I'm taking Gerard to his first lobster boil.

“Now, you should know that this isn't the type of 'lobster boil' they have in Cape Cod.”

“I've never been to one of those either.”

“Good – those are dumb. All kinds of corn and potatoes rolling around, getting in your way. Those fancy pants think they are too good for a plain old lobster on a plate.”

My lobster is simple, approached the way my family has approached everything since the grands-peperes and grands-memeres crashed over the American border in a wave of French-Canadian immigration a century ago. My family has un-recipes: Corn – boil water, toss it in. Potatoes – bake. Boiled dinner – heat broth, add whatever you find in your fridge, wait.

Newspaper reports from the early 20th century widely assume that Franco-Americans are  simpletons. Our highly literal interpretation of what we still call “a lobster boil,” adds some muscle to that idea: We take a lobster, and we boil it.

The boiled lobster is my summers, my birthdays, my family parties. It's so entrenched in my family's life processes that when we moved from Maine to South Carolina, there really was no question of where to have my first birthday south of the Mason-Dixon line -- it was Red Lobster or bust. 

Six-year-old me had no idea the gasps of horror that this decision would elicit from foodies hearing this story years later.

Gerard has never had a whole lobster. He's also never met my family, but I'm more worried about the lobster. I've met his family - Jersey Italians to the nth degree. I've eaten their gravy their muzzarelle. I've heard the good-natured yelling and watched the hand-gestures whip the air into a froth over the dinner table. No, my family won't be a problem - but their spiny red baggage, with its smells and its squirts and its general goopiness might run off my city boy.

Outside, at the plastic picnic tables, my mom plops Gerard's first lobster down in front of him. It sits there, red and wet and hot on his thick cardboard Chinet plate. Gerard stares down its seed-like eyes. It stares back. I try to imagine being so old and having lobster for the first time.

“You always start with the claws,” I prod, wrenching one off to show him. The spines dig into my palms, my fingertips burn. He grimaces on my behalf, whispering, “Watch out for the spines.”

"Now you," I grunt as hot saltwater spews from the claw joint I'm twisting.

Gerard nods, making no mention of the lobster juice that has settled in my hair, and gently grabs his own claw. He yanks. I hand him metal crackers, and in seconds he has pulled out his first piece of lobster meat, slick and fleshy. He has managed to not get hot lobster spew anywhere but on his plate. 

He dunks his claw meat in butter and pops it in his mouth. I focus on my own cracking, shattering claws, hooking the meat on my tiny fork, while Gerard sits perfectly still and chews. I'm afraid to ask him if he likes it because there's no way to be polite about lobster tastings, no way to hedge your bets. It's lobster, and you either love it or you don't.

Gerard makes a quick grab for a second claw. He likes it! By the time I have shown him how to push the thicker, spongier tail meat out of the shell, our wedding is clearly in sight. It will be a seamless integration between our families. There will be lobster and antipaste. It will be beautiful.

Then Aunt Dot scurries to our table.

“Ger-ahhhd! You gotta save the tamalley!”

She loves tamalley - the partially-disintegrated liver and pancreas of a cooked lobster. She eats it rapidly and with gusto, then she goes around to everyone else and collects their tamalley. With a small plastic spoon, she scrapes it into an old margarine tub. Then she slurps it down with Saltines.

As she reaches her tamalley-and-butter-stained claws toward Gerard, his eyes widen with fear. Tamalley dots her face, her shirt, her long, painted nails. There's a small dot of clear liquid on her glasses, which makes her left eyeball look like its melting down into her nose. Dot grabs Gerard's shoulder, gleefully unaware that he is only staying put because he is far too nice to run away. 

Scientists recently discovered that plants, when harmed, emit tiny screams of terror, too subtle for the human ear. I think Gerard is giving his best plant scream right now.

My dream of our wedding melts into an oily puddle at the bottom of a Chinet plate. Forget the stench and the juices of the lobsters – what about the people spewing those things out over the table? To my left, my sister is ripping a lobster's tail from its body. To my right, aunts are  cracking shells with their hands and sucking the meat from lobster legs. Everyone is covered in jellied lobster innards, smeared in tamalley to their elbows, smacking and cracking and slurping. It's a monstrous scene, straight out of a medieval hellscape – though it's hard to tell whose penance is worse, the lobsters' or my naturally fastidious gentleman companion's. I know what role we play – the monsters. Les sauvages, slaves to the small tradition we were born and bred to carry on.

Could an outsider ever become accustomed to this thing?

Much later, with about half a lobster too many in our bellies and reeking of the slaughter, we start the long ride home. We'll shower, and the smell will be gone, but the vision of Aunt Dot, green slime smeared on her cheek, her shirt and her long painted fingernails, will continue to haunt Gerard for many years. 

You either love it or you don't.

Dot, doing her pre-lobster damage to a clam. Lobster time was too messy for Gerard to have his pricey camera out.