Leftovers are a language
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 2 min read
A leftover, in the sense I mean, is not food that was not eaten; it is food that was made in a quantity the maker knew was too large, so that there would be something to send.
The container matters. The good ones with the lids that match are a loan and must come back, which guarantees a second contact; the margarine tubs are a gift and need not. A woman who sends soup home in a tub she does not want back is saying something different from a woman who sends it in the glass dish with the blue lid, and both of them know it, and the son, who is holding the dish in a parking lot, does not.
What the dish says, as far as I can reconstruct it, is roughly: that he does not eat properly and she knows it; that she is not going to say so; that she would like him to come again; and that the dish needs to come back, which is the same thing said the other way round.
He hears that there is soup.
I do not think this is a failure on his part. I think it is what the language is for. If she could say the four things she would not need the dish, and she cannot, and so there is a dish, and he brings it back in about three weeks, usually unwashed, and she washes it and fills it again, and I am not sure, writing this, whether that is a conversation or the absence of one.