It sounded like a threat. There are places around the world where people would kill for a slice of turkey. At home convention stands on its ear. I love contradictory logic.
“Okay, I love life,” I said. “A bit of white meat, please.”
He glanced at the knife, then laughed, as if it had just explained the joke to him. “I meant that you need the protein.” Still chuckling, he looked to his right and his left, and Mother smiled along with him, and Tedious shook his head with exaggerated incredulity. Even Iris rolled her eyes and quickly darted her tongue out at me. What a traitor. I loved her anyway; her tongue made the moment for me.
I held out my plate graciously because I knew how much love and enthusiasm the family had put into this meal. Still, even if Father hadn’t meant he would personally kill me for not eating turkey, the thought had wormed its way into my subconscious.
My plate was piled high with slices of meat drowned in gravy with bits of the bird’s most private organs floating about. Tedious had loaded on his potatoes and yams, and Iris had served me a huge helping of green beans with slivered almonds. The plate weighed a ton. I looked around the table and decided that I had more food in front of me than the four of them put together. Mountains of it sat there steaming, sending up to me a sweaty fragrance.
Suddenly out came a camera, and the flash went pop! pop! in front of my eyes. I got it: a family joke. I didn’t let on that anything was even slightly strange. I didn’t ask what the hell was so interesting about me that day that they needed to record it for posterity. Was it the clothes? They’d seen them before. Might it be the last time in my life that I would ingest turkey? Big deal. The frightened look in my eyes as I ate for my life? Yes, and how cruel. The old eat-to-live adage in living color. I straightened out the leopard-skin pillbox hat, which was about to teeter off, and proceeded to dig in.
Ah, how I dug. In contrast to Iris’s delicate ballet of knife and fork, I was spearing large chunks of turkey, then driving the meat into the hills and mounds of yam and beans and sending it flying into my wide open mouth. Pop! went the flash. Ha, this was fun. Even as I attempted to masticate one clump down to size, I was already angling the fork into a dive for the next bite.
It occurred to me that I’d lived this moment before. That I was only repeating a ritual that can’t be exhausted, which must be relived time after time with undiminished intensity. A fork dives and soars like an airplane doing acrobatics. The engines roar and whine as the payload is lifted into the sky and brought down with ballistic precision into the open cavern of my mouth. Watch it, here it goes! Hmmm, munch munch, yummy.
After a couple of passes I looked around the table. Nobody was laughing; they were doing their best to ignore me. I glanced from Tedious, who was staring blankly at some point in space above my head, to Iris, who was picking the almonds out of her green beans, to Albert, who was staring at my mother at the other end of the table in a silent appeal for help. I flashed Mother a grin.
She seemed about to cry. Carefully she leaned toward me and spooned off the remnants of turkey gravy on my chin, then handed me a napkin, which I put down on the table. Undistracted, I counted out ten green beans to spear on my fork.
“Every year it’s the same disgusting thing,” Tedious muttered under his breath.
He had no right to say this. Bits of pink-and-white marshmallow formed a mustache along his lip. He was wrong, of course; it’s not the same thing every year, but as I opened my mouth to speak only a couple of muffled grunts emerged.
“I’ve lost my appetite.” Ted pushed back his chair and crumpled his napkin on the table.
“For Christ’s sake,” Father said. “Can’t we all be in harmony as a family for one meal?” He looked at Mother as if his question hadn’t been rhetorical.
“Of course,” she might have said. “We’re together as a family, a wonderfully extended family if you take Iris into account, and we’re together every moment of our lives, whether we are sitting at the table or not.”
But this was not what Mother said. What she did say was, “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked, but nobody understood what I said because my mouth was still full. “You wanted me to eat, right?” My mouth went hlumph, hlumph.
Albert got up from the table and took his plate to the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV. He settled down to watch a replay of the famous 1966 Super Bowl.
“Eat up before it gets cold,” Mother said to the ones left at the table, namely Iris and me.
“It’s still warm.” I pressed my palm onto the heaping plate, as if to check its temperature, and let the warm ooze of stuffing and potatoes and gravy-soaked turkey seep between my fingers. It felt nice. It felt better than it tasted. I had visions of the different flavors and textures getting into my body through the skin, finding their way into the capillary network, entering the bloodstream, swimming around the system putting a little sweetness here, a little salt there, making the blood redder and richer. I bypassed the middle organs and got right to the heart of the matter.
I looked up at Iris and thought she could really understand this tactile stuff, the old touchy-feely, as they say, a naked kind of thing with nothing in the way between the brain and the food. Talk about sensuous. No, don’t talk about it; do it. “Hey, Iris. Put your hand on it. It’s like eating naked.”
“That is something strictly between us,” she said. For a moment I thought she was going to give me that sly grin of hers. But no, her lips were pressed tight, her eyes squinting mean thoughts at me. She put down her knife and fork, lining them up alongside each other on the edge of the plate. She stood up, smoothed down the back of her pretty dress, and said, “Excuse me,” to my mother. “I need to make a call.” To me she said nothing.
Then, it was just Mother and me. Like in the old days. And like other rough times, it looked as if we were about to have A Talk. She took her chair and pulled it around the table to sit beside me. She dipped a napkin into a water glass, lifted my hand off the plate, and wiped it clean. I started to put my other hand down on the mass of holiday victuals, but she gripped it by the wrist and bent it back until I cried out. She pushed the plate beyond my reach.
“I think I should go back,” I said.
“Are you happier there than at home?”
“They eat what I do.”
“All the residents are vegetarian?” She was not taking me seriously.
“They range from macrovegan to fishoterian. I fit right in the middle.”
“After all these years.” She started to weep. “Back and forth, back and forth.”
“Not always my idea.”
“We never should have sent you away in the first place,” she sniffed.
“Terrible things could’ve happened, Mom.” I gave her a little jab on the shoulder. “I have considered castrating Tedious, assaulting Iris.”
I didn’t qualify for the Clean Plate Club that year. An hour from the time I sat down at the table, the mountain of sliced bird and mashed tubers sat lumpily before me under a translucent sheath of congealing gravy. Mother gave up and left, stifling a sob. Brother Tedious returned and picked up around me, gathering silverware, the big platter with the dismembered bird, the sloshing gravy boat. I remained alone, knowing I wouldn’t eat any more but afraid to cross the living room, where I knew I would have to face my destiny, again.
Finally, unwilling to consider the lifeless remnants of my friend the turkey any longer, I rose from the table and edged out of the dining room, hugging the wall along the stairs to my room. I kept my head from turning, even though out of the corner of my eye I could see Albert, Ted, Iris, and Mother all sitting next to each other on the blue couch. They appeared primed for intervention.
“Come here, kid,” Albert said softly. “We