The Unfolding, page 17
“Literally the first in America?”
“Literally,” he says. “In 1777 George Washington fought a battle not far from Wilmington, and in December 1787 it became the first of the thirteen states to ratify the US Constitution.”
She laughs. “How much do you love George Washington?”
“As the father of this country, he is as much my father as pater Hitchens.”
Another pause.
“Do you think Mom ever wanted to do something . . . ?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like go back to school?”
“No,” he says, without a pause. “Why would she? Your mother is an exceptionally intelligent woman. If you gave us both IQ tests, I have no doubt that she’d score higher than I would.”
“I wondered if there was something else she wanted to do, some dream that she had or . . .”
“She’s going to be fine,” the Big Guy says.
“Is there anything I can do for her?”
“Nice of you to ask, but I don’t think there’s anything right now.”
“Should I call her?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him. He doesn’t think of them as having that kind of relationship, has no idea whether Charlotte would want that. He realizes that for more than a week the girl has had no idea her mother was in the hospital; it’s all he could do to tell her now, and if it wasn’t for the holiday, he thinks it unlikely he would have said anything. “Well, I don’t quite know how that works—I’m not sure she has a phone of her own, but I could find out for you.”
“I could talk to her and say something encouraging like they did with Bambi.”
“Who is Bambi?”
“The deer, Bambi, from the movie. It’s a way of saying I’m rooting for you.”
“Maybe send a card?” Is there such a thing as a dry-out card? I’m sorry you’re in the bin but here’s hoping you make new friends and stay off the sauce. Staying dry sounds like an advertisement for incontinence pants. Having problems with bladder leakage? He imagines a television commercial that starts with a woman playing tennis, then cuts to a man playing golf before ending with an older, formerly famous actor holding up what looks like a trash bag and saying, “Perfect for keeping an active lifestyle.”
“Is there an address to send the card? Do I write her name and then Betty Ford Center?”
“Just wait,” he says, imagining Charlotte’s name on an envelope with Betty Ford Center written on the line below. “With any luck, she’ll be home soon.” He pauses. “You okay over there, kiddo?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. “Do you think she can shop while she’s there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Christmas is coming and she always does a lot for Christmas.”
“I have no idea,” he says. “But I guess you’d better work up a list and be sure to pass it along to Santa Claus.”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?” Meghan asks.
“Start what.”
“The delusions.”
He laughs. “I guess not.”
“Do you think Mom cares about me?”
“Of course she does.”
“Then why did she do this?”
“I don’t think it’s about you or I.”
“You or me,” she corrects him again.
“I guess that’s what I’m paying the big bucks for, a grammarian.”
“What do you think caused it? Did something happen?”
“Yes, something happened,” he nearly says but catches himself. “You saw it right there in Phoenix, a generation of hard work flushed down the toilet. That’s what it is—it’s not four years, it’s not nothing, it’s an entire generation of men who worked to build this country and now it’s flushed, that’s what happened.”
“Was it something I did?” she asks. “Like did I vote the wrong way, wear the wrong thing, say something I shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t think you should take it personally,” he says.
“But I was in Phoenix, with you and Mom.”
“You’re being too literal. What depressed the hell out of her in Phoenix was seeing how old everyone looked; that hit her worse than the election result. You don’t get another go-round; there is no going back; realizing that was a shock. It had been brewing for years; Phoenix was the tipping point. Your mother has certainly never asked anything of us before; she’s not interrupted our lives in any way.”
There’s a long silence.
“Maybe she’s going through something you don’t know about; maybe it’s not that people looked old but maybe she feels like she wasted her life, that it was all for nothing?” Meghan suggests. Another pause. “Who do you want me to be?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Am I supposed to be like Mom? I mean isn’t alcoholism genetic? Am I supposed to marry a rich guy and have babies and drink vodka?”
“Am I actually supposed to answer that?”
“How is it I’m eighteen and know nothing?”
The Big Guy laughs. “You know some things: colonial history, geometry, European literature, and grammar. Women aren’t really supposed to know all that much.”
“Did you really just say that?”
“Didn’t say a word,” he says. “Let’s talk again in a few days. And until then, take good care of yourself and that horse. You know where to find me if anything comes up.”
“Love you,” she says, hanging up.
A couple of days later, Tony calls.
“Do you think it’s surprising?” she asks. Meghan is in her dorm room at her desk; in front of her is the spreadsheet for her college applications, her essay, and other supplemental materials.
“What?” he asks, not about to give away anything.
“That Mom’s in rehab?”
“Do you?”
“At the moment, everything is surprising. I don’t know whether I’ve had my head in the sand or if suddenly things are coming out.”
“Could be a little of both. As you get older, perhaps you pick up on more and they say more.”
“Do you think she has a drinking problem?”
Tony is quiet.
“Should I take your silence as a yes?”
“Kiddo, I’m not a medical professional and I don’t live with your mom, but I’ve known her a long time. In the long run, it’s promising that she’s taken herself for treatment. What do you think?”
“I think she likes her vodka. She counts the hours between the wine at lunch and cocktail hour. She says that when you fly it can really mess things up. Especially going from east to west.”
“That sounds about right,” Tony says. “Five p.m. in DC is only two p.m. out West; that’s a long dry afternoon.”
“Are you sure she’s an alcoholic? Because she never seems drunk, she doesn’t do stupid things, and she sometimes stops drinking entirely for weeks at a time. Like when she goes on a diet.”
“Maybe something changed,” Tony says. “Things get to a point where a person feels they need to act and need help to make changes. About Thanksgiving,” he says, switching subjects. “I’m hoping that you’ll come with me to a friend’s house in Georgetown.”
“What do I need to wear?”
“Simple but classy. Even though the first settlers landed far north of here, Washingtonians think they own Thanksgiving.”
“Maybe my colonial woman’s work costume from the school play? It’s a print dress with a red apron and bonnet.”
“Perfect,” Tony says.
“I guess Dad already told the school that I’m not leaving because I got an invitation to visit a local church and go apple picking. Gives new meaning to the phrase ‘Black Friday.’ ”
“It’s a day like any other,” Tony says.
“Not when you go to boarding school and all the other girls pack up and leave on Tuesday night and don’t come back until Sunday. I bet even most murderers have Thanksgiving plans.”
“Oof,” Tony says.
She can’t help it. She keeps thinking about the murdered girl. The night she went missing, the police searched but didn’t find her. The next morning her father came with the family dog and found her right away on the hill behind the chapel. Ashley’s aunt said that after the murder the family left the country. Meghan imagines that’s what you have to do when something truly awful happens; you have to seal it off, bury it not just in the ground but so deep within yourself that it can’t ever come loose.
“Don’t worry,” she tells Tony, half trying to convince herself. “I’ll be fine. I’m going to use the time to rewrite my college essay.”
Since Phoenix, she’s been thinking about how people see the world around them. In Phoenix her father’s friends stood in front of the television looking shocked, as if they hadn’t seen it coming. Terrifying was the word her father used and the word stuck with her. What happened in Phoenix was terrifying but in a different way, a new way.
She has always been aware that there is a darkness, a threat no one mentions that lives at the edge of the woods. She thought it was a fake, some kind of grown-up problem, like worrying. Now she feels it for the first time. It’s big and it’s terrifying.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Palm Springs, California
9:00 a.m.
He’s been on his own for days. It’s a strange kind of independence that wasn’t asked for. He belongs to no one, is accountable to no one; no one is watching. What might feel like liberation to others is becoming increasingly terrifying.
The first day or two it was simply odd. If anyone had pressed, he might have said there had been an accident of some sort, an enormous misunderstanding that involved the swimming pool. He might have said that Charlotte had briefly fallen through a psychic crack—that’s how he would describe it, like a crack in the cement—he’s still finding pennies in the pool.
If you asked a pool man, they might say the crack was due to hydrostatic pressure. He loves those words. Hydrostatic pressure has to do with the downward force of gravity from above. That sums it up. Charlotte cracked due to increased hydrostatic pressure.
If you said that to some people, they might nod their heads gravely and say how sorry they were to hear it; they might go home and tell their wives that Charlotte had suffered something akin to a stroke. Some might take the pool metaphor more seriously and announce that her water had broken; most would avoid saying that she’d cracked, although that was the most accurate description. Charlotte had cracked, and after he’d dropped her off at Betty Ford, he didn’t know what else to do. He’d driven around until it started to get dark, then he went home. A day or two passed in a fog. The sun went down, then it came up again, and that happened a few times, and at first, he was afraid to even go into the pool so he used the skimmer to try to scrape up the pennies from the bottom, then finally he just dove in and he rather liked the game of it: holding his breath, going to the lowest point, and picking up the loose change.
The restaurant starts serving Thanksgiving dinner at noon, but he waits until one p.m. to leave the house. He doesn’t want to seem desperate. A race is being run and streets are closed. In an effort to navigate the detour, he nearly clips a runner with his side-view mirror. His system flushes with adrenaline, a rocket-fueled cocktail of shame and rage. He slams the horn just because and guns his way down the road.
He drives past the Betty Ford Center, circling it a couple of times thinking he might see something that would give him a clue about what’s going on inside—but there’s nothing. The place radiates a big blank. He hasn’t heard a peep. When he dropped her off, he figured it would be a week or two at most. He assumes that at some point they’ll want money. He thinks maybe they did a little digging and calculated that he could afford it and decided to keep her. There’s nothing worse than feeling both taken advantage of and helpless. It’s a bad combination.
He parks at the restaurant, takes off his tie, and stuffs it into his pocket. He can’t wear a tie at one p.m. and he can’t go alone into the restaurant. He brings a legal pad and pens.
Once he’s seated, he immediately orders a drink. The waitress brings his scotch and the menu for the day. Oysters, chestnut soup, roasted squash and goat cheese salad, roast beef au jus or free-range turkey with sausage stuffing, sage and pancetta gravy, mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, creamed spinach or green beans with crispy shallots. Dessert is a choice of pumpkin pie, three-berry crumble, pecan tart, or homemade ice cream.
The menu itself is an antidepressant.
The last time he had Thanksgiving dinner alone was 1978. He knows because he remembers it vividly and he keeps datebooks. He’s always kept datebooks and makes annotations in them in part in case the IRS ever asks for them and in part because it’s what he does. He is old-school—makes notes in margins, writes things down, ideas, fragments of conversation, bad jokes and who told them to him. Thanksgiving 1978 alone. And it wasn’t really alone. He was in DC working and was invited by a friend of Tony’s to his family home in Chevy Chase and ended up spending the weekend with them. He remembers it not because it was his first and only Thanksgiving alone but because it was like a fantasy Thanksgiving. There were easily forty people—friends, neighbors, a Supreme Court justice—and after the meal, the “boys,” meaning four seventy-year-old males, went outside and played football, then came back in, watched football, and ate leftovers. In the morning, the lady of the house made him a sandwich he still remembers, white bread with turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing. Then she panfried the sandwich. He still remembers it as the best thing he ever ate. He also remembers that the guy who invited him to Thanksgiving blew his brains out ten years later when he was about to be outed for being gay. He got arrested in a public bathroom with another man in what might have been a setup—it made the evening news. And overnight the guy drove out to Great Falls, hiked out to a rock, and shot himself clear through the head. That stuck with the Big Guy. It depressed the hell out of him that someone would kill themselves over being queer. Only years later did it occur to him that perhaps Chip had been Tony’s boyfriend. He never asked Tony about it, but he makes a mental note to ask him now that the cats are coming out of the bag. He always thought he was doing Tony a favor by not talking with him about his homosexuality—in retrospect, he thinks he did the opposite.
The waitress comes to take his order. “Chestnut soup and turkey.” Does he prefer dark or light meat? “Light.” Mashed white or sweet or both?
He’s a grieving man, and despite that he has made a billion and more decisions, today he is absent the ability to ask for what is good or what is right. “Both,” he says. “Some of everything. And then some more.”
Although he has at times thought of himself as soulless, when the waitress brings him his soup, he says a brief prayer. Who thought it would come to this, alone on Thanksgiving; his wife in the dry-out clinic; his kid, who doesn’t know the whole story, having Thanksgiving with her closeted queer godfather; and he is down deep in Palm Springs, California, secretly plotting what some might call a domestic disturbance, but first—a little prayer that sanity and balance restore themselves over chestnut soup.
The soup has thyme cream and wild mushrooms on top. It is warm, slightly nutty, an earthy delight that he should know from the first spoonful is too rich for his stomach. But it is so good. He’s become a man who speaks to his soup. “So good,” he says to the bowl, and drinks it down. In a maneuver that would send Charlotte off the rails, he breaks off a large wad of his popover and runs it around the inside of the soup bowl, wiping it clean.
“Saving the best bite for last,” the waitress says, refilling his water glass.
He blots his lips with his pumpkin-colored napkin.
Lunch. That’s what he’s calling it even though the restaurant has billed it as an all-day Thanksgiving dinner. This isn’t dinner; this is lunch. A working lunch. He is immersing himself in his project in this new world. He’s eating his soup; reading his book, Democracy in America; and taking notes. He is recommitting to his values and getting this job done. It’s the thing that’s keeping him going while the rest spins out of control.
His plate arrives piled high. And there’s a basket with two fresh hot popovers. “Do you need a side of gravy?” the waitress asks.
“Thank you.”
“I like to take care of fellas like you on their own,” the waitress says.
Is she hitting on him? God, he hopes not; he can’t handle that.
“Much thanks. My wife is away and my daughter is at school.”
The waitress shakes her head. “It’s difficult, isn’t it?”
He’s eating Thanksgiving dinner by himself at one in the afternoon, and as he eats and reads and writes, he’s reviewing his life, flipping through a mental photo album from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving. He cut out brown-paper turkeys and thumbtacked them to the wall outside his elementary school classroom; he had ideas about hope and abundance as a young man, which transformed into a competitive desire to win, to earn, to become an empire builder—master of the universe. But knowing what we all know, that money and success don’t isolate one from pain. He’s left with loneliness, anxiety, and the rising question, What’s it all about, Alfie?
This dark afternoon alone in Palm Springs is unfathomable to him and yet it is happening. The whole thing has gone tits up; nothing is what you’d expect it to be; nothing is the way it was, and that’s the way it’s going to be. Unfathomable. Unexpected. That’s what happens in life—just when you think you know where it’s going, it takes a turn.
“For dessert?” the waitress asks.
He shakes his head, speechless. The meal was enough to feed a family of four.
“Don’t fret, honey; let me figure it out.”
“Is that you, Hitchens?” A man in a cowboy hat comes to a stop at the Big Guy’s table.
“Literally,” he says. “In 1777 George Washington fought a battle not far from Wilmington, and in December 1787 it became the first of the thirteen states to ratify the US Constitution.”
She laughs. “How much do you love George Washington?”
“As the father of this country, he is as much my father as pater Hitchens.”
Another pause.
“Do you think Mom ever wanted to do something . . . ?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like go back to school?”
“No,” he says, without a pause. “Why would she? Your mother is an exceptionally intelligent woman. If you gave us both IQ tests, I have no doubt that she’d score higher than I would.”
“I wondered if there was something else she wanted to do, some dream that she had or . . .”
“She’s going to be fine,” the Big Guy says.
“Is there anything I can do for her?”
“Nice of you to ask, but I don’t think there’s anything right now.”
“Should I call her?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him. He doesn’t think of them as having that kind of relationship, has no idea whether Charlotte would want that. He realizes that for more than a week the girl has had no idea her mother was in the hospital; it’s all he could do to tell her now, and if it wasn’t for the holiday, he thinks it unlikely he would have said anything. “Well, I don’t quite know how that works—I’m not sure she has a phone of her own, but I could find out for you.”
“I could talk to her and say something encouraging like they did with Bambi.”
“Who is Bambi?”
“The deer, Bambi, from the movie. It’s a way of saying I’m rooting for you.”
“Maybe send a card?” Is there such a thing as a dry-out card? I’m sorry you’re in the bin but here’s hoping you make new friends and stay off the sauce. Staying dry sounds like an advertisement for incontinence pants. Having problems with bladder leakage? He imagines a television commercial that starts with a woman playing tennis, then cuts to a man playing golf before ending with an older, formerly famous actor holding up what looks like a trash bag and saying, “Perfect for keeping an active lifestyle.”
“Is there an address to send the card? Do I write her name and then Betty Ford Center?”
“Just wait,” he says, imagining Charlotte’s name on an envelope with Betty Ford Center written on the line below. “With any luck, she’ll be home soon.” He pauses. “You okay over there, kiddo?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says. “Do you think she can shop while she’s there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Christmas is coming and she always does a lot for Christmas.”
“I have no idea,” he says. “But I guess you’d better work up a list and be sure to pass it along to Santa Claus.”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?” Meghan asks.
“Start what.”
“The delusions.”
He laughs. “I guess not.”
“Do you think Mom cares about me?”
“Of course she does.”
“Then why did she do this?”
“I don’t think it’s about you or I.”
“You or me,” she corrects him again.
“I guess that’s what I’m paying the big bucks for, a grammarian.”
“What do you think caused it? Did something happen?”
“Yes, something happened,” he nearly says but catches himself. “You saw it right there in Phoenix, a generation of hard work flushed down the toilet. That’s what it is—it’s not four years, it’s not nothing, it’s an entire generation of men who worked to build this country and now it’s flushed, that’s what happened.”
“Was it something I did?” she asks. “Like did I vote the wrong way, wear the wrong thing, say something I shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t think you should take it personally,” he says.
“But I was in Phoenix, with you and Mom.”
“You’re being too literal. What depressed the hell out of her in Phoenix was seeing how old everyone looked; that hit her worse than the election result. You don’t get another go-round; there is no going back; realizing that was a shock. It had been brewing for years; Phoenix was the tipping point. Your mother has certainly never asked anything of us before; she’s not interrupted our lives in any way.”
There’s a long silence.
“Maybe she’s going through something you don’t know about; maybe it’s not that people looked old but maybe she feels like she wasted her life, that it was all for nothing?” Meghan suggests. Another pause. “Who do you want me to be?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Am I supposed to be like Mom? I mean isn’t alcoholism genetic? Am I supposed to marry a rich guy and have babies and drink vodka?”
“Am I actually supposed to answer that?”
“How is it I’m eighteen and know nothing?”
The Big Guy laughs. “You know some things: colonial history, geometry, European literature, and grammar. Women aren’t really supposed to know all that much.”
“Did you really just say that?”
“Didn’t say a word,” he says. “Let’s talk again in a few days. And until then, take good care of yourself and that horse. You know where to find me if anything comes up.”
“Love you,” she says, hanging up.
A couple of days later, Tony calls.
“Do you think it’s surprising?” she asks. Meghan is in her dorm room at her desk; in front of her is the spreadsheet for her college applications, her essay, and other supplemental materials.
“What?” he asks, not about to give away anything.
“That Mom’s in rehab?”
“Do you?”
“At the moment, everything is surprising. I don’t know whether I’ve had my head in the sand or if suddenly things are coming out.”
“Could be a little of both. As you get older, perhaps you pick up on more and they say more.”
“Do you think she has a drinking problem?”
Tony is quiet.
“Should I take your silence as a yes?”
“Kiddo, I’m not a medical professional and I don’t live with your mom, but I’ve known her a long time. In the long run, it’s promising that she’s taken herself for treatment. What do you think?”
“I think she likes her vodka. She counts the hours between the wine at lunch and cocktail hour. She says that when you fly it can really mess things up. Especially going from east to west.”
“That sounds about right,” Tony says. “Five p.m. in DC is only two p.m. out West; that’s a long dry afternoon.”
“Are you sure she’s an alcoholic? Because she never seems drunk, she doesn’t do stupid things, and she sometimes stops drinking entirely for weeks at a time. Like when she goes on a diet.”
“Maybe something changed,” Tony says. “Things get to a point where a person feels they need to act and need help to make changes. About Thanksgiving,” he says, switching subjects. “I’m hoping that you’ll come with me to a friend’s house in Georgetown.”
“What do I need to wear?”
“Simple but classy. Even though the first settlers landed far north of here, Washingtonians think they own Thanksgiving.”
“Maybe my colonial woman’s work costume from the school play? It’s a print dress with a red apron and bonnet.”
“Perfect,” Tony says.
“I guess Dad already told the school that I’m not leaving because I got an invitation to visit a local church and go apple picking. Gives new meaning to the phrase ‘Black Friday.’ ”
“It’s a day like any other,” Tony says.
“Not when you go to boarding school and all the other girls pack up and leave on Tuesday night and don’t come back until Sunday. I bet even most murderers have Thanksgiving plans.”
“Oof,” Tony says.
She can’t help it. She keeps thinking about the murdered girl. The night she went missing, the police searched but didn’t find her. The next morning her father came with the family dog and found her right away on the hill behind the chapel. Ashley’s aunt said that after the murder the family left the country. Meghan imagines that’s what you have to do when something truly awful happens; you have to seal it off, bury it not just in the ground but so deep within yourself that it can’t ever come loose.
“Don’t worry,” she tells Tony, half trying to convince herself. “I’ll be fine. I’m going to use the time to rewrite my college essay.”
Since Phoenix, she’s been thinking about how people see the world around them. In Phoenix her father’s friends stood in front of the television looking shocked, as if they hadn’t seen it coming. Terrifying was the word her father used and the word stuck with her. What happened in Phoenix was terrifying but in a different way, a new way.
She has always been aware that there is a darkness, a threat no one mentions that lives at the edge of the woods. She thought it was a fake, some kind of grown-up problem, like worrying. Now she feels it for the first time. It’s big and it’s terrifying.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Palm Springs, California
9:00 a.m.
He’s been on his own for days. It’s a strange kind of independence that wasn’t asked for. He belongs to no one, is accountable to no one; no one is watching. What might feel like liberation to others is becoming increasingly terrifying.
The first day or two it was simply odd. If anyone had pressed, he might have said there had been an accident of some sort, an enormous misunderstanding that involved the swimming pool. He might have said that Charlotte had briefly fallen through a psychic crack—that’s how he would describe it, like a crack in the cement—he’s still finding pennies in the pool.
If you asked a pool man, they might say the crack was due to hydrostatic pressure. He loves those words. Hydrostatic pressure has to do with the downward force of gravity from above. That sums it up. Charlotte cracked due to increased hydrostatic pressure.
If you said that to some people, they might nod their heads gravely and say how sorry they were to hear it; they might go home and tell their wives that Charlotte had suffered something akin to a stroke. Some might take the pool metaphor more seriously and announce that her water had broken; most would avoid saying that she’d cracked, although that was the most accurate description. Charlotte had cracked, and after he’d dropped her off at Betty Ford, he didn’t know what else to do. He’d driven around until it started to get dark, then he went home. A day or two passed in a fog. The sun went down, then it came up again, and that happened a few times, and at first, he was afraid to even go into the pool so he used the skimmer to try to scrape up the pennies from the bottom, then finally he just dove in and he rather liked the game of it: holding his breath, going to the lowest point, and picking up the loose change.
The restaurant starts serving Thanksgiving dinner at noon, but he waits until one p.m. to leave the house. He doesn’t want to seem desperate. A race is being run and streets are closed. In an effort to navigate the detour, he nearly clips a runner with his side-view mirror. His system flushes with adrenaline, a rocket-fueled cocktail of shame and rage. He slams the horn just because and guns his way down the road.
He drives past the Betty Ford Center, circling it a couple of times thinking he might see something that would give him a clue about what’s going on inside—but there’s nothing. The place radiates a big blank. He hasn’t heard a peep. When he dropped her off, he figured it would be a week or two at most. He assumes that at some point they’ll want money. He thinks maybe they did a little digging and calculated that he could afford it and decided to keep her. There’s nothing worse than feeling both taken advantage of and helpless. It’s a bad combination.
He parks at the restaurant, takes off his tie, and stuffs it into his pocket. He can’t wear a tie at one p.m. and he can’t go alone into the restaurant. He brings a legal pad and pens.
Once he’s seated, he immediately orders a drink. The waitress brings his scotch and the menu for the day. Oysters, chestnut soup, roasted squash and goat cheese salad, roast beef au jus or free-range turkey with sausage stuffing, sage and pancetta gravy, mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, creamed spinach or green beans with crispy shallots. Dessert is a choice of pumpkin pie, three-berry crumble, pecan tart, or homemade ice cream.
The menu itself is an antidepressant.
The last time he had Thanksgiving dinner alone was 1978. He knows because he remembers it vividly and he keeps datebooks. He’s always kept datebooks and makes annotations in them in part in case the IRS ever asks for them and in part because it’s what he does. He is old-school—makes notes in margins, writes things down, ideas, fragments of conversation, bad jokes and who told them to him. Thanksgiving 1978 alone. And it wasn’t really alone. He was in DC working and was invited by a friend of Tony’s to his family home in Chevy Chase and ended up spending the weekend with them. He remembers it not because it was his first and only Thanksgiving alone but because it was like a fantasy Thanksgiving. There were easily forty people—friends, neighbors, a Supreme Court justice—and after the meal, the “boys,” meaning four seventy-year-old males, went outside and played football, then came back in, watched football, and ate leftovers. In the morning, the lady of the house made him a sandwich he still remembers, white bread with turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing. Then she panfried the sandwich. He still remembers it as the best thing he ever ate. He also remembers that the guy who invited him to Thanksgiving blew his brains out ten years later when he was about to be outed for being gay. He got arrested in a public bathroom with another man in what might have been a setup—it made the evening news. And overnight the guy drove out to Great Falls, hiked out to a rock, and shot himself clear through the head. That stuck with the Big Guy. It depressed the hell out of him that someone would kill themselves over being queer. Only years later did it occur to him that perhaps Chip had been Tony’s boyfriend. He never asked Tony about it, but he makes a mental note to ask him now that the cats are coming out of the bag. He always thought he was doing Tony a favor by not talking with him about his homosexuality—in retrospect, he thinks he did the opposite.
The waitress comes to take his order. “Chestnut soup and turkey.” Does he prefer dark or light meat? “Light.” Mashed white or sweet or both?
He’s a grieving man, and despite that he has made a billion and more decisions, today he is absent the ability to ask for what is good or what is right. “Both,” he says. “Some of everything. And then some more.”
Although he has at times thought of himself as soulless, when the waitress brings him his soup, he says a brief prayer. Who thought it would come to this, alone on Thanksgiving; his wife in the dry-out clinic; his kid, who doesn’t know the whole story, having Thanksgiving with her closeted queer godfather; and he is down deep in Palm Springs, California, secretly plotting what some might call a domestic disturbance, but first—a little prayer that sanity and balance restore themselves over chestnut soup.
The soup has thyme cream and wild mushrooms on top. It is warm, slightly nutty, an earthy delight that he should know from the first spoonful is too rich for his stomach. But it is so good. He’s become a man who speaks to his soup. “So good,” he says to the bowl, and drinks it down. In a maneuver that would send Charlotte off the rails, he breaks off a large wad of his popover and runs it around the inside of the soup bowl, wiping it clean.
“Saving the best bite for last,” the waitress says, refilling his water glass.
He blots his lips with his pumpkin-colored napkin.
Lunch. That’s what he’s calling it even though the restaurant has billed it as an all-day Thanksgiving dinner. This isn’t dinner; this is lunch. A working lunch. He is immersing himself in his project in this new world. He’s eating his soup; reading his book, Democracy in America; and taking notes. He is recommitting to his values and getting this job done. It’s the thing that’s keeping him going while the rest spins out of control.
His plate arrives piled high. And there’s a basket with two fresh hot popovers. “Do you need a side of gravy?” the waitress asks.
“Thank you.”
“I like to take care of fellas like you on their own,” the waitress says.
Is she hitting on him? God, he hopes not; he can’t handle that.
“Much thanks. My wife is away and my daughter is at school.”
The waitress shakes her head. “It’s difficult, isn’t it?”
He’s eating Thanksgiving dinner by himself at one in the afternoon, and as he eats and reads and writes, he’s reviewing his life, flipping through a mental photo album from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving. He cut out brown-paper turkeys and thumbtacked them to the wall outside his elementary school classroom; he had ideas about hope and abundance as a young man, which transformed into a competitive desire to win, to earn, to become an empire builder—master of the universe. But knowing what we all know, that money and success don’t isolate one from pain. He’s left with loneliness, anxiety, and the rising question, What’s it all about, Alfie?
This dark afternoon alone in Palm Springs is unfathomable to him and yet it is happening. The whole thing has gone tits up; nothing is what you’d expect it to be; nothing is the way it was, and that’s the way it’s going to be. Unfathomable. Unexpected. That’s what happens in life—just when you think you know where it’s going, it takes a turn.
“For dessert?” the waitress asks.
He shakes his head, speechless. The meal was enough to feed a family of four.
“Don’t fret, honey; let me figure it out.”
“Is that you, Hitchens?” A man in a cowboy hat comes to a stop at the Big Guy’s table.
