The Cousins

by Rona Jaffe

  His fantasy, he realized, was that he was still young and irresistible to women, that it was the seventies, and life was still a candy box of sexual opportunities. Wendy’s fantasy was that he was going to nurture, protect and take care of her. She was neurotic enough to have so far avoided finding a man who actually would, even though Roger was sure that with her looks and brains it would have been easy. He loved Olivia and intended to continue to make his life with her. He never wanted to do anything to cause her pain. But she was reality, and she was now. He sometimes had difficulty believing, even after these six months, that someone as young and beautiful as Wendy wanted him and enjoyed playing out their dangerous games.

  As long as fantasies don’t hurt anybody, he thought.

  5

  THANKSGIVING WAS OLIVIA’S favorite holiday. There were no religious overtones of guilt that she wasn’t doing things properly, or not at all, and there was no need to pretend to be happy the way she felt she had to on Christmas or her birthday. On Thanksgiving all you had to do was eat too much and rejoice that you had survived another year. The other thing she loved about Thanksgiving was that she gave her wonderful feast for all their friends who had nowhere else to go—her waifs and strays—in the home she shared with Roger and their dogs, surrounded by people she cared about: a grown-up now. Thanksgiving was the only holiday she felt she was really good at.

  Because of work she couldn’t prepare everything, so some of her friends brought part of the meal: pies, salad, a specialty if they liked to cook. She made the turkey, the stuffing, the too-sweet sweet potato pudding with marshmallows on top, the cranberry sauce, the winter vegetables, the corn pudding and the hominy—another starchy thing she had added over the years. It took her the entire day, helped by Peggy, their cleaning woman, and by the time the preparations were nearly finished their guests would already be gathered in her large kitchen sipping champagne, talking, helping or just watching her as if she were putting on a show. The table would be set in the dining room she and Roger seldom used, with flowers, candles, the good dishes and silver inherited from her mother and cloth napkins tied with yarn for napkin rings. Wozzle and Buster, freshly groomed for the occasion, would be basking in attention and looking for handouts, knowing they were clean and cute and that everybody liked them.

  Aunt Myra, who served as sort of the family secretary, called to say she was going to Cambridge to spend Thanksgiving with Jenny and Paul. Jenny had her in-laws with their three children and Aunt Myra visiting for the week, in addition to her own five children, and claimed she was having a nervous breakdown, although Aunt Myra, giggling, said she sounded so cheerful it wasn’t true. Aunt Myra also reported that Melissa was going with her husband Bill and their three children to spend Thanksgiving in Florida with her father, Uncle David, and that Nick, with his wife and child, would be there, too.

  Olivia knew that Uncle David had been seeing a woman in Florida for a long time, but wouldn’t let her get too close. She was described as “a good friend.” Melissa always said he was still grieving for Aunt Hedy after all these years and would never get over her, but Olivia’s father had told Olivia that Uncle David didn’t want anyone but his children to inherit his money. Apparently Uncle David’s good friend was not spending Thanksgiving with him and his children and grandchildren because she had children and grandchildren of her own.

  Nobody could call Taylor, but Aunt Myra said she had spoken to Grady, who was going to be on location in Canada in a movie, and that Taylor and Tim were going to fly there to join him for the holiday. And Kenny called from California to wish Olivia a happy Thanksgiving and to say he was going to some island she’d never heard of with the woman he was dating at the moment. His son Jason was spending the holidays skiing with a friend from prep school and the friend’s parents; whether he was finally branching out on his own because he was older now or because he didn’t like his father’s new girlfriend, Olivia couldn’t tell.

  She remembered the old Thanksgivings at Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris’s before they all became such a mob and went their separate ways: the large Fifth Avenue apartment packed with relatives, everything flawless—the food, the flowers, the table settings, the sweet little uniformed maids coming around the long table barely able to carry the giant silver platters laden with sliced turkey and its accompaniments. After the death of their grandparents Uncle Seymour had quite naturally taken over as patriarch of the family. Aunt Julia had been older, but she didn’t have the slightest interest in running anything. In the early days Olivia had been seated between her parents, and when she got married she sat next to her husband. In between husbands, and afterwards, before Roger, she was seated between her parents again, as if only marriage prevented her from being an eternal child.

  And then there were the two years after her second divorce, when she didn’t come to the family Thanksgiving. Her mother called one morning. “Uncle Seymour and I are coming over to talk to you about Thanksgiving,” Lila said in the stern, tense voice Olivia knew so well.

  “What about it?” Olivia asked.

  “Never mind. He’ll tell you. He has a bone to pick with you. We’re coming over Wednesday night.” It was typical of Lila and Uncle Seymour to set up anxiety for a certain period of time before coming to the point.

  Uncle Seymour arrived without Aunt Iris, who liked to distance herself from anything unpleasant of a family nature, since she was a sister-in-law and knew exactly how to handle the protocol. Grady had been in New York visiting his grandmother and had come to Olivia’s apartment to help her put together the new stereo components she had finally gotten around to buying, her ex-husband having taken the good ones. Her parents arrived with Uncle Seymour, but her mother might as well have left her father at home—he sat on the most distant chair and fell into his usual half doze. Her father hated unpleasantness more than any of them. Grady was looking as if he had sneaked into an interesting movie, a look he usually had when he was around Olivia.

  Her mother and Uncle Seymour sat down facing her as if they were at a business meeting. Olivia offered them something to drink and they refused. Uncle Seymour was so upset and angry that his voice cracked. “You don’t come to Thanksgiving anymore,” he said. “I heard you don’t come because you said it’s too damned boring.”

  “I never said that,” Olivia said, genuinely amazed. Had Lila told him that? Had she ever said that to Lila? Her stomach immediately tied up into a knot of fear. There was a long silence while the two of them looked at her sternly. She remembered that awful last time she had come to his apartment for Thanksgiving. “I stopped coming because of what Hedy said,” she said.

  Their expressions seemed to soften slightly. They didn’t like Hedy.

  “Don’t you remember?” Olivia said. She could feel the pain again. “I had just left Stuart. Marriage number two, smasheroo. And Hedy said to me, ‘When are you ever going to do something I’m not ashamed of?’ Anna got up and left the room. I ran out too and Anna said to me, ‘That was so totally unfair. I’m not going to stay in the same room with that woman.’ Anna said that to Aunt Iris, too. Ask her.”

  She could see Uncle Seymour’s face relax. Invoking the name of Anna the Perfect as her comrade-in-arms had made her distress totally valid.

  “Well,” he said, “you should have told us.”

  “I told my mother,” Olivia said, glaring at Lila.

  “Nobody cares what Hedy says,” Lila said. “Everybody knows she’s impossible.”

  “Next time you don’t have to sit near her,” Uncle Seymour said. “Problems have solutions. Now, will you start coming to Thanksgiving again?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said, although the thought made her nervous.

  “It’s important for the family to stay together,” Uncle Seymour said. “We have to keep up the traditions of the holidays. Thanksgiving, Passover . . .”

  Olivia remembered Passovers of her youth when she had always been there, but C
harlie the Perfect and Anna the Perfect had not because their parents had let them go to their school’s spring dance. No social event had ever been allowed to take precedence over The Family in her home. Yet now Charlie and Anna were more devoted to their parents than she was to hers.

  “These events are for the family to be together,” Uncle Seymour said. “It’s too easy to become estranged. We have to make an effort not to drift away. You should come to these occasions.”

  “Okay,” Olivia said. “I will.”

  Lila was rocking her body back and forth in the wing chair, rubbing her hands together with smug glee. Olivia realized her mother looked just like a witch. “From now on the family comes first,” Lila announced.

  “It doesn’t have to come first,” Uncle Seymour said mildly.

  Olivia felt as if someone had tied a rope around her and then let it go. Lila cast him a desperate glance as if she had been betrayed.

  “Tell her about the lawyer,” Lila said.

  “Ah, yes,” Uncle Seymour said. “Did you explain to her?”

  “When do I ever get to talk to her?” Lila said.

  “The whole family is going to use the same lawyer to make out their wills,” Uncle Seymour said pleasantly. “He’s someone we’ve worked with in business. I don’t know who you used before, Olivia, but he’ll get in touch with you and you’ll redo yours with him.”

  “Then everybody’s will be the same,” Lila said.

  “We want someone we know,” Uncle Seymour said.

  “You don’t know how to take care of yourself,” Lila said to Olivia. “Do you remember when you wanted to leave some money to your cleaning woman and I talked you out of it?”

  “She died already,” Olivia said.

  “And animals,” Lila said to Uncle Seymour. “She gives to those animal causes. And charities all over the place.”

  “You’re a Jew,” Uncle Seymour said. “Never forget that. You have to give to UJA Federation. Now, while you’re alive, not just later. They cover most of the other charities you like under their umbrella. If you give to them, you don’t have to worry about giving to anybody else.”

  “I give to UJA,” Olivia said.

  “That should be your main contribution,” Uncle Seymour went on. “The family has given to UJA very generously all through the years because we know who we are. We have to take care of our people. Who else is going to do it? Everybody takes care of their own. Do you think anybody else cares about you? It’s very important for you to remember always that you’re part of the Jewish community, that we are Jews.”

  “Okay,” Olivia said.

  “That’s settled,” Lila said. She got up. “Wake up!” she said to Olivia’s father. “We’re leaving. You can sleep at home.”

  Uncle Seymour stood, too. He smiled beatifically at Olivia as she handed him his coat. “Good night, Olivia darling,” he said. “Good night, Grady.”

  When they left, Grady turned to Olivia and made a little face. “That speech,” he murmured.

  “What about it?”

  “How do you think it made me feel?”

  It was the first time Olivia had realized that Grady felt like an outsider. When she looked back on it she couldn’t ever remember him and Taylor at any of their family Thanksgiving dinners, even though their grandmother lived in New York, but she had simply thought it was because they lived so far away and had lives of their own.

  “How do you think this whole thing makes me feel?” she said, to cheer him up. “Now they have someone to report to them what I do in my will. No secrets anymore. Complete control even beyond the grave.”

  Grady smiled.

  The following Thanksgivings she had gone again to Uncle Seymour’s, where there were so many people that they took up the entire dining room and spilled out into the gallery, and Aunt Iris thoughtfully placed Hedy and Olivia in separate rooms so they never had to say anything to each other besides hello. Then she met Roger, and the first year they were together they went to the family to prove they were a couple, to be welcomed, and so she could show him off. After that they bought the house, and he had wanted them to have their own Thanksgiving in it, with their friends. The first time Olivia felt guilty and nervous, as if she and Roger were being unfriendly, but her mother, without even being told she wasn’t invited, rejected her first by saying “Of course you know I have to go to the family”—as if she weren’t family. It was actually a great relief.

  The year her mother died, Olivia brought her father to her Thanksgiving dinner, and the year after that he was remarried and traveling around the world with Grace. Olivia’s Thanksgivings with Roger eventually became established as a tradition, albeit a strange one, and Aunt Iris didn’t bother asking her anymore, although Olivia knew the door was always open.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving Day was bright and clear. Roger had bought dried corn, and Olivia put it with the flowers on the dining room table, giving the centerpiece a wild but comfortable look. She was wearing a black bodysuit under one of her little boutique finds: a crocheted dress in autumn colors—thin and see-through and sexy—ballet slippers, and big crazy earrings. The kitchen smelled wonderful. Roger was pouring champagne. They had twenty people this year, some of whom they saw only every few months because everyone was so busy. Their friends were all getting along with each other, and everyone was saying how starved they were, how they hadn’t eaten all day, how they had been saving themselves for this feast. Because of the conversation and laughter you could hardly hear the CDs she and Roger had so carefully selected and put on the changer, but they were a cheerful background anyway.

  Her friend Alys—the spelling her own—whom Olivia had known since high school, which was probably why she put up with her, was there alone, having recently broken up with her latest bad choice, and she was already slightly drunk. It was a shame, Olivia thought, that she didn’t know any nice available man to fix her up with. She looked around the room fondly at her friends. Alys came to stand beside her.

  “What a politically correct party,” Alys said. “The homosexual couple; the turkey-baster single mother; the black couple; the black homosexual—that’s even better; the man whose pregnant wife could pass for his daughter; the woman whose boy toy could pass for her son; the psychic; four people in AA drinking San Pellegrino; one stray Oriental; assorted children—where are the lesbians?”

  “She is not a turkey-baster single mother,” Olivia said. “Her child’s adopted.”

  “Where did you get these people anyway, Central Casting?”

  “Only you,” Olivia said.

  “What are they, patients?”

  “Clients,” Olivia corrected her. “The patients are animals.”

  “Sounds like the men I meet.”

  “Some are clients and others are people Roger and I have met through the years.”

  “Did you ever dream back in high school that you would know so many different kinds of people? Is this New York in the nineties or what?”

  “I never really thought about it,” Olivia said truthfully.

  “You never really thought about anything,” Alys said. “You just did it.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Alys sighed. “You’re so lucky to have Roger,” she said. “He’s adorable.”

  “I think so, too,” Olivia said.

  Roger was showing around the photographs he had taken of their trip to Paris. Alys’s eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. “Oh, God,” she said. “People showing pictures of their trip just breaks my heart.”

  “It does?”

  “It’s so square and corny and family and wonderful. And romantic. All the things I sometimes think I’m never going to have. Remember that guy I was seeing for a year? The married one? The only compliment he ever gave me was: ‘I like the way your comb is always so clean.’ He meant so it was nice for him wh
en he straightened himself up to go home to his wife. Can you believe I stayed with him just because he was great-looking and the sex was good?”

  “People have stayed around for less,” Olivia said.

  Alys wiped her eyes. “You know what? I wouldn’t have wanted him even if he was available. He thinks a woman is a life-support system for a vagina. And still I was actually proud of myself for dumping him! It wasn’t easy. You have no idea how vile it is to be single and terminally lonely out there. You’re just so lucky to have Roger and a relationship and this house and your work together.”

  “I know,” Olivia said gently. “Thank you.” She hugged Alys. “You’ll find somebody. It just takes time. My single years were so unhappy I’ve practically blocked them out of my mind. You’ll be all right—you’ll see. I have to take the turkey out now.” But she wasn’t so sure Alys would ever find anybody. She moved away to the oven.

  Peggy helped her take the large, heavy turkey out of the oven and put it on the counter to cool a bit before they would transfer it to her mother’s silver platter and take it to the table to be carved. The skin was crisply brown and shiny, and she could already tell that the inside would be juicy and moist. She concentrated on the tangible things: the food, her friends, the party, her home, Roger looking so solid and good. Alys’s life was from some bad world that she would never have to enter again. She was so grateful for that.

  She went over to Roger and kissed him. “What can I do to help?” he asked her.

  “Just be sure everybody’s happy.”

  “They are. And I am.”

  “Me too.”

  Her Thanksgiving party was a success, as it always was. Roger stood up and made a toast, thanking her, and they all applauded while she beamed. Everyone got along with everyone else, ate and drank too much, and afterwards there were just enough leftovers to prove she hadn’t been skimpy but not enough so she would have to eat them for a week. She sent what was left of the desserts home with Peggy to get them out of the house. The dogs were exhausted from all the attention, already dozing on their mats on the bedroom floor.