by J. Cafesin
"Hey." I announced. "Happy Thanksgiving." I set the food I'd brought on the slate bench that wrapped two sides of the fireplace, then kissed and hugged my father. He gathered me up in his big arms and drew me in against his barrel chest.
"Hello Baby." It was his only term of endearment for me. "Happy Thanksgiving." He released me and I felt abandoned midst the pack again.
"Hey Lar. How ya doing?" I inquired when he didn't.
"Good." That was it. Larry didn't turn my question around.
"Grandma's in the car and won't come out. Can you please go talk to her, dad?"
My father gave a heavy sigh and shook his head before handing the iron poker to Larry and going outside. Larry rested the end of the poker on the slate bench, held it like a staff and stared at the fire, clearly uninterested in engaging with me. He was a devout Jew, a conservative, directed, precise, with no interest in abstractions like feelings. And Larry dismissed most anyone who wasn't of like mind or income.
I collected my food and went into the kitchen. "Happy Thanksgiving everyone!" And that moment I felt glad to be there, to have family to be with. They were all I had, all I'd ever really had, as my mother so often reminded me. Everyone else came and went in L.A.
"Happy Thanksgiving," everyone said in unison, except Scott. My eight year old nephew sat at the kitchen table and consumed a finger full of the custard from the pumpkin roll he'd taken a scoop out of when he thought no one was looking.
Carrie sat in front of baby Adam strapped in the portable car seat on the kitchen table. She was feeding him spoonfuls of mushed up yams that dribbled out the side of his mouth. The gross factor didn't seem to faze her. Her mass of flaming red hair was pulled back into a tight braid and hung down her back practically to her waist. She wore a Spanish style gauze dress with a colorful, rather loud floral pattern of red roses, and mid-calf tan cowboy boots with sharply pointed tips.
I set the food down on the stove top above the oven where my six year old niece, Jessie, stood basting the turkey. Mom stood behind her, hand over her granddaughter's and together they squeezed the soft plastic ball, sucking up gravy into the tube then squirting it back on the bird.
"Happy Thanksgiving, Auntie Ray." Jessie looked adorably cute in her black velvet dress, her long, strawberry blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail.
"Happy Thanksgiving, baby." I whispered as I bent to kiss my niece's head, and before fully straightening I received my mother's quick kiss on the cheek. Mom was barely five feet, and shrinking with age.
"Happy Thanksgiving, Dolly." My mother had three terms of endearment for me. Dolly, Face, and ‘my baby,' as I was her last born. "Is Grandma giving you grief?"
"She still in the car. Dad went to get her."
"Well, she wouldn't come in if I went out there." Her aged, sun baked skin glowed with beads of sweat that ran along the side of her gaunt face onto the brown plastic frame of her large glasses. "She only listens to your father." She took the baster from Jessie, pushed the turkey back in the oven and shut the door, then wiped her forehead on her shirtsleeve. "Go wash your hands, Jessie Rose," she instructed her granddaughter. "Then see if you can help your mother with the coleslaw."
"I'm feeding Adam now, mom." Carrie was in a huff. "I'll get to it in a minute. I told you I should have brought Mariana to help."
Mom didn't respond. She busied herself and tuned out, a technique she'd honed to avoid conflict. She got a carton of whipping cream from the fridge, poured the cream into a plastic bowl then set up the electric mixer.
I retrieved the coleslaw my sister brought from the fridge and took it back to the kitchen table. A baby bottle filled with dressing was on top of the cabbage mixture and I poured it over the shredded leaves until the bottle was drained. Jessie sat down at the table next to her older brother and started coloring, but within moments they were fighting, Scott hording the markers regardless of his sister's shrill protests. Carrie ignored them. Like our mother, Carrie had the ability to shut out what disturbed her. But the kids bickering annoyed the hell out of me.
"Knock it off, you guys." I spoke loudly to be heard over the mixer. "Scott, give your sister half the pens. And Jess, don't grab. Ask." I got Jessie's attention, but Scott grabbed the only pen Jessie had out of her small hand. She tried to grab it back nearly knocking a stack of dishes off the table. "Stop! Now! Both of you." The last bit sounded like I was screaming because mom had switched off the mixer. I grabbed half of Scott's markers and set them in front of Jess. Carrie looked up from feeding Adam and narrowed her eyes at me, but at least the kids stopped fighting.
"This is ridiculous, Mother." Carrie stood, wiped her son clean with the cloth she kept on her shoulder. "There is nothing for the kids to do here anymore. You don't even have cable. They don't want to be here. And I don't blame them. They can entertain themselves all day at home. We should just have Thanksgiving at my house from now on."
"No way," I protested. I'd never felt welcome in Carrie's home, always the unwanted guest she felt she had to invite. I looked at mom standing at the counter near the sink, poised with the mixer over the bowl of whipped cream. I recognized my mother's pinched expression and felt her rush of distress. "We've had it at home since we were born. Thanksgiving should be here."
"You have no idea what a total hassle it is dragging three kids everywhere." Carrie picked her son up out of the car seat and held him to her. "You only have yourself to worry about, Rachel. It's harder for everyone having it here. If you won't think of me, then at least think of mom."
I stared at my mother. "I am." Mom looked down, busied herself with the cream. Thanksgiving was the only holiday our mother still hosted. She'd mentioned many times how much she enjoyed preparing for it, looked forward to “having the whole family safe in the nest,” even if just for a night. Carrie had co-opted all birthdays, Hallmark occasions and every Jewish holiday from Hanukkah to Passover at her 5,600 square foot McMansion in Agoura Hills. Maids and caterers graced these parties which made it easier for all in some ways. But what Carrie didn't get is that everyone needs to feel needed, and slowly but surely she was robbing our mother of purpose, and pleasure.
"So, I hear you're dating that new guy you've been playing racquetball with." The words seemed to fall out of mom's mouth as if to fill the exaggerated hush.
I glared at my sister. When she called this morning to check on what I was bringing to dinner, I'd mentioned Lee helping me make the apple pie, and his invitation to see Love Letters— a defensive counter to Carrie's condescending comment that since I wasn't involved with anyone [and had the time], I should have cooked more. "Well, we're not exactly dating…"
"What do you call it then?" Carrie held her son and stroked his back in slow circles. "You've been playing racquetball for almost a month like every other day with him. And he's taking you to Love Letters Saturday night, in Beverly Hills. If that's not meant to impress, I don't know what is." Adam laid his little chin on her shoulder, looked at me, and burped. "I'm going to go put him down, mom."
"Night, beautiful." I whispered softly as he passed, his saucer blue eyes half-mast. And I was sucked into the black hole of want as I stood at the table tossing the coleslaw.
"Well, are you seeing him or not?" Mom handed each of the kids a whipped cream coated circle of blades. She used to give them to Carrie and me. My mouth literally watered as I watched Scott and Jessie lick off the cream.
"We're just friends, mom. We go out to dinner after racquetball sometimes, and we've hung out the last couple of weekends, but I really don't think it'll go anywhere."
“Why not? And how do you know this after a month?” Mom's thin, painted red lips stayed in a tight, flat line. "What's he do?"
"He runs his own company shipping freight. He's a consultant, sort of like me, but a lot more successful."
"And what's his name?"
I had my mother's attention, and smiled. "Lee."
"Does he have a last name?"
I knew why she was asking, of co
urse. "Messer. Lee Messer."
"Messer..." She contemplated aloud as she scooped the whipped cream into a crystal serving goblet. Then her countenance filled with lightness and she smiled. "Isn't that Jewish?"
I shook my head, annoyed. I refrained from denoting him an atheist, afraid of dimming her brightness I was momentarily basking in. "What difference does it make, mother? A last name doesn't brand him a believer, and if he was I couldn't be with him. I'm still an atheist, mom."
"Then you're an idiot." She said it deadpan, like the words just fell out of her mouth without filtering through her brain. She didn't intend to be mean. It was almost an expression of endearment. She meant ‘idiot' sort of like ‘my beautiful baby…' "You condemn yourself to the fringes and then complain you're lonely. And I know you are. What woman wouldn't be still single at 33?" My mother had a way of proceeding from instinct rather than intellect, and was clueless how cutting her words were. "Why can't you just accept who you are and embrace your community like your sister. I guarantee if you did, you'd find the life you're still looking for." She shook her head and turned away to put the filled goblet in the fridge then went to the stove and stirred the pot of matzo ball soup.
"Living among the faithful whose belief in money supersedes the moral gospel they espouse isn't the community I'm looking for, mother." I sighed and shrugged my shoulders to shed my mounting tension. "And over scheduling every minute of the day with extraneous activities so I don't have time to think, or create anything, isn't the life I want either. I don't want to be Carrie, mom."
"I don't want you to be your sister, Rachel. I want you to be happy, and taken care of." She stared at me like she was stating the obvious, then her expression softened to empathy and she frowned. "My beautiful Face, why do you always insist on the hardest path."
I'd blown it again, pushed my mom away. Non-conformity was disruptive to the woman's psyche. And Lonely crept in, abandoning me to the outside again from the chasm now between us. I set the coleslaw aside, near Jessie. My niece was coloring a house with stickish smiling people inside. Scott's picture showed planes dropping bombs and people on the ground getting blown up. He looked up at me.
"I don't believe in God, grandma." He stared at me as he spoke to her.
"Oh, of course you do." Mom glared at me over the stove top but spoke to her grandson. "You don't know what you believe at eight."
"I did. I knew from the beginning of Saturday school what the rabbis were preaching was a bunch of crap." I was being combative, to be sure, but my mother was so dismissive, I felt the need to validate my nephew's pejorative statement. “And if religion is so damn important to family togetherness, why did it break up ours?” She'd chased away her first child, my half-brother, when Keith converted to Born Again Christianity to marry.
"You shut up now, Rachel. Don't encourage him." It was hard to see my mom's brown eyes glaring at me behind the large glasses, but I felt her irritation.
Mom busied herself, and I felt bad I'd come back at her so aggressively. Her reaction to Keith's conversion had fundamentally scared me. Though she didn't disown him exactly, she made it impossible for him to attend family occasions by proselytizing Judaism whenever we got together. She'd speak tirelessly on tradition, history, the culture Keith was born into regardless of his newly adopted beliefs, deeply offending his wife, who married my half-brother on the condition he convert to Christianity. The first and last time Keith brought his family to Thanksgiving, mom cornered his 4 year old son— her first grandchild— in the kitchen and preached to him that he was really a Jew, instead of the Christian my half-nephew was being raised. I feared the battle to come when, if, I had kids, since I had no intention of raising them with any religion.
"You two at it again?" Dad scowled at me as he came into the kitchen. I felt the familiar twinge of fear, not just from his size, but growing up I'd felt the wrath of his temper. "You still fighting windmills, baby? Don't confuse your mother with facts, Rachel."
Mom stuck my tongue out at him in a coquettish kind of way, just the tip, childlike. Dad laughed.
"Grandma and Larry are cowering in the living room so they don't have to listen to you two go at each other. And I don't blame them." Dad went to the liquor cabinet above the utility closet in the pantry and got the big bottle of gin, brought it back in the kitchen and made martinis.
"We almost ready to sit down?" Carrie came into the kitchen and dad handed her his first completed drink. "Thank you, dad."
"Dinner will be ready in ten minutes." Mom opened the oven and pulled out the turkey. My seemingly fragile little mother was impressive to watch, straddling the open oven door and hauling that heavy bird onto the stove top. Could have made the cover shot for the November issue of Good Housekeeping. The turkey was golden brown, dripping with juice, and it smelled fantastic.
"For you, my dear." Dad handed mom a martini.
Mom wiped her hands, then the sweat from her face on the dishtowel and then took the wide rimmed glass with a gracious, "Thank you, honey." She leaned back against the counter and contentedly sipped her martini. "Why don't you girls start serving the salad."
Carrie put her drink on the linoleum counter top and got the salad from the fridge. "Jessie Rose. Please go into the dining room and get everyone to sit down for dinner. Scott, go help your sister, please." Her tone was as stern as her expression and her son only hesitated a second then followed his sister from the kitchen.
Jessie took her drawing to show off, but she and her brother left their mess of markers and pad pages scattered on the kitchen table. I began collecting them to make room for serving the salad. Carrie set the salad bowl on the table and glared at me.
"My children are Jewish. I'm raising them to have an identity and a community, both of which you seem to sorely lack. So keep your fucking mouth shut about what you believe, whatever the hell it is, or isn't, around my kids." She didn't give me time to respond. She grabbed her half-empty martini and walked out of the room.
I watched my sister disappear into the dining area. The satiny fabric of the heavy white drapes that covered the back glass wall of the living room glowed warm and shimmered with firelight. I heard Larry ask his wife if she was OK, and Carrie say "dandy," but she was "just so tired of her" (my) "crap."
Then grandma piped in with, "You're all full of crap."
I looked at my mom. She glared at me, then emptied her martini and put the glass in the sink behind her. Her displeasure wrapped her like a shroud and she transferred it as she spoke. "Please serve the salad now, Rachel Lynn."
I did. I turned my back on my mother and put salad onto plate after plate until the kitchen table had no space for more, then carried them two at a time and served everyone before sitting to eat. Larry was touting his lucrative new strip-mall development in Malibu. Carrie beamed proudly at her husband. Dad nodded with respect. I shook my head but held my tongue. It was foolish to question the need of another 7-11 obstructing the views and scarring the fragile ecosystem along the coast to people who viewed personal wealth as social progress. I knew my opinion was unwelcome among them. Like grandma, I too was almost invisible, or at least wanted to be. And I no longer felt glad to be there. We hadn't even gotten through the salad this time before I wanted out.
My craving to get high grew exponentially as I crawled along in traffic on the 101 in the rain after dropping grandma off. Brighter than twilight from the streetlights, with five lanes of unfettered highway, and it was beyond irritating how inane L.A. drivers became when it rained. My ire rose with every ten minute mile, and I felt a desperate need to shed the evening.
I called Lee a hundred times in my head, imagined him bringing over some smoke, hanging out and playing Tavli all night. Talking. Laughing. Sharing... Safe with someone who actually liked me. But as I pulled in my driveway doubt crept in. Inviting him over at 10:00p.m. might imply I was asking him to stay the night, and I had no intention of sleeping with Lee. Intercourse with him would not fulfill me, or enhance the connecti
on we already shared. It would only complicate the friendship I was hoping to maintain.
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Chapter 8
Had to cancel racquetball on Friday to find someone to restore my Macintosh when it crashed attempting to draw the illustration I was creating for the monthly credit union newsletter. I spent the evening at the repair place in Hollywood, and $150 per meg for the additional RAM the salesman told me I needed to run Adobe Illustrator effectively. Continually upgrading my Mac was costing me more than I was making.
---
I was in the shower when my phone rang Saturday morning. I turned off the water and toweled off, listening to my machine cue up and deliver a voice. It surprised me how much I was hoping it was Lee, and how excited I was to see Love Letters with him this evening.
"I can't do a bike ride today." It was Lavonne. "And I won't be able to meet you for brunch." She lowered her voice to just above a whisper. "Joe and I got back together last night. I'm calling from his boat in Del Rey. He asked me to stay the weekend." Her tone was lilted with enthusiasm, and devoid of apology. "I'd say let's get together next weekend but with any luck I'll be busy. I'll call you during the week."
"Don't bother," I said aloud as I came into my bedroom. It was typical, even socially acceptable for women to abandon friends for a date. But still, it made me feel valueless.
Face came over, looking for strokes. I needed some too right then. I resented being the back-up plan to a man, especially a loser like Joe—an overpaid postal worker and beer-bellied sports fanatic, and at 37 he still lived with his mother. A week, a month down the line Lavonne would be calling to whine about feeling neglected and bored. Compared to Joe, Lee was a prince, whatever his failings.
I finished the newsletter to make deadline, leaving me no time to indulge in writing the short story I'd had in my head for weeks of a genie who gives two L.A. punks a shot at being more than bangers. I shut down the computer at 5:30 to get ready for the evening ahead. Pure bliss as the water streamed over me in the shower. The scalding liquid seared my skin, turning it bright red, the heat penetrating deep into my muscles. Physical pleasures— hot showers, jacuzzis, masturbation, back rubs were a good percentage of what made my life worth living.