Boom. The floodgates opened, and all my pent-up frustration and grief and exhaustion surged out. I was on fire with rage. I was trembling in my seat. I’ll give you fucking brunch, I thought. I’ll shove it down your fucking throat. I’ll give you so much brunch you’ll be shaped like a cosmopolitan for the rest of your fucking life. You’ll cry tears of mimosa. I leaned my head into the seat in front of me and took a deep breath, turning my face to the side to gaze out the window at the skyline in the distance.
I was still struggling to see my life reflected back to me in the world, and also struggling to live without that reflection, but when others looked at me it seemed they often saw what the Russian man on the beach had: half a person, empty spaces in need of filling. There was a perverse truth to this. I’d learned in the last year that being single past a certain age meant that many of the most difficult things in my life were the direct result of overflow from other people’s lives. You are the person they call on to bike ninety blocks to the hospital because their baby has no heartbeat and they are alone in the delivery room. You are the person everyone turns to when your business partner gets pregnant, called on to organize everything around her upcoming life as a single mother. And you’re the person who steps in when the marriage hits a rough patch or skids off the rails. And this is how it should be. I wanted to be the good friend, the good sister, the good daughter. The person who happily puts together baby showers and organizes birthday parties. But I was worn out, too. And once again I couldn’t find a language for it. What part of other people’s stories did I have a right to? I found it difficult to talk about my own emotional exhaustion without sounding as if I were complaining. Or worse, appearing to be an emotional vampire borrowing other people’s misfortune and challenges as my own. It wasn’t my baby, my husband, my pregnancy, after all. And yet, some days I felt as if I were the sole doctor on call in a trauma unit, except no one berates a doctor for going out to brunch. It was hard work to do everyone else’s emotional lifting when I was the only person responsible for my own. To have it implied that I was lazy or spoiled on top of it made my blood boil in ways I didn’t know were possible.
My phone vibrated before I could shove it to the bottom of my bag. It was Maddy.
Hope you’re still in one piece. Confirming Thanksgiving and here if you need a drink!
I smiled through my anger. E. B. White had once written, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” I had been very willing, and Maddy had been the lucky number that never stopped coming up.
13. The Family You Make
Maddy had cooked every American Thanksgiving dinner I’d ever eaten but one—sixteen by our count. Our first had taken place in the Stuyvesant Town apartment where she’d grown up not long after I’d arrived in the city. I’d shown up early, and she’d taught me to roast red peppers over the gas flame on her stove. But when we reminisced about our Thanksgivings together, it was the year she didn’t cook it that we always ended up returning to most often.
That was the year her daughter Hannah had been born, and hands full with a six-week-old, Maddy had gone upstate to her mother’s house for the holiday, leaving Mauri and me to fend for ourselves for the first time in thirteen years. We had not done so well. Accustomed to having a regular slate of duties starting at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening, we found ourselves loose in the city and opted to fill the time by meeting for a drink in SoHo. We locked up our bikes on Prince Street in front of a Chinese restaurant and plunked down at the bar at Raoul’s. The bartender Franco was in the holiday spirit and plied us with drinks; as the hours went by the bar around us began to sway with New Yorkers returning home. We stumbled out the door at 11:00 p.m., laying a small pile of twenty-dollar bills on the bar for a tip, and went back across the street to retrieve our bikes, only to discover we’d mistakenly locked them up on the Chinese delivery bike rack and they’d been moved, along with the rack, and were behind the gate of the now closed restaurant. We stood at the bars staring at our confiscated transportation for a long while, not quite comprehending why we couldn’t reach them.
Had we been a degree more sober, or facing a morning of errands, we likely would have gone straight home, bikes or not. Instead we wandered up toward University Place, where the tavern we’d worked at had been located (like homing pigeons we still tended to drift in that direction out of habit, even though it had closed in 2006) and into the still-open dive bar we’d sometimes gone to at 3:30 a.m. after our waitressing shift had ended. It had been five years since either of us had donned an apron but some of our old regulars were at the bar, and this time it was they who plied us with rounds of shots. I could sense in them something I was also experiencing that day for the very first time: the feeling that the city had temporarily become a stranger and I had no place in it. It was terrible; I’d never considered the city anything but a haven. Sometime after 4:00 a.m. we wandered onto a subway train and weaved our way back to Brooklyn. Mauri’s boyfriend (and eventual husband) found her the next morning in the kitchen, still dressed, with her head in a bowl of potato chips. I awoke in my apartment on my living room floor with my shoes on. It would be 4:00 p.m. before I was able to sit up.
“We wandered the streets,” we’d say to Maddy for years after that. “We wandered the streets forlorn and abandoned,” as if having a newborn were not reason enough to not want to feed fifteen people. We were not alone in feeling untethered from our lives that day. Afterward we learned some people who had found themselves without a place to go had hiked out to Brooklyn assuming there’d be space at Maddy’s table, only to find the door locked.
Growing up in Canada, Thanksgiving fell on a Monday in October, though most people celebrated it on the Sunday. As a child, I’d spent one confused and angry Thursday in November wondering why all my favorite television shows had been supplanted by football games. When I eventually came to the States, I was unprepared for the dramatic, all-encompassing screech-to-a-halt-ness of American Thanksgiving, but I was a quick convert.
During the years I waitressed, the night before Thanksgiving was my favorite shift of the year. I filled in for Maddy so she could prep for the following day. The night would start out slow and then swell up as New Yorkers returned home for the holiday; Frank Sinatra played on repeat for hours. The staff would start drinking early, and by 10:00 p.m. we’d drop our drink buyback requirement to two (normally a customer got a free round after every three drinks) and then toast their round with whatever we happened to have poured into our own glasses. The bar was closed on the holiday, and the owners adhered to the old routine of giving the staff their choice of a bottle or a bird. Everyone else took the bottle; I took the bird, which Maddy cooked for us to eat the next day.
At their height, our Thanksgivings became a November Mardi Gras for those lucky enough to stay in the city over the holiday. I, of course, had no family who was expecting me, the fourth Thursday in November being just a regular day for them. But eventually people, like Mauri, abandoned their trips home altogether in favor of celebrating at Maddy’s. Why deal with crowded airports, family dynamics, and awkward conversations when you could come to us! For a few years this meant Maddy was cooking a three-course, sit-down dinner for twenty-five people or more. She put enormous effort into the menu, pureeing her own mango dressing for the arugula salad one year, making turkey bibimbap the next. We made our own rituals. Margeaux hand-painted invitations and constructed elaborate piñatas (one year it was a mermaid, one year it was George Bush’s head), which we dragged out to the Brooklyn sidewalk sometime around midnight, tied to a tree or a parking sign, and wailed on until the candy (and “candy”) tumbled out.
Before the meal was served we’d link hands around the table and offer up things we were grateful for or people we wanted to remember, and then Margeaux would lead us in a long ommm, which everyone, regardless of how they felt about spirituality, simply went along with. Guests assigned themselves dishwashing shifts. There was an envelope in the bathroom to lea
ve money to cover the food expenses. Often in the retelling it was only possible to separate one year from another by the decadence of Maddy’s food and the degrees of debauchery that followed it: there was the year the busboy ended up in the hospital for mistaking the hash-laced chocolate cake with the unlaced one versus the year everyone ended up nude in the bathroom doing lines off the medicine cabinet mirror that someone had thoughtfully unscrewed.
Those days were long gone. Like everything else in our lives, the day had calmed down and sobered up and streamlined. It was no longer a dinner for twenty-five. People had married, had family obligations. There was a kiddie table now. We’d stopped being the best invite; none of the cakes were sending anyone to the hospital. Still it was an annual highlight.
But in the days leading up to this year’s holiday I found myself unable to get out of bed. At first I thought I was going to be okay. The whiplash this time of returning to my life in the city had been especially intense and given me the usual thrill. Less than twenty-four hours after landing at LaGuardia, I’d been sitting in the audience at Carnegie Hall in fur and silk, attending a magazine awards ceremony. I watched as Hollywood and media stars traipsed across the stage making speeches and then returned to their seats around me. I felt dazed, but also grateful. Not to be among celebrities—I knew better than that—but to have a life that involved such extremes and be able to inhabit both ends, painful and exhausting as parts of it currently were.
The high was short-lived. An emotional hangover slammed into me forty-eight hours later—I inexplicably burst into tears when the checkout clerk at Trader Joe’s informed me my favorite breakfast cereal had been discontinued—and had grown more intense instead of fading away. I did not leave the apartment. When I looked around, all I could see was a husband-shaped hole. It was outlined by the dishes I’d left in the sink; the bottle of wine I’d forgotten to buy; the food I found growing moldy in the fridge; and the notice from my landlord that my rent would be past due if not paid in twenty-four hours: all reminders that there was no one else to help pick up the slack—even temporarily. After all of the caretaking I had done, I was overcome with a bone-shaking desire simply to have someone ask me if I was okay, to touch me. Just to say, “I’ve got this.” This is why people get married, I thought, surveying my little square in the city. To hell with romance, and men who ran across rooms to speak to you, or sent you a hundred text messages a day. Fuck flowers. None of that really mattered. You got married so that you wouldn’t be in the trenches alone, so that there was someone else to take the wheel from time to time. So that you wouldn’t have to ask for help; it would just be there. At least that was the ideal.
I didn’t ask for help. There are muscles that don’t get exercised when you live alone, and this was one. Instead, I continued to hit reorder on the restaurant delivery app on my phone, thinking if I ever did leave the apartment and somehow went missing, the kid who brought me my milk shakes (without even a hint of shaming side-eye, which brought me comfort if only because it meant I was far from the only person whom he saw this regularly) would be the first to notice. Or the initial suspect in the ongoing, tabloid headline, Law & Order episode that played in the back of my head. (Neighbors said they saw the delivery boy come and go on a regular basis.)
Thanksgiving, which for so long had assured me I always had a place to go, felt like it was going to require more of me than I was able to give. I didn’t want to go. Anywhere. And I had options. Each year I found myself inundated with more invites. The longer my friends were married, the more determined they seemed to inject fresh blood into their celebrations; it was as if I were a featured act they were trying to book in advance. But it never really occurred to me to go elsewhere. This was what I did. Like a once shocking music that was now considered elevator easy listening, it was too familiar to give up. We’d become our own family obligation.
This year, however, it was as if there were weights attached to my arms, and my tongue. I would skip, I thought. Maddy would understand; she understood everything. I would skip and lie in bed all day and not talk. Not speak or be spoken to.
I played chicken with the idea for a week: so I would do nothing on Thursday, what was the big deal? I could do what I wanted. But suddenly that reality was scary instead of liberating. It was a fine line between being free and floating away. And then, of course I got up Thursday morning and went. Propelled out the door at noon and onto my bike, primarily by the simple horror of thinking what it would mean to deviate from a ritual that had anchored my life for nearly twenty years.
Maddy and Ben lived in a three-story house in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that he had bought a decade earlier and rebuilt. Red Hook was like a little fishing village tacked onto the bottom of Brooklyn. It didn’t have a subway stop, and even though it was just a ten-minute ride from my apartment and faced the Manhattan skyline, it felt a little dislocated from the city. As I rode down the Columbia Street waterfront through empty streets, I could smell salt water in the air and immediately felt better. The solution to all my problems remained the same: I just needed to keep moving.
Maddy didn’t even say hello when she opened the door. She just handed me a glass of wine and pointed me to the couch. Once when I was twenty-five and had just received especially upsetting family news, I had sat down and tried to tell her about it. We were at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, and I struggled to find the words; when they eventually came out, they were cold and flat. She was silent. When I looked up to see if she was listening, I saw that she was crying, as though she were crying for me when I couldn’t manage to on my own.
Now I just lay on the couch, as if I were in my own living room. There was no expectation I do anything else. I didn’t even need to explain why all I could do was lie on the couch. Every once in a while Maddy would bring over more cheese or refill my wineglass. Kara was also supposed to be there, but she had the flu and had sent along her husband and sons without her. Just before dinner was served Maddy’s phone buzzed. She worked as a doula, and one of her clients had gone into labor. She had to go.
“We’ll be fine,” said Ben. “I have this under control.”
Instead of setting the table we ate on the floor surrounding the TV: Ben’s parents, Maddy’s mom Viv and Viv’s boyfriend, me and Hannah, and Kara’s husband and kids. There was very little conversation. We ate and watched the parade, and when that ended, we switched to the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. Eventually everyone left, and I went up to put Hannah to bed, reading to her from a copy of Madeline I’d given Maddy years ago for her birthday, trying to make up for a childhood she’d never had.
One year at Thanksgiving, Maddy’s mother, Viv, had read us all our tarot cards. Viv’s eyes, which Hannah had inherited, were such a deep brown they appeared nearly black, and her cheekbones were practically perpendicular to her jaw. Her long thick hair was streaked with gray, and she wore it down to her waist, sometimes plaiting it into two braids, making her look like an aged, ethereal Pocahontas. Maddy had faded Polaroids in her room of Viv roller-skating through Washington Square Park in the late sixties, same braids, only in hot pants.
The year of the tarot card reading nearly thirty people had shown up—it would go down in the books as the “biggest Thanksgiving.” Maddy was then living in a huge ground floor loft in Williamsburg, on a dark deserted corner down by the bridge. When the cab dropped us off at 3:00 a.m. after a waitressing shift, I’d make the driver wait till she got through the foyer and I saw the inside light go on. Because the lease was in her name, Maddy had the big bedroom. The remainder of the loft was subdivided into quarters with curtains and shared by two kids who went to School of Visual Arts with Maddy and one of the bartenders we worked with. We’d taken down curtains that morning and moved the beds in the living room out to make space for the series of uneven tables we’d laid out lengthwise from one end of the apartment to the other.
I had never had my cards read. I’m not sure I’d ever even seen tarot cards before. When I was growing up, my mother h
ad loved reading us all our horoscopes from the newspaper. “I’m a Taurus,” she would say, “very stubborn!” But tarot cards were new, and I tried to comport myself with the same seriousness with which Viv dealt them out and interpreted their meaning. To my novice eye there was no difference between the gilded swords or the floating cups or the solemn figures; I simply waited while Viv stared at them intently for a long time as though they held the secret of the universe. Finally, she raised her black eyes to me.
“I think in a former life you were a servant girl, and Madeline was the baby daughter of the wealthy family you worked for. One night there was a fire, and you ran into the burning house to get her and saved her from dying.”
I nodded and smiled. How else was one supposed to respond to that pronouncement? Viv had once declared she was from the star system Pleiades; I knew this sort of thing was something she took seriously. She flipped over another card and then looked up and took my hand. “Now you’re back,” she said, “and this time the roles are reversed.”
Maddy and I laughed over that and made a show of extinguishing all the candles later that night, lest any fires get started. It was 1999; we were twenty-five. It was hard to see ourselves as people who needed saving in any dramatic sense. We filled in each other’s phone numbers in the emergency contact line on forms and waited in cabs till inside lights went on—that was the sort of saving we were used to. After September 11, we rode bikes around the city instead of enduring the anxiety of the train in the tunnel or on the bridge, but that was it. It was only fifteen years later, lying in bed with Maddy’s daughter asleep beside me, that I understood that sometimes saving someone simply means opening the door, letting them in for a deeply mundane holiday celebration, and asking absolutely nothing of them other than that they take up the space you’ve made for them. Which was what I was doing when Maddy got home at 2:00 a.m. and found me still there asleep next to Hannah.
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