Let Us Rejoice And Be Glad

THE WEDNESDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING
   
9:32 p.m.

“Hi, it’s Margaret. From Match.com.” I’m whispering into the phone in my mother’s kitchen, volume and timidity left over from high school, thirty-two years and two husbands ago. I’ve been home three hours, and already I’m looking for a way out.

“I can’t hear you,” a man’s voice says.

I can hear him clear as a bell. “It’s Margaret,” I say, using my stop-traffic voice. “From Match.com.” I sound like I’m calling 911.

“Oh, hi. Say, can I call you back? I’m in the car. I’m with my kids. They’re home for Thanksgiving. Can I call around ten?”

“No,” I say. “Everyone will be asleep. Everyone is practically asleep right now. I’ll call you back another time.”

I hang up feeling rejected by all the inhabitants of the known world.

10:30 p.m.

I stand in the dim light of the kitchen with my mother, eyeing the miniature turkey she bought today. “Just in case everyone is sick tomorrow and we can’t make it to the restaurant for Thanksgiving,” she says.

My mother went to bed at 8:30. Now she’s up again. My two teenage sons have gone to a movie, so it’s Mom and me.

“Do you think this turkey would feed eleven people?” my mother says.

It’s the size of a large pigeon.

There’s noise out front, and my two young nieces burst into the kitchen, followed by my brother Ed, who ducks as he walks into the room, though his height hardly warrants the nod. His wife, Hannah, and their two older boys follow, weighted down with what appears to be all their earthly possessions.

“Sorry we’re late,” Ed says. “The car caught on fire.”

He always has some excuse.

11:15 p.m.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me again. Margaret. From Match.com.”

Hi. It’s me from your geometry class, from church, from college. . . . I was your roommate for four years. Your first wife.

“I know who you are. I’m so happy you called. I thought you said you’d be asleep.”

“I am.”

“Well, I’m glad you called.”

THURSDAY, THANKSGIVING DAY
   
7:23 a.m.

I, who usually start the day one down, am clothed and caffeinated, cloaked, and out the door before any of the family have begun to dream the dreams that ring the borderland of consciousness. I, who stood in the pantry this morning in the peaked light of dawn, just as long ago my father must have stood on chilly mornings, all alone . . . my father, dead these twenty years.

It’s cold outside, in the way that makes a person feel resourceful. It’s spitting rain. I’ve got the whole town to myself, the only person in ten neighborhoods who’s up and out. The Pilgrims won’t be grateful for another seven hours; no nfl tight end’s tendon will tear till hours after that.

I round the corner by Fred Bird’s house. “Red Fred,” we called him, for uninspired reasons. I head down Washington Avenue, and walking toward me is a little boy, third-grader size, with a ceramic mug in one hand and a jar of Coffee-mate in the other. He’s wearing soft-looking flannel pajamas. I can’t make out the pattern, but in the drizzling mist he looks entirely warm and right.

“Morning,” I say. “Where are you off to?”

“I’m going to my grandmother’s house,” he says. “We always have breakfast together on Thanksgiving.” He, who has been alive for only eight Thanksgivings, nine at most; he, who has (I hope) been drinking coffee far fewer years than that . . .

“Could I go with you?” I say.

“Sorry,” he says. “If it wasn’t Thanksgiving —”

“No, no. I just meant could I walk with you there?”

“I can’t think why you couldn’t.” He points out his destination.

“How’s your life?” I say. It’s a question I usually wait to ask people, one I work up to, but his grandmother lives only five houses over. There isn’t time to first ask what grade he’s in and does he like school — a sorry-ass question under the best of circumstances.

“My life is good,” he says. “I have my own room now. They moved my sister to the attic. My fish died, but he was ready to go. I’m going ice fishing with my dad once the pond freezes. And today is Thanksgiving, and I’m going to have coffee with my grandma.”

I stand and watch him go up the walk, but I turn away quickly as he frees one hand, just before he opens the front door.

8:07 a.m.

I walk into my mother’s house to find the whole family buzzing about Brian, the teenage hooligan next door. It seems last night he took a sharp turn on wet leaves — that counterfeit of ice — and smashed into the guardrail, totaling his mother’s car.

11:32 a.m.

My father long lamented that his life had amounted to nothing. I think of this refrain as my two stunning nephews, fruit of the fruit of his loins, sit singing hymns in careful harmony. My absent brother has a son off in seminary and a daughter who’s a hospice nurse. And at the dining-room table two golden girls with braided hair and plastic-sandaled feet are choosing real live ducks and pigs and goats, schoolbooks and inoculations, from the Save the Children catalog, to buy with money they have saved all year.

Let God decide whose life amounts to nothing.

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