Home for the holidays
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
This week’s question:
Giving thanks can give you an ulcer. What was your worst experience at the family holiday table?
Next week’s question:
With the stagehands back on and the writers holding out, we wondered—job, friend, or relationship, when did you walk out?
Dad wasted no time marrying his girlfriend soon after Mom died. I avoided him after that, but when he announced he was dying from cancer, the guilt set in. So I came for Thanksgiving. During dinner, step-brother’s bubble-headed wife suddenly slammed the table and screamed, “I WANT A BABY! Why can’t we have a baby?!” He told her to shut up; she slapped the glasses off his face. When Dad said, “Hey, let’s take it easy,” his mother-in-law snarled, “Mind your own business.” Later, Dad confided to me, “Gee, they weren’t like that when we were dating.”
I crawled under the table at Passover at my grandmother’s in Flatbush when I was 8 and tied people’s shoelaces to the table. When my great uncle tried to stand up, he had a panic attack—he thought he was suddenly paralyzed. Because most of the other people at the table were wearing pumps or loafers, they thought so too. He made such a scene that I started to think maybe I actually had paralyzed him. He yelled. I cried. When he died later that year of “unknown causes,” I was sure it was my fault.
I was rushing home from Manhattan to my parents’ house in suburban Pennsylvania, expecting to gorge myself on a mammoth turkey and sweet ‘taters with little marshmallows on top. When I arrived, the house was cold and the kitchen was dark. My mom announced she no longer believed in Thanksgiving, after reading an article about the ill treatment of Native Americans. We drove around for three hours looking for a restaurant that was open on Thanksgiving but did not serve Thanksgiving-related food. We finally found a Middle Eastern place in a darkened strip mall. The baba ghanoush was okay.
I always get a Carvel Cookiepuss on my birthday, which falls in November and is celebrated by my family on Thanksgiving. Muckel is the son of my cousin and her cop husband. The husband calls AIDS “fag cancer.” Muckel is named Michael. My mother asked him what he did in school and he said, “I play with blocks, I color, and I kick children.” Muckel wanted the ice cream cone nose of the Cookiepuss. I refused. Muckel freaked out. Everyone begged me. I was turning 34. He was a nasty 4 year old. It was mint chocolate chip. He kept screaming. That was the last Thanksgiving we spent together.
My wife’s aunt always invited a lot of her old friends from Europe to her Passover seder. The table was alive with stories of coming to America, in a variety of accents. My wife’s cousin, a fairly unpleasant though amusing attention whore, had spent the previous summer in Israel and become engaged to the son of a prominent Israeli. Of course, the old friends wanted to hear all about it. One asked of she dated a lot before she met her fiancee. “No,” she replied, “I only fucked two guys all summer.” I’m still not sure if she was surprised by the shocked silence.
This Thanksgiving weekend, my sister got married. As maid of honor I had no choice but to participate in conversations. This wasn’t just my dad’s or mom’s side of the family as is normally the case for the holiday, but both. Realizing that even I had an audience of 160-plus people, I tried my best to do my duty as the bride’s older (though as-yet happily unmarried) sis: refrain from acting a fool after countless vodka cranberries, not spill said drinks on the bride’s white dress, and bring out just the right amount of tears and laughter during my toast. I like to think that all three happened, but I still haven’t seen all the pictures.
When someone is looking to stir the pot around the holidays, they’ll turn to me and say: “Remember the time you spit in your sister’s eye on Thanksgiving?” I was in high school, and somehow my typical teasing of my little sister turned into a full-throttle chase. At some point I pinned her down and proceeded to engage in one of the most time-honored big brother terrors: I let a loogey hang from my mouth, dangling precariously above her face. And then? My huge wad of spit slipped from my mouth’s grasp and landed in the middle of her eye. Whoops. Each holiday, my sis glares across the table with a look that says: One day I’ll get even. And big bro you won’t see it coming.
My grandmother’s dog, an otherwise perfect boxer named Georgia, derived special pleasure from spoiling food that humans wanted to eat. One Thanksgiving she climbed a counter (yes, climbed it, like a cat), pulled down the turkey, and licked it all over like a breast. She didn’t eat it, just slobbered on every possible spot. My dad was willing to eat it, but the rest of us took a pass and foraged in my grandmother’s kitchen. I ended up with Honey Smacks and was quite satisfied.
Must have been slightly bittersweet, no?
About 20 years ago when we were about 13 around the table; my dippy sister was living with this jackass Dave who had just regaled us with his latest scheme-catering ( he delivered for McDonalds). Dave suffered from some unknown condition that rendered him just about useless. He and my sister attributed this to a faulty garage door that had landed on his head, the gods must not have been suffering fools that day. My nephew, probably 5 at the time, said “hey Daddy remember that funny name you and Uncle Murray used to call Dave?” We all collectively froze- forks poised in the air- my husband and brother in law called him ‘dickhead’. Then Christopher shouted ” I remember it was meatman!” How that child came up with that synonym I’ll never know, but we were very thankful that holiday.