by Amy Bloom
Jewelle runs her hands through the cornbread, making tracks in the crust, rubbing the big crumbs between her fingers. Julia’s house, even with Lionel, is one of Jewelle’s favorite places. At home, she is the Mommy and the Wife. Here, she is the mother of gifted children, an esteemed artist temporarily on leave. At her parents’ house, paralyzed by habit, she drinks milk out of the carton, trying to rub her lipstick off the spout afterward, borrows her mother’s expensive mascara and takes it home after pretending to help her mother search all three bathrooms before they leave. She eats too much and too fast, half of it standing up and the rest with great reluctance, as if there were a gun pointed at her three times a day. In Julia’s house there’s no trouble about food or mealtimes; Jewelle eats what she wants, the children eat bananas and Cheerios and grilled cheese sandwiches served up without even an arching of an eyebrow. Julia is happy to have her daughter-in-law cook interesting dishes and willing to handle the basics when the children are hungry and not one adult is intrigued by the idea of cooking.
Buster will not hear of anything but the cornbread-and-bacon stuffing Grammy Ruth used to make, and Jewelle, who would eat bacon every day if she could, cooks six pounds of it and leaves a dark, crisp pile on the counter, for snacking. Julia seems to claim nothing on Thanksgiving but the table setting. She’s not fussy, she prides herself on her lack of fuss, but Julia is particular about her table, and it is not Jewelle or Buster who is called on to pick up the centerpiece in town, but Lionel, who has had his license suspended at least two times that Jewelle knows of. Jewelle packs the stuffing into Tupperware and leaves a long note for Julia so that her mother-in-law will not think that she has abdicated on the sweet potatoes or the creamed spinach.
In bed, spooning Buster, Jewelle runs her hand down his warm back. Sweetness, she thinks, and kisses him between the shoulders. Buster throws one big arm behind him and pulls her close. Lucky Jewelle, lucky Buster. If Jewelle had looked out the window, she would have seen Lionel and Julia by the tire swing, talking the way they have since they resumed talking, casual and ironic, and beneath that very, very careful.
Lionel cradles the bottle of Glenlivet.
“You drink a lot these days,” Julia says in the neutral voice she began cultivating twenty years ago, when it became clear that Lionel would never come back from Paris, would improve his French, graduate from L’Institut du Droit Comparé, and make his grown-up life anywhere but near her.
Lionel smiles. “It’s not your fault. Blame the genes, Ma. Junkie mother, alcoholic dad. You did your best.”
“It doesn’t interfere with your work?” It’s not clear even to Julia what she wants: Lionel unemployed and cadging loans from her, or drinking discreetly, so good at what he does that no one cares what happens after office hours.
“I am so good at my job. I am probably the best fucking maritime lawyer in France. If you kept up with French news, you’d see me in the papers sometimes. Good and good-looking. And modest.”
“I know you must be very good at your work. You can be proud of what you do. Pop would have been very proud of you.”
Lionel takes a quick swallow and offers the bottle to Julia, and if it were not so clear to her that he is mocking himself more than her, that he wishes to spare her the trouble of worrying by showing just how bad it already is, she would knock the bottle out of his hand.
Lionel says, “I know. And you? What are you doing lately that you take pride in?”
Julia answers as if it’s a pleasant question, the kind of fond interest one hopes one’s children will show.
“I finished another book of essays, the piano in jazz. It’s all right. It’ll probably sell dozens, like the last one. You make sure to buy a few. I’m still gardening, not that you can tell this time of year.”
“Buster says you’re seeing someone.”
“You have to watch out for Buster.” Julia turns away. “Well, ‘seeing.’ It’s Peter, my neighbor down the road. We like each other. His wife died three years ago.”
“No real obstacles, then.”
“Nope.”
“How old is he? White or black?”
“He’s a little older than me. White. You’ll meet him tomorrow. I didn’t want him to be alone. His daughter’s in Baltimore this year with her husband’s family.”
“That’s nice of you. Your first all-family Thanksgiving in twenty years, might as well have a few strangers to grease the wheels.”
“It is nice, and he’s only one person, and he is not a stranger to me or to Buster and Jewelle,” Julia says, and walks into the house, thinking that it’s too late in her personal day for talking to Lionel, that if she were driving she would have pulled off the road half an hour ago.
Julia starts cooking at six a.m. Early Thanksgiving morning is the only time she will have to herself. The rest of the day will be a joy, most likely, and so tiring that when Buster and Jewelle leave on Friday, right after Corinne is wrapped up in her safety seat belt and Jordan squirms around for one last good-bye and their new car crunches down the gravel driveway, Julia will lie down with a cup of tea and not get up until the next day, when she will say good-bye to Lionel and Ari and lie down again. She reads Jewelle’s detailed note and thinks, Poor Jewelle must be thirty-one, it’s probably time for her to have Thanksgiving in her own house. Julia had to wrestle the holiday out of her own mother’s hands; even as the woman lay dying she whispered directions for gravy and pumpkin pie, creating a chain of panicked, resentful command from bedroom to kitchen, with a daughter, a husband, and two sisters slicing and basting to beat back the inevitable. Julia managed to celebrate one whole independent Thanksgiving, with four other newly hatched adults, only to marry Lionel Senior the next summer and find the holiday permanently ensconced, like a small museum’s only Rodin, at her new mother-in-law’s house. Julia can sit now in her own kitchen, sixty years old with a dish towel in her hand, and hear Ruth Sampson saying to her, “My son is not cut from the same cloth as other people. You treat him right.”
After this last, unexpected hurrah, Julia will let go of Thanksgiving altogether. She’ll arrive at Jewelle’s house, or Jewelle’s mother’s house, at just the right time, and entertain the children, and bring her own excellent lemon meringue pies and extravagant flowers to match their tablecloths. If things go well, maybe she’ll bring Peter too. As Julia pictures Peter entering Buster’s front hall by her side, the two of them with bags of presents and a box of butter tarts, she cuts a wide white scoop through the end of her forefinger. Blood flows so fast it pools on the cutting board and drips onto the counter before she has even realized what the pain is.
“Ma.” Lionel is behind her with paper towels. He packs her finger until it’s the size of a dinner roll and pulls it up over her head. “You stay like that. Sit. And keep your hand up.”
“You’re up early. The Band-Aids are in my bathroom.” Her fingertip is throbbing like a heart, and Julia holds it aloft. It’s been a long time since anyone has told her to do anything.
Her bathrobe always lies at the foot of the bed. There is always a pale blue quilt, and both nightstands are covered with books and magazines and empty teacups. The room smells like her. Lionel takes the Band-Aids from under the sink: styling mousse, Neosporin ointment (which he also takes), aloe vera gel, Northern Lights shampoo for silver hair, two bottles of Pepto-Bismol, ajar of vitamin C, zinc lozenges, and a small plastic box of silver bobby pins.
When he comes down, Julia is holding her finger up, still pointing to God, in the most compliant, sweetly mocking way.
“I hear and obey,” she says.
“That’ll be the fucking day.”
Lionel slathers the antibiotic ointment over her finger, holding the flap of skin down, and wraps two Band-Aids around it. It must hurt like holy hell by now, but she doesn’t say so. With her good hand, Julia pats his knee.
“I was going to make coffee,” she says, “but I think you’ll have to.” And even after Jewelle and Buster get up for the kid
s’ breakfast and exclaim over the finger and Jewelle prepares to run the show, Lionel stays by Julia, changing the red bandages every few hours, mocking her every move, helping her with each dish and glass as if he were some fairy-tale combination of servant and prince.
At one o’clock, after Peter has called to say that he is too sick to come and everyone in the kitchen hears him coughing over the phone, they all go upstairs to change. They are not a dress-up family (another thing Jewelle likes, although she can hear her mother’s voice suggesting that if one so disdains the holiday’s traditions, why celebrate it at all), but the children are in such splendid once-a-year finery that it seems ungracious not to make an effort. Corinne wears a bronze organdy dress tied with a bronze satin sash, and ivory anklets and ivory Mary Janes. Julia knows this is nothing but nonsense and conspicuous consumption, but she loves the look of this little girl, right down to the twin bronze satin roses in her black hair, and she hopes she will remember it when Corinne comes to the dinner table ten years from now with a safety pin in her cheek or a leopard tattooed on her forehead. And Jordan is in his snappy fawn vest and white button-down shirt tucked into his navy blue pants, and an adorable navy-blue-and-white-striped bow tie. Lionel and Buster are deeply dapper; their father appreciated Italian silks and French cotton, took his boys to Brooks Brothers in good times and Filene’s Basement when necessary, and made buying a handsome tie as much a part of being a man as carrying a rubber or catching a ball, and they have both held on to that. Jewelle has the face and the figure to look good in almost everything, but Julia herself would not have chosen tight black satin pants, a turquoise silk camisole cut low, and a black satin jacket covered with bits of turquoise and silver, an unlikely mix of Santa Fe and disco fever. Julia comes downstairs in her usual holiday gray flannel pants and white silk shirt. She has turned her bathroom mirror, her hairbrushes, and her jewelry box over to Jewelle and Corinne.
“Do you mind Peter’s not coming?” Buster says.
“Not really.”
Lionel looks at her. “You must miss Pop,” he says.
“Of course, honey. I miss him all the time.” This is not entirely true. Julia misses Lionel Senior when she hears an alto sax playing anything, even one weak note, and she misses him when she takes out the garbage; she misses him when she sees a couple dancing, and she misses him every time she looks at Buster, who has resembled her for the first thirty years of his life, with his father apparent only in his curly hair, and now looks almost too much like the man she married.
Buster puts his arm around her waist. “You must miss Peaches too.” He only met Peaches a few times when she was well and charming, and a few more when she was dying, collapsed in his mother’s bed like some great gray beast, all bones and crushed skin, barely able to squeeze her famous voice out through the cords.
Julia would like to say that missing Peaches doesn’t cover it. She misses Peaches as much as she missed her stepson during his fifteen-year absence. She misses Peaches the way you miss good health when you have cancer. She misses her husband, of course she misses him and their twelve years together, but that grief has been softened, sweetened by all the time and life that came after. The wound of Peaches’ death will not heal or close up; at most the edges harden some as the day goes on, and as she opens her mouth now to say nothing at all about her last love, she thinks that even if Lionel is all wrong about what kind of man Peter is, he is fundamentally right. Peter is not worth the effort.
“I do miss Peaches too, of course.”
Lionel has all of Peaches Figueroa’s albums. On the first one, dark blond hair waves around a wide bronze face, one smooth lock half covering a round green eye heavily made-up. Black velvet wraps low across her breasts, and when Lionel was nineteen it was one of the small pleasures of his life to look at the dark amber crescent of her aureole, just visible above the velvet rim, and listen to that golden, spilling voice.
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet her.” Lionel would like to ask his mother what it was like to go from a man to a woman, whether it changed her somehow (which he believes but cannot explain), and how she could go from his father and Peaches Figueroa, both geniuses of a kind, to Peter down the road, who sounds to Lionel like the most fatiguing, sorry-assed, ready-for-the-nursing-home, limp-dick loser.
Julia raises an eyebrow and goes into the kitchen.
The men look at each other.
“We could open the wine,” Lionel says. “You liked her, didn’t you?”
“I really liked her,” Buster says. He does not say, She scared the shit out of Jewelle, but she would have liked you, boy. She liked handsome, and she knew we all have that soft spot for talent, especially musical talent, and that we don’t mind, we have even been known to encourage, a certain amount of accompanying attitude. Peaches had been Buster’s favorite diva. “Open the wine up. You let those babies breathe. I’ll get everyone down here.”
“It might be another half-hour for the turkey,” Jewelle says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry, honey.” Buster eats one of Corinne’s peanut-butter-stuffed celery sticks.
“Charades?” Julia says, putting out a small bowl of nuts and a larger one of black and green olives. Charades was their great family game, played in airports and hotel lobbies, played with very small gestures while flying to Denmark every summer for the Copenhagen jazz festival, played on Amtrak and in the occasional stretch limo to Newport, and played expertly by Lionel and Buster whenever the occasion has arisen since. Corinne and Jordan don’t know what Charades is, but Grandma Julia has already taken them back to the kitchen and distributed two salad bowls, six pencils, and a pile of scrap paper. Corinne will act out The Cat in the Hat, and Jordan will do his favorite song, “Welcome to Miami.” Corinne practices making the hat shape and stepping into it while Jordan pulls off his bow tie and slides on his knees across the kitchen floor, wild and shiny and fly like Will Smith. They are naturals, Julia thinks, and thinks further that it is a ridiculous thing to be pleased about—who knows what kind of people they will grow up to be?—but she cannot help believing that their mostly good genes and their ability to play Charades are as reasonable an assurance of future success as anything else.
No one wants to be teamed with Jewelle. She is smart about many things, talented in a dozen ways, and an excellent mother, and both men think she looks terrific with the low cups of her turquoise lace bra ducking in and out of view, but she’s no good at Charades. She goes blank after the first syllable and stamps her foot and blinks back tears until her time is up. She never gets the hard ones, and even with the easiest title she guesses blindly without listening to what she’s said. Jewelle is famous for “Exobus” and “Casabroomca.”
I can’t put husband and wife together, Julia thinks, feeling the tug of dinner party rules she has ignored for twenty years. “Girls against boys, everybody?”
Jewelle claims the couch for the three girls, and Buster and Lionel look at each other. It is one of the things they like best about their mother; she would rather be kind than win. They slap hands. Unless Corinne is very, very good in a way that is not normal for a three-year-old, they will wipe the floor with the girl team.
Jewelle is delighted. Julia is an excellent guesser and a patient performer.
Lionel says, “Rules, everybody.” No one expects the children to do anything except act out their charades and yell out meaningless guesses. The recitation of rules is for Jewelle. “No talking while acting. Not even whispering. No foreign languages—”
“Not even French,” Jewelle says. Lionel is annoying in English; he is obnoxious in French.
“Not even French. No props. No mouthing. Kids, look.” He shows them the signs for book and television and movie and musical, for little words, for “sounds like.”
Jordan says, “Where’s Ari?”
They all look around the room. Jewelle sighs. “Jordy go get him. He’s probably still in Uncle Lionel’s room. When did you see him last, Lionel?” she says.
Jordan runs up the stairs.
“I didn’t lose him, Jewelle. He’s probably just resting. It was a long trip.”
Ari comes down in crumpled khakis and a brown sweater. Terrible colors for him, Jewelle and Julia think.
In French, Lionel says, “Good boy. You look ready for dinner. Come sit by me and I’ll show you how to play this game.”
Ari sits on the floor in front of Lionel. He doesn’t expect that the game will be explained to him; it will be in very fast English, it will make them all laugh with each other, and his stepfather, who is already winking at stupid baby Corinne, will go on laughing and joking, in English.
The children perform their charades, and the adults are almost embarrassed to be so pleased. As Julia stands up to do Love’s Labour’s Lost, Jewelle says, “Let me just run into the kitchen.”
Lionel says, “Go ahead, Ma. You’re no worse off with Corinne,” and Buster laughs and looks at the floor. He loves Jewelle, but there is something about this particular disability that seems so harmlessly funny; if she were fat, or a bad dancer, or not very bright, he would not laugh, ever.
As Julia is very slowly helping Corinne guess that it’s three words, Jewelle walks into the living room, struggling with the large turkey still sizzling on the wide silver platter.
“It’s that time,” she says.
Buster says, “I’ll carve,” and Jewelle, who heard him laugh, says, “No, Lionel’s neater, let him do it.”
They never finish the charades game. Corinne and Jordan and Ari collapse on the floor after dinner, socks and shoes scattered, one of Corinne’s bronze roses askew, the other in Ari’s sneaker. Ari and Jordan have dismantled the couch. Jewelle and Buster gather the three of them, wash their faces, drop them into pajamas, and put them to bed. They kiss their beautiful, damp children, who smell of soap and cornbread and lemon meringue, and they kiss Ari, who smells just like his cousins.