Like most Americans, I begin to panic about Thanksgiving right about now. Given my druthers, we’d spend it in snowy Lake Tahoe or exquisite San Francisco with my dearest friends or my brother and his partner at a lively table of beautiful people sipping expensive pinot and nibbling on culinary delights.
But, about every four years the bottle spins in our direction and we get Thanksgiving duty. When I was a new bride that meant my late father -in -law would pre-order and bring the holiday home in a box. I took the role of reading the instructions and sticking the half-baked components in the oven. Then, the four of us would assemble in the depressing dining-cum-computer-room and get ready to pass around the foil containers.
But invariably, just around the time when the quarter turkey breast was done, my mother-in-law Jack would decide we needed to call up and invite over the next door neighbor (who was clearly visiting his own family) or that she’d have to go around the block to the Apple Pan to get a pie. These were the days before a person could numb themselves by escaping into their Blackberry, so those were long nights.
After my father-in-law died and Jack lived alone in this house, the situation became even more drear. With just three of us to feed, Jack agreed to allow me to prepare a traditional dinner--to take it off her plate. At my in-laws house one could never count on finding a wooden spoon or decent knife or even the oven working, so I actually cooked the turkey in my home in northern California and drove to Los Angeles with it, along with all the other dishes that normal people eat on this special day.
When we arrived on Turkey Day hoping to get everything into the oven and on the table, we were greeted by the bustle of Sandy in the kitchen. With sweat pouring down her face, she proudly proclaimed that “Ms Adams” (what Jack insists all the help call her even though that is not her name) had hired her and that she spent the entire morning preparing three enormous vats of spaghetti and swedish meatballs and four baking sheet sized peach cobblers for our dinner. I was dumbfounded by the amount of food that covered every surface and would not be consumed. And, I was disheartened by the redundancy of the dinner that had travelled four hundred miles.
This was still before the advent of smartphones so I can only imagine that I retreated into glasses of wine. So, that’s why I didn’t exactly hear how Jack came around to the idea that afternoon of inviting over a “very nice couple.” I vaguely recall Jack saying they had some association to UCLA, and I was thinking how much worse can this day be. And wouldn’t you know it, they had no other plans and would be around in about an hour.
One look at the young woman with her unkempt bohemian clothing and her stringy hair gave me pause. She and the equally peculiar young man, who was a new arrival to this country declined a glass of wine in favor of water as we got ready to serve dinner. Psst, into the kitchen I motioned to my husband. I was getting a strong non-meat eating vibe here. So, as Jack entertained the couple, husband and I frantically worked the meatballs out of the spaghetti.
When we began dinner, I held my breath as Ms. Bohemia announced that she was vegan and she eschewed everything else in favor of the denuded spaghetti. The woman was very engaged in telling us about her graduate studies and her childhood on a small island in the Northwest even as we watched her pulling out minute particles of meat out of Sandy’s sauce and setting them politely to the side of her plate. It wasn’t the veganism. I myself like to go vegan every once in awhile. But, they were queer in a freeloading kind of way I just can’t put into words four years later.
My mother-in-law, hard of hearing bobbed her head and smiled at the apparent success of her dinner party, and I held in my grief of spending the holiday with these oddballs. The woman was very self absorbed and chatty, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how they had befriended Jack. So when the woman excused herself I turned to the man and asked. Since English wasn’t his first language, there was a pregnant pause and then he answered “Craiglist.”
This year, my husband’s brother whom I love and my niece are traveling from way up North to join us for the holiday. He informed my husband that he is doing the cooking, but I’ll do my best to run interference. My fear is that Jack, who is currently very angry at Sandy for a transgression committed while we were recently out of the country, will enlist her to prepare dozens of dishes no one wants to eat on Turkey day.
No amount of negotiation can steer that old lady from her crazy plans, so it goes.
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