ambition for me, her third daughter. And perhaps it was the daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend who had managed to buy her own car, to secure a proposal of marriage with a flashy diamond engagement ring and to dress professionally with an air of confidence to go along with her perfect body and hair cut that put the idea in my mother’s head that this might be a good thing for me too.

There were several problems with this scenario. I wasn’t ready to give up jeans, T-shirts and work boots for one. I had no car. We didn’t have the kind of family, friends and neighbors who would buy the stuff. I was extremely uncomfortable in a room of strangers, particularly middle-class suburban housewives who burped their containers to get the air out before refrigerating, and in truth, beyond the adorable key chain with the teeny tiny Tupperware bowl and real, detachable, burpable Tupperware lid I received at the information/training session--which would have been an ideal accessory for my younger sister Suzanne’s Barbie Carousel Kitchen had we been say, seven or eight years younger--I couldn’t have cared less about Tupperware products.

My friend Gina’s mother was heavily into Tupperware. Pat had a huge collection, not only of Tupperware bowls, rectangles and cylinders, but Tupperware closet organizing systems. Even though all Tupperware is stackable, there is only so much space even an enthusiast can dedicate to it. The Tupperware cabinets in her kitchen contained special racks on which to store the containers and lids. The lids, in addition to the trademark burpability seals, have a tab which is how you pull the lid back for burping (while gently pressing the center). The tabs are also notched so they can be hung on the organizer bars, and Pat’s were neatly ordered by size and color, biggest to smallest, like-colors together, cascading a surprise of crystalline order out of open cabinet doors, quite unlike the avalanche typically set off when opening my mother’s cabinets.

Pat was a great cook too, and her Tupperware was daily filled with fresh Tupperware Salad Spinner-spun greens, homemade sauce, and pre-boiled and peeled eggs, handy for an anytime, healthy snack.

The first time Gina and I got drunk, we filled a Tupperware container with a shot of this and a thumbsworth of that from her parent’s liquor cabinet, concocting something I suppose was like a Long Island Iced-Tea without the sweet part (we were ON Long Island, after all). We walked over to a nearby park and sipped from the Tupperware while swinging on swings, until we were suitably silly and the brew was gone. We tossed the container in some bushes and stumbled home, but a few days later, as Pat had noticed the missing container, Gina retrieved it, snuck it into the house and washed it out really well. We were quite relieved it was only the Tupperware she noticed missing.

Gina’s family didn’t have a huge amount of money compared to mine, but my parents had a few more kids, higher taxes and we only owned a few random pieces of Tupperware purchased at tag sales and thrift stores or the occasional piece someone forgot to bring home after a party. I don’t think it was a class thing; it was more of a priorities situation. We lived in a better neighborhood and took family vacations every summer. They had a wine cellar, rose gardens and lots of Tupperware.

I don’t know anyone who owns Tupperware anymore, at least not with the kind of vigor Pat brought to her enviable collection. My own kitchen has long been geared towards recycling and re-use (which, now that I think about it, is part of what Tupperware is all about), though I have discontinued the practice of washing and drying plastic bags. I have also for the first time recently invested in disposable leftover containers. I actually re-use these save for the occasional one-that-gets-away. When an overly ripe item I can not bear to deal with mano a mano presents itself, I dispose of the entire container and contents, as the SC Johnson Family of Brands surely intended.

My mother did pass on to me several small, trademark burpable Tupperware containers from the harvest collection--muted reds and oranges--but they were not transparent and any delectable of roughly 2/3 c. or less that found its way inside would rarely see the light of day again before it was far too late. I’m afraid I’m an out-of-sight-out-of-mind leftover engineer.

Am I sad that I don’t know any hard-core Tupperware users anymore? I think its less sadness than curiosity. I don’t know many Republicans anymore either, and that doesn’t bother me too much. But I am curious about them too.

I guess I would just like to know if this subculture still exists. Are there women and men out there with the resources, time and inclination to practice the high art of kitchen and food organization like Gina’s Mom did? Are there parties to which I am not invited going on in living rooms all over southern Connecticut? Once or twice a month, I do like to really cook. Sometimes I will even make up batches of sauce or soup or other freezables, which is where my disposable containers come into play. I bake during holidays, and am not totally inept at home economics. But even though I am efficient when I get going, and part of my periodic procurement of household reserves includes laying in supplies of healthy snack choices for my son Drew, the choices stand amid what can only be described as domestic chaos on the verge of order.

Part of my disassociation from this now totally foreign world has always been there, traceable to that information session I attended twenty-five years ago with my mother, who herself was turned off when she realized that the hostess sample kit one used on the party circuit was not actually free. It was cash up front on that display carrying case filled with the latest wares, a lot of cash as I recall, to be earned back over time with every faithless converted to the cause. I am grateful because this freed me up to seek employment elsewhere, to don the brown, yellow and orange polyester of the affable, speedy burger-board queen I was during my tenure at Burger King (Gina was a McDonald’s queen) and to eventually trade that uniform for the dining hall apron worn over T-shirts and jeans while chopping onions and celery as a “salad girl” on the way to a no-frills marriage and my first college degree.

Another part of this disassociation stems from my inclusion in the single working Mom set, as well as still being, at heart, like my best friend Jan, another single Mom once from Long Island who passes children back and forth with the ex. Jan recently admitted being a “throw-my-clothes-on-the-floor-kind-of-a-gal.” And I think this aptly describes one of several essential qualities we share.

During our weekly or daily or monthly (depends on the crisis level) long distance telephone conversations, Jan and I comfort each other regarding our mutual inabilities to consistently work full-time, manage household finances, cook, clean, rake leaves, spend quality time with our children, chauffeur and change oil while simultaneously doing home repairs. I might complain about exhaustion and the four baskets of laundry I have yet to fold, and she will cheer me up by saying, “What? The clothes are clean, aren’t they?” Last week she advised me re: the overwhelming nature of the Saturday chores before me to: “Put on some music, throw on a facial masque and sweep the floor.” Likewise, when Jan frets about her inability to apply plastic to all of her northern New York subzero winters windows because she has been working ten hour days and cooking for her twins, I console her with my sage advice to “Just do the one’s upstairs. Don’t bother with the blow-dryer part, the wrinkles will work themselves out.”

I’m not sure if things would be that much different if I lived the leisure-class lifestyle with which I associate all things Tupperware and a concordant higher domestic order. In addition to being a “throw-my-clothes-on-the-floor-kind-of-a-gal,” I would have to say I’m also an “I’d-rather-be-reading” or “I’d-rather-be-in-the-hot-tub” or “I’d-rather-be-doing-anything-but-housework” kind-of-a-gal. Prolonged periods of domesticity, no matter how artful they may be, would inevitably lead me over the edge, and no doubt before long I’d be drinking in the middle of the day, schtooping the tennis coach and wearing work boots again.

It might be a different story if I had the wherewithal to employ others to feng shui my home while I read or soaked in the hot tub, but perhaps, like the Bushmen and women in the Kalahari desert in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, who, when presented with a Tupperware party, rightly had no idea whether they were looking at strange drums or some lethal, animated creature-that-burps, I am just better off incuriously out of the loop. As for Republicans, my father--inexplicably breaking with a long line of Irish-Catholic Democrats dedicated to the welfare of the common woman and man--was one and I do miss him, a lot. So perhaps in an effort to extend the democratic ideal of free and open debate to kitchens across the land, it’s not a bad idea to invite a few Republicans to my next potluck dinner party. Who knows, they might even leave a piece of Tupperware behind.