Idioglossia: A Story About Thanksgiving

We had left the list of names on the living room floor. It was an accident, of course; the leaving behind, not the list. It was the first Thanksgiving since my sister, Jennie, had moved to Colorado, and I had not seen her in three months; this was a record for she and I. Our father came across the list, and stood at the bottom of the stairs waving it in his hand.

“Mandy! Do you two need this? Is it some sort of game or something?” he asked. The lined piece of paper, having been ripped from a legal pad was torn at the top, and the inability to find a pen had forced us to use a dull pencil. We couldn’t find a sharpener either. Jennie and I looked at each other with wide eyes, and I lipped the words: “Oh fuck.” I peered around the corner to see my father reading the list.

“Louie? Mandy? What is this?” he asked again.

“It’s a list of names we think we’d like to name our future sons,” explained my sister from my bedroom with her voice just loud enough to echo down the stairs to the first floor.

“Names? That doesn’t make any sense… you guys have John and Chris written several times.”

“Dad, it’s a bizarre mathematical process of how first names sound with middle ones… you can just throw it out,” I yelled. My sister laughed into a pillow and I rolled over onto my back. “Brush my furs and tell me I’m the prettiest.”

“You sho’ be da’ prettiest,” she said still laughing.

“Fine. I’m throwing it out,” he yelled back, “And hurry up – it might be nice if you helped your mother for a change.”

We had immaturely decided to make a list of all the boys we had kissed. Then, because our virginities had been misplaced a few years before that, we starred the names of the ones with whom we had had sex. It wasn’t a contest or a race, but rather we’d been up since 7am and had exhausted several rounds of the card game, Spit. A list of our sexual conquests seemed like the next most entertaining way to spend that morning. By the time our father found the list, we were already upstairs getting dressed for Thanksgiving dinner, and our mother had just lectured us on how to behave upon the arrival of our grandmother, aunt and cousins. It wasn’t that we misbehaved; we were 19 and 20 at the time, we just had this way of ganging up on people, and usually our victims didn’t have the slightest realization as to what we meant with our private lingo and eye glances. Our mini-lecture from Mom was also followed by the fact that we “absolutely would not be fake sleeping on the couch after dinner to get out of quality family time.” Just because we had successfully pulled it off last year, didn’t mean we should think it appropriate behavior again.

It was the first Thanksgiving that our grandfather would not be joining us. His Alzheimer’s had officially taken over his mind, and he had been in the hospital since early spring of that year. Before my sister had moved to Colorado, we went to see him. Due to the high number of dementia patients, we had to be buzzed into the premises, sign-in, and be escorted to his room. It was the first and last time we saw him in the hospital, and also our last living memory of him: slumped over in grey sweatpants and a sweatshirt, the slightest bit of recognition for either one of us long gone. The corners of his mouth were cracked and dry, and having dropped his glasses the week before, he was now wearing make-shift ones that resembled something out of a Jeffrey Dahmer documentary – it was not our Grampy.

Jennie, the stronger of the two of us, stood at my mother’s side and tried to engage our grandfather in conversation, but he had forgotten how to talk, the words were no longer there; he was no longer there. I turned and ran out of the room. I didn’t wait to be escorted, I didn’t sign out, and when I opened the door in a fury to escape the reality that was now my grandfather, a loud alarm went off. I fumbled with the handle, I felt like Rain Man when he burned toast; I wanted to pound on my ears and shake the facts off me, let them slide from my skin and build a puddle I could demolish with one quick jump. Finally a nurse helped me, and I tripped over my own feet down the stairs. I caught myself with the palms of my hands on the crushed rock of the parking lot, and stayed there until I caught my breath. I didn’t cry. Even when he died, I didn’t cry. I don’t know how to cry when people die. Whoever said denial was a bad thing, never understood the importance of self-preservation.

Our grandmother had headed to the hospital that morning before dinner. She had gone to all the effort to make dinner the night before, just so she could bring the only man she ever loved a plate on Thanksgiving. Grampy had stopped eating at that point, and this fact was something we were not allowed to discuss. It was as though we were supposed to pretend the missing part of the equation, our grandfather, was on vacation; and if we were lucky, he’d be back in time for Christmas.

While my sister and I had been busy compiling the list of the boys who had ventured in and out of our lives, our mother had gone to the Honey Baked Ham store in Nashua. Neither my sister nor I ate ham, but our grandmother preferred it, and considering the emotions at stake, her needs took precedence. We never saw the turkey our mother had bought, before it hit the table. Our mother had always been an avid cook, and excellent one, too. She could cook and sew and do all the other motherly things that didn’t come so easy to others; and she was amazing at it. Outside of Halloween, Thanksgiving had always been a favorite, as my mother dedicated the entire day to course after course as we lounged and watched whatever holiday movies happened to be on cable. So when we sat down to eat and still had not seen or even smelled a turkey cooking, we were confused.

“I’m trying something else this year,” our mother said as she finished all the sides that would normally accompany a turkey dinner.

The fancy visitor-only table linens had been set up perfectly, and the China that our mother had saved up to buy piece by piece from Tiffany in her early 20’s was placed around the dining room table with place cards for the mere eight of us. I was put next to my aunt, as usual; and that year I was finally excited to be seated next to the woman who had been asking me if I had a boyfriend since I was 13-years-old. I had been dating Timothy since the spring, and was fairly certain we’d be married within the next year or two. On the other side of me was my cousin Kristen; and across from me, my sister sat in between our grandmother and cousin, Kim. Our parents took the head of each end of the table… a place that my father could never stay in longer than five minutes at a time. He was constantly pushing out his chair to “get something,” although it had been decided among the three of us, that he didn’t really need anything at all, he just feared being sucked into the monotony of family gossip. Sometimes he’d get up from the table two or three times just to get more butter even though there was enough already out. Despite our affection for dairy, we would not be able to consume three sticks of butter between the eight of us… even if we had been forced to sit there for days.

After our mother put the ham in the center of the table, she went back into the kitchen to get the turkey. On an average-sized plate sat a brown thing that wasn’t much bigger than a football.

“What is that?” asked Jennie as she poked the turkey ball with her fork.

“It’s a turkey – it is Thanksgiving…” replied our mother.

“No, it’s not,” said my sister as she got up for a closer look. “Where are the bones? Is it a Spam turkey?”

“Spam turkey?” asked my dad, “Like your mother would ever prepare a Spam turkey.”

“I didn’t prepare it… I bought it at the Honey Baked Ham store. I didn’t see the point in making a big turkey for two girls who refuse to eat ham for a change.”

“The pilgrims didn’t eat ham, Mom!” I said watching my sister push on the turkey with her index finger as if waiting for it to turn around and tell her to stop.

“Jennifer!” snapped my mother, “stop playing with the turkey and sit down.”

“But it’s not a turkey!” said Jennie. She stabbed it with her knife and watched the juices spill out onto the plate. “It’s bleeding! It’s bleeding!”

I stood up and leaned over the fowl to see if it was indeed bleeding. “That’s not blood…” I said.

“Mandy, Louie, sit down and stop being dramatic. Your mother made a fine meal and we’re going to enjoy it!” exclaimed my father.

“I’m not eating it. It’s weird looking,” said my sister. We looked at each other across the table. “You try it first,” she continued.

“No, I’m practically a vegetarian… I don’t eat Spam,” I said.

“Try it,” she said again, gritting her teeth.

“No,” I said, “You do it.”

Then she threw her napkin at me. The linen napkin, light-weight and without the ability to do much damage in the long run, almost took out one of the candles in the process. When I called her a bitch, she threw a popover at me. I ducked and heard the soft eggy roll hit the window behind my head. Before I could respond with my own Thanksgiving weapon of choice or before we could be reprimanded, she threw a ceramic napkin holder and it hit my lower lip perfectly in the center. I started to bleed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I yelled. I was more than willing to leap across the table and strangle her for trying to ruin Thanksgiving, but feared my inability to aim would mean I’d end up taking out my grandmother instead.

“Amanda!” yelled my mother, “language!”

“But she’s hurling shit at me!” I screamed back.

“That’s it!” said my father, as he pushed his way from the table again. “I’m going to get more butter and you two are going to your rooms right now.”

“Are you kidding?” laughed Jennie; “you can’t send us to our rooms… we don’t even technically live here anymore!”

“You’re upsetting your mother and I won’t stand for it! Now out! Out!” He had thrown his napkin on the table and was now pointing to one of the two doorways that led out of the room. I grabbed the popover and marched out of the door, with my sister following right behind me.

Like spoiled children, we pounded our way up the stairs, each step louder than the next. We could hear our mother apologizing and our cousins laughing at our behavior. When we got to my room, we lay in the bed and pulled the covers over our heads, as if to make a mock fort.

“That went well… don’t you think?” Jennie asked.

“It was fine until you threw the fucking napkin ring. Was that really necessary?”

“It’s called acting,” she replied. I threw the blanket off our heads, gave her half the popover and put on the record player. “I guess it’s a good thing we overdosed on appetizers so we won’t totally starve while we’re up here being punished.”

“Oh, they’ll force us to come back down before they leave… we won’t get off that easy,” I said.

We could hear someone coming up the stairs, and feared another verbal lashing from our father, or even worse, being denied turkey sandwiches later that day. Our father stood in the hallway and turned on the light. In his hand, he had yet another stick of butter and the Morton salt container. “Next time, include me, please? We can all fake food poisoning or something,” he said. He looked at his watch, then back up at us. “Only a couple more hours…” he sighed. “Now you two really need to learn to grow up!” he yelled for the sake of the visitors downstairs. He turned off the light, slammed the door, and descended with his butter and salt in hand.

“How could he have possibly known?” asked Jennie.

“I don’t know… most of it was improv! Maybe he’s psychic…”

“Or maybe you really are just like him!”

“I am not,” I said. I was sick of being compared to my father. It had been an ongoing theme since day one.

“Yes, you are!”

“No, I’m not…” I whispered to counteract her yelling; then I pinched her thigh hard enough to leave a bruise.

Before we could get appropriately settled into a game of Scrabble, our mother came upstairs and asked that we rejoin the party. Downstairs, nothing had changed. Everyone was still seated in their designated spots; and our grandmother, the one for whom the ham was supposed to be for, was eating the round turkey ball; she had not touched the ham.

“Mom, do you want me to get you some ham?” asked our mother. There was a silence. Jennie and I exchanged looks over the spiral-cut swine and wondered why everything had become so somber.

“It’s Thanksgiving,” said our grandmother, “You eat turkey on Thanksgiving. I only ate ham because your father preferred it… I don’t even like ham. I’ve never liked ham.” She didn’t seem to be saddened or moved or even aware that she had opened her mouth. She continued to chew as the words sort of rolled off her tongue like a simple truth, like how nine will always precede ten and that’s just how it is.

“Well then,” said my father, “Someone hand your grandmother the mashed potatoes… I’ll go get us more butter.” And with that, he was up and out of his seat again, only to discover that there was no butter left in the refrigerator. Instead, he brought back the gallon of milk, although no one at the table was drinking milk.