Turkey Day 2005

Posted on November 25, 2005 in Festivals

When I needed to, I took walks back and forth next to my aunt’s pool. Her housekeeper told me not to say that the screen doors were open. If my 98-year old aunt heard, she would complain of the cold on that 70 degree day. She kept the house warm because she was thin skin stretched over bone. When the atoms around her slowed, she wanted them to move again.

As is now the custom, I hacked and chopped at the turkey, cleaning it to a fuzzy carcass in about half an hour. The others watched television or talked in the living room as my aunt’s housekeeper helped and my mother swung in and out of the kitchen, giving me advice and insisting that disaster of one kind or another was imminent. Which is her way.

The dinner table conversation began with compliments for the turkey and the side dishes everyone brought. Everyone brought cranberries, the most impressive being the ones Lynn boiled up in sugar water. My cousin Natalie made some excellent brownies and her mother, who did a nice dish of green beans, asked me the secret of my yams. Then talk wandered into other places, like cute things Virginia and I did when we were young (led, of course, by my mother) and then a little psychiatry-bashing by my mother which I handled with blase disinterest even though those who knew my secret watched me for signs of mental collapse.

I handled it.

After dinner, my mother ordered me to help in the cleanup. I looked up at her and reminded her that I had spent forty five minutes carving the turkey. Then just sat there, while everyone who had been in the living room chatting bussed dishes. And spoke kindly to my aunt.

We ate our dessert as the November night ignored the light specifications for 5 PM and moved in early. Natalie escaped we adults for a time while some of us argued politics (I only participated for ten minutes and, I think, did fine in standing up for my progressive views). When she came back, the two of us joined my aunt in the television room.

Natalie interrogated me about her mom. She wanted to know if her mom ever smoked. “I don’t know.” Did she do drugs? “Um, she never did them around me or talked about it.” Did she smoke dope? “Maybe. Everyone took a drag. She did go to college.” What about drinking? “Oh yes. We all drank. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I wouldn’t call your mother ‘Square’,” I concluded. “I wouldn’t call her bad. I would call her ‘Good’.” Virginia joined us at this end. “He says that you weren’t one of the ‘Cool’ ones.” I laughed and repeated what I had said.

As we all walked out together, we laughed about the way we had been. None of us had been bad kids. We’d studied, mostly. Gone to college. Found decent jobs. We’d been good kids, me more of a loner and my cousin more social though dedicated to her books. Good kids.

Is this what life amounts to? A turkey slashed until it gives up all that made it a living thing to a platter? Memories passed to the next generation which interprets it in through its own iconography. Hints and verbal games played around the dinner table. And when this becomes too tight, pacing in the cool outdoor air because one inside has become needy of the heat.