Billy said, “Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday for more than the fifty first years of my life. Of course I don’t remember my first few feasts, but in the photographs, my dad’s father and my dad’s sister were there at the table with us, grinning bigger than I ever saw them grin, along with Ma’s aunt and her husband, you know: all the old relations who died long ago had gathered round the table, smiling and hungry, all politics aside, driven actually mad by hours of aromas, the men in suits and ties, the ladies in pearls, hair fresh from the beauty shop, the air throughout the whole small house aromatic of old ladies and all their mingling perfumes.”
“Yeah, and those were the good days before football began to encroach upon turkey territory,” added Paula.
“No lie! Yeah,” said Billy. “But I don’t remember exactly when I began to have my own appreciation of Thanksgiving. It happened gradually, from year to year, I’m almost positive, that my love of the glory of turkey, dressing, and gravy had become, actually, important to me, that primarily the food but also the gathering of family – a big group of family gathered round the table with eager anticipation gleaming and dripping from their faces – attained a meaning, though I didn’t even realize the precise year when Turkey Day surpassed Christmas as my favorite holiday.”
“Really? I love that you say that, but I can’t say I’m with you on that one. I won’t list my reasons, right now, for still preferring Christmas, because I wish to discuss the holiness of Turkey Day to me as a yearly occasion on which I feel especially close to Mother when I replicate every one of her recipes. Some dishes had to appear every year, and then there were always a few new trial treats that would appear and stay or disappear, depending on how much we, or really, my dad, approved.”
Billy said, “I know, exactly! One, that staple of the ’60’s going on into the ’70’s: the Jello salad, red....”
“Red, or lime!”
“The lime was too gross! But stuffed with shredded carrots and what? Grapes?”
Paula actually squealed. “Gross! Grapes, or chunks of pineapple out of a can!”
“How could I have made that into my holiest holiday?”
“And always topped, each serving, with a giant glop of mayo.”
“And on a single leaf of lettuce.”
Their synchronous disgust erupted in mutual paroxysms in both, and their tongues shot out, along with guttural honkings and then laughter.
“Who was the first genius to pair cold Jello with iceberg?” Billy wanted to know.
“Moms always hiding vegetables in desserts. But then glopping mayo on top! I mean, that is seriously deranged!”
“And it occurs to us only just now.”
“Bless their hearts. They didn’t know any better,” Paula managed, halfway between laughing and sighing.
Billy, recovered now: “But you were about to talk about your mother’s recipes.”
“Oh, yes! My favorite has always been the dressing. I don’t know how the bird got to be the star of the show. I could eat the whole ten-pound tray by myself! I mean, seriously! Well, not ten pounds, but I could easily shovel down seconds and thirds. I thought Ma a goddess just for her sublime dressing. But then when I grew up, I discovered she just merely followed the directions on the package, which took away absolutely nothing from her mystique.”
Billy squeezed her, replying, “Well, of course not. She had to manage to produce sixteen or twenty perfectly prepared delights at more or less exactly the same time.”
“In spite of any exigencies the day would surely bring: crying babies, having to mop up spills or go get Uncle John from the Greyhound station.”
“Or,” Billy chimed in, “do the old reshuffle of cars in the driveway so Pop could make a beer-and-ciggy run.”
“Haha! How did she manage to pull it all off, year after year?”
“She was a miracle. So was my mom. So are you. So was I, whenever I did it, cooked the big Thanksgiving feast. I used to love cooking on that Thursday, using all Mom’s recipes, just like you.”
“It seemed so wrong not to.”
“Exactly,” Billy agreed. “I did, however, surpass my ma when I learned to add a healthy splash of Guinness late in the cooking to keep the dressing from drying out.”
“Yes, I have noticed you do that, and it does add a good flavor.”
“Thank you, Lovey. And it shows that I have been quaffing from a pint just so as to be able to add that magic touch to your favorite dish. I use jalapeños instead of green bells, too. Sometimes.”
Paula called him an iconoclast of sacred tradition. Then Billy called her the same.
“What do you mean?”
Billy brought up the tiny marshmallows in the sweet taters.
“Oh yes, you’re right! Mama always used the giant ones. It must’ve been before they even made the tiny ones. She would make a casserole with marshmallows and bourbon in the sweet potatoes.”
“Mine did, too. But now I make a stand against wasting perfectly good bourbon in a lousy casserole. Or even in a pecan pie.”
Paula asserted that “These reminiscences and differences of opinion delight me, but do not exactly qualify as a fight, which seems to me to be required on your holiest of holidays. So what will it be?”
“Make love to me at once!”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No. I will not.”
“Yes, for I cannot.”
“This I know.’
“Let us move to a different theater of operations, for I know you feel a nap coming on, just like I do, and though, as for the other, though the flesh is weak, my libido roars on as it has since I was nineteen.”
“So you always tell me,” she sneered gently, taking his hand and leading him to the bedroom, even as he mumbled groggily, “So come on.”
“All right, you win,” she smiled. “I need a long nap after all of today, anyway.”
“Thanksgiving: still my favorite day every year.”
She removed her sweater, kicked off her furry slippers, helped him out of his sweater, both of them asleep before they hit the pillows, aware, though, in gray semi-slumber, of still-pending acts of amour.
After but a short time, she awoke, studied him asleep, liked what she saw, threw a big leg over him to wake him up, grew impatient.
Looked under the blanket and the top sheet, didn’t remember getting naked, wondered how she got completely naked, stopped wishing he’d wake up as she nearly succumbed to a new wave of drowsy but then thought what she had to do and knew with utter happiness there were no dishes to wash, no leftovers to wrap and stash away and so slid from consciousness to dreamstart just as he woke up and asked some kind of question of her.
“Damnit, let me sleep!” she told her dream, but he was caressing the leg she’d given him and recognizing his clothinglessness and rapidly becoming more awake, asking again, “Why do you still love me?”
“I always have.”
“Is that all there is?”
“Of course not. You can’t surprise me with a question like that at a time like this.”
“Fair enough.” He kissed her throat, felt her elbow that stretched over his chest, lifted it, kissed the soft crinkly crook of it.
“Do you want the entire answer?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay. It will take hours for me to formulate the only response that will satisfy you, and hours more to say it out loud, including mistakes and everything.”
“Take your time, then,” Billy said. “I’m going to tell you about you. My love for you, I mean.”
“Don’t tell me what you love, what you feel,” Paula said. “Tell me about the me that has kept you with me for all these years.”
“And when I do, will you tell me the jones? I mean, why you’ve stuck with me all these years?”
“Against every odd,” she promised.
“Precisely, as much as it costs me in pain to say. Do you remember the fight we had once you found out I was still in contact with some bygone girls?”
“No.”
“No? Seriously?”
“What? You were writing to girls.”
“Yes, but it was when we married. I regret, right now, bringing it up. But I remember it as one of our nastiest fights.”
“It rings no bell,” she said. “I don’t remember.”
“Then that is another major thing I love about you.”
“That doesn’t count,” Paula said. “That isn’t flattering to my ego.”
“Yet I still tally it. But here is this: I remember your expert soft kisses. The way the dance of your tongue on mine erased my mind. I remember how quickly you left your man to be with me. That flattered my ego overwhelmingly. But not as much as the softness of your tongue.”
“So you loved my tongue.”
“What it did to me,” he said. “But you’re not listening to me,” he said, and kissed the breast over her heart. “I’m starting at the beginning. I can tell you’re gonna make me list decades of reasons and you’re gonna rehash all the mistakes I made in those decades that make you question why I love you.”
“No. I....”
Billy said, “I have two lovers now. No, more than that. The Paula now and the Paula in my mind’s eye and in my heart and on my heart’s tongue every time I love you. You’ll always be seventeen to me. I hope you still remember the young me who loved you and was still capable of bringing you pleasure.”
She asked, “That was you?”
“Don’t play rough tonight, Paula. I haven’t the strength.”
“I’m sorry, Baby,” she said. “I’m just enjoying how looking back illuminates and changes our two perspectives.”
“Yeah, cool. Me, too,” Billy said.
Another reason he loved her and planned to tell her was that he couldn’t get hard anymore and she knew it but she let him start anyway because he needed to love and they both needed love and she’d mocked him back at the first of his inability and repented, and they recognized they’d have to let age have its way because they wanted to continue to love each other, but they didn’t know then how to carry on, so they kept on with the way they had learned in youth that had served them well in their twenties and thirties before the natural slowdown that preceded the full stop they hadn’t predicted or wanted, when they had to reconsider affection and love.
She hadn’t responded to his last reason why he still loved her, nor had she asked for another, but he offered that, from the start, she’d been easy to talk to, and she still was, and that was more godawfully important than most anything else. They had been comfortable with each other for forty years. Fifty, he realized. Then he thought that this reason sounded weak, so he stopped to let her take over. “Are you sleeping?”
“No,” she answered. “Just listening to you talk. Your voice has never changed.”
“You always liked my voice.”
“It’s sexy.”
“I always talked too much: nonstop. Always wished you talked more. You’re the superior raconteur.”
“Baby.”
“My baby.”
“How much further down the list are my boobs?”
“Say what, now?”
“You used to love my boobs.”
“I still do. I always said so, thinking that would please you, but I’m attracted to the whole being, and the soul.”
“Nice save, except that it’s obvious bullshit.”
“Thank you. Thank you on both clauses. It’s true I love your boobies and your booty.”
She kissed him. “Even though it’s all hideous now.”
“Yes, even though.”
Too tired to hit him, she said, “We never did cook. We never did eat.”
“We talked about it. That’s better.”
“My favorite part about Thanksgiving is postponing it until the next day. Order pizza?”
“Hell, yeah!”
| Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him. |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment