EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
Thanksgiving
When Ellie was little, we had pizza for Thanksgiving.
It was the first Thanksgiving for us to be on our own, and I wasn’t thankful for anything. Not one single thing. The Civic had died (again—that time it was a radiator so rusted it looked like a cheese grater). The washing machine had turned toes up, sending a biblical flood across the kitchen floor, and, because I was riding the bus at the time with Ellie, I didn’t get the water up in time, and it warped the kitchen linoleum. The clothes dryer was working, but it smoked a little even when it was on low, and I was too scared to use it. That left me washing our clothes in the bathtub and line drying them, heavy from not being spun first. The clothesline itself kept breaking free of the tree I’d tied it to with what I thought was a square knot (but obviously wasn’t), so just when I thought I was done with laundry for the day, I’d go out and find our soggy clothing lying in mud puddles. Then all my hand washing in the tub created a clog that I couldn’t fix with the cheap plastic snake I’d bought at the hardware store, so when Ellie or I showered, we had to stand in calf-deep water. She didn’t like it. I told her to buck up, but she was four. Four-year-olds don’t buck up. They smile, they jump like baby goats, they sparkle and rumble and twirl and twinkle, but they do not understand bucking up or why it is sometimes necessary.
Then the stove died, refusing to heat to temperatures of more than two digits, and the toaster went up in a blackened bagel accident.
The refrigerator was the last straw. When I came home to find warm milk and all my carefully planned frozen meals defrosted and gray, I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed. I had enough money in the bank to pay the mortgage and the utilities, and no more. Alimony and child support were late and often slimmer than they should have been. I couldn’t afford to replace a single broken thing.
Really, all I wanted to replace was myself, and I couldn’t afford that, either. I wanted the new, shiny version of Nora Glass. I was freelance copyediting as well as working at the paper, and I routinely stayed up past two in the morning to finish a job that would pay for Ellie’s day care. Then I got up at six to get us ready for the next round. The woman I saw in the mirror was too skinny, with dark shadows under her eyes. The humor that used to dance there was gone. Ellie had complained that she wanted to live with her aunt, “who always laughs like you used to and has cookies for me.”
To this I snapped, “Yeah? Well, those are store-bought.” It was my ultimate insult.
I wasn’t good at divorce. I wanted to figure out the method to it, the reason behind it. If I could figure out where I’d gone wrong, then I could fix whatever it was and start over. I didn’t want Paul back—once my heart started beating again about six months after he left, I was so angry with him I wouldn’t have taken him back if he’d showed up covered with hundred-dollar bills. I wanted myself back. I’d lost myself, somewhere, along the way. I’d left myself behind like an empty popcorn box, like a sweater forgotten on a train.
No, it was worse than leaving something behind.
I’d failed.
Divorce is, at its very core, the ultimate failure. You can blame many things on circumstances: you lost your condo because of the recession, you lost your job because of downsizing, your album failed because of distribution interruptions. But divorce? You just picked the wrong person. You were wrong, all the way around, about him and, worse, about yourself. You did it all wrong, and there’s no absolution. Even if you’re both better off being apart, when you say, “I’m divorced,” it means, “I failed.”
My bread always rose. I got out every stain. My curtains always hung straight. I hated failure more than anything.
One night as I was roughly drying Ellie with a towel I’d have to wash in the tub that took hours to drain, she said with four-year-old honesty, “You used to be fun, Mama. I liked you better then.” She wrapped her arms around my neck, smacked a kiss to my cheek, and raced away, bare bottomed and joyful.
The day after she told me I wasn’t fun was Thanksgiving. I would be fun, by god. I would find where my fun was hiding if it killed me. Hand in hand, we walked to the corner store and bought one turkey breast. I called my twin, even though I knew she had plans with her boyfriend, and left her a message. On our walk home, I pushed Ellie in the swing at the playground until my arms were sore.
At home, I dug through the boxes in the garage until I found what I was looking for: a toaster oven Paul and I had received as a wedding gift and had never used. Ellie was enchanted by the two dials and the high-pitched pings it made. She loved its loud ticking. I cut two potatoes into small pieces and cooked them next to the breast. When they were done, I mashed them, adding salt and the cheap margarine I had started buying. I cut the turkey into two pieces.
The front door burst open. My twin sister, Mariana, tumbled in. She was bleeding from both elbows and both knees, but she was laughing. “I couldn’t get a ride from Robby’s house, but I borrowed a bike. I kept falling off. I don’t think I’ve ridden one since we were kids. But I’m here! I rode all the way here!”
I boggled at her. “Robby lives in Fremont.” A bike ride that length would take four hours, at least.
“Okay, I took BART. And then two buses. I couldn’t get the bus bike rack down, though, and two guys had to help me. Then I fell off again and a pizza delivery guy almost ran me over with his car, and he felt so bad about it that he gave me two pizzas because they were made wrong. One’s Hawaiian and the other is pepperoni and green onions, which is weird but we can handle that, right? They’re bungee-corded to the rack. Ellie-belly, wanna help me carry them in?” Ellie, who was already jumping up and down, squealed in delight.
Together at my big family table, we ate small bites of turkey and potatoes and enormous bites of pizza, using our hands for everything (even the mashed potato!) just because we could. We guzzled sodas I’d found in the garage when I’d been looking for the toaster oven. We let Ellie draw all over the driveway with all the chalk colors, and then we spent an hour playing hopscotch. We played jump rope. After she fell asleep on the couch, my sister and I talked into the late hours over a bottle of cheap wine she’d miraculously managed not to break any of the times she’d fallen off the bike. All three of us slept in my bed that night, together.
And I was thankful again, for everything.