It's All Relative (29 page)

I stood up, rather enjoying this chaos, and dribbled myself a glass of wine, realizing the day might fly faster if I were very drunk.

I turned to find Gary standing shell-shocked in the middle of my parents' kitchen, just out of view from them.

He looked drained, slap-happy, ashen.

“I'm sorry,” I said, feeling immediately guilty. “She'll settle down once she switches from coffee to wine.”

“That's not it,” he said, and began pointing.

I followed his finger up to the top of our refrigerator, where our Thanksgiving turkey sat.

It had been sitting out, unthawed and fully stuffed, for five hours now.

“We're … going … to … die!” he mouthed slowly.

“It's fine,” I whispered. “It's the way we always do it.”

“Well, it's not the way sane people do it!” he whisper-yelled.

And then my dad busted Gary, following his finger point, and said, “Lookin' good, ain't it, boys?” He came over and touched its damp skin. “Not quite room temp, though.”

When my father went to pee, Gary motioned for me to head upstairs, gesturing wildly, as if he had just found a bomb in the cargo hold of the plane and was trying not to tip off the hijackers.

“First of all,” Gary said as soon as he got me to the upstairs guest room, had bolted the door, and moved the mannequin-sized spray of eucalyptus so we could sit on the bed, “has anyone here in the country ever heard that a
stuffed
turkey's not supposed to sit out at room temperature
all day
!” He said this panicked, in a half scream, half mumble, like the teen campers did in
Friday the 13th
before they were beheaded. “Second of all, I like my stuffing cooked in a separate tin, so it gets crisp on top. I'll gag if I have to eat soft stuffing. And third—yes, there's more—is anyone going to be sober enough to actually serve our dinner?”

Now, this ticked me off.

In fact, I was beginning to miss the way things used to be: sitting
at the children's card table, sleeping on the uncomfortable couch, everything.

I mean, we arrived too early for me to see any of my family.
His
Thanksgiving was going to be on a
Thursday
. When people
had
Thanksgiving. People were still at work today. And talking about how great Thanksgiving
was going to be
.

And so I said, like a fifth grader, “I guarantee my parents' Thanksgiving dinner will kick your parents' dinner's ass.”

Gary did not speak to me the rest of our first Thanksgiving together.

The man who had never taken a nap in his life, who thinks naps are only for the weak or those on life support, wound up fake sleeping on the couch upstairs all day—me telling my parents that “he's just exhausted from work”—before he appeared for dinner and sat silently through the entire meal.

The one and only noise he made was an audible gagging sound, strictly for my benefit, when he ate the soft stuffing.

But, damn, my dad's turkey was good.

I knew I was in for payback when, on the drive to Gary's parents' house, we stopped at a gas station that sat between a silo and a hay field, and Gary said his first words to me in hours: “My mom tends to overcook her turkey in order to ensure it's not contaminated. Oh, and all the grandkids are joining us.”

We were the only SUV at the gas station. Everyone else was filling up their tractors. A windburned young farm boy who looked as if he was smuggling an anaconda in his jeans leered at me while I pumped gas, and I thought briefly about running away with him, sitting behind him on that tractor, holding on tightly to my man as he plowed a field even if it meant he had to hit me occasionally because he didn't understand what he was feeling. That would still be better than what I was about to endure.

Because I quickly learned that while my parents follow no set
rules at the holidays—they improvise recipes, they wing the time to eat, they lounge around, they drink a bit too much—Gary's family has hard and strict codes that must be followed.

First, his mom cooked every single item (“No help needed!”) following recipes that had been handwritten on hundreds of index cards, passed along from grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Every ingredient was measured, even though every dish had been made hundreds of times before and really required only three ingredients: sugar, Velveeta, or Jell-O.

Second, dinner was always at noon, meaning Gary's mom started cooking at three
A.M
.

The food also adhered to strict rules: Everything was prepared to meet the complete and utter satisfaction of the grandkids, all other guests be damned. (“The grandkids like this,” or “The grandkids won't eat this, you'll see,” Gary's mom started telling me five minutes after we had arrived, as though I was being prepared for the fact that they were conjoined twins who could eat with only one shared mouth.)

Which is the reason why, although Gary's mother is the single best baker in the world—I mean, she makes Mrs. Fields and Mrs. Smith seem like lunchroom cooks—the rest of the dinner was prepared with little seasoning, so that no one could possibly be offended, and why the turkey ended up cooking, I would guess, for nine hours. When it came out of the oven, it simply vaporized.

Still, there had always been one Thanksgiving constant in my life, one tradition that pulled me through all those years at the children's table, that made Thanksgiving Thanksgiving: Marshmallows were always melted on top of the sweet potatoes.

Until today.

When I saw the casserole dish go into the oven, I softly asked Gary, “Umm, isn't she forgetting to melt those mini-marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes?”

Gary's mother heard me, stopping in midmotion, a look of absolute
panic on her face, as if she had just discovered that Lancome was no longer giving out a free gift with purchase. She looked at Gary, who looked at me, who looked back at his mother, who looked at her son again, her thoughts now clearly channeled into his body.

“The grandkids don't like marshmallows,” he whispered, as though he were trying to talk me off a ledge.

Gary's brother's family had just arrived, and Gary's mom was throwing everything into the oven to rewarm it. There was no time for an incident.

I wanted to go ballistic. I wanted to run through the floor-to-ceiling dining-room windows I knew were hidden behind the floor-to-ceiling blackout drapes. Maybe then I'd know if it was sunny or raining today. But instead I gritted my teeth and smiled and walked grimly into the living room where Gary's dad and the boys were watching sports. At least I could watch some traditional NFL football—the Lions and Packers, or Cowboys and Redskins.

“
You
like sports?” one of the grandkids asked incredulously.

He's had “the talk,” I realized.

“Sure do.”

“Wow!” he said, staring at me all wild-eyed, like Pam Anderson was his prom date.

I sat down on the couch next to Gary's brother and immediately fell into the middle of the collapsing twenty-year-old sofa, my head coming to rest on the shoulder of his brother as if he'd taken me to a drive-in on our first date and I was gently nuzzling him.

“Sorry.”

I tried to straighten my spine enough to sit upright, and then tried to adjust my eyes enough to make out the picture on the TV his parents bought when Eisenhower was president. After a few seconds of hard staring, I realized they were not watching football at all: They were watching a Class 1A Illinois basketball game between Podunk High and Hooterville RVIII, watching guys who were five
two playing center for high schools of two hundred kids and asking, very seriously, out loud, “Think these guys have a shot at the pros?”

I dribble better than they do
, I wanted to yell.
And I look better in a tank top
.

I grunted my way off the couch and went directly to the guest bathroom, where I did the only thing I could: barred myself in until I could regain my sanity.

All righty, mister, pull yourself together
, I thought, sitting on the toilet in a bathroom that looked like the middle of a birch forest in Wisconsin: pinecone wallpaper and carved wood toilet-paper holders and baskets filled with twigs.

I sat and stewed.

I wanted my marshmallows, dammit.

I wanted my Thanksgiving to be the way it used to be.

Upset, I started to analyze the situation, never a good idea when you're bitter: I knew for a fact that the grandkids were not allergic to sugar, since they'd had sixteen snickerdoodles and three fruit punches in the fifteen minutes they'd been here and were now just manically punching each other in the back.

I was near my breaking point, close to opening the bathroom door and screaming, “The turkey's been in the oven for about nine hours. It's done, okay? Those redneck oompa-loompas will never play pro ball, and there is no liquor anywhere in the entire house, so I'm close to drinking the rubbing alcohol out of this bathroom cabinet just to get a buzz. Give me something today, anything—just the tiny, stinkin' marshmallows please!”

And then out of nowhere it hit me: I and both of our families were freaking out because we were all afraid of a little holiday change.

There was a knock on the door.

I put my head to the crack in the frame and heard Gary's voice, speaking very calmly, like presidents do when they announce we're going to war. “She's adding the marshmallows,” he said. “And please
don't kill yourself in the bathroom. It won't do any good. My mother will just decorate around your bloodstain with a few well-placed pinecone accessories.”

I laughed. I needed to laugh.

A few minutes later I emerged, and we were all finally seated at the table as a family. I felt good. This was all going to be okay.

And then, out of nowhere, the bomb dropped.

“What's on the sweet potatoes?” a grandkid asked.

No one said a word.

“What
is
this?” the other one asked, picking up the ladle and then slapping it back down.

“Marshmallows,” I said.

“Gross!” they screamed at the same time. “That's so gay!”

Time stopped, the earth slowed considerably, and the table turned silent. It was then that I actually saw the soul of Gary's mom fleeing her body. Thanksgiving was officially ruined. I would never be asked back. Gary and I would now forever eat Swanson's TV dinners alone at home on Thanksgiving, both of us crying in the dark and pretending that the apple brown Betty really wasn't so bad, despite the fact that the corn had baked into one side of it.

But in the blink of an eye a holiday miracle occurred.

Someone farted—so loudly, in fact, that all of our water glasses as well as the cornucopia platter holding the turkey actually vibrated.

Everyone started laughing, and, just like that, Thanksgiving was saved.

And Gary and I started a brand-new Thanksgiving tradition: We began to embrace one another's families. And they began to embrace us, no matter the day or the holiday.

And those marshmallows?

Well, they never tasted more goldeny delicious.

O
ne of the worst days of my parents' marriage came mere weeks into it, before I was even born, over a November pot-roast dinner when my mother admitted, as she scooped mashed potatoes for my father, that she had just voted for JFK.

For my father, this was a more horrifying revelation than if my mother had yanked up her apron to reveal, say, a kangaroo pouch or a foot-long penis.

My father simply eased his chair back, according to family lore, left the table, and “went for a drive.”

My father is a lifelong Republican.

I come from a family of lifelong Republicans.

The elephant is as much a part of our DNA as astigmatism and a wicked arch.

Like singles today who seek others with similar interests—SWM seeks SWF, NS, loves dogs and kids, not into water sports—my father intentionally sought out someone who shared his political interests as a way to keep the GOP family spawn swimming conservatively upstream.

My father returned home that election night to massive defeat both on the home front and the national scene, but he coped by
turning my mother into a stereotype: She had voted for JFK because she was a young woman, immature, pliable, and Kennedy was rugged, attractive, manly. My mother had been deceived by the media, by TV, by looks over substance, but this was an aberration.

Unfortunately for my father, my mother has always been a free thinker, and I believe something altered our family genes that November Election Night when my mother voted for Kennedy's rugged good looks over Nixon's sweat-drenched bod because—like an experiment gone bad—I was later produced, like the Fly, and I turned out to be, horror of horrors, not only a Democrat but also a boy who liked meat other than pot roast.

“I voted for JFK because I will always believe in hope, in dreams, in miracles,” my mother told me when I was still too young to understand what she was saying.

Still, I was able to understand from an early age that I took after my mother both politically and sexually, and network TV—the “great evil,” as my dad often called it—was my initial gauge.

My mother and I not only used to get inexplicably turned on watching Hal Linden and Kevin Dobson play Simon Says during
Battle of the Network Stars
, but we also used to become inexplicably incensed listening to my father curse Walter Cronkite and his “liberal tendencies,” decades before that phrase became a heralded conservative battle cry.

“Why don't you just switch the channel?” my mom would say to my father when he watched the
CBS Evening News
. “Watch someone else.”

“I need to keep an eye on Cronkite,” he would say, before adding, “and Nixon doesn't take any fucking prisoners.”