and a can of undiluted Campbell ’s Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in, then galumphed into the family room and built a blazing fire. The house filled with the sweet smell of wood smoke and roasting turkey. Nifkin and Gertrude and Alice arranged a cease-fire and curled blissfully in front of the flames, all in a row. Josh passed around the shrimp he’d prepared. Lucy mixed Manhattans – she’d perfected them during a stint as a bartender that followed the topless dancing escapade but preceded her six weeks doing phone sex.
“You look lousy,” she observed, handing me a drink. Lucy herself looked great, as always. My sister is just fifteen months younger than I am. People tell us we looked like twins when we were little. Nobody says that anymore. Lucy’s thin – she always has been – and she wears her wavy hair short, so that the slightly pointed tips of her ears show when she shakes her head. She’s got full, lush lips and big, brown Betty Boop eyes and she presents herself to the world like the star she thinks she ought to be. It’s been years since I’ve seen her without a full face of makeup, her lips expertly outlined and colored, her eyebrows dramatically plucked, a tiny silver stud flashing and winking from the center of her tongue. She was dressed for the Thanksgiving feast in skintight black leather pants, high-heeled black boots, and a sequined pink sweater set. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot, or stopped in for a quick drink before heading off to someone else’s much more stylish holiday festivities.
“I’m a little stressed out,” I said, yawning, handing the drink back, and wishing there was time for another nap.
My mother bustled around the table with the same placecards she’d used at Passover the year before. I knew there was one that said “Bruce” somewhere in the pile, and I hoped, for my sake, that she’d discarded it rather than crossing his name off and writing in someone else’s as a way to economize.
The last time he’d been here it had been winter. Josh and Lucy and Bruce and I had stood on the porch, sipping the beers that Tanya refused to let us keep in the refrigerator. (“I’m in recovery!” she’d bleat, holding the offending bottles as if they were grenades.) Then we’d gone for a walk around the block. Halfway back, it had started to snow, unexpectedly. And Bruce and I stood, holding hands with our eyes shut and our mouths wide open, feeling the flakes like tiny wet kisses on our cheeks, long after everyone else went inside.
I closed my eyes against the memory.
Lucy stared at me. “Jeez, Cannie. Are you okay?”
I blinked back the tears. “Just tired.”
“Hmmph,” said Lucy. “Well, I’ll just mash a little something special into your potatoes.”
I shrugged, and made sure to avoid the potatoes at dinner. We followed my mother’s Thanksgiving tradition, going around the table and talking about what we were thankful for that year. “I’m thankful for having found so much love,” rasped Tanya, as Lucy and Josh and I winced and my mother took Tanya’s hand.
“I’m thankful for having my wonderful family together,” said my mother. Her eyes were glistening. Tanya kissed her cheek. Josh groaned. Tanya shot him a dirty look.
“I’m thankful…” I had to think for a while. “I’m thankful that Nifkin survived his bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis last summer,” I finally said. At the sound of his name, Nifkin put his paw on my lap and whined beseechingly. I slipped him a piece of turkey skin.
“Cannie!” yelled my mother, “stop feeding that dog!”
“I’m thankful I still have an appetite after hearing about Nifkin’s trouble,” said Ben, who, in addition to the nose ring, was irritating his parents by sporting a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.
“I’m thankful that Cannie didn’t dump Bruce until after my birthday, so that I got those Phish tickets,” said Josh in his deep, deadpan baritone, which went nicely with his six-foot-tall, skin-and-bones frame, and the little goatee he’d grown since I’d seen him last. “Thanks,” he stage- whispered.
“Think nothing of it,” I whispered back.
“And I’m thankful,” concluded Lucy, “that everyone’s here to hear my big news!”
My mother and I exchanged anxious glances. Lucy’s last big exciting news had been a plan – thankfully aborted – to move to Uzbekistan with a guy she’d met at a bar. “He’s a lawyer over there,” she’d said con-fidently, gliding smoothly over the fact that he was a Pizza Hut delivery guy over here. Before that, there’d been the plan for the bagel bakery in Montserrat, where she’d gone to visit a friend in medical school. “Not a bagel to be had down there!” she’d said triumphantly, and got as far as filling out the papers for a small business loan before Montserrat’s long-dormant volcano erupted, the island was evacuated, and Lucy’s bagel dreams died a hot molten death.
“What’s the news?” asked my mother, looking into Lucy’s shining eyes.
“I got an agent!” she trilled. “And he got me a photo shoot!”
“Topless?” asked Josh dryly. Lucy shook her head. “No, no, I’m done with all that. This is legitimate. I’m modeling rubber gloves.”
“Fetish magazine?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.
Lucy’s face fell. “Why doesn’t anyone believe in me?” she demanded. Knowing my family, it was just a matter of time before somebody launched into Lucy’s Catalogue of Failures – from school to relationships to the jobs she’d never kept.
I leaned across the table and took my sister’s hand. She jerked her hand back. “No unnecessary touch!” she said. “What’s with you, anyhow?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We weren’t giving you a chance.” And that’s when I heard the voice. Not God’s voice, unfortunately, but Bruce’s. “Good,” he said. “That was nice.”
I looked around, startled.
“Cannie?” said my mother.
“Thought I heard something,” I said. “Never mind.”
And while Lucy prattled on about her agent, her photo shoot, and what she’d wear, all the while evading my mother’s increasingly pointed questions about whether she was getting paid for this or what, I ate turkey and stuffing and glutinous green bean casserole, and thought about what I’d heard. I thought about how maybe even though I’d never see Bruce again, it might be possible to keep part of him, or of what we were together, if I could be more openhearted, and kind. For all of his lecturing, for every time he was didactic and condescending, I knew that he was basically a kind person, and I… well, I was too, in my private life, but it could be argued that I was making my living by being unkind. But maybe I could change. And maybe he’d like that, and someday like me better… and love me again. Assuming, of course, we ever even saw each other again.
Underneath the table, Nifkin twitched and growled at something chasing through his dream. My eyes were clear, and my head felt cool and ordered. It wasn’t as if all of my problems were gone – as if any of them were gone, really – but for the first time since I’d seen the little plus sign on the EPT stick, it felt like I might be able to see myself safely through them. I had something to hold on to, now, no matter what choice I made – I can be a better person, I thought. A better sister, a better daughter, a better friend.
“Cannie?” said my mother. “Did you say something?”
I didn’t. But at that moment I thought that I felt the faintest flutter in my belly. It might have been all the food, or all of my anxiety, and I knew it was much too early to really feel anything. But it felt like something. Like something waving at me. A tiny little hand, five fingers spread like a starfish, waving through the water. Hello and good-bye.
The last day of my Thanksgiving break, before I was going to make the trek back into town and pick up the pieces of my life where I’d left them, my mother and I went swimming. It was the first time I’d been back to the Jewish Community Center since I’d learned that it was the scene of my mother’s seduction. After that, the steam room had never felt quite the same.
