I was doomed.
“I make a mean duck with orange-cranberry relish,” I said hopefully to my husband at breakfast.
“Not on Thanksgiving you don’t,” he said without looking up from his newspaper.
I knew that there were turkeys available shot full of some stuff that made them all plump and juicy, turkeys that came with little slimy instruction booklets packed in with the giblets, turkeys that even had those plastic daggers that pop up to tell you when they’re done. I couldn’t buy one of those turkeys because I had long ago sworn off that kind of prepared foodstuff (although on nights when my husband had to work late and the kids were safely tucked away in bed, I would sometimes make myself a big portion of Kraft macaroni and cheese, for old time’s sake). I needed a fresh turkey, with no additives, no preservatives, no chemicals, nothing to protect me from the possibility that I would pull something from the oven with white meat resembling wallboard.
It’s important to note here what I think of as Quindlen’s dictum: It is impossible to cook badly something you love. I am constitutionally incapable of making bad fudge or bad fettuccine Alfredo. I do not love turkey; I don’t even like turkey. The only part I eat is the big triangular piece of skin covering the stuffing at the back. My brother-in-law and I have for years bickered over it, although now that we both have children we’ve gotten pretty adult about the whole thing. We split it and then bicker over who gets the bigger piece. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the turkey is a testimonial to what boring people we’ve turned the Pilgrims into. Calvin Trillin is leading a nationwide campaign to have spaghetti carbonara declared the official Thanksgiving food. I say, “Hear, hear!”
That said, the turkey was delivered on Wednesday afternoon. “I hope it fits in your oven,” said the butcher, with what I can only describe as a smile. The turkey was enormous. It was as ugly as a baby just after birth and looked about the same: wrinkled, misshapen, with odd bumps and bruises and a weird white-pink color. Luckily, it fit in my oven. It did not, however, fit in my refrigerator.
I was doomed.
“Put it on the fire escape,” a friend of mine said, “it’s colder out there today than it is in your refrigerator.”
“Stray cats,” I said.
“Wrap it in foil and put it in a box.”
“Rain.”
“Put a tarp over it.”
“You think of everything,” I said. “You come over here and cook this thing.”
Well, I did put it on the fire escape, at least until I could farm out all the other food in the refrigerator to my friends. In the morning I put it in the oven. First I stuffed it, rubbed two sticks of soft butter into its pathetic skin and shrouded it in cheesecloth. I worked out a roasting time between five hours and eight hours, basted it every half hour and hoped for the best.
Inevitably, my mind kept turning to the time I first made a chicken, which sounds soothing but wasn’t. I was seventeen. My mother talked me through it: season, truss, roast, let rest, carve. The only thing she left out was thaw. Even today, when family members have had a little eggnog and want a good laugh, someone says, “Anna’s chicken!” and they all roar and roll around while I have another drink.
I was doomed.
Or so I thought. It was a good turkey; not a great turkey, but not a “family joke” turkey either. It was pretty juicy, and it wasn’t raw, and it looks good in the photographs, which is more than you can say for me. The only complaint I have about the whole episode is that I was so busy worrying about the turkey that my brother-in-law got a much bigger piece of skin than I did, which I can assure you will not happen this year. Oh, yes, I’m doing it again this Thanksgiving, making my second turkey for only eleven people. A lot of the others say that since they were here last year, they have to go to the in-laws this year. None of them know about the fire escape, so maybe they are telling the truth.
SILLY
One of the first terms of art you learn in the newspaper business is something called the silly season, which once upon a time occurred around August. It was that time of the year when news had ground to a dead halt, when the mayor was at the beach, the kids were out of school, and public relations people called up promoting things like the Madonna lookalike contest or the first annual dog Frisbee competition. After Labor Day the pace was expected to quicken again: legislation, Supreme Court decisions, heat complaints, and the press of daily business.
But what many of us began to notice over the years—and what some of you may have noticed, too—is that the silly season has proliferated. Perhaps this has something to do with holiday weekends, which have spread out faster than chicken pox in a first grade class. There’s a silly season now that stretches from Thanksgiving to New Year, and another one in May, which is usually linked to spring fever. Slowly but surely, the United States has developed an unbelievable year-round case of senioritis.
I’ve come to believe that this is because the United States is the silliest nation on the face of the earth, although it probably gets a bit of competition from England, which is silly only because it is so terribly serious. I don’t get the impression that the French or the Germans are silly. The Soviets are not silly at all. But this is some silly country we live in, between the bakeoffs and the baby beauty contests and all those events in which people balance pancakes on their noses or bet on which box turtle will cross the finish line first. I believe that Gary Hart had his finger on the American pulse and realized that reentering the presidential race was so silly that Americans just might be amused by it. (I am not saying the United States is a stupid country. Which is why I believe the bumper crop of Gary Hart cartoons, apocryphal stories, and even knock-knock jokes will bear no relation to votes. Since Gary Hart went on Nightline and appeared to confuse having female friends with taking yacht trips with actress/models, it is no surprise that he can also confuse amusement with forgiveness.)
My husband and I are educated people, and I can’t tell you what a whoop we got out of it when we heard the story—untrue, it developed—that Joe Biden would get back in the race, too. Was that silly or what? “Ted Kennedy’s next!” we both shouted. “Nixon,” I screamed. “Like the T-shirt says, he’s tanned, rested, and ready.”
This is very undignified and if I were a serious commentator I would here decry such silliness. But I won’t. I was raised in the silly branch of a funny family, and I now help run a silly household myself. My grandfather always played a song on the piano that we called “The Laughing Song.” The melody was really only a series of fancy-dancy scales, and there were no lyrics. Instead, along with the syncopated melody, you sang laughter, something like this: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ho ho ho ho ho. That was it. The thing about it was, after a few bars somebody would inevitably crack up. Then somebody else, and somebody else again. By the time “The Laughing Song” was over, most of the people in the room would be howling along with it.
That’s the kind of environment I grew up in. My father is a very silly man who will do almost anything for a good laugh, although unlike Gary Hart he disdains a cheap one. For a time, we lived amidst the mountains of West Virginia, where the most talked-about programming on the radio was the WWVA Jamboree. And my father would take me with him in the car to the highest elevation in town late at night and fiddle with the car radio dials as delicately as a safe cracker until he picked up Jean Shepherd’s monologues. Then we would listen and laugh. I still think my father has never been prouder of me than the day when, accompanying a group of his colleagues to a business lunch, I successfully completed the second anecdote in a two-part joke which required complicity and excellent timing. (My father did think that I should have waited until dessert rather than the main course for my part, but it was a small complaint.)
I don’t mean to suggest that we were a whoopee cushion family, the kind who balanced buckets of water over the kitchen door and collapsed into laughter when someone got soaked, although I’d be willing to give that a try. Rather the contrary. Everyone always considered
it quite amusing that my grandfather, safely at home, would from time to time send motel postcards which always said “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. (Wish I was, too.)” When I was at boarding school my father would habitually send me letters signed Joe, which is not his name. (Today he frequently sends me letters signed “Your husband’s father-in-law.”) My friends thought this was uproarious, and envied me. I really hated it. No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own éclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.
I cannot help but feel now that my parents raised me right. Being silly seems the easiest, certainly the most pleasurable way to survive and thrive in these times, particularly during an election year. If I had not been silly I never would have covered the weeklong attempt to inflate a balloon facsimile of King Kong atop the Empire State Building or the invasion of the khapra beetle in lower Manhattan. Silliness has made my life easier. It has certainly made it easier for me to have children. You cannot imagine how much easier it is to have two children under the age of four if you are not only able but willing to do lifelike monkey imitations. This would not be in keeping with a role as a serious commentator, but then there are lots and lots of serious commentators around. And precious few silly ones. Not to mention first-rate monkey impersonators.
KEEPING
THE
FAITH
I AM A CATHOLIC
Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. These are my bona fides: a word, a phrase, a sentence in a language no one speaks anymore. Kyrie eleison. Confiteor dei. I am a Catholic. Once at a nursing home for retired clergy, I ate lunch with a ninety-year-old priest, a man who still muttered the Latin throughout the English Mass and ate fish on Fridays. When he learned how old I was, he said with some satisfaction, “You were a Catholic when being a Catholic still meant something.”
What does it mean now? For myself, I cannot truly say. Since the issue became material to me, I have not followed the church’s teaching on birth control. I disagree with its stand on abortion. I believe its resistance to the ordination of women as priests is a manifestation of a misogyny that has been with us much longer than the church has. Yet it would never have occurred to my husband and me not to be married in a Catholic church, not to have our children baptized. On hospital forms and in political polls, while others leave the space blank or say “none of your business,” I have no hesitation about giving my religion.
We are cultural Catholics. I once sneered at that expression, used by Jewish friends at college, only because I was not introspective enough to understand how well it applied to me. Catholicism is to us now not so much a system of beliefs or a set of laws but a shared history. It is not so much our faith as our past. The tenets of the church which I learned as a child have ever since been at war with the facts of my adult life. The Virgin Birth. The Trinity. The Resurrection. Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next. I could recite parts of the Baltimore Catechism in my sleep. Do I believe those words? I don’t know. What I do believe are those guidelines that do not vary from faith to faith, that are as true of Judaism or Methodism as they are of Catholicism: that people should be kind to one another, that they should help those in need, that they should respect others as they wish to be respected.
And I believe in my own past. I was educated by nuns, given absolution by priests. My parents were married in a Catholic church, my grandparents and mother buried from one. Saturday afternoons kneeling on Leatherette pads in the dim light of the confessional, listening for the sound of the priest sliding back the grille on his side. Sunday mornings kneeling with my face in my hands, the Communion wafer stuck to the roof of my dry mouth. These are my history. I could no more say I am not Catholic than say I am not Irish, not Italian. Yet I have never been to Ireland or Italy.
Some of our Jewish friends have returned to the ways of their past, to Shabbat without automobiles and elevators, to dietary laws and the study of Hebrew. We cannot do the same. There is no longer a Latin Mass, no Communion fast from midnight on. Even the inn is gone from the Bible; now Mary and Joseph are turned away from “the place where travelers lodged.”
The first time my husband and I went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in our parish church, we arrived a half-hour early so we would get a seat. When the bells sounded twelve and the priest came down the center aisle, his small acolytes in their child-size cassocks walking before him, the pews were still half empty. We were thinking of a different time, when the churches were packed, when missing Mass was a sin, when we still believed that that sort of sin existed—sins against rules, victimless sins.
There are more families coming to that church now, families like us with very small children who often have to leave before the Gospel because of tears, fatigue, temper tantrums. (I remember that, when I was growing up, my family’s parish church was shaped like a cross, and one of the short arms was for the women with babies. It had a sheet of glass walling it off and was soundproof. And through the glass you could see the babies, as though in a movie with no audio, their little mouths round, their faces red. Inside that room, the noise was dreadful. But missing Mass was a sin.)
I think perhaps those families are people like us, people who believe in something, although they are not sure what, people who feel that in a world of precious little history or tradition, this is theirs. We will pass down the story to our children: There was a woman named Mary who was visited by an angel. And the angel said, “Do not be afraid” and told her that though she was a virgin she would have a child. And He was named Jesus and was the Son of God and He rose from the dead. Everything else our children learn in America in the late twentieth century will make this sound like a fairy tale, like tales of the potato famines in Ireland and the little ramshackle houses with grape arbors on hillsides in Italy. But these are my fairy tales, and so, whether or not they are fact, they are true.
I was born a Catholic and I think I will die one. I will ask for a priest to give me Extreme Unction, as it was given to my mother, and to her mother before her. At the end, as in the beginning, I will ask for the assistance of the church, which is some fundamental part of my identity. I am a Catholic.
NUNS
The most compelling question of my girlhood was whether nuns had hair. Occasionally, when we were taken by Mother Thérèse to the yard beside the school, as we eddied about her long black legless skirts in our duffle coats and saddle shoes, a strong wind would lift the heavy black serge of her veil, and one of us—that day’s celebrity—would glimpse a strand or two at the nape of her neck. For days we would conjecture whether it was merely the popular pixie cut under there, or whether her entire scalp had been shaved and what we had seen was just an oversight. A few girls of a Jesuitical turn of mind suggested that perhaps she had hair just like ours and that it was braided or pinned up. No one ever took them very seriously.
The nuns were, with the exception of my family and one or two fast friends, the most important force in my formative years. It is popular now to think of them as a joke or an anachronism, to suggest that the nuns taught little more than that a well-placed ruler hurt like the dickens and that boys were only after one thing, but that was not what I learned from them at all. I learned that women were smart and capable, could live in community together without men, and in fact did not need men much.
I am sure that being under the constant sway of human beings living in a state of enforced employment and chastity must have had some blacker reverberations, and I know the nuns attached too much value to our being well behaved, to sitting with backs straight and hands folded. But today it is the good things I remember. I suspect, deep down, that some of those
women turned me into a feminist. I wonder what they would think of that? For the nuns were intelligent, most of them, and they seemed in charge. The place where they lived smelled of furniture polish and horsehair-stuffed brocade and reeked of order, and if in the morning there was chalk on their simple yet majestic habits, by afternoon it was gone.
I attended Catholic school just as the sovereignty of the church over the lives of its citizens was beginning, very slowly, to crumble. It was still a time when the Roman Catholic son who chose the priesthood beat the one who went to medical school hands down, when a Catholic daughter chose habitual pregnancy or the convent. Often it was the brightest and the most ambitious who took the latter course, which offered, in some orders, the opportunity for education and advancement. But it must have also seemed an attractive life when faced with the alternatives. I know that what I found most seductive about the convent was the place itself. Growing up in and among families where children—in various stages of undress, distress, and toilet training—outnumbered adults, I thought it was a place of wonderful peace and quiet. There were no fingerprints on the mahogany table tops.
My recollection is that the woman who founded the order that taught me, a somewhat upper-crusty group that ran private rather than mere parochial schools, had even been a wife and mother and had thrown it over for the convent. The story was that her husband decided he had a calling for the priesthood and somehow got a dispensation to follow it despite a sizable family, and his wife then decided to enter religious life. He changed his mind—that’s men for you—but she refused to change hers. When I was a schoolgirl, the founder was being pushed very heavily for sainthood. No mixed messages in that story. The religious life was a higher way.
Nuns seemed sure of themselves. Perhaps, in order to style oneself a bride of Christ, self-confidence must be part of the costume. It was not their supremacy but their vulnerability that we found most disturbing. On those rare occasions when Mother Thérèse wept, it seemed to me that a certain surety in life disappeared. It occurs to me now, of course, that she was high-strung, quite young, and very pretty, and that seventh grade combined with poverty, chastity, and obedience must have been heavy going. And we often gave her good reason to cry.