Fiction: "Thanksgiving"

By Dianne Allenberg

This late in November, I forget what it's like to be warm.  There's no sweat, no sticky orange sherbet melting down my arms.  Only a few flies buzz at the screen no one has bothered to take down.  These flies want summer.  They want to come inside, attracted as flies are by warm air and calamity.  I want to tell them, sorry, you live too dangerously, too much adaptation under your wings, but I’m too late.   One of them finds a hole and screws its way through.  Emboldened, it lights on my father's hand, wanting to be someplace.  My father waves it off. 

The sun pushes the moon over the porch into a faded memory of last night.  In the kitchen, which is chilly and badly lit, my little sister dabbles with her bowl of raspberries and milk, her face pocked with tiny seeds.  My brother makes soup out of his oatmeal and pouts for more sugar.  My mother is across the table next to me, wrapped in a thin housecoat with bursting red tulips.  We all know she's been up all night with my father, and now she's polishing brass and silver doohinkeys that come from Kresgee's.

There’s a headless turkey, two mince pies and a bowl with Katie’s two goldfish on the plastic tablecloth.  Through the static of the radio, Arthur Godfrey is playing his ukelele.  I want to go back to my little grass shack....  With his good hand, my father keeps turning the dials, tuning the instrument.  He wants to find out the name of the fish Arthur Godfrey keeps singing about.  Drugged and deliberate, though, he's losing his patience.  The fly comes back, too close to him.  Clearly, no one will make it to Grandmother's house today.

My father reaches for the large bowl of fruit in the center of the table.  Raspberries spill like blood, and broken glass tears across the green and white squares of linoleum.  No one moves except for my father who has his work boots on. My mother wears fuzzy yellow slippers.  My feet are bare, and my brother and sister keep playing with their food.

Next thing, my father turns the radio down and asks me to recite the Gettysburg Address.  Of course, there are any number of reasons why I can't.  My brother can--we all know that.  Sometimes he plays a brilliant game of chess with my father, and he always brings home report cards with A's.  But my brother doesn't say anything now, quiet as the inside of a dead cat's ear. 

My mother picks up a toothpick holder, another dime store trinket, and starts polishing it.  Then she makes some comment about the accident last night, and my sister pokes her finger into the fishbowl.  Like dark lemon slices, the fish rise to the top of the water.  Sit still, eat your raspberries, my father says.  He pushes himself away from the table and stumbles across the squares of linoleum.  When he pulls a beer from the refrigerator, my mother looks across the table and speaks to my sister with her eyes: Mind your father…please.  Then she looks at my father who is getting drunk and keeps repeating things under his breath.

He says to my brother, name the fourth dimension, and he leans forward and rests his hand on the shelf above the stove, restless.  Who's the governor of Massachusetts?  His voice is loud in the tiny kitchen.  His lips are wet with beer.  This is how we learn about the world until we grow up someday, give a quick wave and disappear.  Don't go, somebody will echo behind us.  Please, don't go, but we will anyway. 

The bandages on my father's right hand are beginning to ooze blood.  With his good hand, he takes a plastic bag out of his shirt pocket.  It is the first time any of us has seen it.  Awkwardly, he unties the string, opens the bag and spills the tip of his finger onto the table.  No one can help being rude.  We all stare.  I think it looks like a pencil eraser.  My father picks it up and shoves it in my mother's face.  Then he drops it into the fishbowl and reaches for his beer.  This is your fault, he says and waves his arm. Go fuck yourself.  He forgets about the beer and pulls my mother away from the table and pushes her onto the linoleum squares.  She sits calm and deliberate, like a chess piece that knows its next move.