noises. I rolled my eyes, feeling queasy.
“Like an anteater!” cried Lucy.
“Lucy, cut it out!” I said. Nifkin woke up and started growling. “Besides, even if it is just sex, that’ll only get you so far.”
“How would you know?” said Lucy.
“Trust me,” I said. “Mom’ll get bored.”
We all sat for a minute, thinking that over.
“It’s like she doesn’t care about us anymore,” Josh blurted.
“She cares,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Before Tanya, my mother had liked to do things with us… when we were all together. She’d visit me in Philadelphia, and Josh in New York. She’d cook when we came home, call us a few times a week, keep busy with her book clubs and lecture groups, her wide circle of friends.
“All she cares about is Tanya,” said Lucy bitterly.
And I didn’t have an argument for that. Sure, she’d still call us… but not as often. She hadn’t visited me in months. Her days (not to mention her nights) seemed full of Tanya – the bike trips they went on, the tea dances they attended, the weekend long Ritual of Healing that Tanya had taken my mother to as a special three-month-anniversary surprise, where they’d burned sage and prayed to the Moon Goddess.
“It won’t last,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “It’s just an infatuation.”
“What if it isn’t?” Lucy demanded. “What if it’s true love?”
“It’s not,” I said again. But inside, I thought that maybe it was. That this was it, and we’d all be stuck, saddled with this horrible, graceless emotional wreck of a creature for the rest of our lives. Or at least the rest of our mother’s life. And after…
“Think of the funeral,” I mused. “God. I can just hear her…” And I dropped my voice to a Tanya rasp. “Your mother would want me to have that,” I growled. “But Tanya,” I said in my own voice, “… that’s my car!”
Josh’s lips twitched upward. Lucy laughed. I did the Tanya-growl again.
“She knew how much it meant to me!”
Now Josh was out-and-out smiling. “Do the poem,” he said.
I shook my head.
“C’mon, Cannie!” begged my sister.
I cleared my throat, and began to recite Philip Larkin. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
“They fill you with the faults they had…” continued Lucy.
“And add some extra, just for you,” said Josh.
“But they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats.”
And we joined in together, the three of us, for the last stanza – the one I couldn’t even bring myself to think of in my present predicament. “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like the coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”
Then, at Lucy’s suggestion, we all got to our feet – Nifkin included – and dropped our knitted items into the fireplace.
“Begone, Tanya!” Lucy intoned.
“Return, heterosexuality!” Josh implored.
“What they said,” I echoed, and watched the pride muffler burn.
Back at home, I parked my bike in the garage, next to Tanya’s little green car with its “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” bumper sticker, hauled the gigantic frozen turkey out of the garage freezer, and set it in the sink to defrost. I took a quick shower and went into the Room Formerly Known as Mine, where I’d been camped out since my arrival. In between short bike rides and long baths and showers, I’d dragged enough blankets out of the linen closet to turn Tanya’s futon into a triple-lined oasis. I had also dug a crate of books out of the basement and was working my way through all the hits of my childhood: Little House on the Prairie, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Narnia chronicles, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I was regressing, I thought bleakly. A few more days and I’d be practically embryonic myself.
I sat at Tanya’s desk and checked my e-mail. Work, work. Old Person, Angry (“Your comments about CBS being the network for viewers who like their food prechewed were disgraceful!”). And a note from Maxi. “It’s 98 degrees here every day,” she wrote. “I’m hot. I’m bored. Tell me about Thanksgiving. What’s the cast?”
I sat down to reply. “Thanksgiving is always a production in our house,” I wrote. “Start off with me, and my mother, and Tanya, and Josh and Lucy. Then there’s my mother’s friends, and their husbands and kids, and whichever lost souls Tanya recruits. My mother makes dried turkey. Not intentionally dried, but because she insists on cooking it on the gas grill, and she hasn’t quite figured out how to cook it long enough so that it’s done, but not so long that it’s not leathery. Mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed potato potatoes. Some kind of green thing. Stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce from a can.” My stomach turned over even as I typed. I had pretty much stopped being nauseous during the last week, but just the thought of turkey jerky, Tanya’s lumpy gravy, and canned cranberry cocktail was enough to make me grab for the saltines I’d packed.
“The food’s not really the point,” I continued. “It’s nice to see people. I’ve known some of them since I was a little girl. And my mom builds a fire, and the house smells like wood smoke, and we all go around the table and name one thing we’re thankful for.”
“What will you say?” Maxi shot back.
I sighed, wriggling my feet in the thick wool socks I’d swiped from Tanya’s L.L. Bean stash, and tugged the afghan I’d lifted from the family room tighter around me. “I’m not feeling especially thankful right now,” I typed back, “but I’ll think of something.”
ELEVEN
Thanksgiving Day dawned crisp and cold and brilliantly sunny. I dragged m yself out of bed, still yawning at ten in the morning, and spent a few hours outside raking leaves with Josh and Lucy while Nifkin kept watch on us, and on the stalking cats, from the porch.
At three that afternoon, I took a shower, blew my hair into some semblance of style, and put on lipstick and mascara, plus the wide-legged black velvet pants and black cashmere sweater I’d packed, hoping that the cumulative effect would be both stylish and slimming. Lucy and I set the table, Josh boiled and peeled shrimp, and Tanya bustled around the kitchen, making more noise than food, and breaking frequently for cigarettes.
At 4:30 the guests started to arrive. My mother’s friend Beth came with her husband and three tall, blond sons, the youngest of whom was sporting a nose ring right through his septum, giving him the look of a baffled Jewish bull. Beth hugged me and started sliding trays of appetizers into the oven while Ben, the pierced one, started discreetly chucking salted nuts at Tanya’s cats. “You look great!” Beth said, like she always says. It wasn’t even close to being true, but I appreciated the sentiment. “I loved your story about Donny and Marie’s new show. When you said how they were singing with LeAnn Rimes and it looked like they wanted to suck the lifeblood out of her… that was so funny!”
“Thanks,” I said. I love Beth. Trust her to remember the “Mormon vampires” line, the one that I’d loved, too, even if it had occasioned half a dozen angry phone calls to my editor, a fistful of furious letters (“Dear Too-Bit reporter” my favorite one began), plus an earnest visit from two nineteen- year-old Brigham Young University students who were visiting Philadelphia and promised to pray for me.
Tanya contributed green beans with the crunchy canned onions on top
