Living Out Loud (23 page)

It’s hard to know where to begin. My husband says that I was conscious and not on drugs, alcohol, or cold medication when I decided to invite both my family and his family to our home for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Only eighteen people could make it. Some had other commitments. Perhaps they had heard that it would be my first turkey.

I bought the bird from the butcher. “I need the biggest fresh turkey you can manage to trot out,” I said, struggling into my competent person’s
air like a pair of 501 Levi’s two sizes too small. The butcher wrote on a piece of brown paper. I went home and read cookbooks. One said that in cooking turkey, allow fifteen minutes a pound. Another said allow twenty-five minutes a pound. One said to cook the turkey five hours. Another said to cook the turkey eight hours. “It depends,” said my mother-in-law. “On what?” “On how accurate your oven temperature is,” she said.

I was doomed.

“I make a mean duck with orange-cranberry relish,” I said hopefully to my husband at breakfast.

“Not on Thanksgiving you don’t,” he said without looking up from his newspaper.

I knew that there were turkeys available shot full of some stuff that made them all plump and juicy, turkeys that came with little slimy instruction booklets packed in with the giblets, turkeys that even had those plastic daggers that pop up to tell you when they’re done. I couldn’t buy one of those turkeys because I had long ago sworn off that kind of prepared foodstuff (although on nights when my husband had to work late and the kids were safely tucked away in bed, I would sometimes make myself a big portion of Kraft macaroni and cheese, for old time’s sake). I needed a fresh turkey, with no additives, no preservatives, no chemicals, nothing to protect me from the possibility that I would pull something from the oven with white meat resembling wallboard.

It’s important to note here what I think of as Quindlen’s dictum: It is impossible to cook badly something you love. I am constitutionally incapable of making bad fudge or bad fettuccine Alfredo. I do not love turkey; I don’t even like turkey. The only part I eat is the big triangular piece of skin covering the stuffing at the back. My brother-in-law and I have for years bickered over it, although now that we both have children we’ve gotten pretty adult about the whole thing. We split it
and then bicker over who gets the bigger piece. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the turkey is a testimonial to what boring people we’ve turned the Pilgrims into. Calvin Trillin is leading a nationwide campaign to have spaghetti carbonara declared the official Thanksgiving food. I say, “Hear, hear!”

That said, the turkey was delivered on Wednesday afternoon. “I hope it fits in your oven,” said the butcher, with what I can only describe as a smile. The turkey was enormous. It was as ugly as a baby just after birth and looked about the same: wrinkled, misshapen, with odd bumps and bruises and a weird white-pink color. Luckily, it fit in my oven. It did not, however, fit in my refrigerator.

I was doomed.

“Put it on the fire escape,” a friend of mine said, “it’s colder out there today than it is in your refrigerator.”

“Stray cats,” I said.

“Wrap it in foil and put it in a box.”

“Rain.”

“Put a tarp over it.”

“You think of everything,” I said. “You come over here and cook this thing.”

Well, I did put it on the fire escape, at least until I could farm out all the other food in the refrigerator to my friends. In the morning I put it in the oven. First I stuffed it, rubbed two sticks of soft butter into its pathetic skin and shrouded it in cheesecloth. I worked out a roasting time between five hours and eight hours, basted it every half hour and hoped for the best.

Inevitably, my mind kept turning to the time I first made a chicken, which sounds soothing but wasn’t. I was seventeen. My mother talked me through it: season, truss, roast, let rest, carve. The only thing she left out was thaw. Even today, when family members have had a little eggnog and want a good
laugh, someone says, “Anna’s chicken!” and they all roar and roll around while I have another drink.

I was doomed.

Or so I thought. It was a good turkey; not a great turkey, but not a “family joke” turkey either. It was pretty juicy, and it wasn’t raw, and it looks good in the photographs, which is more than you can say for me. The only complaint I have about the whole episode is that I was so busy worrying about the turkey that my brother-in-law got a much bigger piece of skin than I did, which I can assure you will not happen this year. Oh, yes, I’m doing it again this Thanksgiving, making my second turkey for only eleven people. A lot of the others say that since they were here last year, they have to go to the in-laws this year. None of them know about the fire escape, so maybe they are telling the truth.

O
ne of the first terms of art you learn in the newspaper business is something called the silly season, which once upon a time occurred around August. It was that time of the year when news had ground to a dead halt, when the mayor was at the beach, the kids were out of school, and public relations people called up promoting things like the Madonna lookalike contest or the first annual dog Frisbee competition. After Labor Day the pace was expected to quicken again: legislation, Supreme Court decisions, heat complaints, and the press of daily business.

But what many of us began to notice over the years—and what some of you may have noticed, too—is that the silly season has proliferated. Perhaps this has something to do with holiday weekends, which have spread out faster than chicken pox in a first grade class. There’s a silly season now that stretches from Thanksgiving to New Year, and another one in May, which is usually
linked to spring fever. Slowly but surely, the United States has developed an unbelievable year-round case of senioritis.

I’ve come to believe that this is because the United States is the silliest nation on the face of the earth, although it probably gets a bit of competition from England, which is silly only because it is so terribly serious. I don’t get the impression that the French or the Germans are silly. The Soviets are not silly at all. But this is some silly country we live in, between the bakeoffs and the baby beauty contests and all those events in which people balance pancakes on their noses or bet on which box turtle will cross the finish line first. I believe that Gary Hart had his finger on the American pulse and realized that reentering the presidential race was so silly that Americans just might be amused by it. (I am not saying the United States is a stupid country. Which is why I believe the bumper crop of Gary Hart cartoons, apocryphal stories, and even knock-knock jokes will bear no relation to votes. Since Gary Hart went on
Nightline
and appeared to confuse having female friends with taking yacht trips with actress/models, it is no surprise that he can also confuse amusement with forgiveness.)

My husband and I are educated people, and I can’t tell you what a whoop we got out of it when we heard the story—untrue, it developed—that Joe Biden would get back in the race, too. Was that silly or what? “Ted Kennedy’s next!” we both shouted. “Nixon,” I screamed. “Like the T-shirt says, he’s tanned, rested, and ready.”

This is very undignified and if I were a serious commentator I would here decry such silliness. But I won’t. I was raised in the silly branch of a funny family, and I now help run a silly household myself. My grandfather always played a song on the piano that we called “The Laughing Song.” The melody was really only a series of fancy-dancy scales, and there were no lyrics. Instead, along with the syncopated melody, you sang laughter, something like this: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ho ho ho
ho ho. That was it. The thing about it was, after a few bars somebody would inevitably crack up. Then somebody else, and somebody else again. By the time “The Laughing Song” was over, most of the people in the room would be howling along with it.

That’s the kind of environment I grew up in. My father is a very silly man who will do almost anything for a good laugh, although unlike Gary Hart he disdains a cheap one. For a time, we lived amidst the mountains of West Virginia, where the most talked-about programming on the radio was the WWVA Jamboree. And my father would take me with him in the car to the highest elevation in town late at night and fiddle with the car radio dials as delicately as a safe cracker until he picked up Jean Shepherd’s monologues. Then we would listen and laugh. I still think my father has never been prouder of me than the day when, accompanying a group of his colleagues to a business lunch, I successfully completed the second anecdote in a two-part joke which required complicity and excellent timing. (My father did think that I should have waited until dessert rather than the main course for my part, but it was a small complaint.)

I don’t mean to suggest that we were a whoopee cushion family, the kind who balanced buckets of water over the kitchen door and collapsed into laughter when someone got soaked, although I’d be willing to give that a try. Rather the contrary. Everyone always considered it quite amusing that my grandfather, safely at home, would from time to time send motel postcards which always said “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. (Wish I was, too.)” When I was at boarding school my father would habitually send me letters signed Joe, which is not his name. (Today he frequently sends me letters signed “Your husband’s father-in-law.”) My friends thought this was uproarious, and envied me. I really hated it. No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an
adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own éclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

I cannot help but feel now that my parents raised me right. Being silly seems the easiest, certainly the most pleasurable way to survive and thrive in these times, particularly during an election year. If I had not been silly I never would have covered the weeklong attempt to inflate a balloon facsimile of King Kong atop the Empire State Building or the invasion of the khapra beetle in lower Manhattan. Silliness has made my life easier. It has certainly made it easier for me to have children. You cannot imagine how much easier it is to have two children under the age of four if you are not only able but willing to do lifelike monkey imitations. This would not be in keeping with a role as a serious commentator, but then there are lots and lots of serious commentators around. And precious few silly ones. Not to mention first-rate monkey impersonators.

   KEEPING   
        THE         
FAITH