Chapter 1 - My sister-in-law called my 22-pound Thanksgiving turkey dry before I’d taken off my coat. Then my mother-in-law sighed, “Well, I suppose it’ll do.” After seven years of trying to please them, I picked up the platter and said I could take it to my mother’s. My husband said my name, but could I leave our family dinner without him...
“It looks dry,” my sister-in-law said as I set the turkey on my in-laws’ kitchen counter. Renee hadn’t said hello, and I still had my coat on. I’d spent almost five hours cooking that bird, then forty minutes driving it across the city wrapped in three towels.
“Well, it’s not carved yet,” I told her. “It’s hard to tell from the outside.” She stretched her mouth into something that passed for a smile in that house and went back to setting the table.
I kept my hands on the platter for a moment. It weighed twenty-two pounds before I’d cooked it, and my wrists were aching from carrying it inside. I’d expected someone to clear a place for it, ask how the drive had been, or perhaps acknowledge that dinner’s main course had arrived.
My name is Margo. I was thirty-four that Thanksgiving, an occupational therapist, married to Graham for almost seven years. We had a four-year-old son, Theo, and I’d become very practiced at making visits to Graham’s family look easier than they felt.
His parents, Brenda and Walter Hendrick, had a big brick house with a wraparound porch. They’d been married thirty-eight years, and Renee had a law degree. From the outside, the whole arrangement looked settled and fortunate, and I knew Graham felt that way about it.
He loved his family without having to think much about whether they liked him back. I don’t blame him for that. But it made it difficult to explain what it felt like to walk into their house already bracing for the first correction.
Sometimes I’d parked too close to the hedge. Sometimes Theo’s winter shoes were the wrong brand. Once Brenda asked whether I used to wear my hair shorter, then told me it had suited me better that way.
Any one comment could have been brushed off. I brushed off plenty, then went home and lay beside Graham replaying them. I wanted to know whether I’d missed a joke, misunderstood a tone, or somehow arrived looking for trouble without realizing it.
When I pointed out a specific sentence, he usually said, “That’s just how my mom talks.” He didn’t sound dismissive to himself; he sounded reassuring. I would try to accept it that way because I wanted our holidays to be ordinary, especially after Theo was born.
I wanted to bring something, eat dinner, and leave without spending the ride home deciding whether I was too sensitive. Instead, I kept thinking the next contribution might settle the matter. Good wine, a homemade pie, a gift I’d taken time to find—surely something would communicate that I was trying.
Two years earlier, Walter had mentioned his mother’s tourtière. Nobody made the meat pie the way she had, he said. It was one of the few times he’d talked about a meal with actual affection, and I remembered it.
Through one of Graham’s cousins, I found the handwritten recipe. I went to a specialty butcher for the pork and spent a month learning to make it. I practiced the lattice crust on three weekends because I wanted it to look like something worth serving.
Walter took a bite and said it needed more clove, the way his mother’s did. He didn’t finish his slice. Then Brenda remarked that it was interesting I’d used a store-bought crust.
I told her I’d made it. Later, I told her again, and by the third time I could hear how badly I wanted her to believe me. She still seemed more comfortable with her own explanation, and I went home thinking about the crust instead of the weeks I’d spent making the whole thing.
I didn’t stop volunteering. That’s a part of this story I wish I could make more flattering, but I can’t. I kept showing up with another carefully chosen offering, convinced I hadn’t quite found the right one yet.
The week before Thanksgiving, Graham asked whether I’d handle the turkey. “Mom’s oven’s acting up,” he said, and I answered yes before we’d discussed much beyond that. His mother needed help, we were going there anyway, and I knew how to cook one.
I didn’t ask whether somebody else could take it on. It seemed easier to agree than to explain why cooking the main course for his family felt different from cooking it for people who simply wanted dinner. Besides, I still wanted this visit to go well.
I’d ordered the bird three weeks ahead from the butcher on Danforth. A twenty-two-pound turkey doesn’t slip neatly beside the milk and yogurt in an ordinary refrigerator. I brined it in a cooler in the garage because there was nowhere else large enough to put it.
Theo had been sick with a cold the previous week. I’d missed time at the clinic and was catching up on work, which hadn’t left me particularly well rested. Still, I got up at five Thanksgiving morning because I wanted to give the turkey enough time.
I basted it every forty minutes. In between, I checked the clock, checked the bird, and thought about getting it to Brenda’s while it was still warm. I wasn’t putting together a television cooking segment; I was trying to make one family dinner go well.
By the time I wrapped it for the car, I’d put a great deal more care into it than into getting myself ready. Three towels kept the platter steady in the back seat. I drove for forty minutes conscious of every turn, as though the turkey had paid for a driving lesson and might leave a review.
Now it was on the counter, and Renee had decided what was wrong with it before a knife had touched it. I could have answered once and let it pass, which was what I generally did. I had already given her the reasonable answer: we hadn’t carved it yet.
Graham was opening wine. Renee was busy at the table. Everything around me continued normally, which somehow made it harder to decide whether I had any right to be upset.
About ten minutes after we arrived, Brenda came into the kitchen. She looked at the turkey, then let out a sigh loud enough to travel beyond the room. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it’ll do.”
I waited for something else to follow. A thank-you, maybe, or a question about whether I’d had trouble managing it with Theo sick. But she’d said what she came to say, and I recognized the familiar expectation that I would make her disappointment more comfortable for her.
Usually I would have offered an explanation. I could have told her about the brine, the basting, or the cooler in the garage. I could already imagine myself saying, “I hope it’s all right,” while she settled into being the person who would decide.
Instead, I heard myself say, “If it’ll do, I can just take it back.” Graham looked up from the bottle. For a second, nobody moved, and I wondered whether I had really said it loudly enough for them to hear.
“Take it back where?” Brenda asked. She sounded puzzled, as though carrying something into her kitchen meant it had ceased to belong to the person who brought it. I told her my mother was hosting overflow and would appreciate a turkey she hadn’t needed to cook.
Then I picked up the platter. It felt heavier now, partly because my arms were shaking. Graham said, “Margo,” in the voice he used when he wanted me to pause and reconsider, but he didn’t put down the wine and come toward me.
May you like
I carried it through the front door and down the steps. Walter was smoking on the porch and barely looked up. At the car, I eased the platter onto the towels in the back seat, realizing I had taken the main course and left my husband standing in his parents’ kitchen.
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