The Real Pretend: On why you should not take your sister to Olive Garden

Last Saturday afternoon my mom was in town and she wanted to go to lunch with me and my sister. She let us decide where we wanted to go, and I made the dumb mistake of suggesting we go to the Olive Garden. Based on past experiences, I should have known better.

I’ll let you see why.

“Would you like a wine sample?” asks our male server.

“Yes,” says Jessamy, rather enthusiastically. For how fast she pulled out her ID, you’d think she kept it up her shirt sleeve.

“No thank you,” says my mother.

“No thanks, “ I say. I’m not against wine with lunch, I’m really not. I just don’t like many wines. I’m also very uneducated when it comes to vino, so I don’t even know the names of the few wines I do like. Riesling maybe? Chardonnay? I really don’t know. I always do a sniff test before tasting, which is typically very attractive and is how I score most of my Friday night dates.

The server pours my sister a sample, then goes to get our waters. We debate the menu. Our server comes back to take our orders. “Are you done with this?” he says, reaching for Jessamy’s wine glass.

“NO.” She reaches out to protect the last swig—so possessive you’d think she stomped those grapes herself and labored to make the drink on her own. I’m feeling a bit embarrassed about this, but to make matters worse, she downs the last sip in record time and then hands the glass to the man. I die a little bit inside.

“You embarrass me every time I take you to the Olive Garden,” I say, once the server is out of earshot.

“Why?” she says.

“Because that just happened.”

“Why do you care?”

“Some of us are trying to find husbands.”

Jess raises an eyebrow, “And it was gonna be that guy?”

“Well not anymore,” I half-laugh.

It’s true. Finding a husband these days is rather difficult. I mean, I have a hard enough time trying to get someone to visit me at my house. You think I’m gonna be able to convince a guy to live here with me too? I don’t even know what the issue is, because I have a very cute, tidy house and the world’s comfiest couch. Maybe I should put that into my match.com profile.

A bit later our salad arrives. This time a woman brings it. She asks if we would like extra cheese on our salad. Sister says yes. Lady begins to grate cheese onto salad. I’m talking to Jess for a minute, then I realize the cheese is still being grated. It’s like a snow blizzard has covered the salad. You know, if snow blizzards were short, stringy, room-temperature, and tasted like parmesan.

“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. That’s enough,” I say to the server.

“Maybe that’s enough for you,” Jess says to me, clearly upset that I interrupted her cheese flow.

“I could put some more on your plate if you’d like,” the woman offers. I think it’s a joke.

“Yes, please,” says my sister.

She just did that. Got cheese grated directly onto her plate. And okay, I get that she loves cheese. Most people in my family do. We have a Swiss heritage. Cheese making used to be the livelihood* of our great-great-great grandfather, Peter-Fred Grossen. People who are lactose-intolerant practically get smudged out of our family line. If Grossens had been raised Amish instead of Presbyterian, then not having cheese in your fridge would nearly deserve a shunning. But even if you have a cheese passion, you need to act with propriety.

These are my actual real-life living cousins. We celebrate our Swiss heritage with a parade every year.

“You did that on purpose,” I say to Jess. Because clearly now she just wants to do every embarrassing thing she can. And we haven’t even gotten to the breadsticks yet.

Jessamy begins telling stories about work, and of how her new assistant, Elsa, has a very unique personality. Apparently whenever Elsa gets upset, she says “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!” Elsa also recommends that you lay with your head over the side of the bed for at least two minutes a day in order for the blood to rush to your head and stimulate hair growth. I guess one day Elsa bobbed her head back and forth and was all “I think my hair is growing a lot faster because I’m bending over so much at work.” So there’s that.

Our food arrives. I’ve ordered the never ending pasta bowl (fettuccine alfredo) and Jess went for the Zuppa Toscana. My mother decided to get fettuccine as well. We dig in. In case you were wondering, my sister and her husband’s first date together was at the Olive Garden during their never ending pasta bowl promotion. She ate three bowls and took one home. This is how it went down: Jess posted on MySpace (because that used to be a thing, back in 2005)“I need someone to go to Olive Garden with me for the never ending pasta bowl!” And Travis said he’d go. Then it was happily ever after.

You might suggest to me that I try this find-a-date-strategy with Facebook, but whenever I’m looking for someone to go somewhere with me, I usually only hear from the crickets. I guess trying to get a partner to help with my detective work sounds too dangerous. Or maybe it’s the mention of wearing disguises that really puts people off. So instead I’ve learned a better strategy is to post “first person to invite me to dinner gets $100!” Because then not only do you attract the go-getters, but your date is guaranteed to have some cash too.

At this point, we’ve all eaten one breadstick and there’s one remaining in the basket. I look up at Jess and observe her behavior for a while. I look back at the lone breadstick and regard it with the feelings one usually has towards a solar eclipse. See, every other time I’ve been at the Olive Garden, Jess will make sure all the breadsticks make it onto plates immediately, so that way when the server comes by she can ask for more. I was mortified at her 25^th birthday dinner, because I think she asked for 8 breadstick basket refills that night. After that evening, the Olive Garden manager considered starting a policy where people get their wrists Xed out if they’ve had too many breadsticks. But then my sister started an Occupy Olive Garden movement, where she encouraged all the patrons to stay as long as they could, peacefully ordering breadstick refills.

Despite my sisters attempt to embarrass me completely, I’m in a good mood. I start to joke around, but then pretty soon the joke becomes a serious plan.

“You know. I could order some more pasta for you, and you could order a bowl of minestrone for me, and then we could eat each other’s food.” Because I mean really. Does it make sense to you? Should I eat three pounds of pasta, salad, and breadsticks, when instead I could eat a bowl of pasta, a bowl of soup, salad, and breadsticks? Either way, Olive Garden is out the same amount of food. It’s just different people would eat it. But rule breaking must be done discreetly. I slide a few noodles onto Jessy’s breadstick plate, telling her to eat them immediately, then I’ll give her more.

It’s kind of like feeding a toddler, really. Only you have to do it when no one is watching.

“We should keep ordering bowls and bowls of pasta, then we can both take some home and I can have enough to last until I am gainfully employed again**.”

My mother interjects. “They only bring you one bowl at a time, so you can only ever leave with one bowl.” Such a realist.

“Then this is what we do. Mom, you keep ordering more fettuccine, and we’ll dump it all into my bowl,” I break into laughter. I usually laugh the most at my own jokes, which apparently is a really annoying attribute. “Then we’ll get a mountain of pasta this high,” I raise my hand up to the hanging lamp, “and I’ll just be sitting here, eating pasta and acting like nothing happened. Then we ask for a to-go container.”

Only we didn’t carry out our brilliant plan. Instead I had a few bites of Jessy’s third bowl of soup, and she had a few bites of my second dish of pasta, and we asked for just one more basket of breadsticks. No one left with Mount Fettuccine. Also, no one left with a date either.