Family Affair (25 page)

• • •

It’s Thanksgiving week, and UCCC has had more losses than I expected this year. I blame myself. We’re way out of any conference title contention. I haven’t been all there, giving it my usual two hundred percent, and I feel I’m doing the team a disservice. I tell
Coach Wells I’m thinking about quitting, because he and the guys need a better effort even for the last few weeks of the season.

“Son, I know you’ve been going through some things,” Coach Wells says. “But you gotta remember: Never get too high with the highs or too low with the lows.”

“I know,” I say.

“That goes for everything. Just take it one play at a time.”

“I just feel bad. I hope my lack of focus hasn’t caused—”

“Nonsense,” he interrupts. “You haven’t caused anything. And even if you did—you know we’re a family. We don’t kick anyone out for a few stumbles. You’ve got to do a lot more than that to lose privileges here. But we’re your
second
family. You go take care of your real family. Go stuff yourself with turkey. Next season we’ll start over, and in January we’ll hit the road again, see if we can’t drum up some new recruits. And I don’t mean drum majors.”

I truly love that man.

Still, the recent dip in the Condors’ performance reminds me that I should focus myself, too. I really need to look into getting one of those things I’ve heard about called “a life.” Knowing that they don’t just happen upon you between trips to the refrigerator to see if something that wasn’t there twenty minutes ago (like a pastrami-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich) has magically appeared (it hasn’t). Monday I decide to finally get the proverbial ball rolling on Wonder Armour. I make a few calls and talk to one of my players, whose dad has a clothing business. He tells me the best place in downtown L. A. to get clothing samples made, and makes me swear on the success of the Cowboys never to tell anyone else.

The following day I make an appointment, and hours later I’m driving down an alley, past a faded billboard with an impossibly long and lean blond woman lying sideways, touting some sort of brandy I don’t recognize: “So Smooth You Won’t Know It’s Gone … Until It’s Too Late.” Recipient of
Advertising Age’s
1987 Double Entendre of the Year Award, I guess.

I pull up to a windowless gray door at what appears to be a large abandoned warehouse in the middle of a nondescript L.A. commercial district. It’s the right address: “The number is twenty-seventeen, but the two is missing,” the fast-talking proprietress said on the phone in an almost impenetrable Chinese accent, and sure enough, there’s no two. And there is a button, which I press, which summons someone inside.

“Who there?” comes a voice across the intercom.

“Brett Foster, about the … having samples made?”

There’s a very long pause. I’m not sure my explanation has proved convincing, and I’ll need to slump down on the doorstep and cry, Dorothy-like, before they’ll let me in. But then the door opens and I’m being given the once-over by Katie Hu, the owner of this fine establishment. Katie’s about four-eleven, with the voice of a screech owl and bright blue eye shadow to match. Her hair is tied in a ponytail, and she purses her lips and pushes out her nose, making her face seem a little like it’s pointing accusingly at me. But most remarkable is her body—not the shape of it, which is fairly typical, but the way it’s encased from head to toe in a single sleeve of brilliantly neon-green fabric, so that she looks a little like an irradiated pea pod.

“Like it?” she asks, smiling slyly.

My cover is blown, I’m thinking, but no, I’ve made a very strong effort not to stare at the lime bodysuit. Instead, I think she simply starts all conversations with strangers like me by using a reference to her attire.

“Lycra,” she says proudly, pinching it away from her body to demonstrate its springiness as I follow her to a freight elevator. “I design it all myself.”

The gate slams down and we’re slowly rising toward a deafening din, a chorus of industrial sewing machines presided over by a sea of seamstresses.

“I could never have made it as a designer,” she says, a smile tossed away like junk mail.

“That goes without saying,” I reply. Then, catching her glare, I immediately throw out, “Well, it’s such a cutthroat,
artificial
business. It’s so refreshing that someone of your talents would actually choose to apply herself
this
way, as opposed to the mere popularity contest of the fashion business.” I don’t know what I’m saying.

“Exactly,” she says, and she leans in closer, squinting at me a bit. “But if I ever see these designs anywhere, I’ll know who stole my idea.”

“For a while there I thought about going pro as a seamstress, but I blew out a thumb while thumb-wrestling,” I say, attempting humor. The joke disappears into the cultural chasm between us, never to be heard from again.

I go on, trying to put her at ease. “Don’t you worry. My dream is to bring my value-priced, lightweight, breathable underapparel to the sports-loving masses.”

She stares back blankly, apparently having heard a lot of half-baked dreams in her day.

She walks quickly through the maze of the production floor, which is amazingly clean but smells of burned toast for some reason. Maybe it’s the blizzard of sheer effort. Her Lycra hisses with each step, and she motions for me to follow.

“They call this place Little Shanghai,” she says, waving an arm overhead, indicating who knows how much real estate. “Work fast, not so much money. Like China. But not as many people. Good here for the prototype, not so good for the big volume.”

“Too small,” I say, but she shakes her head without looking at me.

“Too expensive. I pay in one hour what they pay in one week. Even Shanghai is getting too expensive for manufacturing. Too many iPod and Mercedes. But Shanghai is easy to pronounce, so we stay Little Shanghai.”

We reach her office, which is a forest of fabric, buttons, sample books, and other oddities of the apparel trade.

“I’m famous, you know,” she says.

“I didn’t,” I reply.

“Look at my wall. What do you see?”

I look at the wall and see what looks like a large yet virtually cupless woman’s bra encased in glass. I’m not sure if that is what she’s referring to so proudly.

“That?” I ask.

“Yes!” she exclaims. “I was the designer of the Manziere.”

Unsure of what she’s referring to and not wanting to offend her, I smile politely and nod.

“The Bro?” she asks.
“Seinfeld?
This was real deal. But I get no credit.”

And then it starts to come back to me. She’s talking about the
Seinfeld
episode when George’s father wants to create a bra for men, and he and Kramer invent one but argue over whether to call it the Bro or the Manziere. I’m not sure which won.

“You made that?” I ask.

“Hollywood calls me all the time,” she brags, as if Hollywood is a fat man in a suit, chomping a cigar, pinning its hopes for the next blockbuster on her fertile imagination. I wonder briefly whether he is.

“Then I came to the right place,” I reply, not sure how to move off topic and back to my Wonder Armour. I decide the best way is just to change the subject, which I do. I lay it out, explain my product, show the designs I’ve worked up and the ones I’ve commissioned from the graphic designer I met on Craigslist, and then wait as she sits and fondles her chin for an uncomfortably long time. Finally she responds.

“So,” she says, as she rubs her hands together like she’s trying to start a fire, “if I give you a discount on the prototype, you want to go fifty-fifty with me?” I guess the true mark of a good idea is someone wanting to steal it or join forces.

I politely decline her offer, and we arrange to meet again in a week’s time when she’ll have my prototypes ready, in several
variations. As we walk back through the factory, I have a strong feeling that I’m onto something, and I’m elated. The sun streams in through the high glass windows, and I feel as though it’s shining specifically on me. At last, a dream of mine is on its way toward becoming the real deal.

When I was a little girl, my favorite thing to eat was tuna-noodle casserole. I used to make it with my mom, and I loved putting it together nearly as much as eating the final product. There are more ways to make a tuna casserole than you’d think, and the several variables can make or break the dish. The standard method is to top the thing with bread crumbs. Some people use cornflakes
(blegh)
, but we used crushed Lay’s Classic potato chips, which added a special kick. It was just us two in the house, and the dish was huge—I suppose we
could
have halved the recipe—so there was plenty to save for later.

Whenever we made it, I’d snack on the leftovers for a week. I’d stand at the refrigerator with a fork, pull back the tinfoil, and eat it cold, right out of the casserole dish. My mom would sometimes catch me in the kitchen and I’d think she was going to reprimand me and tell me to get a plate, heat some up, and sit down to eat it, but she’d always grab her own fork, nudge me aside, and take a bite herself.

I say that we made it together, but the truth is that she was the one doing all of the work. She’d cook the noodles and mix the soup in with the tuna and add everything else and stir it and pour
it into the baking dish, and then I’d proudly cover the top of the casserole with the potato chips. My part wasn’t terribly difficult or important, but my mom would act like the art of topping the dish with potato chips was the most critical part of the endeavor. I can’t even hear the words “tuna-noodle casserole” without thinking of my mom, and it always makes me smile. Cooking was love.

Maybe that’s why Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. It was extra-hard the first Thanksgiving after my mom died, but the Fosters were already treating me like a family member, so it was a no-brainer that I’d share the holiday with them. And Ginny—sensing my loss and displacement—somehow knew the exact right thing to do: She asked me to help her with the cooking.

She was making her sweet-potato soufflé, and she had two bags of marshmallows sitting atop the counter. I wasn’t feeling particularly useful up to that point, but then she turned to me and said, “Layla, I always put marshmallows on top of the soufflé. It’s the most important part of the dish. Would you be so kind as to help me out and put the marshmallows on for me?”

Not only did it remind me of making the tuna-noodle casserole with my mom, it made me feel useful, like I was part of something. Ever since that first year, the responsibility of the marshmallow topping always falls on my shoulders, and I proudly and lovingly place each marshmallow in its proper position. She treats it like art, and I feel every bit the artist.

As I’ve grown up with the Foster rituals and advanced my cooking skills from absolute hazard to mere liability—I’m kidding; I’m actually an excellent cook—I also have my own dishes that I’ve added to the feast. Ginny and I now almost equally share the Thanksgiving cooking duties.

Ginny asks me to show up at seven-thirty a.m. to begin prep work for the day, so we can make sure we have the turkey in the
oven by eight a.m. sharp. Ginny says the reason our turkey is always moist and flavorful is that we cook it with love. And by “love,” she means it’s a bigger pain in the ass than a thirsty two-year-old. We take turns basting it every twenty minutes for the seven or eight hours the thing cooks.

“Can I just skip the basting this one time?” I asked her once in the early years.

“Go right ahead, love,” she replied sweetly. “When they ask why the bird is a little drier this year, I’ll just let them know you thought you’d try something different.”

My request never surfaced again.

So, that’s twenty-four times of opening and shutting the oven, ladling meat juices, broth, orange juice, and whatever else we are using over the turkey. Two times slightly cooking my right arm. Three others, I’ll convince myself I’ve seriously roasted my flesh to a fine golden brown.

Having just been through the corn-maze fiasco, I’m concerned about whether Brett is planning to bring back
that girl
, but I put it out of my mind and show up as requested. Brett does surprise me once again—but this time with not a girl but an apron. As I walk into the Foster kitchen, Brett is there already, fully caffeinated, game face on, wearing an apron that says
Is it hot in here or is it just me?
Ginny is nowhere to be found.

“It’s just you,” I’m tempted to say, but instead I force out a pleasant hello, trying to be mature, wishing I could secretly replace his apron with one that says,
Candied yams for brains
.

“Good morning,” he answers. I think about whether I should have said good morning instead of hello and search for his hidden subtext. Why is it such a good morning to him? Did he have an extra-special night last night? Did they go for round two first thing this a.m. so she could send him off with a smile?

Luckily, Ginny materializes and takes the focus off us and onto the task at hand.

“Morning, kids,” she says. I love the fact that she still refers to us as kids. Granted, we do sometimes deserve the description.

“Morning, Mom,” Brett says, and kisses Ginny on the side of her head.

“Morning, Gin,” I say. “What’s the plan of attack?”

“Brett can get the gizzard and do all of that unpleasant stuff while you and I chop the celery and carrots for the stuffing,” she suggests. “Then, once we get the bird in the oven, we’ll split up dishes and see who wants to do what.”

“Sounds great,” Brett says.

“Yeah,” I add. “Peachy.” And I say it so kindly that the sourness is lost on both of them. Well, on Ginny, anyway. “Where did the yams go?” Ginny says, panicked. “The yams?” I ask.

“The sweet potatoes,” she snaps. “For the soufflé.”

“I thought I saw …” I open the refrigerator and see that the soufflé is there—already made, and waiting to be baked in the oven. “It’s done, Ginny. See?”

“Oh, right, right,” she says.

For the next two hours, Brett and I take turns outcooking each other. Let’s be clear that Brett—in all my years as his girlfriend and then wife—has never spent a single Thanksgiving in the kitchen. I don’t think he’s ever even made it to the kitchen by way of clearing a plate. Thanksgiving is and always has been about the football game, so this is way out of character.