All Write, Already!

“I dunno what he’s talking about! His mouth is running in all different directions but I can’t make neither heads nor tails out his nonsense!”

               Aunt Mazy’s face was flush, her brow is furrowed, her eyes are slits. She’s pretty angry. Young William’s presentation of gastronomic blasphemy notwithstanding, his real mistake, in my opinion, was offering an explanation, which naturally reads as an excuse. It’s just a mistake of youth. Older men know when a woman is shrieking her lungs you just keep your trap shut till it’s over.

I’m sitting on the sidelines, relaxed as I can be, under the circumstances, but it’s a hard fight not to laugh out loud. I guess that’s why they call it nonsense...? I think to myself when suddenly Mazy turns to me. This was something I was afraid of happening, involvement!

               “Lawrence, you understand what the hell your boy is talking about?!” she shouts, she shouts it at me from the other side of the table, shouts it over the macaroni and cheese, over the neatly carved marble ham, the pretty pools of cranberry sauce from the can, three different forests of green beans, green peas and broccoli laid down in fine white porcelain platters. She shouts and  the white wine in our ornate gold trim glasses stir a bit, the uneven surfaces sway from side to side and you have to wonder is this just the share strength of her voice or did she bump the table during her rant. I’d vote for the latter, but the former is a funnier thought. I come out of the amused fog to a realization that words are expected from me. It takes a minute to form a thought and this is the perilous time, too much dead silence and I might laugh, laughing would be bad.

               “I understood him to say he thought it was cooked.” I offer, coming to sit straight in my chair. I picked last sentence out of Young William’s defensive diatribe, the one that spurred Aunt Mazy’s rather loud rebuttal, the one where he semi articulated his naivety when it came to cooking a bird for a family of ten. I mean, I’m not wrong, exactly, he put the bird in the over an hour earlier. Yes…, ONLY an hour earlier. He took it out and dropped it on the table for the rest of us to marvel over. He must have thought he'd cooked it through, right? Unless he was trying to poison us. The scene was priceless, if you had no soul, which I fear I do not. There’s him looking all loud and proud of his accomplishment, there’s everyone else looking somewhat less enamored with his masterpiece once they note the lack of steam rising off it, once they see the bright pink skin stretched over it from stem to stern. Me, I start leaning back in one of momma’s oak wood antique dining chairs in anticipation of a ruckus bright and noisy enough to beat the band. And…, Aunty ‘crazy Mazy’s internal eruption in 5,4,3,2,--- There it came, regular as a bill in the mail. She stood with that wide eyed preamble to indigence and the screeching started.

Some of us cook, sure, there are experts and there are novices alike in our gathering. That’s just how some families are. What united us all that night, the well practiced and the whimsy proletarian alike was the universal certainty amongst us all that our long awaited main dish was raw to the touch, without hesitation or experimentation, we were all pretty damned sure.

               “He thought it was cooked?! He thought it was cook?!!” there’s Mazy, crazy Mazy, Uncle Wilkes calls her when she ain’t around, working herself up to a high pitch through tightly clinched teeth. I just nod, a dumb look on my face just to exasperate the situation.

               “S’what the boy said.” I say. She starts to shake. She grabs on the white clammy leg of the giant dead bird. It resists, tough and cold as it is, her fingers slip right off the slimy surface.

“How the hell you gonna call this finished?!”

“Oh no, I didn’t.” I offer up fast! “was him that said it, not me.” I’m pointing at William now, all eyes turn instinctively to him and the sell out on my part is complete.

All this while, My son, the culinary genius we’ll call Young William has been standing in the corner looking absolutely ludicrous in that white apron and billowing chef’s hat. Last time you volunteer, ain’t it, kiddo? I think to myself, looking at him hovering there, big pink fuzzy oven mitts still hiding the details of his hands, his eyes aimed at his shoes. I mean honestly if you saw him there you’d cry, if you weren’t me. Me who don’t know how to cry or feel sympathy for smart ass know-it-alls that think they can skim an internet blog on cooking turkeys for ten minutes and become an expert. No sir, not me, I don’t got a sympathetic bone for ya, my child! So It’s On! I’ll allow this scene to escalate a bit more, and when it reaches a suitable crescendo I’ll steal away upstairs claiming a headache. There I’ll catch the last quarter of the jets game. You see, my friends, as the goddamned paterfamilias you have to know how to turn the inevitably heinous mishaps of every family get together to your advantage. It just comes with the Job!