I hesitated about how to respond to this. I did have something to tell him—something that would change everything—but it was not what he wanted to hear.
The bathroom door opened and Sosi emerged, toweling her tumble of hair. “Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of Sosi,” Will said. “It’s really only because of her that we came here this weekend. You have her to thank for that.”
I mumbled something that could have been taken as Thank you.
Sosi looked from him to me. “You don’t have to thank me. I just hated that you guys weren’t speaking. But I don’t want to get in the way of anything private.”
“It’s okay.” Will set a plate of toast down in front of her. “I’m sure she’s just planning to give her canned speech about anonymous donors—again. And guess what, I don’t need to hear that. Again.”
Well, this was not a good start to the morning, I guess it goes without saying. But I kept trying. “So, Sosi. You’re Armenian!” I didn’t intend to sound so excited about it. Partly I was trying to hide the fact that I knew nothing about Armenia, aside from the fact that there had been a genocide there. Now it was clear to all of us, if it hadn’t been before, how hard I had to work to welcome this new person to the house I was accustomed to sharing only with my son.
“Well, my family is. My name is.” She spread a prim pat of peanut butter (after checking the label) on her toast. “But I’m pretty sure I don’t have a drop of it, myself.”
I looked from one to the other of them, thinking for a split second that they were playing a joke on me. The pain of it, that possibility, exploded inside my chest. Then Will said, “She’s adopted.”
Sosi nodded confirmation as she lifted her toast and let my son take a bite from it. I looked away, as if they’d just performed a French kiss in front of me. “At first I was only a foster. Then I guess I grew on them.” She smiled the smile of someone accustomed to being chosen, then pointed pertly at Will. “He thinks I should get one of those DNA kits and find out what I am. Maybe even find my birth parents. But I’m not really interested. What difference would it make?”
I tried to keep my voice under control as I asked, “You can find your birth parents with those kits?” The question was just to buy some time, because I already knew the answer. I’d looked into it, wanting to be ready for when—not if—the subject came up. But expecting something to happen is not the same as having it happen, and I felt blindsided.
He’d found the same information I had. “It’s possible. Not likely, but there are people who’ve found the fathers they were looking for.” He paused to let sink in for me—as if I didn’t know it already!—how much he wished he were one of them. “In case you’re wondering, I’m thinking of getting one of those kits myself.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I got up from the table to clatter my plate into the sink. “Why spend the money, and get your hopes up, if it’s such a long shot?”
“Because a long shot is still a shot,” he said. “Which is more than I get by asking you.” His tone wasn’t mean, even though the words were. He had a little crumb at the edge of his lip and I was going to let him know, but Sosi did it before I could and he used his napkin to blot it away.
“We’ve been through this,” I murmured, as if using a softer tone would make the conversation less tense. “Do we have to bring it up now? You used to agree with me that it didn’t matter.”
“That was when I was a stupid kid. Of course I had to agree with you. What choice did I have?” He was looking straight at me as he asked this, holding up his knife as if he might use it to catch any response I tossed in his direction.
But I didn’t give him one. I’d responded so many times already, and he’d never liked what he heard, so why put us both through that again? After a few minutes Sosi said, “Well, I’m not doing it. I like having a blank slate. That way there’s nothing to live up to, or to live down. I’d rather just create myself, thank you.” There may have been a touch of defiance in her voice along with the pride, but I didn’t know her well enough yet to be sure.
“What about how you’re raised?” I focused on my juice glass as I spoke, counting the pieces of pulp at the bottom. “What about nurture? I thought that was a lot more important. Honey, it is.”
“Mom, calm down.” I think he may have thought he was hurting my feelings, implying that my nurturing wasn’t good enough or something. “It’s just—well, not everything can be overcome or undone by your environment. You can’t change your DNA.”
I knew that no good could come of prolonging this conversation. When I began too quickly to clear the dishes, I knocked my glass from the table, and Will put his hand out to catch it, just in time. “Whoa, that was a phew,” I said, speaking with too much cheer again, this time out of relief. If the glass had fallen and shattered, I don’t know what I would have done.
“A few what?” asked Sosi, so I explained how it came from when he was a little boy and we used to play Chutes and Ladders. The whole game, Will was anxious about what would happen when he got to the last row and feared spinning the number that would force him to slide his game-piece all the way back to the beginning. “That was a phew,” he’d say when he avoided that number, hopping his piece over the fatal entrance to the chute. It became an inside phrase between us, whenever one or both of us had a reason to feel relieved.
“She doesn’t know about that?” I asked him after he saved the glass from smashing, when Sosi asked A few what?
“No,” he said. “I haven’t told her every single silly little thing about my life.”
That hurt, the word “silly,” I admit. But I didn’t say so. Instead I did the dishes and turned on the parade, but Will said it was too childish and changed the channel to CNN. We weren’t due at Grettie and Jack’s until noon, but at eleven I found myself in my bedroom calling her to whisper that we might be there a little early, if that was okay. “What’s she like?” Grettie asked. “I’m dying to meet her.”
“She has a lot of red hair,” I said, knowing that if I added anything else it would come across as snarky, and I didn’t want Grettie to think of me that way. When we got to their house everyone greeted Sosi warmly, and in hugging her Grettie said, “Any girlfriend of my godson is a goddaughter of mine.” How long had she had that line prepared, I wondered? And why did it make me feel guilty?
Because I did not feel that Sosi was in any way my daughter, I suppose. I reminded myself that it was just a nice thing Grettie had thought to say—as she always did.
Though her son Cam was the only one of the kids of legal drinking age, Grettie offered a glass of beer or wine to all of them except Bella, who’d just turned twelve and who got only a cordial-sized serving of Cabernet.
I never liked Thanksgiving until I met Grettie. After my father left it was always just my mother and sister and me, with my mother trying to re-create the table decorations she saw in the photographs of Woman’s Day and Ladies Home Journal. She always started drinking too early in the process, so nothing ever worked out, and we ended up eating soup and Saltines on tray tables in front of our ancient Sylvania console.
But now I hadn’t missed a Thanksgiving with Grettie in more than twenty-five years. When the kids were young, Jack took them out to play in the woods or, when they were older, to run in the local Turkey Trot, while Grettie and I stayed behind at their house and talked our way through the time it took us to prepare the meal. I got my fill of her then; it was a long weekend from her college teaching so she was not in a hurry, she was not distracted, she was not on her way to someplace else.
I can think of no other time that I have ever felt as comforted or as comfortable as in Grettie’s kitchen on Thanksgiving Day. I looked forward to it for weeks ahead of time, and felt the loss of it, and her, for weeks after.
But today, when Grettie was pouring people’s drinks, it became obvious that there was
n’t a plan for Jack to take the “kids” anywhere. Realizing that I would not have the chance to be alone with Grettie caused my stomach to constrict in resentment at Sosi. I knew it wasn’t directly her fault. But I didn’t care—that was what I felt.
Sosi took the Cabernet, too. Cam and Will chose beer. All of us stayed in the kitchen and talked about the election we’d just been so shocked by—what else? At least, I was relieved to see, Sosi felt the same way about Trump as the rest of us, though I noticed she said less about him than we did. When we’d exhausted all of our outrage, we shifted gears and talked about what the kids were doing at school. Cam obviously found Sosi appealing—she flirted with him a little, tossing that wild red hair as she laughed—and I saw that this made Will feel proud instead of flustered. He was sure of her, I saw.
From the way Jack made it a point to keep his physical distance and to use more formal language than usual when he spoke to her, I knew he was trying to conceal his own attraction to his vibrant young guest. Bella, accustomed even at her tender age to being the quiet beauty in any room, had the air about her, after a few minutes, of conceding this particular room to the louder, more animated beauty among us.
Even Grettie’s hostess expression of attentive interest was more attentive and interested than I’d seen in a long time. This, I admit, did make me jealous.
It was the whole family’s reaction to Sosi that told me what a catch Will had made in her, and that this went far beyond her looks.
By the time we sat down in the dining room, having shared the job of carrying things out to the table, we were all a little buzzed. Before we’d even passed all the dishes around, Sosi had gotten up from the table to go into the kitchen and refill her wineglass. Grettie caught my eye and smiled, and I figured she was remembering all those nights in our Amherst apartment, when we shared those cheap bottles of Gallo and sprawled next to each other on the sofa to watch Cagney & Lacey or Falcon Crest.
There was a little bit of awkwardness around the grace. A long time ago, Jack had taught us all a Gaelic blessing, in Gaelic, that we’d taken to reciting together even though the rest of us didn’t really understand what the words meant, it was more a phonetic memory exercise than anything else. In years past Will said it along with everyone at the table, but this time I noticed that he and Sosi smiled at each other and even traded winks at the sound of the lilting syllables that were pretty much gibberish to all of us except Jack. It made me feel bad; were they mocking him and his heritage? His faith? Our tradition? I decided not to think so—it was just an exchange of intimacy they thought no one else would see.
The conversation that had flowed so easily, in the kitchen, seemed to have died on the way to the dining room. Probably it was the pressure of sitting in high-backed chairs at fancy place settings, and an awareness that we were now officially Celebrating the Holiday. (It was not lost on me that Grettie’s Thanksgiving table was always the one my mother aspired to, right down to the homemade pinecone-and-cranberry centerpiece.) Gamely, Grettie asked Sosi where she was from. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her that myself? Because I was too busy watching her, I realized. Watching and measuring the effect she had on my son.
West Virginia, as it turned out. “Really?” Cam’s interest, already high, appeared to spike. “What do your …”He’d been about to ask what her parents did, we all understood, but then reconsidered when it occurred to him that the question might be a little too pointed.
But it didn’t seem to bother Sosi. “Court clerk and meter reader,” she said, and though it wasn’t clear which parent did what, she offered no elaboration and nobody followed up. Were they having Thanksgiving at home today, or going somewhere else? Cam asked, and this seemed to light a fire under her, because she launched into a narrative of what was no doubt going on at that very moment in her family’s dining room down in Pleasants County. Her father would have prepared a beer-can turkey on the grill, she told us. The table would be crowded with cousins and uncles and aunts. After the blessing and before the dishes were passed, her mother would whisper “FHB,” short for “Family Hold Back,” so that Sosi’s father and brothers would wait to make sure the guests all had full plates, before serving themselves. When Bella asked why, Sosi just shrugged and said it was an expression from the old days, used when there’s not a whole lot of money for extra food.
At our Thanksgiving table, nobody seemed to know what to say to this. But Sosi herself came to our rescue. “It’s kind of ridiculous, because everybody sitting there knows exactly what ‘FHB’ means. It’s not like it’s some secret code. But everyone pretends she didn’t say anything, or that they didn’t hear.” And her father and brothers, she added, would obey her mother and hold back.
“So did your family vote for Trump, then?” Bella asked, and I could feel most of the stomachs in the room drop to exactly the same sharp point. Will laughed, though I assumed it was out of nervousness.
“Bella,” Grettie said. “We don’t ask things like that.”
“Why not?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Actually, I think they probably did.” Sosi took a substantial gulp of her wine. “My parents hate Hillary.”
I must have made a noise I hadn’t intended, because everyone looked at me. “It doesn’t matter how her parents voted,” Will said, in a louder than usual voice. “She’s her own person. They don’t tell her what to do.”
“Of course not,” Grettie said, nodding with too much vigor. “Sosi, since you’re majoring in sociology, are you interested in voting trends by demographic? One of my students did a great presentation on that, I could send you the link if you want.”
Before Sosi could respond, Cam said, “Or maybe your specialty is globalization? Or environmental health?” He didn’t seem to care that we all recognized his showing off what he knew about the field she’d chosen. “I’m guessing you aren’t into the criminal side of things.”
Sosi smiled. “What makes you say that? The criminal mind is really fascinating, don’t you think? I’m going to do my thesis on murderers. Stranglers, specifically. How much they enjoy that moment when they see the life go out of their victim’s eyes.”
Everyone stopped eating. Even Will looked as if he didn’t know how to react.
“I’m kidding!” Sosi laughed and reached for her wineglass. “You guys. You should have seen your faces, that was hilarious. No, my real interest is in families. Specifically, the way they communicate. Or, more specifically, the way they don’t.”
Grettie asked, “Really? How so?”
“Oh boy,” Will said. “We should probably go back to the subject of Donald Trump.” He was trying to sound playful, but I could tell that his warning was real, and I felt gravy clot in my throat.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing more,” Cam said. “What about the way families communicate, or don’t?”
Too late, Sosi seemed to register Will’s caution. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, giving an equivocal wave. “It’s different for every family. I don’t want to ruin Thanksgiving dinner. Forget I said anything.”
“No fair.” Cam shook his head, too vigorously. “Come on—you’re the one who brought it up.”
When no one else weighed in with an objection, Sosi put her fork down and took a breath. When she exhaled, I smelled wine. “Well, it’s not really anything everybody doesn’t already know. Just that most families seem inclined to avoid certain topics, to preserve the peace. Or the illusion of peace.”
I got up and went into the kitchen to pour an inch more of wine into my own glass—just an inch—but I could still hear her. “I mean, it makes sense, I get it, but I think we’d all be better off if we were willing to talk about the hard things.”
Bella asked, “Like what?”
This will ruin dinner, I thought.
Sosi sighed, giving the impression of a person being forced to give testimony against her will. But it was a false impression,
I was sure. I had the feeling she secretly loved this. “Well, for instance, aren’t there questions you’d ask your parents, if you thought they’d be willing to answer them? And if you really wanted to hear what those answers would be?”
In the expression on Bella’s face then, we all watched the train of thought traveling through her mind, before it stopped at some station she hadn’t realized lay ahead.
Enough, I said to Sosi with my own mind, but of course she didn’t hear me. To Bella she continued, “You know, like, Did it ever cross your mind to wish you didn’t have children?” She swept her hand between Bella and her brother. “Which one of us is your favorite? Or if you want to go full Sophie’s Choice, which one of us would you save, if you could only save one?”
At the head of the table, Jack appeared a bit stunned. He cleared his throat and said, “I think there’s a perfectly good reason people don’t ask each other those questions. What would be the point?”
Will said, “The truth,” seeming to have forgotten his reluctance for the subject.
Jack was usually pretty temperate, but I could tell he was annoyed by the anxiety his daughter had been forced to feel at the holiday table. He turned to Sosi and asked, “You’re telling me this is an actual field of research? The things people in families don’t torture each other with?”
She smiled as if he’d made a good-natured joke, before recognizing the irritation that lay behind it. “Well, that’s not how I would put it, but yes.” I suppose she could be admired for standing her ground after such a question. “I wanted to find something for my thesis that no one else would be doing.”
Jack laughed, not in a nice way. “Do you think there might be a reason for that?”
Across from him, Grettie warned him with her eyes to back off. Gamely Sosi answered, “I don’t know, I just think our families are the ones who’re supposed to have our backs. If we can’t trust them, then who can we?” But for the first time all day, she sounded unsure of herself. I tried to ignore the look she shot at Will and the one he responded with.
The Gretchen Question Page 6
