by New Yorker
—WILLIAM B. POWELL AND
JAMES THURBER, 1929
Morgan was yelling at Brian to get out. “And out of this town—I mean it—and don’t you wait till tomorrow if you still want your arse in one piece! Out!,” he shouted, and the cleaver swung dramatically towards the door. Brian started in that direction but, whether he meant to or not, he made a swaggering, taunting motion of the buttocks. This made Morgan break into a roar and run after him, swinging the cleaver in a stagy way. Brian ran, and Morgan ran after him, and Irene screamed and grabbed her stomach. Morgan was too heavy to run any distance and probably could not have thrown the cleaver very far, either. Herb watched from the doorway. Soon Morgan came back and flung the cleaver down on the table.
“All back to work! No more gawking around here! You don’t get paid for gawking! What are you getting under way at?” he said, with a hard look at Irene.
“Nothing,” Irene said meekly.
“If you’re getting under way get out of here.”
“I’m not.”
“All right, then!”
We got to work. Herb took off his blood-smeared smock and put on his jacket and went off, probably to see that Brian got ready to go on the supper-time bus. He did not say a word. Morgan and his son went out to the yard, and Irene and Henry went back to the adjoining shed, where they did the plucking, working knee-deep in the feathers Brian was supposed to keep swept up.
“Where’s Gladys?” I said softly.
“Recuperating,” said Marjorie. She, too, spoke in a quieter voice than usual, and “recuperating” was not the sort of word she and Lily normally used. It was a word to be used about Gladys, with a mocking intent.
They didn’t want to talk about what had happened, because they were afraid Morgan might come in and catch them at it and fire them. Good workers as they were, they were afraid of that. Besides, they hadn’t seen anything. They must have been annoyed that they hadn’t. All I ever found out was that Brian had either done something or shown something to Gladys as she came out of the washroom and she had started screaming and having hysterics.
Now she’ll likely be laid up with another nervous breakdown, they said. And he’ll be on his way out of town. And good riddance, they said, to both of them.
I have a picture of the Turkey Barn crew taken on Christmas Eve. It was taken with a flash camera that was someone’s Christmas extravagance. I think it was Irene’s. But Herb Abbott must have been the one who took the picture. He was the one who could be trusted to know or to learn immediately how to manage anything new, and flash cameras were fairly new at the time. The picture was taken about ten o’clock on Christmas Eve, after Herb and Morgy had come back from making the last delivery and we had washed off the gutting table and swept and mopped the cement floor. We had taken off our bloody smocks and heavy sweaters and gone into the little room called the lunchroom, where there was a table and a heater. We still wore our working clothes: overalls and shirts. The men wore caps and the women kerchiefs, tied in the wartime style. I am stout and cheerful and comradely in the picture, transformed into someone I don’t ever remember being or pretending to be. I look years older than fourteen. Irene is the only one who has taken off her kerchief, freeing her long red hair. She peers out from it with a meek, sluttish, inviting look, which would match her reputation but is not like any look of hers I remember. Yes, it must have been her camera; she is posing for it, with that look, more deliberately than anyone else is. Marjorie and Lily are smiling, true to form, but their smiles are sour and reckless. With their hair hidden, and such figures as they have bundled up, they look like a couple of tough and jovial but testy workmen. Their kerchiefs look misplaced; caps would be better. Henry is in high spirits, glad to be part of the work force, grinning and looking twenty years younger than his age. Then Morgy, with his hangdog look, not trusting the occasion’s bounty, and Morgan very flushed and bosslike and satisfied. He has just given each of us our bonus turkey. Each of these turkeys has a leg or a wing missing, or a malformation of some kind, so none of them are salable at the full price. But Morgan has been at pains to tell us that you often get the best meat off the gimpy ones, and he has shown us that he’s taking one home himself.
We are all holding mugs or large, thick china cups, which contain not the usual tea but rye whiskey. Morgan and Henry have been drinking since suppertime. Marjorie and Lily say they only want a little, and only take it at all because it’s Christmas Eve and they are dead on their feet. Irene says she’s dead on her feet as well but that doesn’t mean she only wants a little. Herb has poured quite generously not just for her but for Lily and Marjorie, too, and they do not object. He has measured mine and Morgy’s out together, very stingily, and poured in Coca-Cola. This is the first drink I have ever had, and as a result I will believe for years that rye-and-Coca-Cola is a standard sort of drink and will always ask for it, until I notice that few other people drink it and that it makes me sick. I didn’t get sick that Christmas Eve, though; Herb had not given me enough. Except for an odd taste, and my own feeling of consequence, it was like drinking Coca-Cola.
I don’t need Herb in the picture to remember what he looked like. That is, if he looked like himself, as he did all the time at the Turkey Barn and the few times I saw him on the street—as he did all the times in my life when I saw him except one.
The time he looked somewhat unlike himself was when Morgan was cursing out Brian and, later, when Brian had run off down the road. What was this different look? I’ve tried to remember, because I studied it hard at the time. It wasn’t much different. His face looked softer and heavier then, and if you had to describe the expression on it you would have to say it was an expression of shame. But what would he be ashamed of? Ashamed of Brian, for the way he had behaved? Surely that would be late in the day; when had Brian ever behaved otherwise? Ashamed of Morgan, for carrying on so ferociously and theatrically? Or of himself, because he was famous for nipping fights and displays of this sort in the bud and hadn’t been able to do it here? Would he be ashamed that he hadn’t stood up for Brian? Would he have expected himself to do that, to stand up for Brian?
All this was what I wondered at the time. Later, when I knew more, at least about sex, I decided that Brian was Herb’s lover, and that Gladys really was trying to get attention from Herb, and that that was why Brian had humiliated her—with or without Herb’s connivance and consent. Isn’t it true that people like Herb—dignified, secretive, honorable people— will often choose somebody like Brian, will waste their helpless love on some vicious, silly person who is not even evil, or a monster, but just some importunate nuisance? I decided that Herb, with all his gentleness and carefulness, was avenging himself on us all—not just on Gladys but on us all—with Brian, and that what he was feeling when I studied his face must have been a savage and gleeful scorn. But embarrassment as well—embarrassment for Brian and for himself and for Gladys, and to some degree for all of us. Shame for all of us—that is what I thought then.
Later still, I backed off from this explanation. I got to a stage of backing off from the things I couldn’t really know. It’s enough for me now just to think of Herb’s face with that peculiar, stricken look; to think of Brian monkeying in the shade of Herb’s dignity; to think of my own mystified concentration on Herb, my need to catch him out, if I could ever get the chance, and then move in and stay close to him. How attractive, how delectable the prospect of intimacy is with the very person who will never grant it. I can still feel the pull of a man like that, of his promising and refusing. I would still like to know things. Never mind facts. Never mind theories, either.
When I finished my drink I wanted to say something to Herb. I stood beside him and waited for a moment when he was not listening to or talking with anyone else and when the increasingly rowdy conversation of the others would cover what I had to say.
“I’m sorry your friend had to go away.”
“That’s all right.”
Herb spoke kindly and wi
th amusement, and so shut me off from any further right to look at or speak about his life. He knew what I was up to. He must have known it before, with lots of women. He knew how to deal with it.
Lily had a little more whiskey in her mug and told how she and her best girlfriend (dead now, of liver trouble) had dressed up as men one time and gone into the men’s side of the beer parlor, the side where it said “Men Only,” because they wanted to see what it was like. They sat in a corner drinking beer and keeping their eyes and ears open, and nobody looked twice or thought a thing about them, but soon a problem arose.
“Where were we going to go? If we went around to the other side and anybody seen us going into the ladies’, they would scream bloody murder. And if we went into the men’s somebody’d be sure to notice we didn’t do it the right way. Meanwhile the beer was going through us like a bugger!”
“What you don’t do when you’re young!” Marjorie said.
Several people gave me and Morgy advice. They told us to enjoy ourselves while we could. They told us to stay out of trouble. They said they had all been young once. Herb said we were a good crew and had done a good job but he didn’t want to get in bad with any of the women’s husbands by keeping them there too late. Marjorie and Lily expressed indifference to their husbands, but Irene announced that she loved hers and that it was not true that he had been dragged back from Detroit to marry her, no matter what people said. Henry said it was a good life if you didn’t weaken. Morgan said he wished us all the most sincere Merry Christmas.
When we came out of the Turkey Barn it was snowing. Lily said it was like a Christmas card, and so it was, with the snow whirling around the street lights in town and around the colored lights people had put up outside their doorways. Morgan was giving Henry and Irene a ride home in the truck, acknowledging age and pregnancy and Christmas. Morgy took a shortcut through the field, and Herb walked off by himself, head down and hands in his pockets, rolling slightly, as if he were on the deck of a lake boat. Marjorie and Lily linked arms with me as if we were old comrades.
“Let’s sing,” Lily said. “What’ll we sing?”
“‘We Three Kings’?” said Marjorie. “‘We Three Turkey Gutters’?”
“‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’”
“Why dream? You got it!”
So we sang.
1980
MY EX-HUSBAND AND THE FISH DINNER
JOAN ACOCELLA
My ex-husband didn’t care much for Christmas. What he loved was the night before Christmas. He was one of those Italian-Americans who in the wake of the civil-rights movement got deeply into their ethnic roots. So did others in his family, and consequently we spent a lot of time at what I recall as eighteen-hour cousins’ parties, where they would all pass around Grandma’s immigration papers and talk about the time Uncle Angelo got kicked by the mule. My son and I, when we had to go to these affairs, used to stow magazines in the glove compartment, and every few hours or so we would sneak out to the car for a little rest.
Around this time, too, my husband decided to Italianize our Christmas. The people in his grandparents’ generation had followed the old-country custom of eating their feast not on December 25th, but the night before. And it wasn’t turkey; it was a nine-course fish dinner. (December 24th was a fast day—no meat. Nine courses of fish was their way of fasting.) My in-laws, by way of assimilating, had switched over to turkey. This now seemed to my husband a hideous betrayal. We were going back to the old way, he declared. So the next December 24th, and every December 24th after that, we had a dinner that could kill an army.
Many of his recipes came out of Marcella Hazan’s excellent cookbooks, but he had his problems with Marcella Hazan. Number one, she was a Northern Italian, which in his mind, as in the minds of most of the descendants of the largely Southern Italian people who immigrated to this country at the turn of the century, meant snob, cake-eater—Protestant, even. (Anna Magnani, as these people will point out to you, was not a Northern Italian.) Number two, Marcella Hazan tried to demystify Italian cooking, turn it over to non-Italians. In America, anyone can be President, and in Marcella Hazan anyone can make minestrone.
This worried my husband. Pretty soon, he figured, you’d have Basques, Northumbrians, British Columbians making Italian dinners. He preferred cookbooks that kept a few veils on. A favorite of his was Ada Boni’s “Talisman Italian Cook Book,” which you used to be able to get by sending in four dollars and ninety-five cents with a coupon from the Ronzoni box. Ada Boni called for things like “1 large can Italian tomatoes.” How large? Only an Italian would know. Best of all, he would have liked a cookbook that said, “Take a handful of chopped meat, add some parsley, throw it in the scolabast.…” That would keep the Northumbrians out of the kitchen.
“See here, Pottsman! That happens to be my secretary!”
The menu of his Christmas Eve feast changed from year to year, but certain items remained constant. For the appetizer course, he always served mozzarella in carrozza, because everyone loved it. For the salad course, he always had Ada Boni’s shrimp-and-potato salad, because I loved it. And he always made marinated eel, because he liked to drive everyone crazy with it.
He had a weakness for food machismo—that is, he prided himself on eating what you wouldn’t. Tripe was nothing to him; he ate necks, tails, toes. One of the things he loved best was when we were out to dinner with friends and someone confessed an unwillingness to eat certain animal parts. Then he would tell the story of how the biggest treat in his grandfather’s house was capuzzell, or sheep’s head. They would take this head, roast it, and hoist it out onto a platter. Then Grandpa would crack it open. (“Stop! Stop!” we’re all yelling at my husband by now. But there was no stopping him.) Grandpa would crack it open and then stick in the spoon and scoop out (“No! Please!”)—Grandpa would scoop out the brains onto everyone’s plate. The people who were really lucky got the (“No, Nick! Don’t tell us!”)—the people who were lucky got the eyeballs. The story thus triumphantly finished, our dinner companions would look down glassy-eyed at their plates, push them away, and order a drink. And my husband, glowing with happiness and ethnic pride, would pick up his fork and dig into whatever was in front of him—ears, probably.
That’s why he liked the marinated eel. Right around the fourth course of the Christmas Eve feast, he would produce it: a big dead snake in a bowl of yellow oil. “No!” we would scream. “Take it away! Eat it in the kitchen!” And, beaming with joy, he would maneuver the thing onto his plate, eat it by himself, and look at us pityingly.
The rest was magnificent, though: mussel soup, spaghetti with scallops, baccala with olives, bass stuffed with vegetables. This year, he’ll probably be cooking it again, for a tableful of cousins. I can see them now, happily lifting their forks. “Wait!” he says, and runs back to the kitchen for the eel.
1995
WINTER IN MARTINIQUE
PATRICK CHAMOISEAU
When I was a child, in Martinique, my mother, Ma Ninotte, kept pigs. They were little cochons-planches, fattened all year long and destined for the Christmas feast—a singsong time, filled with sausages, chops, pâtés, stews, and roasts. The pigs were fed on leftovers, green bananas, useless words, nicknames; they scarfed up the seasonal fruit peels, and we children lavished a kindly tenderness on them. Sometimes they escaped from the kitchen, which had become a pig park, and dashed into the streets of Fort-de-France. We could always catch them in less than an hour. In Fort-de-France, everyone knew how to corner a pig, and the countrywomen were able to stop them by calling out a single old word. Everyone knew, too, that a family’s survival often depended on the skinniest, slightest little pig.
All pigs were different—some were more engaging or mischievous than others—and my brothers and sisters and I didn’t love all of them equally. In our shared memory, though, there was Matador. He arrived a bag of rattling bones and turned into a charming monster who laughed at the world with the eyes of an old man. He loved ch
ocolate, soup, loving scratches, and Creole songs. And he became huge. When he escaped into the city, he was like a rolling boulder. One kindly fellow who sought to corner him found himself driven into a pole. Others were dispatched into gutters. When Ma Ninotte, followed by her brat pack, caught up, one of Matador’s victims asked her, “Tell us, Ma’am, what seventh species of animal is this, if you please?” Another said, “He’s a sower of sores, a liver boiler, a rheumatism starter, a filth-maker, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. So-and-So, an ill-bred bastard of a beast.” We finally rounded up Matador on the banks of the Pointe Simon, opposite the white man’s warehouses, where he had stopped to suck down unceremoniously the scrumptious emanations of a salted-meat barrel.
As December approached, a parade of snivelling delegations implored Ma Ninotte to excuse Matador. Ma Ninotte responded, with a feigned rage (for she loved Matador as much as we did), “Tianmay soti en zèbe, muven”— “Get away from my feet, you brats.”
A dog dressed as a man was the killer—a certain Marcel. He seemed to exist only as Christmas approached, when he became a pig slaughterer. We had become so attached to Matador that when the fellow appeared we greeted him with cries of hatred. He had brought no implements; he had come, as he did every year, to agree on a price, a day, and a time. He arrived by day, in his white visiting shirt. As usual, he called up from the first step, “Ma Ninotte, how’d the pig do this year?”
Then began a long wait, the most terrible of our childhood. December arrived, with its winds, cold drafts, swollen noses, upset stomachs, fitful coughs, and old flus. We remained vigilant. We counted the knives and the tubs, but Ma Ninotte seemed to be preparing a pigless Christmas. She tended to the peels of her orange liqueur. She prettied her salted ham, her conserves, the other delicacies she had accumulated in her cupboard while awaiting the days of joy. But we never heard her promise anyone even the smallest chop. The air was trimmed with scents from cake ovens and the steam of fricassees. We saw her buy neither the peppers nor the sack of onions nor the coarse salt nor the herbs that announced the evil Saturday of the fattened pig.