But Enough About Me (21 page)

“You okay?” he said. “You look a little better. You want me to come in?”

I shook my head. “No, that's okay,” I said.

He persisted. “You want me to make you some tea or something? I don't know anything about being on coke but maybe you need to get something in your stomach. Maybe I should make you a sandwich.”

“That's okay,” I said, but I paused. Suddenly I didn't want to be stoic. “Actually, could you please come upstairs?”

Together, we slowly walked up the stairway, then he deposited me gently on my bed. I cleaned all of the blood off of my face and shakily climbed into my pajamas while he bustled in the kitchen. “There's not much in your fridge,” he called. “Don't you ever cook?” I went out every night. I never made anything anymore except cereal for breakfast.

A pause. “Here's some bread. Okay, I can at least make you a grilled cheese.”

I sat at my tiny kitchen table. “I'm really embarrassed,” I said, sniffling. “I don't know what I was thinking. I had been drinking so much that I guess it warped my judgment.”

He found a frying pan and slapped the sandwich onto it. “I understand why you're embarrassed,” he said over his shoulder. “But let me tell you something, I could tell plenty of stories that would make you a lot less embarrassed.” He laughed. “If it makes you feel any better, I've done things that make what you did tonight feel like nothing.” Patrick, a former enthusiastic drinker, had been sober for years. At family gatherings, when my folks
broke out the wine, he always had a Virgin Mary. “I mean, I've been sober for a while now and I'm very proud of that, but I struggle with it,” he said.

He flipped my sandwich over, then ran to get me a blanket. “Put this around you,” he said. “I remember one time, it was around the holiday season, I was working as a sous-chef at the Tudor Hotel on Forty-first Street. The hotel was having their employee Christmas party, but I was supposed to go home because Dinah's friends Sarah and Mark were celebrating their anniversary. Because I was a chef they had been bugging me to make them a meal, so I had promised to make them a gourmet dinner in Hoboken.” He flipped the sandwich onto a plate and pushed it toward me. “So I was going to leave the party because I knew it was a potential disaster,” he said, taking a seat across from me. “But my boss, the chef, talked me into staying for ‘just one drink.' And as any substance abuser will tell you, ‘just one drink' or ‘just one sniff' are the famous last words.”

He shook his head with a bemused smile. “So the bartender was sneaking me straight vodka at this holiday party and I just got hammered. I probably drank easily a pint of vodka—sixteen, seventeen shots.”

I stared at him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I was getting so drunk I was putting out cigarette butts right on the nice new carpet. At which point—I don't remember this, but I was told later that the general manager whispered in my boss's ear, ‘I don't care how much it costs, get him in a cab and get him home.' I don't even know how I got home, don't remember coming home. Don't remember anything.”

He folded his arms. “What I had done was stagger in the front door while Dinah and her two friends were sitting in the living room. I was three hours late and not only was I supposed to cook but I was supposed to buy the food. I didn't even say anything to them because I didn't realize they were there. I stripped down butt naked, in front of them. Because it was French doors. Okay? And French doors have fifty windows. I opened the French door, walked by them to the kitchen, stuck my head under the kitchen faucet and got a drink, walked naked back to the dining room,
gave Dinah a kiss, and said, ‘I'm beat, I'm going to bed.' And then I went to sleep.” He shook his head again. “At which point Mark turned to Sarah and Dinah and said, ‘We need to get him to the gym.'”

He laughed loudly. “What a dick!” he said. “I think that upset me more than anything else.”

Then he looked at my grayish face and his smile faded a little. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Are you going to get sick? Let me help you.” He struggled to pull me up so I could run to the bathroom. “It's okay,” he said as I grabbed onto his arm. “Not a big deal. No, no, don't cry. There we go.”

 

The next day, Dinah phoned me at work. “I heard what happened,” she said carefully. “How are you feeling?” Oddly enough, I felt fine. My vows from the night before
—I will never, ever do this again—
were already beginning to fade, especially after a contrite Trevor showed up at my apartment with bagels and coffee, telling me sorrowfully that he had been walking up and down the streets of Hoboken, looking for me. In the mild light of morning, the whole episode had transformed into our first drama, one that we weathered together.

“I'm okay, thanks to your husband,” I told Dinah.

“Listen,” she said. “Can you just please be careful? I'm worried about you.”

“Don't you worry,” I said firmly.

“I wish I had been there,” she said.

“Really. Honestly. Don't worry.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, I won't lecture.” Dinah didn't push. I still had some residual status as the eldest sibling. “Listen,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about Thanksgiving.” Our family celebrated every single holiday together, including all birthdays. Each one had its own set of traditions. The night before Thanksgiving, for instance, we always went to an old-fashioned Chinese place near my parents' house that was shaped like a giant pagoda and had a Plexiglas bar with goldfish swimming inside. We ate heaping plates of dumplings with peanut sauce and read our fortune cookies aloud.
Christmas Day involved some sort of family craft—one year we made bird-houses, another time we did gingerbread houses that my folks donated to the local senior center.

This year, the thought of Thanksgiving exhausted me. I just wanted to dislodge my family's tentacles. Dinah always called a month in advance to “organize” everything, even though it was the same drill every year. She loved to plan. “So are you coming home Tuesday or Wednesday?” she asked. “Because if you're coming up Wednesday, then we'll come up Wednesday afternoon, but I need to know now because we need to know what room to put the baby in, and if we go to the Chinese restaurant I want to get a table around six, or even five thirty, because Claire has to go to bed early.”

I reached into my drawer for my econosized bottle of aspirin.

“Fine, that's fine,” I said. “But I really wanted to bring Trevor home. I have to talk to the folks. I don't think they're too keen on him. Let me call you back.”

I dialed my mom. “Hi, stranger,” she said.

“Hi, Mom.” I girded myself. “Listen, can I bring Trevor home for Thanksgiving?”

There was a short silence. “Doesn't he have his own family?”

I gulped down three aspirin. “His parents are going to the Bahamas and he doesn't have anywhere to go.”

She sighed. “You know, this is really a time for family. You really haven't been dating him that long.” I felt the first prickle of irritation. Why did I keep bringing these guys home? Why did I bother?

“I thought the idea of Thanksgiving was that you were supposed to be inclusive,” I said. I could feel the peevishness creep into my voice.

“I'd rather you didn't,” she said.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. “Mom, I know you keep hoping I'm going to bring home a Wall Street guy, but it's not going to happen.”

She was quiet. “That's not what I'm hoping. I just feel like what you want isn't necessarily what you need. There is just a kind of disconnect between what you see yourself as and what you actually are. You know?”

I sighed. “You know what, Ma? Maybe I'll stay home this year. I'll actually be on deadline the day before Thanksgiving, anyway.” This was a major family transgression. I had never missed a single holiday, even when I was in college.

Another silence. “Well, do what you have to do,” she said curtly.

I called Heather, hoping that my cubicle mates in the office couldn't hear me. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I'm trying to get out of the house, but Rob won't take his nose out of his new cookbooks.” Rob loved his work as a chef, so much so that he collected cookbooks by the hundreds. “He just got three of them on all these hot new Austrian chefs,” Heather said. “He thinks if he gets them online, I won't know. And then he does what I do when I go clothes shopping—he subtracts fifty bucks from the total when I ask how much he paid. Or he says that the books were on sale when they really weren't. Or that he had a store credit when it actually ran out two years ago.”

“Listen,” I said. “You have to work at the restaurant for Thanksgiving, right?”

“We both do,” she said. “You know how I love holidays. That's the one bad thing about this stinkin' business, but what can you do. But the night before, Rob and I are going to have a nice dinner at home.” Rob always made jokes about Heather's enthusiasms, but I could tell that he secretly enjoyed all of her lavish rituals.

“Well, I'm not going home,” I announced. “They don't want Trevor to come, so I'm not going to, either.”

“Well, don't worry, it could be great,” she said. “Go to the gourmet store and get a nice little Cornish game hen and some mashed sweet potatoes and a pecan pie for two. Get dressed up, light candles, get a bottle of champagne, put on some Nat King Cole, and you can have a romantic dinner. Oh! I know! Go to a card store and get one of those paper turkeys that you open up in the middle of the table. Then you can make a nice Thanksgiving for him since his parents aren't around.”

When I hung up, I felt a little better. I always did exactly what Heather prescribed. The day before Thanksgiving, I bustled around the city while Trevor worked a long shift at the studio, picking up a pie at the Little Pie Company and racing to three different card stores before locating a paper turkey. I never minded the long lines during holidays because everyone was in a good mood, for once. I even got into an impromptu conversation with an ancient man in a bow tie with three hairs combed heroically in an elaborate swirl on his head. He was as leathery and desiccated as King Tut's mummy, but he was a vigorous advocate of corn bread stuffing over plain white bread stuffing.

I came home to a message on my machine from Julie. I hadn't talked to her since she had returned from a vacation in Italy. “I told my mom that when I was on vacation I had an epiphany,” she said. “I saw a woman and thought, ‘She should be wearing a one-piece.' Then I thought, ‘I'm not going to think that way, and when I have a daughter, I'm not going to pass that kind of thinking on to her.' And you know what my mother said? ‘I was in Florida this winter and there were all these fat people walking around in bikinis.' That's what she got out of the conversation. That was her response. As usual, she crystallized my thoughts perfectly. Anyway, you might be in New Jersey but call me if you're around.”

I must call her today. I will, after I've made dinner. Later. Definitely.

“I'll do everything,” I told Trevor when he arose at eleven. “You just relax.”

He smiled bemusedly and picked up a newspaper as I set the table. “I hadn't planned on doing anything,” he said.

I switched on the TV so that I could see the parade.

Trevor put down his paper. “What are you doing?” he asked.

I shrugged. “At home, we always keep the parade on,” I said. “I'll turn the volume down.”

“Can you just mute it, please? Thank you,” he said.

I grabbed the remote. “Sure,” I said. I put the game hen and the sweet potatoes in the oven. Should I make yeast rolls? It was just the two of us.

“Smitty called,” said Trevor. “He wants us to meet up with him after rehearsal.”

I stopped flipping the pages of a cookbook. “What? Tonight? I was thinking we could watch old movies or something.”

He laughed. “Jesus, it's just Thanksgiving. Come on, let's go have fun.” It occurred to me that Trevor was the one who drove the bus in our relationship. When did that happen?

“Okay,” I said.

After an hour, the food was ready. It's not like a game hen takes a long time to cook.

“What's this?” Trevor said, sitting down at the table and pointing at the paper turkey. “Why would you spend money on that?”

I spooned up some sweet potatoes. “Heather thought it would be festive,” I said. Why did I sell her out like that?

I had asked him to dress up. We were both wearing head-to-toe black, as if we were attending a funeral for the game hen. As I picked up my fork, Trevor jumped up. “Almost forgot,” he muttered. He searched his knapsack and brought out a joint. “Want some?” he said with a grin, lighting it up.

“No, thanks.”

“You know me,” he said. “I'm not a big eater. This makes food taste better.” I flashed onto my parents' house. My mother was probably fussing over the elaborate autumn display on their Thanksgiving table. She rotated each one, carefully noting it in the calendar (“Thanksgiving 2000: Indian corn, white ceramic pumpkins, mums in center. Thanksgiving 2001: orange and yellow squash, maple leaves, gold candles”).

The phone rang. It had to be someone in my family. I let the machine pick it up. I was obviously having so much fun that I couldn't possibly answer the phone.

It was Dinah. “Where's the recipe for your yeast rolls?” she asked. “I thought it was in this old
Better Homes and Gardens
cookbook. There's so much flour on it, it's disgusting, it's like papier-mâché.” I could hear her flip the pages. “Hey, where are you? Is anything even open? I know. You're probably
at the parade. Well, I missed you. We didn't do a craft this time because there weren't enough people. You're in for Christmas, right? Please tell me you're in. I'll probably be up until ten. Okay, maybe nine. Call me.”