Reprinted in the anthology Literal Latté: Highlights from Fifteen Years of a Unique "Mind Stimulating" Literary Magazine, 2009
In the House of Lovers
When I enter the kitchen, my father’s hand is up my mother’s shirt, while she, apparently oblivious, pulls the giblets from the turkey cavity in the sink. Beside them, my sister peels the skins from new potatoes at the table while singing The Twelve Days of Christmas. From the living room, my brother yells for another beer. For a few moments, all I can do is stare, and hope after deep breathing and rubbing the sleep from my eyes like film from a dirty window, that the facts might change, but they do not. When I look again, my brother is still yelling, my sister is still peeling, and my parents are making what looks like whoopee over the raw flesh of an enormous turkey.
I have no idea who these people are.
How do I begin to explain why this particular picture from the entry way on Thanksgiving Day seems like a television special or an exotic foreign film about people whose lives are full of drama and comedy, and not my family. If only distance allows this kind of perception, or distortion, I have clearly been away from home too long because the people gathered here to gorge a single meal as if they might never eat again are not the same people I grew up with. They are like aliens, especially my parents, whose soft, warm, and aging bodies seem newly inhabited by perverts from another planet.
Pervert is a harsh word, I admit, but that is the only one I can come up with as my father fondles my mother beneath her thankfully large t-shirt and sniffs her neck like a dog. From a safe distance, my sister sings the first two days of Christmas over and over to jar the third from her memory.
Three French hens, I mumble, three French hens. It dawns on me that those words are my first, that they give me away.
There she is! my mother yells, smiling behind a turkey leg. My father draws away from her and offers me a coffee mug with a glowing smile that ends at the stray points of black hair behind his ears. I accept and move slowly across the threshold to the one object that is most familiar in this kitchen: the simple black coffee pot that is older than me. With more milk and sugar than coffee, I sip and wait for something magical to kick in.
Three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. My sister looks at me as if she is trying to remember the fourth day.
Four calling birds, I offer, my hands tight around the mug, my lips inches away from the substance that will make this house seem less alien, mother ship, and more farmhouse Americana.
No, I know that. You need to make cranberry sauce. Mom saved that for you. And mashed potatoes.
Thanks, I say, and sit down beside her.
On the floor beneath my sister, on her clothes, on the dog at her feet, on the sliding glass doors that open onto the garden in front of her, there are long strips of red potato skins. She stops singing and peeling long enough to give the dog a slice of raw potato. The dog takes two bites, spits it out onto her sock, and lays down again. He quickly rewards my pats to his head with a body hug that consists of his wrapping his back end around my feet like a stole. Between my parents, my sister, and the dog, I am completely surrounded.
Have they been like this all morning? I ask.
Why do you think I’m singing The Twelve Days of Christmas on Thanksgiving Day?
From a safe distance, we watch my parents as if they might sprout wings or strange limbs used to abduct earthlings. My father is also watching, not us, but my mother, and the look on this face has everything but fear or surprise in it. He has a gleam in his eye as if he is about to tell a dirty joke and is waiting for the right moment. His brows raise as my mother bends down to retrieve pots, spoons, plates, knives, forks, ladles, an egg beater. As is our custom, she cooks as if for a starved army of 200, never mind the five human forms who actually sit at the table. My mother works at a feverish pitch, as if she has Kali arms to create and destroy the world over and over again to her liking and moods. One of her many hands cleans the turkey cavity, another mixes stuffing, one cleans China, another fends off my father’s hands, one pulls out a dozen eggs, another tries to pinch my father’s leg, one lets the dog out, the other lets my father out. The destructive aspects of this Kali mother exist from simply watching her. Her moves are a dizzying dance I avoid fiercely, as if one of those hands might inadvertently plant me on top of a cake or place an apple in my mouth and two white gloves over my hands. Every move or gesture risks destruction.
I told them to get a room, but they ignored me, my sister says. Besides, where else am I going to eat?
My sister is as perplexed as I am about the change in our parents over the years, but much less curious and accepting. The tone of her voice when she refers to my mother, for example, sounds as if she were talking about a best friend who just found the man of her dreams, and dumped my sister in the process. She might also be jealous. My sister is a beautiful woman, with near black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and an alarming intellect full of curiosity and wonder. She is in the prime of her youth, all of 29, with a good paying job as a nurse, wonderful friends, and siblings she might actually choose as her friends if they were perfect strangers instead of family. But for all her beauty and many talents, my sister’s love life, next to my parents’, is like the back of humanity that Kali stands on to remind us of our humility. My sister is not humbled by my parents’ newfound ardor. She seems wounded.
My brother is another story. As the only child not to have moved away, I expected that he would have been indoctrinated into our parents’ behavior at a more leisurely pace. He lives one mile away and sees them regularly, but he too believes his parents are now occupied by aliens. His reward for making the tragic error of visiting the folks without calling first was to discover my mother descending the stairs into the foyer wearing white go-go boots, a Brizzota coat, and nothing else. If you ask me, the least he could have done was to say Hello. Instead, he stared as if expecting the alien to attack or withdraw, but when it blushed, giggled, and then howled at him, he slammed the front door and fled. My brother did not remember seeing the other alien, my father, but he did make it a point to avoid a return visit to that house for a month. On this holiday, I am waiting for a private moment with him to suggest a good therapist. I must admit, however, that because of his conservative streak in anything from clothes to politics, my grand fantasy is that instead of laughing when my brother entered the house during The Incident, as we now refer to it, my mother might have stopped in the foyer, tossed her head back, bared her nipples, and said Coffee, son? We agree on little, my brother and I, except that the current scenario between my parents is indeed new, if not a little strange.
Throughout their marriage, my parents have been traditional in the sense that based on the amount of affection they showed one another in front of their children—or rather, the lack—it would have been a shock to us to learn that they had ever been intimate on more than three occasions, maybe four. I am certain we are not the only children to have thought so.
For the first ten years of their marriage, my parents raised their children in the Roman Catholic tradition of walnut-faced nuns, 12 inch wooden rulers, metallic smelling priests, and Sunday school. Men were providers and the centers around which women baked and had children. My parents were humble, devout, and eager to see at least one of their children devoted to God’s service, until they were forced to work enough days in the week that regular attendance at church grew impossible. Still, cleanliness was, and is, next to godliness. Sex was, and is, for marriage, and somewhere in the Bible, so we grew up believing, even dating was not permitted until long after one could vote.
What is strange is that despite their reserved manners and early religious devotion, my parents changed. Like many couples, during their thirty plus years together, they fought over finances; they worked hard; they argued and shouted; they smiled and celebrated; they argued and refused to speak; they held hands and enjoyed long walks; they threatened divorce and listened to us pray they would divorce; they went to church; they kissed, though sometimes as children do, with their bodies positioned as far apart as possible; they took care of family members, their children, themselves. They worked harder than any couple I know.
They had little choice. We were poor and I mean more than the hike-to-school-in-snow-with-no-snow-boots kind of poor, I mean without indoor plumbing at one point and a kitchen wall made of cardboard at another. My first words in a south side Chicago apartment were O sit, bugs! My mother would enter my room in the middle of the night to find the nipple of my bottle covered in cockroaches, and me apparently quite happy to share, bouncing at the edge of the cradle waiting for her standard nighttime dialogue: Shit, bugs. Over the years, my parent’s hard work was rewarded by a nice home they built with their own hands, minus bugs, three healthy, well adjusted children, and a solid marriage. But in the early years, to arrive at these luxuries, all they ever did, as far as I knew, was work. After years in construction, my mother returned to school to earn a degree in nursing and work in hospice. My father worked night shift at Harvester until they laid him off and then started a business in drywall and taping. They worked night and day and anything resembling vacation or play time, service to self or bodily pleasure, rough housing or sex-capades, was as strange as a steak that had not been chopped, watered, and pressed into a food formerly known as meat.
The change of life began with their recent vacation together. Vacations are new to them for good reason. We have gone on exactly two family vacations, one to Florida and one to Arkansas. On the former trip, I landed in the hospital with an asthma attack from the climate change. My father, brother, and sister came down with the flu. My mother, the iron Superwoman but with smaller breasts and blonde hair, took care of us, shuttling between my hospital bed and the small home we stayed in for free because we had signed up for a sweepstakes on the back of a cereal box. I was nine.
On the second trip, to Arkansas, we borrowed my grandmother’s camper and drove from Chicago through the southern states to stay at a campsite on Bull Shoal’s Lake. On the way, in Georgia, we stopped at an abandoned house to pick the bruised and overripe peaches covering the ground. When a car pulled up with several men and women in dark suits, all carrying steel clipboards, we had filled three grocery sacks with peaches. Our faces and hands were wet and scented from eating and packing. My brother’s blue jeans were darkened where he had crawled through rotten peaches. My sister and I had spots on our pants where we deposited the fruit in our pockets. After carefully but quickly analyzing the situation, my father grabbed two bags and yelled Go! My mother grabbed the third as we dove into the camper and drove off. We laughed all the way to Arkansas, telling and retelling the story from each of our perspectives, but when we arrived at the campsite, our stomachs were cramped from the fruit. We spent the next two days in various bathrooms. I was twelve years old.
More than twenty years later, my parents returned to Bull Shoal’s Lake on the first vacation they have ever taken together that did not include children or a visit to relatives. They are no longer poor, but by their work ethic you would think they were. And as for the trip? I only know that they went skinny dipping because of the strange language of puns and inside jokes they have shared since their return. When my father enters the kitchen for chips and salsa, for example, he sets his beer down and smiles devilishly at my mother. Without altering his gaze, my father asks my mother if she would like a chip dipped in salsa. He says the word dip as if it is his first, slowly, careful to pronounce each letter. She stirs the broccoli with her ninth hand and says that no, she does not want a chip dipped in salsa. My father walks to the patio doors and looks out. The pool is out back, but it has long been covered by a black tarp, the water beneath frozen solid.
Mama, my father groans as if he hurts, don’t you want a dip in the pool? My mother finally turns and looks into her husband’s smiling face. Something registers and they both burst out laughing as if they have just shared a dirty joke, with the good parts exchanged telepathically. My mother turns to the gravy on the counter and stirs with her tenth hand. My father moves toward her, puts his hands under her shirt, and asks for just one dip in the olive bowl. He finds something ticklish as my mother turns to the sink, doubled over with laughter, and struggles to check the turkey. I am quick to take her place at the stove so that my back is to them.
When my brother enters the kitchen, my parents are giggling over a can of creamed corn that one or both of them is trying to open. Because I am least threatening, my brother joins me at the stove. We stare deep into the pot of cranberries and sugar and water, our heads moving down, down until our foreheads are nearly touching. With the giggling piping up randomly behind us, the cranberries become the most interesting things in our lives. As they start to boil, the skins pop and jell. That is when I decide that we are intruders in this house we grew up in, not my parents.
That’s gross, my brother says.
When you’ve been married as long as we have, you can bitch. Until then, keep a lid on it, my mother playfully retorts. My father laughs because she swore. Swearing has also been added to the list of new behavioral traits. I laugh with my father.
That’s not what I meant mom. The cranberries. The popping’s like running over tarantulas or something. It’s gross. My mother smiles at him with her hands on her hips, her head shaking as if he has no clue but she is not going to be the one to tell him. From behind her, my father’s head merges into hers. My brother and I stare back at the round berries boiling and popping, not like tarantulas, I think, but tiny hearts, beautiful and overripe.
If I have learned anything, it is that my parents are not having a mid-life crisis. Their children are. We are having to learn how to cast off the old staid ideas of parenthood and the stern expressions of two persons who were once predictable, but loving workaholics who had probably only dreamed and hoped they would come to the luxury in life of feeling each other up over a stove they bought and paid for in cash, of making barking noises at an oak table they built with their own hands, and of playing dress up in a house they raised and got rid of three children in. They earned this.
Thanksgiving Day and almost everything is ready, except the turkey and mashed potatoes. For the next few hours, my sister and I have nothing to do but wait. My mother sits down at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. She looks out into the garden it has taken her and my father years to build. Who is this woman? Her features are small, her face red and blotched from the lupus that has yet to go internal. Until it does, if it does, she can expect a healthy, long life if she stays out of the sun, which she does not. The blotches on her face remind me of red suns, too painful to look at. I could not bear to lose her this young. It is impossible to think how any of us, especially my father, would survive her. Worse, on this day of feasting, I remember that the only thing my father can cook with any success is toast, oatmeal, and coffee.
She inhales deeply and chews her cheek. She has grown plump over the years, but not fat. A smile comes on her face. I look outside from over the sink to where her eyes are focused. Near the pool, the bird bath has frozen over, but the birds still come for the seeds she has scattered over the ice. Their spots of color stain the frozen surface on what is an otherwise dark and white background. The trees are thin and sparse, even the evergreens. The ground is covered from last week’s snowstorm. The birds flit about the bath and retreat with their seed. My mother smiles at them and then turns to catch me smiling at her.
My mother is calm and able in her body. It is not the same body she had when she married my father, but stronger. The cigarettes are not good, but I know what she would say if I said so. And I know how. She only has to give me a look. The mother look that reminds me that I am the daughter and she is the mother and she, as a nurse, knows exactly what is and is not good for her life, her body, her home, or her husband. She can spit with her eyes if she wants to, but for now, her skin is relaxed and supple, her blonde hair soft and curled around her face. She is in love, and not just with my father. She enjoys her life and her body. That is where real beauty derives, and my mother is a beautiful woman.
She also makes me nervous. After putting her cigarette out, she steps toward me, her eyebrows moving wildly up and down. Which woman is this? The Kali mother with 20 arms bent on destruction and creation, or the soft bellied temptress who likes to dip vegetables under cover of night? One of them is washing her hands. The other one is watching me. One of them giggles in my face.
I’m a mosquito, right? Not this game. Oh no, I am too old for this.
Mom, no. I’m serious. Let me wash these pots.
I’m a mosquito, riiiiight? Her voice raises at the end so that it sounds as if she hiccups the word.
And mosquitoes bite, riiiiight? At that, her expert fingers wind the towel into a long sword that flies out and stings my rear end, first on one side and then the other.
Mom! I yell before cracking up. She chases me around the kitchen table until my father enters the room to see what the fuss is about.
He is the one with dark features and though he is in his mid 60s, what hair is left on his head is black as top soil with only an occasional gray strand. His dark brown eyes are piercing, though starting to cloud over. Because he still climbs ladders and labors daily with his body, his frame is strong and lean, with only a lump at his belly to suggest the beer a day habit. If life consisted of newspapers, nature channels, the garden, and my mother, my father would be perfectly happy. He is quiet, reserved, and speaks little. When he does have something to say, it is meaningful, and often, alarmingly funny. When my parents retell the story of our stealing peaches on vacation, my father listens as my mother exaggerates the number of bags and the looks of the people who caught us. Sometimes they are realtors, sometimes police officers. She describes the day and our faces in infinite detail, down to the strands of hair that fell this or that way on our faces. My father always listens and smiles, waiting his turn. At the right moment, when the laughter dies down, he is the one to whom we turn for the last word. With a taciturn expression, he insists that that event taught us all a very, very important lesson. Then he takes a deep breath and looks at the ground, his lips a thin serious line, his hand balled into a fist, his eyes solemn as he says, You have to keep the car running. My father is a witty and handsome man, but as my mother wrinkles her eyes at him, he too looks a bit on the nervous side.
I’m a mosquito, right? My father stops and looks at her and then me. I shrug as if to say, I have no clue Dad, she’s your wife. She sharpens the long wet blade and threatens to release as my father backs into the wall. Eventually he turns and heads for the stairs, not hurrying, but assuming she will back off. She does not. The towel is never released but I hear my father yelp and back up the stairs, giggling at my mother who is still asking if she is the ever-deadly, ubiquitous mosquito.
My sister rolls her eyes. I try to create a weapon out of a new towel as my mother had, to no avail. You’re only encouraging them, my sister sighs, but I see the corner of her lips curl up into a smile. She sings the first five days of Christmas over and over until she remembers the sixth. A-ha! On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six geese-a laying . . . she is giggling as she puts the pot of potatoes on to boil. An hour later, my brother is yelling yet again for a beer when my parents return.
Well, we’re done with our nap, my mother announces. She yawns and stretches like a cat beside her husband who starts a fresh pot of coffee and moves to help my sister.
Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days, mother, naps? My mother winks at me and yawns again. My father giggles and pours himself a cup of coffee. He leans over my shoulder as I stir the cheese sauce for vegetables.
Don’t worry Dad, we’re leave the turkey carving to you, I promise.
Good, last time you mutilated it.
Thanks, Dad. He scrunches his face and then offers a kiss. I deny it. He steals one anyway from my shoulder. The nap has made him warm and languid. He trails the scent of Old Spice as he walks away, his eyes half closed. It feels like déjà vu when he hands me a cup of coffee.
The affect of the nap on my mother is startling. Another yawn and stretch and she is back at it stirring potato salad, mixing egg yolks for deviled eggs, removing cranberries from the refrigerator, and cleaning dishes.
I’m out of beer, my brother yells again.
Idiot, I whisper under my breath. My sister rolls her eyes and sneezes into her sleeve.
He can get it by his own stupid self, Mother, I smile.
Oh great, is that what you want honey? Both of them in here when we can just barely get around each other? And don’t call your brother stupid. When she gets him a beer, my protests follow her.
Well, I could give you more room, Mom. I don’t want to be the one to hold you back.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, my sister yells. Seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, fiiiiiiiiive goooooollld riiiiings! I add, badump, dump, dump, four calling birds. . . My sister giggles over the melting cheese and starts barking the last three days. I laugh too hard to join her at first. I’ve had enough of the women cooking, the men enjoying the football game and nookie. When I lie and yell that dinner is ready, my brother, as I have predicted, is the first one by my side. I put the egg beater in his hand, Mash the potatoes or else. When he actually does, I turn to join my sister at three French hens.
Arf, arf, arf, arf arf…and when we get to the end, and a meow, meow, and a meow, meow.
You’re not supposed to say ‘and a,’ you’re just supposed to say ‘in a,’ you dope.
I thought Christmas wasn’t for another six weeks, brother dear?
Well, if you’re going to do it anyway, you might as well get it…
Children, oh adult children, my mother croons. Stop it or I’ll beat you with my ladle. None of us takes her seriously, but in the spirit of the holiday, I myself a beer and toast his extensive mashing abilities which, I insist, could prove highly profitable as mashing is an underrated field dominated by women who could use the excellent leadership of my brother. You could manage, I laugh, patting him on the back. He sticks his tongue out, but continues mashing.
My sister screams the eighth day of Christmas again and again, guessing strange things that are not the actual eighth day. Eight rabbits hopping. Eight mommies mounting. Eight brothers mashing. Eight drummers drooling. Eight parents panting. Eight turkeys gobbling.
You’re getting warmer, I laugh.
When everything is ready and the table nearly set, my mother shoos out all but herself and my father. My father starts carving the turkey as my mother lines the dining room table with bowls, dishes, and trays of food I do not remember putting together. We are forced to sit and wait like three year olds incapable of doing anything for ourselves. From the couch, I watch my parents turn from the table, the turkey, the counters, the stove, and hold one other. They face the garden from the window above the sink. Their mouths have not moved and not a line on their face is wrinkled, but I know they are smiling. I can tell by my mother’s look that says everything without her moving her mouth, in the same way I can hear my parents’ in the bathroom and know they are not doing home repairs, and in the same way I do not believe my father who walks around pretending to be all thumbs when it comes to cooking, though he has no trouble navigating four boiling pots and one hot oven door without burning himself just to get his fingers on my mother’s flesh. My parents are as utterly familiar as they are alien. They are mom and dad and lovers who like to play dress-up. They are grown adults and teenagers making eyes at one another over a bowl of cheesy broccoli.
We share a moment of silence at the dinner table that is soon interrupted by my sister. She snaps her fingers in the air and bites down on her lips as if she might explode. My father stops slicing the turkey. My brother moans and swallows from his beer. Eight maids a-milking, baby! She exhales deeply and sinks into her seat, exhausted, clearly enjoying the attention. My brother and she start arguing. He insists it’s eight ladies waiting. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. No, it’s not. Yes, it is… My mother has had enough. She slams a fist on the table, stands up, and belts out Fiiiiive, holding the number until her face, even with her lupus, burns. She breathes and continues gooooolld riiiiings. Her arms move up and out as if she were a flying soprano. Her head tilts back. My father giggles and pinches her rear. We know only because she jerks forward and hits her knee against the table in response to stimuli that none of us can see. I stand up and start barking. My sister meows. My brother covers his ears and sings the words as they should be, down from eight maids a-milking to the partridge in the pear tree. When he finishes, my father claps, my mother bows, we all dive in.
In the House of Lovers
When I enter the kitchen, my father’s hand is up my mother’s shirt, while she, apparently oblivious, pulls the giblets from the turkey cavity in the sink. Beside them, my sister peels the skins from new potatoes at the table while singing The Twelve Days of Christmas. From the living room, my brother yells for another beer. For a few moments, all I can do is stare, and hope after deep breathing and rubbing the sleep from my eyes like film from a dirty window, that the facts might change, but they do not. When I look again, my brother is still yelling, my sister is still peeling, and my parents are making what looks like whoopee over the raw flesh of an enormous turkey.
I have no idea who these people are.
How do I begin to explain why this particular picture from the entry way on Thanksgiving Day seems like a television special or an exotic foreign film about people whose lives are full of drama and comedy, and not my family. If only distance allows this kind of perception, or distortion, I have clearly been away from home too long because the people gathered here to gorge a single meal as if they might never eat again are not the same people I grew up with. They are like aliens, especially my parents, whose soft, warm, and aging bodies seem newly inhabited by perverts from another planet.
Pervert is a harsh word, I admit, but that is the only one I can come up with as my father fondles my mother beneath her thankfully large t-shirt and sniffs her neck like a dog. From a safe distance, my sister sings the first two days of Christmas over and over to jar the third from her memory.
Three French hens, I mumble, three French hens. It dawns on me that those words are my first, that they give me away.
There she is! my mother yells, smiling behind a turkey leg. My father draws away from her and offers me a coffee mug with a glowing smile that ends at the stray points of black hair behind his ears. I accept and move slowly across the threshold to the one object that is most familiar in this kitchen: the simple black coffee pot that is older than me. With more milk and sugar than coffee, I sip and wait for something magical to kick in.
Three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. My sister looks at me as if she is trying to remember the fourth day.
Four calling birds, I offer, my hands tight around the mug, my lips inches away from the substance that will make this house seem less alien, mother ship, and more farmhouse Americana.
No, I know that. You need to make cranberry sauce. Mom saved that for you. And mashed potatoes.
Thanks, I say, and sit down beside her.
On the floor beneath my sister, on her clothes, on the dog at her feet, on the sliding glass doors that open onto the garden in front of her, there are long strips of red potato skins. She stops singing and peeling long enough to give the dog a slice of raw potato. The dog takes two bites, spits it out onto her sock, and lays down again. He quickly rewards my pats to his head with a body hug that consists of his wrapping his back end around my feet like a stole. Between my parents, my sister, and the dog, I am completely surrounded.
Have they been like this all morning? I ask.
Why do you think I’m singing The Twelve Days of Christmas on Thanksgiving Day?
From a safe distance, we watch my parents as if they might sprout wings or strange limbs used to abduct earthlings. My father is also watching, not us, but my mother, and the look on this face has everything but fear or surprise in it. He has a gleam in his eye as if he is about to tell a dirty joke and is waiting for the right moment. His brows raise as my mother bends down to retrieve pots, spoons, plates, knives, forks, ladles, an egg beater. As is our custom, she cooks as if for a starved army of 200, never mind the five human forms who actually sit at the table. My mother works at a feverish pitch, as if she has Kali arms to create and destroy the world over and over again to her liking and moods. One of her many hands cleans the turkey cavity, another mixes stuffing, one cleans China, another fends off my father’s hands, one pulls out a dozen eggs, another tries to pinch my father’s leg, one lets the dog out, the other lets my father out. The destructive aspects of this Kali mother exist from simply watching her. Her moves are a dizzying dance I avoid fiercely, as if one of those hands might inadvertently plant me on top of a cake or place an apple in my mouth and two white gloves over my hands. Every move or gesture risks destruction.
I told them to get a room, but they ignored me, my sister says. Besides, where else am I going to eat?
My sister is as perplexed as I am about the change in our parents over the years, but much less curious and accepting. The tone of her voice when she refers to my mother, for example, sounds as if she were talking about a best friend who just found the man of her dreams, and dumped my sister in the process. She might also be jealous. My sister is a beautiful woman, with near black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and an alarming intellect full of curiosity and wonder. She is in the prime of her youth, all of 29, with a good paying job as a nurse, wonderful friends, and siblings she might actually choose as her friends if they were perfect strangers instead of family. But for all her beauty and many talents, my sister’s love life, next to my parents’, is like the back of humanity that Kali stands on to remind us of our humility. My sister is not humbled by my parents’ newfound ardor. She seems wounded.
My brother is another story. As the only child not to have moved away, I expected that he would have been indoctrinated into our parents’ behavior at a more leisurely pace. He lives one mile away and sees them regularly, but he too believes his parents are now occupied by aliens. His reward for making the tragic error of visiting the folks without calling first was to discover my mother descending the stairs into the foyer wearing white go-go boots, a Brizzota coat, and nothing else. If you ask me, the least he could have done was to say Hello. Instead, he stared as if expecting the alien to attack or withdraw, but when it blushed, giggled, and then howled at him, he slammed the front door and fled. My brother did not remember seeing the other alien, my father, but he did make it a point to avoid a return visit to that house for a month. On this holiday, I am waiting for a private moment with him to suggest a good therapist. I must admit, however, that because of his conservative streak in anything from clothes to politics, my grand fantasy is that instead of laughing when my brother entered the house during The Incident, as we now refer to it, my mother might have stopped in the foyer, tossed her head back, bared her nipples, and said Coffee, son? We agree on little, my brother and I, except that the current scenario between my parents is indeed new, if not a little strange.
Throughout their marriage, my parents have been traditional in the sense that based on the amount of affection they showed one another in front of their children—or rather, the lack—it would have been a shock to us to learn that they had ever been intimate on more than three occasions, maybe four. I am certain we are not the only children to have thought so.
For the first ten years of their marriage, my parents raised their children in the Roman Catholic tradition of walnut-faced nuns, 12 inch wooden rulers, metallic smelling priests, and Sunday school. Men were providers and the centers around which women baked and had children. My parents were humble, devout, and eager to see at least one of their children devoted to God’s service, until they were forced to work enough days in the week that regular attendance at church grew impossible. Still, cleanliness was, and is, next to godliness. Sex was, and is, for marriage, and somewhere in the Bible, so we grew up believing, even dating was not permitted until long after one could vote.
What is strange is that despite their reserved manners and early religious devotion, my parents changed. Like many couples, during their thirty plus years together, they fought over finances; they worked hard; they argued and shouted; they smiled and celebrated; they argued and refused to speak; they held hands and enjoyed long walks; they threatened divorce and listened to us pray they would divorce; they went to church; they kissed, though sometimes as children do, with their bodies positioned as far apart as possible; they took care of family members, their children, themselves. They worked harder than any couple I know.
They had little choice. We were poor and I mean more than the hike-to-school-in-snow-with-no-snow-boots kind of poor, I mean without indoor plumbing at one point and a kitchen wall made of cardboard at another. My first words in a south side Chicago apartment were O sit, bugs! My mother would enter my room in the middle of the night to find the nipple of my bottle covered in cockroaches, and me apparently quite happy to share, bouncing at the edge of the cradle waiting for her standard nighttime dialogue: Shit, bugs. Over the years, my parent’s hard work was rewarded by a nice home they built with their own hands, minus bugs, three healthy, well adjusted children, and a solid marriage. But in the early years, to arrive at these luxuries, all they ever did, as far as I knew, was work. After years in construction, my mother returned to school to earn a degree in nursing and work in hospice. My father worked night shift at Harvester until they laid him off and then started a business in drywall and taping. They worked night and day and anything resembling vacation or play time, service to self or bodily pleasure, rough housing or sex-capades, was as strange as a steak that had not been chopped, watered, and pressed into a food formerly known as meat.
The change of life began with their recent vacation together. Vacations are new to them for good reason. We have gone on exactly two family vacations, one to Florida and one to Arkansas. On the former trip, I landed in the hospital with an asthma attack from the climate change. My father, brother, and sister came down with the flu. My mother, the iron Superwoman but with smaller breasts and blonde hair, took care of us, shuttling between my hospital bed and the small home we stayed in for free because we had signed up for a sweepstakes on the back of a cereal box. I was nine.
On the second trip, to Arkansas, we borrowed my grandmother’s camper and drove from Chicago through the southern states to stay at a campsite on Bull Shoal’s Lake. On the way, in Georgia, we stopped at an abandoned house to pick the bruised and overripe peaches covering the ground. When a car pulled up with several men and women in dark suits, all carrying steel clipboards, we had filled three grocery sacks with peaches. Our faces and hands were wet and scented from eating and packing. My brother’s blue jeans were darkened where he had crawled through rotten peaches. My sister and I had spots on our pants where we deposited the fruit in our pockets. After carefully but quickly analyzing the situation, my father grabbed two bags and yelled Go! My mother grabbed the third as we dove into the camper and drove off. We laughed all the way to Arkansas, telling and retelling the story from each of our perspectives, but when we arrived at the campsite, our stomachs were cramped from the fruit. We spent the next two days in various bathrooms. I was twelve years old.
More than twenty years later, my parents returned to Bull Shoal’s Lake on the first vacation they have ever taken together that did not include children or a visit to relatives. They are no longer poor, but by their work ethic you would think they were. And as for the trip? I only know that they went skinny dipping because of the strange language of puns and inside jokes they have shared since their return. When my father enters the kitchen for chips and salsa, for example, he sets his beer down and smiles devilishly at my mother. Without altering his gaze, my father asks my mother if she would like a chip dipped in salsa. He says the word dip as if it is his first, slowly, careful to pronounce each letter. She stirs the broccoli with her ninth hand and says that no, she does not want a chip dipped in salsa. My father walks to the patio doors and looks out. The pool is out back, but it has long been covered by a black tarp, the water beneath frozen solid.
Mama, my father groans as if he hurts, don’t you want a dip in the pool? My mother finally turns and looks into her husband’s smiling face. Something registers and they both burst out laughing as if they have just shared a dirty joke, with the good parts exchanged telepathically. My mother turns to the gravy on the counter and stirs with her tenth hand. My father moves toward her, puts his hands under her shirt, and asks for just one dip in the olive bowl. He finds something ticklish as my mother turns to the sink, doubled over with laughter, and struggles to check the turkey. I am quick to take her place at the stove so that my back is to them.
When my brother enters the kitchen, my parents are giggling over a can of creamed corn that one or both of them is trying to open. Because I am least threatening, my brother joins me at the stove. We stare deep into the pot of cranberries and sugar and water, our heads moving down, down until our foreheads are nearly touching. With the giggling piping up randomly behind us, the cranberries become the most interesting things in our lives. As they start to boil, the skins pop and jell. That is when I decide that we are intruders in this house we grew up in, not my parents.
That’s gross, my brother says.
When you’ve been married as long as we have, you can bitch. Until then, keep a lid on it, my mother playfully retorts. My father laughs because she swore. Swearing has also been added to the list of new behavioral traits. I laugh with my father.
That’s not what I meant mom. The cranberries. The popping’s like running over tarantulas or something. It’s gross. My mother smiles at him with her hands on her hips, her head shaking as if he has no clue but she is not going to be the one to tell him. From behind her, my father’s head merges into hers. My brother and I stare back at the round berries boiling and popping, not like tarantulas, I think, but tiny hearts, beautiful and overripe.
If I have learned anything, it is that my parents are not having a mid-life crisis. Their children are. We are having to learn how to cast off the old staid ideas of parenthood and the stern expressions of two persons who were once predictable, but loving workaholics who had probably only dreamed and hoped they would come to the luxury in life of feeling each other up over a stove they bought and paid for in cash, of making barking noises at an oak table they built with their own hands, and of playing dress up in a house they raised and got rid of three children in. They earned this.
Thanksgiving Day and almost everything is ready, except the turkey and mashed potatoes. For the next few hours, my sister and I have nothing to do but wait. My mother sits down at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. She looks out into the garden it has taken her and my father years to build. Who is this woman? Her features are small, her face red and blotched from the lupus that has yet to go internal. Until it does, if it does, she can expect a healthy, long life if she stays out of the sun, which she does not. The blotches on her face remind me of red suns, too painful to look at. I could not bear to lose her this young. It is impossible to think how any of us, especially my father, would survive her. Worse, on this day of feasting, I remember that the only thing my father can cook with any success is toast, oatmeal, and coffee.
She inhales deeply and chews her cheek. She has grown plump over the years, but not fat. A smile comes on her face. I look outside from over the sink to where her eyes are focused. Near the pool, the bird bath has frozen over, but the birds still come for the seeds she has scattered over the ice. Their spots of color stain the frozen surface on what is an otherwise dark and white background. The trees are thin and sparse, even the evergreens. The ground is covered from last week’s snowstorm. The birds flit about the bath and retreat with their seed. My mother smiles at them and then turns to catch me smiling at her.
My mother is calm and able in her body. It is not the same body she had when she married my father, but stronger. The cigarettes are not good, but I know what she would say if I said so. And I know how. She only has to give me a look. The mother look that reminds me that I am the daughter and she is the mother and she, as a nurse, knows exactly what is and is not good for her life, her body, her home, or her husband. She can spit with her eyes if she wants to, but for now, her skin is relaxed and supple, her blonde hair soft and curled around her face. She is in love, and not just with my father. She enjoys her life and her body. That is where real beauty derives, and my mother is a beautiful woman.
She also makes me nervous. After putting her cigarette out, she steps toward me, her eyebrows moving wildly up and down. Which woman is this? The Kali mother with 20 arms bent on destruction and creation, or the soft bellied temptress who likes to dip vegetables under cover of night? One of them is washing her hands. The other one is watching me. One of them giggles in my face.
I’m a mosquito, right? Not this game. Oh no, I am too old for this.
Mom, no. I’m serious. Let me wash these pots.
I’m a mosquito, riiiiight? Her voice raises at the end so that it sounds as if she hiccups the word.
And mosquitoes bite, riiiiight? At that, her expert fingers wind the towel into a long sword that flies out and stings my rear end, first on one side and then the other.
Mom! I yell before cracking up. She chases me around the kitchen table until my father enters the room to see what the fuss is about.
He is the one with dark features and though he is in his mid 60s, what hair is left on his head is black as top soil with only an occasional gray strand. His dark brown eyes are piercing, though starting to cloud over. Because he still climbs ladders and labors daily with his body, his frame is strong and lean, with only a lump at his belly to suggest the beer a day habit. If life consisted of newspapers, nature channels, the garden, and my mother, my father would be perfectly happy. He is quiet, reserved, and speaks little. When he does have something to say, it is meaningful, and often, alarmingly funny. When my parents retell the story of our stealing peaches on vacation, my father listens as my mother exaggerates the number of bags and the looks of the people who caught us. Sometimes they are realtors, sometimes police officers. She describes the day and our faces in infinite detail, down to the strands of hair that fell this or that way on our faces. My father always listens and smiles, waiting his turn. At the right moment, when the laughter dies down, he is the one to whom we turn for the last word. With a taciturn expression, he insists that that event taught us all a very, very important lesson. Then he takes a deep breath and looks at the ground, his lips a thin serious line, his hand balled into a fist, his eyes solemn as he says, You have to keep the car running. My father is a witty and handsome man, but as my mother wrinkles her eyes at him, he too looks a bit on the nervous side.
I’m a mosquito, right? My father stops and looks at her and then me. I shrug as if to say, I have no clue Dad, she’s your wife. She sharpens the long wet blade and threatens to release as my father backs into the wall. Eventually he turns and heads for the stairs, not hurrying, but assuming she will back off. She does not. The towel is never released but I hear my father yelp and back up the stairs, giggling at my mother who is still asking if she is the ever-deadly, ubiquitous mosquito.
My sister rolls her eyes. I try to create a weapon out of a new towel as my mother had, to no avail. You’re only encouraging them, my sister sighs, but I see the corner of her lips curl up into a smile. She sings the first five days of Christmas over and over until she remembers the sixth. A-ha! On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six geese-a laying . . . she is giggling as she puts the pot of potatoes on to boil. An hour later, my brother is yelling yet again for a beer when my parents return.
Well, we’re done with our nap, my mother announces. She yawns and stretches like a cat beside her husband who starts a fresh pot of coffee and moves to help my sister.
Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days, mother, naps? My mother winks at me and yawns again. My father giggles and pours himself a cup of coffee. He leans over my shoulder as I stir the cheese sauce for vegetables.
Don’t worry Dad, we’re leave the turkey carving to you, I promise.
Good, last time you mutilated it.
Thanks, Dad. He scrunches his face and then offers a kiss. I deny it. He steals one anyway from my shoulder. The nap has made him warm and languid. He trails the scent of Old Spice as he walks away, his eyes half closed. It feels like déjà vu when he hands me a cup of coffee.
The affect of the nap on my mother is startling. Another yawn and stretch and she is back at it stirring potato salad, mixing egg yolks for deviled eggs, removing cranberries from the refrigerator, and cleaning dishes.
I’m out of beer, my brother yells again.
Idiot, I whisper under my breath. My sister rolls her eyes and sneezes into her sleeve.
He can get it by his own stupid self, Mother, I smile.
Oh great, is that what you want honey? Both of them in here when we can just barely get around each other? And don’t call your brother stupid. When she gets him a beer, my protests follow her.
Well, I could give you more room, Mom. I don’t want to be the one to hold you back.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, my sister yells. Seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, fiiiiiiiiive goooooollld riiiiings! I add, badump, dump, dump, four calling birds. . . My sister giggles over the melting cheese and starts barking the last three days. I laugh too hard to join her at first. I’ve had enough of the women cooking, the men enjoying the football game and nookie. When I lie and yell that dinner is ready, my brother, as I have predicted, is the first one by my side. I put the egg beater in his hand, Mash the potatoes or else. When he actually does, I turn to join my sister at three French hens.
Arf, arf, arf, arf arf…and when we get to the end, and a meow, meow, and a meow, meow.
You’re not supposed to say ‘and a,’ you’re just supposed to say ‘in a,’ you dope.
I thought Christmas wasn’t for another six weeks, brother dear?
Well, if you’re going to do it anyway, you might as well get it…
Children, oh adult children, my mother croons. Stop it or I’ll beat you with my ladle. None of us takes her seriously, but in the spirit of the holiday, I myself a beer and toast his extensive mashing abilities which, I insist, could prove highly profitable as mashing is an underrated field dominated by women who could use the excellent leadership of my brother. You could manage, I laugh, patting him on the back. He sticks his tongue out, but continues mashing.
My sister screams the eighth day of Christmas again and again, guessing strange things that are not the actual eighth day. Eight rabbits hopping. Eight mommies mounting. Eight brothers mashing. Eight drummers drooling. Eight parents panting. Eight turkeys gobbling.
You’re getting warmer, I laugh.
When everything is ready and the table nearly set, my mother shoos out all but herself and my father. My father starts carving the turkey as my mother lines the dining room table with bowls, dishes, and trays of food I do not remember putting together. We are forced to sit and wait like three year olds incapable of doing anything for ourselves. From the couch, I watch my parents turn from the table, the turkey, the counters, the stove, and hold one other. They face the garden from the window above the sink. Their mouths have not moved and not a line on their face is wrinkled, but I know they are smiling. I can tell by my mother’s look that says everything without her moving her mouth, in the same way I can hear my parents’ in the bathroom and know they are not doing home repairs, and in the same way I do not believe my father who walks around pretending to be all thumbs when it comes to cooking, though he has no trouble navigating four boiling pots and one hot oven door without burning himself just to get his fingers on my mother’s flesh. My parents are as utterly familiar as they are alien. They are mom and dad and lovers who like to play dress-up. They are grown adults and teenagers making eyes at one another over a bowl of cheesy broccoli.
We share a moment of silence at the dinner table that is soon interrupted by my sister. She snaps her fingers in the air and bites down on her lips as if she might explode. My father stops slicing the turkey. My brother moans and swallows from his beer. Eight maids a-milking, baby! She exhales deeply and sinks into her seat, exhausted, clearly enjoying the attention. My brother and she start arguing. He insists it’s eight ladies waiting. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. No, it’s not. Yes, it is… My mother has had enough. She slams a fist on the table, stands up, and belts out Fiiiiive, holding the number until her face, even with her lupus, burns. She breathes and continues gooooolld riiiiings. Her arms move up and out as if she were a flying soprano. Her head tilts back. My father giggles and pinches her rear. We know only because she jerks forward and hits her knee against the table in response to stimuli that none of us can see. I stand up and start barking. My sister meows. My brother covers his ears and sings the words as they should be, down from eight maids a-milking to the partridge in the pear tree. When he finishes, my father claps, my mother bows, we all dive in.
