bumped into each other by the bathroom. I had on my pajamas, and she was a vision of moonlit skin. I whispered, “Well, hello, Iris,” as we crossed, acting as if the sight of her hadn’t taken my breath away.
“You should try sleeping in the nude,” she murmured in her haughty ballet-student accent. “It makes the night très sensual.”
That night I put away my pajamas and haven’t worn them since. In my nightly wanderings down the hall I have never again crossed paths with Iris. I have, however, stumbled into Tedious, who said I looked like a turnip, and my father, who told me it was unsanitary to sleep naked, and my mother, who warned that if the house caught fire I would not be properly dressed for the escape.
Sitting around the table that Thanksgiving, I delighted in the secret that Iris and I had something meaningful in common. Our skins shared a nightly experience of smooth sheets, each individual fiber seeming to find a pore to tickle and rub. It meant that when we dreamed we dreamed with our entire bodies. But most important, it meant that we were open to new experiences, courageous enough to be ready for whatever the fates might send us in the night. I never found a chance to tell her this.
Our family likes to dress up for celebrations. Tedious put on a white shirt and a bolo tie with a silver skull clasp. Albert actually removed his hat and slicked his hair back with a dab of old-fashioned brilliantine imported from Argentina to make his hair as glossy as patent leather. Marjorie put on her pearls. Iris wore a black dress that made her white skin positively luminescent.
As for me, I wore one of mother’s old Sunday dresses. I liked the style, with the full skirt and the blousy sleeves and the neat row of pearl buttons along the front. The overall effect was capped by a leopard-skin pillbox hat I’d found at a costume shop: the nice lady gone haywire.
White or dark?” Father asked, holding the carving fork in his right hand. He looked me straight in the eye, not letting on if he thought my attire was in any way strange.
“Neither.” I smiled throughout the exchange. “I have a contract with turkeys,” I said. “We have agreed not to eat each other.”
“You’re going to die if you don’t eat,” he said, pointing the carving knife at me.
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
