Thanksgiving '64

We went out to dinner for Thanksgiving. I was in high school, my sister in community college, dating a boy named Chip who would jilt her, crush her senseless. We had moved to Hopewell Junction a few months earlier, to a new development on a hill where Angus cows had grazed and left their droppings. The restaurant seemed to my sister and me to be expensive, not Chinese, or pizza that we were used to, it was in an old Colonial house with fireplaces sparking and we all ate prime ribs au jus. I didn’t know my parents were unhappy together, I thought all families were like ours, quiet, anxious, slumping. I remember the cheese cake for dessert, with pineapple on top. At home, my sister found a 33 LPM album with songs to dance by, a tango, a cha-cha, a waltz, a lindy. The carpet in the living room was mustard-colored. The window looking out on the brown street and our peach-fuzz new lawn with cow footprints was concave. She put the album on the record player and we danced together. I was in high school but never had had a drink, I drank coke with my cheese cake, but we were quite intoxicated, and danced the lindy fast, spinning, and then the waltz, which we both seemed to know, we spun and my eyes hit the wall above the piano and the dining room ceiling and the mustard floor. My sister could really dance, spin forever without being dizzy, but I spent the next three days throwing up. She picked up with a new boyfriend, later married him and waited for him to return from Viet Nam, and later waited for him to recover his senses, his self worth, his sobriety. My parents waited for me to get married before they divorced with my help, my mitigation, my advice, my arbitration. Don’t remember any Thanksgivings after that one, the four of us together. But when we were small, my parents danced the jitterbug in our living room in an earlier house, on Long Island, speechless, sure-handed, and with grace, and I watched them.