Maybe other kids slept in on Thanksgiving morning, relishing the day off from school and looking forward to playing with family and friends as the grown-ups cooked, played cards, or watched football on TV. Other kids might have turned over in their beds and dreamed about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, presents, and the magic of Christmas. On this Thanksgiving I awoke early thinking I could sneak a phone call to my daddy before anyone was awake. Daddy would probably be asleep too, but he wouldn’t mind waking up to my voice wishing him a happy Thanksgiving.
I crept down the stairs of Grandma’s old house, cringing at every creak of the steps, crossing my fingers they wouldn’t wake Mama. Grandma always slept in on her day off. She worked six days a week at a restaurant called the Noble House, but it was closed on Thanksgiving. Reaching the last step, I peeked around the corner to see Grandma wrapped in an apron, crimping the edge of a pie crust. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to a steaming cup of coffee. She turned to greet me with a kiss and then asked if I wanted a crusted crispy and some coffee.
“Eww, coffee?” I scrunched my face in yuckiness.
“My grandma gave me coffee,” she said. “I couldn’t have been much older than you.”
“But Auntie Lo says it will put hair on my chest.”
Grandma unbuttoned the top two buttons of her housedress and pulled it open. “Do you see any hair on my chest?”
I saw the big white straps and cups of her brassiere, but no hair. I shook my head.
“Well then, how about a cup?
“If you say so.”
Grandma reached into the back of a cabinet and pulled out a tiny china cup with a matching saucer. My eyes grew wide with the beauty of that little cup. It was nearly transparent, white, with pink rosebuds entwined around a pale blue ribbon. The rim was streaked with gold.
“Here’s the cup my grandma gave me. It’s a demitasse she brought with her from Ireland. I know you’ll be very careful with it.” Grandma rinsed it out, dried it and filled it half full with coffee. Then she added two spoons of sugar, stirred it with a tiny spoon dug from the back of the silverware drawer, and then topped it with cream. Grandma used real cream that the milkman left by our door every Monday.
I sat down at her red Formica table and stirred my coffee with the little spoon. My legs dangled from the chair in unison to the rhythm of my stirring. Grandma turned back to the sink, but I could tell she was watching me from the corner of her eye.
My fingers fit through the tiny handle with ease and I lifted the cup to my face. I looked into the circle of creamy brown and saw myself looking back. I smiled and tipped the cup to my lips. The coffee tasted divine, almost as good as the ears of a chocolate Easter bunny. Grandma invested me in the family ritual that morning, the coffee ritual I would see enacted around the red Formica table for twenty years in real life and forever in my memory.
After my second cup of coffee, Grandma suggested I consider some orange juice because it being Thanksgiving and all, I’d need plenty of vitamin C to get me through the day. She slapped down a jelly glass with orange juice and disappeared out to the pantry and returned with a huge white parcel.
“What’s that?” I pointed to the package.
“It’s the bird.”
I screwed up my face in a question mark. “Huh?”
Grandma unwrapped the huge white thing, then held it up by the wings and made it jiggle. “Ever seen a turkey dance?”
I laughed and giggled while Grandma returned the turkey to the sink.
“Want to give it a name?” Grandma said.
“Okay. But is it a boy or a girl?”
Grandma looked over the bird with a grin. “It’s not either one, if you ask me. So you choose.”
“Then how about Matilda?”
“Matilda she is. Watch this.” Grandma’s reached into Matilda’s rump, her arm disappeared nearly to her elbow and then pulled out a handful of bloody looking stuff.
“Yuck!” I jumped back as if the bloody stuff were alive.
“What do you mean, ‘yuck.’ This is the best part. It’s the giblets. The liver, heart, and gizzard.
I wrinkled my nose. “Double yuck.”
“Then I suppose you don’t want to do the neck?”
“There’s no neck on that bird.”
“It’s tucked away. Wanna dig for it?”
“Where?”
Grandma pointed to the caved-in area where the neck should’ve been and then pulled up a flap of pimply skin. “Just reach in here.”
I had to stand on my tip-toes to get to the bird. I ran my hand around the rim of the neck-hole to make sure it was safe, as if the bird’s gaping hollow had teeth. Easing my hand into the cold, slimy hollow, my hand caught on something soft and hard. Sliding my hand up and down the object, I encircled my fingers around the thing and pulled. The thing came free and I dropped it into the sink like it was a poisonous snake.
“There, that wasn’t so yucky was it?
“No, it was yucky and icky.” I stuck out my tongue and gagged. “So what’re you going to do with this stuff?”
Grandma pulled out a saucepan, tossed in the giblets and neck, filled it with water and set it burning on the stove. “That’s what. I boil them down for the broth and then cut up the giblets and pull the meat from the neck bones for the dressing.”
“Sounds so icky, but it tastes so good.”
Grandma moved back to the bird lying naked in the sink. You want to pop some feather buds?
“Huh?”
“Huh? Is that all you can answer when you don’t know something? I sure would like it if you said, ‘What, Grandma?’”
My friend Jenny back at our old house had to say “sir” and “mam” to grown-ups because her daddy was a Marine and had been in Viet Nam. I guessed that I’d been corrected kind of like Jenny was, but Grandma’s voice was a lot nicer about it than Jenny’s dad had been.
“What, Grandma?”
“That’s better. That’s how a girl drinking from a china cup would answer.”
More than anything at that moment I wanted to be that girl. I wanted to say, ‘Yes, Grandma, I’d like some coffee this morning,’ every day of my life.
Grandma pulled me up a stool and together we popped the feather buds. She said this was the fun part of turkey making. The turkey skin was slick, not slimy, with pock holes where feathers had been. The feather buds were easy to find because they were swollen up kind of like a pimple and had a hard, white thing in them. Some of the feather buds actually had the tiniest spray of white blooming from the end of the shaft. Grandma showed me how to use my thumbs to pop out the feather buds, saying I’d probably use the same technique to pop blackheads on my face in a couple of years.
We finished popping the feather buds while my mind imagined huge swellings on my face with black buds sticking out, rather than the white ones on the turkey.
Grandma washed off the bird and patted it dry, then lifted it from the sink and set in inside an enormous blue and white speckled roasting pan.
“Now we have to season old Matilda. This is what turns a plain, old turkey into a well-dressed bird.”
Grandma chopped up a handful of garlic cloves and cooked them in a square of butter. Then she poured the garlic butter over Matilda and rubbed it all over her wings and legs and chest. She even lifted the skin over Matilda’s plump breast and rubbed some inside.
Next she sprinkled salt straight from the pour spout of the carton, her wrist moving so fast the salt flung high into the air and settled on the bird. Then she grabbed her long wooden pepper grinder and dusted the bird with black speckles. She pulled bottles of spices from the cabinet and lined them on the counter and then took one at a time and sprinkled them in succession, saying their names as she went.
“Sage. A good sprinkling of sage; it’s the number one poultry seasoning. Now for some thyme.”
“How long do we cook it?”
“Not t-i-m-e, as with a clock, but t-h-y-m-e, an herb.”
“Ah ha. T-H-Y-M-E.” Delighted at the lesson, spelling was one of my academic achievements.“Then you’re going to toss a bit of marjoram, some finely chopped rosemary—not the leafy kind—I like to grind it up in one of these.” Grandma pulled out a small bowl with a stick in it. “This is my mortar and pestle. I look kind of like a witch using this, don’t I?”
Really she did. Her long, gray-streaked hair, which she usually wound in a sleeping snake on the back of her head, now crawled down her back in a huge braid. Her apron had crept above the hump of her big tummy and hung loose in the back. I’d seldom seen her without make-up and her wrinkly skin was dotted with brown spots. That she was fixing up a huge bird the size of a small child did little to wipe away the image.
“Finally, add a light dusting of nutmeg. Not a lot; just enough for a bit of sweetness to the skin.”
Grandma stood back and swept her arm across the bird. “Sheila, meet Matilda; our Thanksgiving feast.”
Grandma put a cover over Matilda and shoved her in the oven.
“Let’s take a bit of a break, shall we?” Grandma poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Do you feel like jumping out of your skin?”
My eyes flew open. “Huh? I mean, what, Grandma?”
“How about one more cup of coffee, Sheila? I’ll sit down and join you this time.” Grandma made me a fresh cup of coffee, plopped herself into a chair and lit a cigarette.
My eyes followed the cigarette to her mouth.
“No cigarettes, Sheila. Coffee’s okay. It’s good. But don’t ever do this to yourself,” she nodded at the pack of Benson & Hedges laying on the table.
“Then how come you do?”
“Honey, if I could stop, I would. These things have me by the throat. Don’t ever let anything—or anyone—own you like these cigarettes own me.
A gray spiral of smoke climbed through the air as Grandma lifted the cigarette to her lips. She drew in a huge puff, waited a moment and then exhaled the gray plume above her head.
“How about a quick game of Yahtzee before everyone wakes up? We’ll use my quiet cup.”
Seemed Grandma had a cup for everything.
“I won’t have another minute from now until dinner, so let’s play.”
I’d never seen this side of Grandma. She left for work at nine o’clock in the morning six days a week and didn’t return home until we were long asleep. Her days off were spent grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning house. If anyone needed a few minutes of shaking the dice, Grandma did.
“I didn’t know turkey-making was so much work.” I said, writing my name in cursive across the top of a brand-new Yahtzee score sheet.
“Everything good in life takes time, Sheila,” she said, handing me an empty orange juice can with dice inside.
“It’s not just the time; it’s so complicated. There are so many steps and you have to do everything in the right order and with just the right amount. How do you know how much to use?” I rolled out a triplet of threes and marked a nine in my uppers.
“Experience, hon. Trial and error. Learning from mistakes. Like I don’t stuff the dressing inside the bird because it gets soggy. I cook it in a baking pan all by itself and everyone likes it better.” Grandma swept up all but two deuces, tossed them in the cup and put her mouth to the opening. Her voice echoed out, “Deuces, more deuces.”
I laughed at this playful side of Grandma and asked, “Does the cup listen to you?”
“Just wait and see.” She rattled the cup and poured out three more twos. “Yahtzee!”
“Amazing! How did you do that?”
“I just named it and claimed it, baby.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Will it work for anything?”
“Why not? Why don’t you give it a try with something you want.”
I picked up Grandma’s Yahtzee, dropped the dice into the cup and put my mouth to the opening. “Gimme a Yahtzee.” The dice thumped around in the cardboard juice cup while my mind chanted, “Yahtzee, Yahtzee, Yahtzee.” I poured the dice out one at a time. One six, two sixes, another six, two more sixes. I jumped from my chair and shouted, “Yahtzee.”
Grandma clapped and told me to mark the fifty points in my Yahtzee square.
So it was true, the Yahtzee cup could give me anything I wanted. On my next turn I spoke boldly. “Gimme my mama and daddy back together.”
Grandma groaned. Her face was so pale the brown spots blended into the white. She shook her head and took the cup from my hand. “Sheila, honey, if the cup worked that way don’t you think you wouldn’t have to ask that?”
If I had believed in magic before, the gravity of Grandma’s truth seeped deep into my heart and I knew… I just knew all the magic in the world couldn’t bring my family back together. It was luck in the Yahtzee cup, not magic. And luck was a hope that I could believe.