Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “I think so,” he murmured, and then he was asleep.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, after a patchy night of sleep — all those courses not settling well — that Holly could wonder at what had left her feeling so bereft. Maybe she was being overly dramatic — the downside, Mark sometimes implied, of all that “energy.” But really: Was this it? One Thanksgiving following another? One more turkey to be trussed? Countries passing, kids leaving, families changing. And always, always missing people.

  Get off the pity pot, she could hear her mother say. What the hell were you expecting, Hollyhock? She’d loved and hated when her mother had talked like this: the thrill of her hells and shits beside the accurate, often painful, aim of her observations.

  The spectre of time passing pretty much sobered anyone over the age of forty, didn’t it? It had to be something more specific than this. And then, watering the bougainvillea on the balcony, its coral petals flying off in the wind, she saw what had been amiss the day before, what had thudded in her soul. It was the gravy.

  Gravy was Holly’s one gift as a cook. She was competent enough in the kitchen. Mark would say she was exceptional, but then Mark thought Old El Paso tacos were something else. There was no gravy recipe per se, just years of practice. What she lacked in culinary talent elsewhere, she more than made up for when it came to scraping drippings from a pan and transforming them into what her brothers used to call Velvet.

  “Hey, Sugar, pass me some more of that Velvet,” Vince would say and Pete would put out his plate too, though his white meat would be swimming in sauce. They were already man-size in their early teens, cute, hardy boys in big sweatshirts. “Hey, Hol, ever think about bottling this stuff?” Even at sixteen, the year their mother packed up and moved out, Holly knew this was something that would define her: loyal friend, head for numbers, klutz at sports, makes really good gravy.

  Black Friday, a shopping bacchanal at home, was dead quiet in the UAE. But then so were most Fridays, at least in the morning, before noon prayers, before families packed up food trunks — they were trunks here, not mere baskets — and installed themselves in parks around the city. It wasn’t about chasing a ball or a Frisbee. It was about parking yourself on something that might be grass, unloading the food, cooking the food — cubes of lamb or chicken on a grill — serving the food, then sitting and talking deep into the evening, kids darting back and forth, though they were rarely the centre of attention. Picnics were for parents and grandparents, a sedentary pleasure.

  Holly was sorry they hadn’t gone out more on Friday afternoons during the lovely winter months. Mark was hopeless with a hibachi, and the kids, older teenagers by the time they’d arrived in Abu Dhabi, grew impatient after an hour of sitting. (“Mom, I’ve got to study.”) Now driving past clusters of women in headscarves and men smoking shisha on a Friday afternoon, everyone sitting around nothing more eventful than a metal grill, could bring tears to her eyes. They made it look so easy to belong exactly there on that spot.

  The parking lot at Spinney’s wasn’t empty — it was never empty — but she found a space at the back near where the recycling bins had once been. “Too ugly,” the store manager, a gracious Indian man, had tried to explain six months before. “The municipality take away.” “But why?” she’d asked, knowing this was a question for which there would be no logical answer. “Maybe they bring back, madam.” The manager had bobbled his head politely. They both knew those bins — the only recycling deposit in the entire city — would not be coming back. True, they weren’t pretty, but they weren’t the eyesore of the rusting dumpsters parked on every street, filled with garbage, busted Ikea furniture and crawling with feral cats.

  The store was out of fresh cranberries now, the display having been ravaged two days before. More tomorrow, insha’allah, a clerk told her. So they could do without the cranberries. Holly bagged more potatoes (Idahos grown in Saudi Arabia), a few bulbs of garlic, a fresh baguette, picked up a can of pumpkin and another pint of whipping cream. But the Butterballs were gone, every single one. Holly asked a man at the meat counter if they might be getting more. “Before Christmas.” The smiling, shrugging Filipino butcher couldn’t tell her more than that. “But I need one today. I have to have one today,” and in the way her voice rose and stayed there, Holly realized how much hinged on this Thanksgiving redux.

  Every couple of years — okay, more than that — she would come to a juncture where things stood out in too-bold, too-sad relief. Usually there was a trigger. Justin’s departure for university had set off mornings of tears. He’s gone, she’d think as soon as the alarm went off. Some of their departures — Paris was one of those — felt so premature they broke her heart too. “But we just become les amis,” cried wonderful Juliette, someone she’d met only a month before decamping. It was often like this — the very loveliest people surfaced after two years of loneliness, as if now that it no longer mattered, Holly could loosen her grip and let things happen. “Where have you been?” she would say to some smart, sympathetic, interesting woman in a café, as somewhere across town the apartment was being packed up. There’s email, there’s Skype, they would reassure each other. But how do you stay in intimate touch with fifty people? A hundred? She’d shared the wonders and weirdness of life abroad with so many good souls. But when you left, you left.

  These junctures were mostly internal, though after twenty-five years together — he was not an insensitive man — Mark could see a dip coming. He would take her out to an expensive dinner, call from work more often, try to be more attentive in bed. But there was something dutiful in his efforts as he stroked her breasts a bit too roughly. Holly could practically hear him curse her mother: Why couldn’t you have just loved her?

  Abela, a store she didn’t often shop in because it was expensive, had turkeys. Well, two turkeys. Someone had ordered them for Thanksgiving, but failed to pick them up. Holly imagined a woman, some oil-and-gas wife from Pittsburgh or Santa Barbara originally, waking up on Thanksgiving morning, the sun pouring through the giant windows of her villa, thinking: Fuck the turkey. Who needs it when the InterContinental caters a top-to-bottom Thanksgiving dinner for 2,000 dirhams? They were small turkeys — she’d need both — probably the runts of the lot, but they smelled okay and the butcher gave her 20 percent off.

  Back home, the Gulf a glory of turquoise beyond the tenth-floor kitchen windows, the fixings for another Thanksgiving close at hand, Holly began to run low. Not a loss of confidence exactly. Conviction maybe. She’d just done this, all the effort, the concentrated focus. And Mark might worry. She was glad in that moment that he had gone into the office as he did on so many Fridays. She was not even sorry that Jersey, such good company as she’d gotten older, had gone to Dubai with friends for a day of shopping. “Got an American tradition to uphold, Mom,” she’d said, tossing a pashmina over her shoulder on the way out.

  Holly put on music — Glee was good for a boost — poured herself a glass of last night’s wine. Rinsing the turkeys in the sink, she suddenly thought: This isn’t the First Thanksgiving, it’s the Second. And laughing — this really was quite insane — she started in on the stuffing.

  Vince and Pete hadn’t meant to drive their truck off the Sakonnet River Bridge. They’d called it Suck On It Bridge when they were kids, then Suck My Dick Bridge when they hit their early teens, now that they knew what was what, causing their mother to rear up in indignant fury. She even grounded Vince for a month when he called the dog a “dumb shit.” “Where the hell does she think we get it from?” Pete, older than Vince by a mere eleven months, said later. They were a trio. Hey, Sis, got your back. Hey,Vince, got yours.

  They were in Beijing that year, Mark having been promoted into immigration services, not the top spot, two notches down. Jersey and Justin were still young, six and seven, going to the American school, where Holly taught remedial math three days a week. It was still dazzling, the travel, all things new, feeling opened so wide
. There was less to say to old friends back home in Rhode Island. Even with her brothers, there was more air to fill, though Pete and Vince loyally watched their slide shows every summer. “Wow, you been there, Hollyhock?” Pete was especially impressed by Angkor Wat. “Always did want to see the Taj Mahal,” Vince said.

  “Any time,” Holly told them every summer. “You know we’ve got the room.”

  But there was always something. Vince had a bad fall off a ladder, was laid up for nearly a year, pins, surgeries, therapy. Pete’s longtime girlfriend died of a misdiagnosed appendicitis. There was constant work on the house their father had left them. “Gee, thanks, Dad!” the three would joke when the furnace exploded or half the roof blew off in a storm. Holly contributed to the repairs. Mark was making more money than her brothers’ salaries combined, and technically, though she couldn’t imagine living there ever again, she was part-owner.

  They’d just been home for Thanksgiving, Mark having finagled a meeting in Washington for early December. It was brief, eight days, not enough time to get over the jet lag, but enough time to gather in the family bungalow. They celebrated Thanksgiving on the day itself — a treat after living abroad where Thursdays weren’t a day off and gathering people for a feast meant postponing it a day or two. The turkey that year had been on the dry side, Mark managed to mangle his trademark mashed potatoes, little Jersey dropped the pumpkin pie as she shakily carried it to the table and Justin couldn’t think of anything to be grateful for when they went around the table giving thanks. But the gravy? “Haven’t lost your touch, Sis,” said Pete, and Vince gave her a thumbs up, misting unexpectedly.

  The gravy was exceptional, though Holly had done nothing radically different that year: roasted the turkey over a bed of onions, carrots, celery and fresh thyme, later caramelizing the vegetables as she added wine, plus broth made from the giblets and neck. The gravy even looked gorgeous that year: rich mahogany with a nearly iridescent glaze and molasses-thick. She didn’t make too much of the flavour, which was subtle, deep and complex, knowing her brothers would throw her scornful looks before teasing her to death. “Hey, Hol, we know it’s good! We’re having thirds, okay?” They were seven at the table that year; Vince had thought to invite an elderly aunt who would have otherwise been eating institutionalized turkey at her seniors’ residence. Vince and Pete pulled her chair out, pushed it back in, fluttered around her like big turkeys over a nest. It was low-key, a nothing-to-get-fussed-about Thanksgiving, and Holly left for China thankful for what they’d shared and for the life she now had. What the hell did you expect, Hollyhock? Well, Mom, everything, I guess.

  It hadn’t been a particularly white Christmas that year, light flurries on Christmas Eve, Pete said over the phone when he called Christmas night: “Deck the halls with boughs of Holly.” He’d been singing this to her since they were kids, cracking up when he got to her name. But at the start of the new year, temperatures all along the East Coast shot up, an accidental spring. Vince emailed Holly a picture of Pete floating on a spare tire in the backyard thaw. And then the temperature dropped: a sudden minus 30 on the night of January 20, the night Vince and Pete were coming back from a party in Tiverton. Those signs on the side of the road as you approach a bridge, the ones that say BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROAD? They’re true.

  “You see, what happens is the cold air surrounds the upper and lower surface of the bridge.” The police officer who’d found the truck in the frozen river the next morning must have thought knowing the details would be, if not a comfort, then a way to understand the tragedy. “This double exposure causes the water on the bridge to freeze faster than that on the road.” He’d remembered to say how sorry he was and that he hoped her family had some “closure” soon. Vince and Pete would have snorted at that word.

  She’d been overly ambitious, Holly realized after baking the cornbread for the stuffing. It was now one o’clock. If the turkeys went into the oven within the hour, they’d be lucky to eat by eight. Eat. She hadn’t actually thought beyond the shopping, cooking, baking part. Who was going to eat all this food? Parting the birds’ legs to push in the stuffing, she saw again how small they were, how puny compared to last night’s Butterball. And again it struck her as completely nuts — a piled-high platter of leftover turkey sat in the fridge — to be doing this. “Can’t make lemonade without lemons. Can’t make gravy without a turkey,” she said out loud and heard herself laugh again.

  But she could do without the non-essentials. She’d bake the potatoes instead of mashing them, ditto for the sweet potatoes (who needed all that butter and brown sugar again?) And for dessert there was plenty of leftover apple pie and pumpkin mousse. The night before, Holly had tried to pack up leftovers for her dinner guests, but after the Pakistanis threw each other startled looks, she’d stopped. She would never, ever, completely understand another culture. After twenty years abroad she knew this for a fact. It was time perhaps to stop trying. It was time perhaps to go home.

  Their mother hadn’t been a vain woman, not one to get manicures or spend a lot on clothes. But she was bold and bright, a tall redhead with a wide mouth, olive-green eyes accented with a sweep of pearly shadow, a small waist — what men used to call “a looker” — and the mouth of a truck driver. You couldn’t miss her. You didn’t want to miss her if you were one of her chosen.

  Carolina chose people, pulled them in from the crowd. She didn’t necessarily go for the obvious power-brokers, like bank presidents or school principals. But she wooed their teachers, their coaches, anyone who might be able to open doors and eliminate the rest of the competition. “You can’t say Mom isn’t ambitious for us,” Vince once said after Holly and her mother had finished each other off in a shouting match, begun when Holly refused to give chocolates to her teachers before exams. “Ungrateful bitch!” Carolina had growled. That mouth, that tongue. Even after her mother left them to pursue another life, Holly could still hear the names: Slob. Brat. Pain in the freaking neck. Bitch.

  Finding Carolina wouldn’t have been that difficult. There had been various addresses and phone numbers over the years, mostly from aunts or cousins who’d heard from her. But she never contacted them, the family of four she’d let fall away, even after their father died at fifty. And so she didn’t hear what had happened to her boys — thirty-six- and thirty-seven-year-old bachelors, managers at the Safeway in town, best friends. “Why should she know?” Holly asked Mark, who knew better than to offer anything but a soft-eyed nod. She must have known, of course. Word would have reached her somehow.

  Holly slipped the turkeys, propped on a mound of sliced onions, celery stalks and unpeeled carrots, into the oven just at two. And then, even though she knew it was not a sign of mental stability, she went back out in search of cranberries. She’d already checked in the obvious places, but something kept whispering at her, and finally, at the other Choitram’s, the one in Khalidiyah, a store you couldn’t even get near with a car, she found one sad bag. It was thirty dirhams, an absolute crime, but she bought it anyway. Back home, the kitchen was warm with the smell of roasting birds. She tipped the cranberries into a pot, stirred in sugar and orange juice and felt the knot that had been there since yesterday loosen. Cranberries were part of what made Thanksgiving dinner a feast, not just another big dinner, and she had found them.

  “Have you recovered from le grand bouffe?” Mark always called at 4:30 unless he was in a meeting. Lately he’d been involved in a U.S. Embassy program on human trafficking. It was a hard sell, he said. “You know this part of the world. They want to look good, they want our respect and regard, but they don’t want to change.” He sounded tired, like he was the one who needed recovering.

  “Everything’s pretty much back to normal,” Holly said and surveyed her counters, grateful again that she’d never employed a maid here. Who needed that scrutiny? A household was complicated enough. Bags of flour and corn meal, parts of vegetables, knives and cutting boards, plastic wrap from the turkeys
covered the granite counters for the second time in twenty-four hours. She’d never been a neat cook. Well, it was. This was normal.

  She started on the roux while the turkeys roasted, working her magic on the birds’ innards. And when the turkeys came out at six she was ready, broth and flour in hand. This was the part she loved best: placing the roasting pan over two burners, turning up the flame and stirring like a dervish as the drippings turned dark as burnt caramel. Then came the wine, scraping the browned bits, pressing the remaining moisture from the spent vegetables, stirring, reducing, straining. And then…velvet.

  Mark looked stunned, anxious, then simply blank as he stood in the kitchen door, shaking his head finally, surrendered, as he came to hug her.

  “You are something,” he said.

  “It was the gravy,” she said. “It wasn’t right.”

  Mark nodded. “Do I have to keep my suit on for this?”

  Jersey looked delighted when she came home. “Why didn’t you tell me we were doing Thanksgiving all over again?”

  “It was the gravy,” Holly said, her only explanation.

  The turkeys were surprisingly tender for such little guys, the baked potatoes better than last night’s mashed potatoes with roasted garlic and crème fraîche, the stuffing crunchy and soft in the right places, the cranberries sweet and puckery. They broke the garlic bread — “Like croutons!” cried Jersey — in chunks over the salad of spinach and butter lettuce. And the gravy, while not her best-best, not quite to the level of that Thanksgiving in a Rhode Island bungalow a dozen years before, was splendid. Good gravy is no mere condiment, Holly read once in a cookbook. It’s the tie that binds.