In a couple days it’s Thanksgiving, that celebration that marks the midway point of the unconscionably long holiday season which begins for many Americans in mid-October with Halloween prep, and is only gratefully extinguished on the first stroke of the New Year, maybe with the pot of water that Ana and I throw out the window.
This year, I’m keeping my head down, mostly pretending the holidays aren’t happening. I don’t like the surge in memories, especially family ones. Both my parents are gone now, and I believe the dead deserve to rest in peace, be remembered with charity. And if we can’t manage that, let’s just forget them and the holidays that resurrect them. For all our sakes. Why rub salt into wounds that fade but don’t heal?
I wish it were different. I really like the idea of giving thanks, and who doesn’t love a feast, particularly of autumn food? But somebody has to make it, somebody has to clean up afterwards. And when I start considering about how that somebody is almost always a woman—usually stressed out of her mind—it takes me straight to thoughts of my mother.
I may have already written about this, how once, in an attempt to avoid the burden of the meal, my father’s parents took us to their country club where my very working class Southern Baptist mother was delighted at the sinful wine glimmering in the perfect crystal, and how the ample tablecloth it sat on was blindingly white— at least until I puked all over it. I can’t remember if I’d had too many Shirley Temple’s, or the flu, but I do recall the horror of seeing my brightly colored guts spread out like a shot deer on a snowy field.
Then there was the year dad’s parents came over to our house. My mother, eager to impress them, woke up at some ungodly hour to put the turkey in the oven, scrub the already sparkling house, prepare the sides, which included green bean casserole with cream of mushroom sauce and those little fried onion bits that come in a can, plus extra sweet, sweet potatoes with little marshmallows. There would have been some kind of dressing also, as well as homemade giblet gravy rich with drippings from the pan, all capped off with two kinds of pie. Her three daughters weren’t allowed to help, for fear we’d make a mess or ruin things. Though I remember being captivated by the scent, and lurking nearby until one of us kids got in her way, and Mom flipped out and screamed her head off with a kind of violence that didn’t inspire thanks at all.
It took me a lifetime to see how much she longed to impress her in-laws. All the work a huge meal involved. The pressure. All the things she believed she had to do if she didn’t want to be considered as white trash. When she exploded all I knew was that my mother was a terrifying menace with a wounding tongue who attacked us for no visible reason. And because she did that a lot, the stories I told about her for years portrayed her as always enraged, unpredictable and cruel. She often was. But that’s not all she was.
Like my father is more than the stories I used to tell about him in which he largely failed to shine. Growing up, he was rarely around, traveled all week. Appeared on Friday night with gifts after his business trips, then like most fathers at the time retreated as soon as possible. I remember charms for a charm bracelet. Once from Wisconsin, stinky blue cheese my mother turned into a salad dressing. He had his own man cave in the basement where he watched football or golf, sipped the gin which he hid in his file cabinet. I found it when I got older and would sneak occasional swallows, though one of my older sisters got blamed (Sorry!). On holidays, he’d only come upstairs to carve the turkey, oblivious to the air crackling with misery, grinning at the sight of the feast.
Pretty soon my sisters learned that when my mom said no, they could go to him, and benevolent as a god, he would say yes to anything. When they were older, my sisters hit him up for cash. Appealed to him to be rescued when they got themselves into jams. My mother said he bought their love. And their relationships often did seem transactional. Because I was too proud, too dykely, too young to even know what I needed or how to ask for it, I got nothing at all.
Instead, I remembered how when I was little and sobbing it was his voice saying, “Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry for.” I remembered, too, that time when I was nearly a teenager and Mom finally asked for a divorce. He was so shocked he went to a racquetball court, hit the ball so hard it broke. Which I know because he made a point of telling me, shoved the ripped thing under my nose. He clearly enjoyed the display of his anger, the harmless violence of it. “Look what she made me do.”
The story I told most happened when I was a teen, and recounted that time he paid to have a tumor removed from his dog, but a few months later when I had a tumor, too, refused to get out his checkbook for me. The whole thing was nearly Southern Gothic, but not quite. Southern Farce, really. Let’s not talk about how he lied about child support—the check was always in the mail.
All these stories were true but not enough. They reduced both of my parents to the worst in them. But controlling the story was all I could do to fight back. Contain them. It was easy. It made me feel good. It also poisoned me, reduced me to a powerless victim. Until one day I decided not to tell the stories any more, even began to forget them. Define myself differently, separately. To shrug. Get on with my life.
Lately, I’ve been trying to remember other things, good things, and tell those stories, too, see what they offer. For instance, I remember my mother would hold me in her lap and read to me every night before bed, sing songs. She loved to walk in the woods, would take us sometimes to a nearby forest where we’d end up with mosquito bites, and sunburned faces. Every spring she’d drag us outside in the yard, “The jonquils are blooming. Look at those blooms!” She took us to museums. I guess I am my mother’s daughter after all.
When I was little I loved to crawl on my father’s round belly and listen to the beating of his heart while he watched TV. He was an amateur photographer, and would let me follow him into the red-lit room and gape in wonder as he slid the white paper into a tray of stinky liquid where an image would gradually emerge. He gave me an old camera once, when I turned up unexpectedly for Christmas. “I think you’ll like this.” And I did. Like I liked the gin in his file cabinet. And think of him sometimes now when I fix a martini. Sometimes I even watch golf on TV. Yes, we are kin.
It’s a good sign—that I have begun to learn generosity. Monsters shrink in front of it. Maybe it’s the best thing that aging has taught me.
Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself…
Virginia Woolf was writing about how men diminish women to feel better about themselves. But for me, it’s a warning as well about telling stories that are too black and white, without pity or charity, context, history, or complexity. It’s radical to refuse to think you’re better than someone else, but also to refuse to think you’re worse, and to recognize love when you see it, even when it’s awkward and messy as can be.
In Other News
That’s it for this time,
xoxo K