Why I Love Singlehood: (32 page)

As I’d preheated and prepped, mixed and stirred, braised and baked and boiled, I tried to pin down exactly what made our family dinners so
us
. I wanted to re-create all the silly traditions that made our family unique, to feel some semblance of having a family unit again. When setting the table (a yard sale find when I was with Shaun, polished into something of a well-loved antique), I tried to recall every golden turkey, every crowded place setting, every pie-induced bellyache of my family’s history, but I came up short. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered how mad Mom got whenever Dad snagged a bite of whatever she was prepping. How Dad was never pleased with that year’s turkey, perpetually convinced that he’d bought the previous year’s someplace better. How by the end of dinner we were so tired it hurt to speak to one another, much less peel ourselves off whatever couch or chair we’d collapsed into to face dishwashing. How I always tried to negotiate with Mom regarding leftovers: fewer hot turkey sandwiches awash with undeserving bread, more potato pancakes.

The lack of more pleasant memories disturbed me.

I had finished preparations with twenty minutes to spare—a miracle! The table set, turkey happily roasting away (as happy as a dead bird could be, I suppose), I changed out of my sweats and T-shirt, running a mental checklist.

As Olivia and crew arrived, followed by Norman, I doled out hugs and hellos, remembering the ritual when we were kids: our parents, Olivia, and I standing at the door like a receiving line at a wedding as aunts and uncles and cousins processed in with covered dishes and bottles of wine. Just like Thanksgivings past, we all congregated in the cozy kitchen. Olivia sliced the French bread she had brought and set it in a basket, and I tucked Norman’s infamous seven layer bars (the only thing he knew how to bake, which he described as “so good, why bother learning to make anything else?”) out of eyesight from Tyler and Tara.

At dinnertime, as the hungry pack grazed from kitchen to dining room, Olivia laughed at the Mayflower place cards made from cracked walnut shells (it wasn’t as fun to make them by myself as when we were kids, the Elmer’s glue running down our arms and on the tablecloth, to Mom’s dismay). But, like a tickle in the back of my throat, the inability to conjure a truly happy family memory nagged at me as we passed platters and dishes and bowls around, each of us holding one as the next scooped heaping portions onto already brimming plates. Only the green bean casserole dish remained heavy by the time it circled back to me. I looked at it in dismay—we’d always had green bean casserole. Taking a generous scoop in an attempt to mollify the green bean gods, I scanned the plates: Olivia and David hadn’t taken any; Tara had pushed a few forkfuls to the far outskirts of her plate just to please her mother; and Tyler outright refused, suspiciously eyeing the dish as if it might attack, like something straight out of Calvin & Hobbs. Norman had taken a tentative scoop and politely ingested a miniscule forkful. He managed to swallow without so much as a wince, but followed the bite with an immediate chug of cider.

The serving spoon was still poised in my hand, hovering above my plate, when I suddenly saw the monstrosity as it was: stringy, French-cut frozen green beans swimming in cream of mushroom soup. Awful.

“Blegh,” I said. “Green bean casserole? What was I thinking? Liv, was it always this bad?”

“Worse,” Olivia laughed. “I think the panko upgrade is a nice touch. As much class as it could hope for.”

“I like it,” Norman said.

All heads turned to him.

“The crust, I mean.”

“What was the crust before?” David asked, giving the casserole a dubious look.

“Funions,” Olivia answered.

We all looked at each other in horror before bursting into laughter. I surveyed the faces around the table, faces I’d seen primarily at work or on bank holidays. They were faces of people I loved, sure, but I couldn’t help but feel as if Olivia and I had forfeited sisterhood when I filed taxes as an independent North Carolina resident. Following our parents’ deaths, she and I went to aunts and uncles’ or cousins’ houses before she started hosting her own gatherings with her nuclear family and sometimes David’s. One year, when David’s parents hosted, they invited me knowing I had nowhere else to go. I’d felt so guilty accepting their pity. The memory still left a bitter taste in my mouth, masked by the perfectly mashed potatoes and the twice baked stuffing, although I felt somewhat bolstered as Norman took a polite second helping of the fated casserole, despite not touching it.

Norman. He was the one with whom I shared the most meals, regardless of whether we were eating BLTs (no mayo) behind The Grounds’s counter, out of sight from the customers; sitting on stools in the kitchen with nachos and salsa delivered by the NCLA campus food court; or grabbing slices of Greek pizza while crammed in our cluttered office. He probably could read me best out of anyone here, maybe even out of anyone at all, save Minerva. After turning down my invitation, Minerva had secretly confessed to me that she’d rather have dinner with my family than Jay’s, or even her own. And I knew she included Norman with Olivia, et al., in “family.” Drowning my turkey in a lumpy river of gravy, I imagined how Minerva must feel sitting at a table full of people with whom the only thing she shared was her husband and name. And yet, I could almost relate. Just like the speed dating night, Norman was the one at the table who made me feel most at ease. Olivia had even pulled me into the pantry prior to dinner to ask about Norman’s and my relationship status.

“He’s cute,” she remarked. “Very John Cusack.”

“Not happenin’, Liv.”

Throughout the meal, as Olivia tended to Tyler and Tara while David and Norman talked college football and steered clear of politics and religion, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was as good as it gets.

After dinner David turned on the TV to watch football and Norman offered to help us with the dishes. I shook my head, sticking a bottle of beer in his hand and pushing him into the other room. He looked at it, then me, as if I’d handed him a strange torture device.

“After all that food I ate, you’re giving me a
beer
?”

My dad always had a beer following the big meal. It just seemed natural, involuntary, to hand one to Norman.

“I don’t have any room left,” he said. “One sip of this and I may explode.”

“So don’t drink it. I just thought you might like it.”

He grinned and gave my shoulders a quick squeeze. “Dinner was fantastic, Eva. Show-stopping.”

He twisted the cap off the beer bottle—I always loved that crisp
pfft
sound it made—and toasted me with it. “Thanks.”

Olivia and I had always been on Dish Patrol when we were younger, and it seemed only fitting to carry on that tradition, too. We stood side by side and settled into a rhythm in front of the double-sink—one filled with Palmolive-sudsy water, the other with pots and pans and dishes and flatware, the dishwasher waiting for us to cram as much as we could into it.

“It wasn’t perfect, was it.”

“Dinner?” Olivia asked, dunking a large pot. “I thought it was great.” She hesitated. “Except for the casserole…”

I shook my head, rinsing off a stray serving spoon. “No. I mean you and Mom and Dad and me. Our family.
We
weren’t perfect.”

“Oh,” she said. “No, we weren’t.”

“What did we fight about?”

She shrugged. “All sorts of stupid things. The stuff everyone fights about.” Olivia scrubbed at a bit of already-dried mashed potato. “Remember the time you stole my bra and I caught you wearing it stuffed with a pair of my socks?”

I cringed and laughed at the same time. “The one with the pink hearts? Yeah, sorry about that, Liv.”

She laughed as well. “It was my favorite. I could’ve killed you.”

“Was that before or after you read the notes Beth and I passed in class out loud—at the top of your lungs, mind you—while walking home from the bus?”

“After,” she said. “Might’ve been what prompted it.”

“I was so mad I cried.”

She nodded. “I remember.”

“And remember the time you hung Lacy Stevenson’s underwear from the tree outside and Dad was mortified?”

She laughed even harder. “She always left something at our house after a sleepover. Seriously gross.”

I giggled, remembering her feeble explanation. “You just wanted to air it out—”

“Yeah, and leave it somewhere where she could find it.” Olivia paused to hand me the now de-potatoed pot. “I don’t know if Dad was more upset that it was hanging in his front yard, or that it was black and silky.”

“Poor Dad.”

Unable to fit the pot in the dishwasher, I set it aside as Olivia continued. “How about the time when Mom got offered that big promotion and Dad didn’t want her to take it?”

I stiffened. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

Our mother had been an executive administrative assistant. Not just a secretary, but one of those I-can’t-live-without-you assistants. An organizer extraordinaire. Sometimes she worked nights and weekends, much to Dad’s objection, although Olivia and I handled cooking responsibilities far better than he did, even when we were twelve and sixteen years old.

The promotion was for vice president of something or other, and would’ve meant a company car, an extra month’s vacation time, a huge bump in salary, and a lot of travel. But our dad had put his foot down. I couldn’t remember why, although I seem to remember the word
neglect
in the midst of angry exchanges.

“They didn’t speak for a week and a half, I think,” said Olivia.

“God, dinner that week must’ve sucked.”

“Mom stopped eating at the table after the third night.”

How had my memory so completely failed me?

“What happened?” I asked.

Olivia shrugged. “Dunno. But she told me that being a mother was always her most important job. I don’t think I believed her at first. Not until she got sick and I saw how she worried about what was going to happen to us. She feared that more than dying, I think. I can fully understand it now, of course.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to take it all in.

Olivia continued. “At the time I was so angry—with both of them. She’d worked so hard and deserved the promotion as well as the extra money and perks. I thought Dad was being selfish, as did she. But I think I would’ve made the same choice if I were in her shoes. Being a good mom is more important than anything, really.”

The words churned in my stomach and left me feeling more like a foreigner, a citizen without a country, than I had since Dad’s diagnosis and death shredded the last piece of family we had left. When I was younger I’d likened myself to Little Orphan Annie, but even that felt like a faulty comparison now. After all, she was never portrayed as lonely or wanting, and she made out great with Daddy Warbucks. Besides, she had the sweet voice and the cute curls and the scruffy dog going for her. Being an orphan was about as romantic and glamorous as a hermit crab. Not only was I an orphan, but even after all this time, I still had no real family of my own. Not like Olivia.

“You’re a good mom,” I said, desperately wishing the same could be said of me.

Olivia’s voice was bitter. “I had plenty of practice for the whole mom thing.”

“Hey,” I said, “I never asked you to be my mother.”

“No, but you needed me to be.”

I shook my head. “No. I needed
my
mother to be my mother.”

The running faucet sounded like a waterfall between us. I don’t think either of us had ever acknowledged this, that we had each made demands on the other without asking. Nor had we ever realized how deep our mutual resentment ran. The soapy water thinned, bubbles bursting one by one and breaking off in little islands.

“Thank you, though,” I offered. “You did a good job under the circumstances.”

I thought I saw her brush away a tear. Or maybe a stray bubble, or wisp of bangs.

“Sorry I made you my guinea pig,” she said quietly.

“Sorry I let you.”

I studied Olivia’s reflection in the window as she swirled a finger in the suds, and I saw the thought register on her face a split second before she scooped a handful of remaining suds and flicked them at me, sloshing my arm.

I gasped, then plotted. “Hey, Liv? You’ve got something on your cheek.”

“Wha—”

“This!” I smeared a handful of bubbles on her.

When Tyler came skidding into the kitchen a few moments later to find both of us shrieking with laughter, drenched in lukewarm water and remnants of suds-bombs, he took stock of the situation and backed away, retreating to the safety of the living room.

“Mom and Aunt Eva are having a suds fight!” he announced.

“You’ll have a whole new appreciation of it when you get older, kiddo,” I heard Norman reply. By this time Olivia and I were slipping on the floor, soaked, and squealing with laughter.

Norman was the last to leave, and no sooner had I waved good-bye and he’d gotten to his car than I called his cell phone. I stood in the doorway, watching him.

“I’m not taking that casserole,” he said after the second ring. “I don’t care how bad your fridge smells.”