Chapter 14: Thanksgiving Dinner Part 3

Oil paint is thick and gloopy. It takes ages to dry. If you pile it on thickly enough, it can take weeks to get dry enough so you can handle it without smudging or smearing it. You’re not supposed to put a lacquer coating on an oil painting for at least six months because it’s still drying in all of that time. And even then, it isn’t completely finished – that takes years. Mum told me it’s because the oil doesn’t evaporate like water, it slowly congeals until it gets hard – a bit like fat in a frypan will go solid as it cools.

Scraping half-dried oil paint is not like scraping that acrylic stuff they put on walls. Oil paint rolls and mounds up in front of the scraper like snow in front of a snowplow. Or maybe I should stick with saying that it’s like scraping half-congealed fat from a frying pan. Week-old paint like I was scraping has a skin on the surface that kind of stretches a bit and then rolls up or breaks into segments. Underneath is the softer stuff that mounds and piles up on your scraper.

I didn’t want to be scraping old paint. I wanted to be painting. I had this picture filling my head that was desperately wanting to made real. But I couldn’t paint until the old stuff was gone, so I scraped. Scraping fully absorbed me though. My entire world was focused on making sure the scraper slid evenly across the surface, clearing nicely parallel strips of paint. Then a brief pause to clean the mounds of paint off the scraper and into an old ice cream container and then back to scraping.

I was so absorbed in the process of scraping that I actually forgot that the surface I was cleaning was actually the back of the door. I got forcefully reminded of that fact when the door suddenly opened and smacked right into me – pushing my hand and a scraper loaded with paint into my chest.

I was a bit stunned from being jerked out of what I was doing so suddenly and from being smacked by the door so unexpectedly. Because I was stunned, I could only stand there and stare stupidly at Tara as she yelled into my face about something or other. I think she was asking what I was doing so I used the scraper to point vaguely at the back of the door. She’s been around Mum enough to know what scraping paint looks like. I was surprised she had to ask. And why was she shouting at me?

Waving the scraper around reminded me that it had been knocked into my chest so I looked down. I was expecting to see a big mess on my painting shirt but instead I saw that I was wearing good clothes and I’d put a big smear of paint on one of my favorite tops. That reminded me that it was Thanksgiving and I cursed myself for changing into good clothes before I was finished mucking around with the paint. My brain felt really sluggish – like my brain was full of thick mud and thoughts were taking a long time to bubble up to the surface.

I dropped the scraper into the ice cream container and picked up one of the old rags I use for cleaning up. I dabbed at the mess of paint on my chest but that only smeared the paint around worse. It was oil paint, too. It was never going to clean off properly. The top was ruined.

Tara was still in my face. I’m not clear about what she was saying but she seemed to be trying to get me to hurry up and my mud-clogged brain wasn’t allowing me to do that.

Tara took the rag out of my hands and roughly cleaned the worst of the paint off my hands. It was about then I remembered that people had already arrived for Thanksgiving and that I was supposed to be out there with them and not in here mucking around with paint. But I couldn’t go out there wearing a top ruined with paint. My hands went to the buttons so I could take it off and put a clean one on. My hands were still a bit greasy from the paint, though, so I had a lot of trouble.

I must have been going too slowly for Tara because she slapped my hands out of the way and held my arms out to the sides until I got the message that I should hold them there and not touch anything. She quickly undid my top and slid it off me. She dropped the ruined top on the floor and dove into my closet to find a clean one. I’m not sure, but I think she grabbed the first thing she saw, which was a turquoise short-sleeved light-weight top that I had gotten last summer.

I reached for it but Tara slapped my hands away again and reminded me that I had paint all over my hands. She threw the top over my shoulder and steered me out of the room. I was about half-way down the hall before I woke up to the fact that I was being pushed down the hall wearing only my bra – on my top half, I mean. I still had my long skirt on. If I hadn’t been so dazed I would have been completely freaked out. As it was I felt really nervous. I crossed my forearms across my chest. That was awkward because I had to bend my hands back at the wrist so that I wouldn’t get paint on my naked shoulders but I did it anyway.

Tara was apparently aware of my half-dressed state – she knows the way I feel about being in revealing clothing in public. Not to mention it being against Dad’s rules about always being properly clothed outside of our bedrooms. She put herself between me and the opening into the living room as she hustled me past. Hopefully nobody saw me. I’d be mortified if anybody did.

Tara forced me into the bathroom and got my hands over the sink by grabbing my wrists and dragging me there. Mum has special soap stuff she uses for cleaning up oil paint and Tara slathered some of that all over my hands. All the time she was muttering to herself about how the entire family always revolved around me and how she was sick of always having to look after me and how she was always expected to clean me up and wipe my nose and wasn’t it about time I grew up and learned how to look after myself and how she wished that just once we could get through a family day without me turning it into a big drama that was all about me and so on and so on.

I don’t think Tara realized that I could hear her muttering away like that but I could. It was a bit upsetting. I don’t really try and mess things up all the time. If I could unplug my brain and put in a perfectly normal brain in its place I would do that in a heartbeat. I would throw my worthless brain in the trash and never miss it for a second.

Tara finally had my hands clean and she started drying them roughly with the towel. By that time I was starting to recover a bit from the confusion. I could’ve taken over but Tara was hustling me around and I didn’t have the energy to confront her about it. So I let her treat me like a plastic action figure – moving when she made me move, holding my position when she stopped moving me. I let her put the top on me. She wasn’t gentle about it but she wasn’t hurting me either so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

That top doesn’t have proper buttons. It has little loops of braid that link together. They can be a bit fiddly to do up. Tara cursed as she realized that and stepped close to me so that she could link them up. She had the tip of her tongue poking out the side of her mouth as she concentrated on doing that. With nothing else to do, I stood there and watched as the tip of her tongue twitched and moved around between her lips. It was kind of cute and funny at the same time.

When she got up to the higher ties I could feel her breath fluttering against the exposed skin at the very top of my chest, just under my neck. Her knuckles kept grazing the swelling flesh of my boob. It made me twitch and I had to stop myself from jumping back out of reach. Mum said it was normal for my breasts to be extra sensitive while they’re growing. It’s annoying. The most casual bump or knock – the sort of thing that can happen at any time – sends the weirdest sensations racing through me. There was nothing sexy about what Tara was doing and there was definitely nothing sexy about the way she was doing it to me. So why was I suddenly having that sexy tingling feeling going all through my body? The tingling washed through my daze like a breath of wind stirring up a mist. I felt like at any minute the mist would get blown away and I’d be able to see normally again. But that didn’t happen. All I got to see was swirling patterns in the mist.

Eventually Tara stepped back and ran her eye up and down me.

“You’ll do,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She gripped me by the shoulders, turned me and pushed me out the door. As I was turning, I got a brief glimpse of myself in the mirror. Tara had left the top three loops undone. I would normally have only left the top one undone. As a result I was showing more skin than I like. On any other girl I would have called it cleavage. I don’t really have any cleavage and even if I did, I wouldn’t be so willing to show it off.

My hands went to my top to finish fastening it. My head bobbed down at the same time so that I could see what I was doing. This happened while Tara was pushing me back towards the living room. The result was me stumbling as I lost my balance.

Tara cursed under her breath and knocked my hands away again.

“Just leave it. You look fine.”

So I was propelled into the living room with my non-cleavage showing and my hands waving in front of me. A part of me wanted to hold my hands up in front of my chest – to hide the gap in my top or maybe hold it closed. Another part of me knew that doing so would look stupid and draw attention to what I was trying to hide, so that part of me was trying to lower my hands down to my sides. The two different parts of me were having a war over the control of my hands. Neither part was winning so my hands continued to hover uselessly in front of me.

Everyone was seated around the long table in the living room. They all turned and watched as Tara steered me into the place reserved for me. There was no chair. A place was set. A plate sat there waiting for me but there was no chair. Now I remembered why I’d gone to my room in the first place. I needed the chair out of my room.

I turned and took a step towards my room. Tara stopped me.

“I’ll get it. If I let you go, it’ll be Christmas before we all get to eat.”

I turned back to the table and stood in my place. Everyone was still staring at me – a ring of faces – all those eyes – all staring at me. My hands flapped helplessly in front of me as first one part of me and then the other part won the unceasing war for control of my body. Everybody was watching me – waiting patiently for me to be seated so they could start eating. But I couldn’t be seated because I didn’t have a chair so we were all stuck. Everything was on hold. Someone had pressed the pause button and we were all frozen in place.

The unblinking stares of my entire family were getting to me. I dropped my chin down onto my chest and let my hair fall down over my face. The bits fighting for control of my hands declared a truce and started discussing an alliance to take over my feet and make them run me out of there. That was sounding like a really good idea. My heart agreed. It was thumping along at a sprint.

It took me a long time to say all that but from when Tara pushed me into the room to the point where I was ready to run back out of it was only a really small amount of time. I don’t know exactly but, like, maybe ten seconds – at the most.

I’d dropped my head to hide my face and was about to start backing out of there when I heard a scraping sound. It was the sound of a chair being moved. An instant later there was more of the same sound and then a whole lot more – and I was catching movement out of the corner of my eye as well.

Feeling curious, I peeped through the curtain of my hair and saw that people were standing up. I think Dad started it and then Dan stood up and then Nana and then Aunt Ally and Aunt Penny and then everyone else. I suddenly didn’t feel so stupid any more because everybody was standing around the table. Instead of being the odd one out, now I was one of a ring of people standing around the table. It made me feel safe. I felt a warm little glow deep inside of me as I realized my family were doing all this so I wouldn’t feel so stupid and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to run away any more. I did want to hug everyone but I wasn’t going to do that either. I stood there and felt – I don’t know. My feelings were really complicated and hard to describe.

Dad hadn’t waited for everyone to finish standing. He’d already carved half the turkey before I came in and now he picked up the carving knife and started carving more slices. At the same time he called out for people to pass their plate if they didn’t already have some. Also both Mum and Nana started encouraging people to serve themselves from the bowls of vegetables and other stuff on the table. There was a crazy bustle of activity as food got dished out and people passed serving bowls back and forth. Everyone was standing and leaning over the table so they could serve themselves or pass plates to each other.

As I said, the turkey was already half carved. I was a bit disappointed to see that because I missed out on seeing it all fully cooked and glistening in its juices. The cooked turkey sitting on the table is kind of symbolic. Do you know what I mean? And I missed it. I can’t complain, I guess, because it’s my own silly fault that I wasn’t in the room to see it.

Leroy turned and looked at me – he was standing right next to me and I hadn’t noticed.

“Do you want me to pass your plate along? Do you want some turkey?”

I hesitated for half a second and then picked up my still empty plate and handed it to him. He gave me a strange little smile as he took my plate and passed it along the line to Dad.

Dad looked up at me and grinned when he realized that he had my plate.

“How much do you want, champ?” he asked as he speared a couple of slices of turkey breast and slid them onto my plate. “Is this enough, or do you want some more?”

I nodded and then I realized that my nod could be taken as meaning yes to either of his two questions so I gestured for him to pass the plate back to me. He grinned at me again and sent my plate back towards me.

Mum couldn’t help herself. She dropped a dollop of mashed potato onto my plate as it went past her. Aunty Ally reached across the table and added a spoonful of green peas and sweet corn kernels mixed together. Even Leroy got into the act by asking me if I wanted some of the stuffing that he was in the process of dishing onto his own plate. At least he had the decency to ask me so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I nodded to him and held up my thumb and forefinger about a half inch apart to tell him only to give me a small amount. He nodded and spooned a little pile of stuffing onto my plate and then handed the plate to me.

I suppose that I should be grateful that my plate didn’t go anywhere near Nana. She would have quite cheerfully loaded the plate six inches high with all the things she considered would be “good” for me. Fortunately for me, Nana gets to sit at the other end of the table from Dad. Sometimes we make jokes about her being the matriarch of the clan and that’s why she gets to sit at the head of the table. I used to think a matriarch was something bad and so I thought Dad was poking fun at Nana by calling her that. Then one time I looked it up in the dictionary and found out it was kind of a good thing to be a matriarch. I think it describes Nana pretty well, actually. She’s the matriarch of our clan and I think she likes it that way.

During all of that, Tara came back into the room and slid my chair in behind me. Then she ducked around to the other side of the table and took her place next to Mira. The twins don’t get to sit next to each other or else they would spend the meal sniping at each other – at least that’s what they used to do. I don’t know if they still would or not because nobody has seated them together at a family meal for years and years. There’s a word for things that keep happening in a certain way for no reason except because that’s the way it’s always been done but I can’t think what the word is.

I put my plate down in its place and looked around to see what else looked tasty. That was a silly thing to say because the table was absolutely loaded with food and it all looked good. Actually I was trying to decide what I was going to have to avoid. If I had a stomach like Dan’s then I would have had a bit of everything. Dan eats as if his legs are hollow and he has to fill them up with food at every meal. Sometimes I envy Dan because he doesn’t ever have to decide what not to eat.

Sam passed the gravy boat to me and gave me a little wink. He was standing on my other side and I was kind of relieved and pleased to see him there. I ladled out some of Nana’s special gravy. No way was I going to miss out on that. Then I passed the gravy boat on to Leroy.

Eventually the bustle died down as everyone got to the point where they had enough food on their plate.

Dad waited until everyone was quiet and then he said, “Since we’re all standing, let’s keep standing for the next bit as well.” Then he nodded at Nana.

We joined hands around the circle and looked at Nana. Once more I got to hold hands with Leroy. Once more I thought about how weirdly shaped his hands are – all long and thin instead of being broad and strong like men’s hands are supposed to be.

“We give thanks for this wonderful food that we have before us,” said Nana in her calm strong voice. “We give thanks that we can be together today as a family united by our love for each other. We give thanks for this country that welcomed us in and gave us a place to live and grow in peace and safety.”

It was pretty much the same speech she made every year but this time it made so much more sense to me. It’s the closest our family ever gets to any sort of prayer and I think originally Dad objected to even saying that much but he got outvoted. I mean, there’s not much point in having Thanksgiving if you don’t give thanks, is there? And Nana always carefully keeps Dad happy by not mentioning who we’re giving thanks to. We just say thanks and put it out there into the universe where it can float around until it finds somewhere to land. Maybe if the thanks lands in the right place it will plant itself and grow into a little thanks-bush with little red fruits and if someone eats the fruit they feel extra thankful. There’s three hundred million people in America. If they all say thanks at once, on the same day, then that’s an awful lot of thanks floating around in the universe. Surely all of that must make the universe feel better about itself. And a happy universe is going to be a better place to live in than a sad universe – that makes sense, doesn’t it?

The last bit of Nana’s speech had a lot more meaning behind it. Now that I knew we’d fled from something or someone dangerous in England, it made a whole lot more sense for Nana to talk about us living safely here in America.

We dropped our hands and everyone sat down. Nobody spoke for quite a few minutes as we all were all too busy eating. I ate slowly. Now I’d actually started eating I found out that I was hungry. That was a surprise. I hadn’t been feeling hungry up until that point. But even though I was hungry, my brain was still operating at the speed of a slug so I had to concentrate very hard just to do the simple things like chewing and swallowing.

The two boys on either side of me were inhaling their food like it would disappear if they didn’t eat it quickly enough. The amount of food that Leroy ate was surprising. He’s so skinny that I figured he must hardly eat at all but he was eating a lot.

After a bit of concentrated eating, conversations started up around the table. It started with comments about how good the food was. I had to agree. The turkey was awesome – it was so juicy and rich that biting into it was like inviting a party into your mouth.

I looked further – up and down the long table. You could see where the different tables were joined because they were at slightly different heights. And everyone was sitting on different sorts of chairs so people were sitting higher or lower depending on what chair they had. Dan was sitting next to Aunty Penny and it made them look as if they’re the same height, even though they aren’t. That made me laugh – inside my head, I mean. And Angie was perched high on a stool so her knees were nearly at the height of the table. She had to lean down to eat. She was sitting next to Mum so that Mum could cut up her food and help her if she had trouble with the cast and everything. I could hear Angie’s voice chattering away at Mum about all the different colored foods on her plate.

I looked down at my own plate and saw that Angie was right. There was color – and more than that, there was color and texture and depth and contrast. I had all the ingredients of art sitting right there on my plate. A small collection of peas looked out of place and desperately wanted to be on the opposite side of the plate for the plate to look balanced. I used my fork to slide one of them across. It left a trail wiped clear of gravy so the rose color of the plate showed through in a clear curving line that swooped across my plate. I captured another pea on my fork and dragged it down, looping out of the gravy and back in. It left a thin double track of gravy on the otherwise clean portion of my plate like uneven train tracks looping around the side of a hill.

“Are you okay?”

Leroy’s voice intruded into my silent shell. I barely glanced at him before I shrugged and went back to sliding peas around on my plate.

“Look! I know what’s going on. You’re giving me the silent treatment. Mira’s done that enough for me to figure it out. I’ve pissed you off somehow. I don’t know what I did but it must have been when we were outside.”

I didn’t have any idea what Leroy was going on about. I looked at him more carefully this time but his face didn’t have any clues. It did have a little smear of gravy down the side of his mouth but I figured that was more of a clue about the way he ate rather than being a clue about what he was saying. I shrugged and trapped a corn kernel with my fork so that I could send it weaving up and down and around the remnants of my mashed potato.

Apparently Leroy couldn’t interpret my shrug because he kept on talking at me.

“First you slam the door in my face, then you hide in your room and now you give me the silent treatment. I don’t know what I did to piss you off like that.”

“Hey, cous,” said Mira from her place across the table, “if the dork is bugging you then punch him in the stomach. That’s what I always do. He’ll soon get the message and leave you alone.”

I was aware of Leroy automatically moving his arms to protect his stomach. I looked up at Mira. Why would she talk about her brother that way? She sounded angry. He was sitting there and talking to me. Why was she being so mean? Usually I’m so good at figuring out why people do the things they do. Why was it so hard for me to figure her out?

Okay! It’s true that Leroy was being a typical guy. Blaming himself for something that wasn’t his fault but completely oblivious when he did do something wrong.

Mira started to twitch and I realized that I had been sitting there and staring at her. I looked back down at my plate and tilted my head to one side – looking at it with my “artist’s eyes.”

“I don’t think Bec’s actually giving you the silent treatment,” said Sam. I could feel him leaning up against me slightly so that he could talk around me to Leroy.

“She’s just not talking right now. She does that sometimes – when she’s upset or freaked out about something or pissed off or feeling arty or a mixture of those. Right now, I think she’s feeling arty.”

“How do you know?” asked Leroy.

“Look at her plate,” said Sam.

They both looked down at my plate. I’d created a kind of floral pattern with the scraps of uneaten turkey and potato at the center of different flowers. Except it wasn’t finished. I panicked about them looking so closely at unfinished work and used a scrap of turkey to frantically wipe back and forth – erasing the pattern and leaving a mess of food scraps in its place.

I think my reaction surprised both Sam and Leroy because they both reared back away from me and my plate. I cut off a little bit of gravy-covered turkey and put it in my mouth. I chewed slowly and kept my head down – looking down at my plate and pretending there was nothing else in the world.

It wasn’t much of a pretense because I was aware of Sam and Leroy exchanging glances on each side of me.

“Let’s leave her alone for a bit,” suggested Sam. He shrugged and reached out to serve himself another slice of sweet potato coated with herbs.

I put my knife and fork down on my plate and sat with my head down. The food scraps called to me – begging to be rearranged more artistically but I ignored them. A plate with more slices of turkey was passed around and both Sam and Leroy helped themselves – passing the plate right around me. I didn’t want any more.

After the two boys had finished topping up their plates the gravy boat ended up right in front of me. The temptation was too great to resist. I ladled a small amount onto the center of my plate and used the back of my fork to smear it around. Then I started again, cutting and arranging the food scraps and making tracks in the gravy. The last time I’d been experimenting and the final pattern emerged from those experiments. This time a complete image sprang into my head before I started and I had to make that image become real on my plate using the materials I had available.

I mostly used my fork to move things around. A few times I drew a single prong of my fork through the gravy to make really thin lines. And I used my finger sometimes to wipe clean little sections of the plate or to draw thicker lines. The good thing about using food was that I could lick my finger clean afterwards. I did cheat a couple of times. I served myself a few extra string beans basted in herb butter. I had to bite the ends off some of them to make them the right length. I also grabbed some shredded carrot for the bright orange color and thin lines – it made a great contrast with the thick hard lines of the dark green beans.

At one point Mum told me to stop playing with my food. I guess she was up the other end of the table and couldn’t really see what I was doing. I was right in the middle of sucking some gravy off my finger when she said that so I looked back at her with my finger in my mouth but I didn’t say anything. Tara smirked at me from across the table. I think she was enjoying seeing Mum tell me off.

“There are children in Africa who are starving,” said Mum.

I don’t know why she always says that. Maybe she saw some mother on TV say it once and she decided it was a good thing to say to kids who weren’t eating their food. Maybe she thinks it will make me feel guilty for not feeling hungry. One time I offered to parcel up my plate and mail it to Africa but I didn’t enjoy the reaction I got so I’ve learnt not to say that. Instead I looked at her and sucked my finger.

One time Mum said that nobody was going to leave the table until I’d eaten everything on my plate. So we sat there and stared at each other – and we sat there and we sat there. That must have been before Angie – or maybe Angie was still only tiny and was already sleeping. Anyway, we sat there for hours. I was being stubborn and Mum was being stubborn and neither of us would back down. When it got to 10 o’clock at night, Dad finally stood up and told us we had school tomorrow so we should go to bed and that he was going to bed too. He took the plate away from me with the half-eaten food on it – all cold and congealed. He dropped the entire plate into the trash and then he walked out of the room. Mum never said that again.

It was Uncle Stan who came to my rescue.

“Let her be, Louise. She’s not hurting anybody.”

Then he laughed and poured some more wine.

“We should be grateful they aren’t throwing food at each other and leave it at that.”

I saw Mira roll her eyes when he said that. It was something that happened when the twins were younger that Uncle Stan never let go of – we’d all heard the story several times. Like I said, there are reasons why the twins don’t get to sit next to each other – just not so many recent reasons. Well, that’s not totally true. They’re still always nasty to each other.

So there was a renewed round of drinks pouring and conversation and I got back to playing with my food. I think some of the adults were talking about teenage girls who starve themselves so they look thin. I think Aunty Janice started that.

At one point, I heard Mum say, “Actually she usually eats pretty well. She has that active teenager’s type of metabolism. She can eat anything and not gain an ounce of weight. I get quite jealous sometimes.”

It was weird hearing Mum defend me like that. Especially since she obviously didn’t always think I ate properly. I think Mum’s chilled a bit since we had that run in. Or maybe I was going through a phase when I didn’t eat so well and now I’m over it. Who knows? It was also weird hearing Mum do that adult thing of talking about us kids like we weren’t even there. Did she think I was suddenly deaf or something? I tried to block out the rest of that conversation. I didn’t want to hear it.