Prompt: A Movie (300 words or less)

To dismiss the traditions and rituals and holidays is to mock what is sacred to others, to insult their beliefs, and to ruin the pleasure for everyone else because you are a difficult and disagreeable person.

“I’m not mocking Thanksgiving,” I said. “I just don’t want to go.”

Why? Why wouldn’t I want to spend a day with family. Extended family. Uncles and aunts and cousins, and last year there was an infant, a cheesy-stinking font of spit-up, and everyone carrying on as if the parents had actually done something extraordinary like publish a book or win the lottery, until I broke in and said, “The earthworm is impressive because it impregnates itself.” After that, they all gave me the cold shoulder except Natalie, my nine-year-old nose-picking booger-wiping-on-walls cousin with the mouse ears: circular ears set nearer to the top of her head than where you’d expect to find human ears; ears I could only hope were genetically recessive.

“You want to stay home,” my mother gave up the argument, “then stay home. Alone,” she added with emphasis, as if alone were a state of being that I’d come to deeply regret soon enough.

Positioned at the living room window, I watched the car pull out of the driveway and down the road until it went beyond my range of vision, and then I went to the kitchen to make a feast of my own. In the refrigerator was a packet of Oscar Mayer bologna and another of sliced ham, which had a pig for a logo. A cartoon pig wearing a chef’s hat, which was cruelty all on its own. I made myself a cheese sandwich. Three individually wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese on Arnold’s Bakery White garnished with two slices of a grainy-textured tomato, grainy-textured like wet sand, and topped off with dollop of mayonnaise. For side dishes I chose a can of Diet Dr. Pepper and a stack of Oreo cookies, and I carried the tray to the family room, where I sat, cross-legged, on the floor in front of the television and ate my Thanksgiving dinner while watching Miracle on 34th Street, a movie I’d seen a trillion and a half times before. Yet, still I was not prepared for how nearly unbearable it was to watch the movie to its very end, to that last scene when young Natalie Wood’s wish comes true, when we see the ordinary house with a backyard swing under a patch of sunlight, an image that foreshadowed the inevitability of the excruciating ache of wistful regret that comes with a perfectly nice life.

Already, it was dark outside. The kitchen light glowed with a yellow halo, and I caught sight of my reflection in the window, faint and opaque; there, but not there. I contemplated giving myself the finger, but didn’t bother. Taking the box of Oreos with however many cookies were left, I went to the living room where I cozied up in one of the two matching armchairs to read Peyton Place, yet again. Peyton Place was one of the half-dozen books in our house, all hardcover, navy-blue cloth bound, a shade of navy blue that was a near-enough match to the navy-blue upholstery of the couch, which matched the armchairs. The books filled the small shelf built into a corner table where my mother would’ve preferred to put geranium plants, but this shelf was not positioned for sunlight. I’d read the other five books a bunch of times too; they stunk even worse than Peyton Place. The one about the cattle drive in the Old West was the one that stunk the most.

As if an Oreo were a Communion wafer or a tab of acid, I popped a cookie into my mouth, whole, where it was ablated, creamy on my tongue. I opened Peyton Place at random. Despite having it practically memorized word for word, I was sufficiently engaged with Peyton Place not to hear the car pull into the driveway. Instead, I heard the absence, the absence of sound of the motor turned off. Then came the muffled basso click of the car doors opening followed by the satisfied clap when shut.

The four of them—my parents and my sisters—like the four cups of milk to a quart, the four quarters to a dollar, the four seasons in a year, four people to make a family—were in the foyer unwinding scarves, taking off their coats—the faw-yay, my mother called it, to which I’d said right, the faw-yay because we live in France—when Dawn, the youngest of us and already showing signs of the twat she would become, made a beeline for the living room to where I pretended to be deeply engrossed in my reading, as if I were oblivious to Dawn who was right there in front of me doing the little bouncy-dance of someone who really has to pee; really, really has to pee but, for whatever reason, is holding it in. Except Dawn didn’t have to pee. She was holding in words, words that she was desperate to utter, restraining herself only to sweeten the release, until she could contain it no longer. “Bunny, you won’t believe it, but I swear to you,” Dawn said, “the entire day, and no one, not one person, not even Natalie, asked where you were. It was like, Bunny who?”

On that first Thanksgiving without me there, my extended family regenerated seamlessly, a Darwinian adaptation of evolution that, among other improvements, allowed for more elbow room around the table.

Even now, looking back, in retrospect, that was my happiest Thanksgiving ever.