Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Thanksgiving at the Anderson's

A late post, I know. Science Olympiad (my nerd convention) was this weekend, and I spent the rest of the time moving back into my room (I've been stuck in the attic for about three weeks). I wrote this the day after Thanksgiving in a fit of boredom. I wish my Thanksgivings were really like this; all we actually do is eat and then fall asleep from the tryptophan. 

Thanksgiving at the Anderson’s house is always interesting.
            Actually, I don’t think ‘interesting’ quite covers it.

            I went along with my friend, Tilly Anderson, to her family’s Thanksgiving feast. Not a meal—a feast. I was going to school in her hometown, and I wasn’t able to go back home for Thanksgiving, so Tilly invited me over to help with the cooking and join her family for the feast and competitions. I asked her what she meant by competitions, and if that meant they were going to be watching the football game. She said, no, they weren’t watching it, and that I would have to wait and see.
            I arrive ten minutes early, but when I got in, I discovered I was actually late. Tilly’s entire family was already there, bustling around like bees inside the huge, linoleum-floored kitchen with its soaring ballroom ceiling. The architecture was grand enough to leave me staring for a full five minutes, considering the fact that the Andersons’ house was a tiny, scruffy bungalow perched on the corner of Livingston and 5th. I would have stared longer, but Tilly noticed me about then, and she swooped down and seized me by the arm, grinning and talking excitedly about what they were cooking. I didn’t hear a whole lot, as my brain was still frozen on the impossible size of the inside of her house, but I did catch the fact that she and I were supposed to be dressing the turkey. I used that little bit of normalcy as an anchor to reality, and was able to focus on that as we shoved our way through the crowds of Tilly’s relatives. We bumped into people wearing togas, Medieval half-armor, and several who appeared to be partially or completely covered in scales or fur. I didn’t have any time to assimilate all this, so I didn’t end up freezing again and was able to get to the turkey with relatively little mishap.
            We finally reached the table where the turkey was begin dressed, and I had to do another double-take as I realized it was about the size of a half-grown cow. Tilly handed me a baster and a pot of honey mixed with spices I’d never smelled before, and told me to start glazing the bird. I did so in a sort of half-dream, noting as I did so that there was the occasional bluish, metallic-colored scale stuck to the pan underneath the turkey. Tilly picked up a bowl of stuffing she’d been mixing before I came and went to work on that, chatting happily with me and with anyone who happened to poke by and see how the main course was coming. A young boy with skin the color of an eggplant stopped by and tried to filch a bit of stuffing out of the bowl, but Tilly gave him a smack with her wooden spoon and he took off running, shooting dirty looks behind him. She simply snorted and went back to her work, commenting on how difficult Mr. Weisner’s chemistry tests had been this past semester.
            When the turkey was done, Tilly grabbed a couple passing men (she called them ‘uncles’) who looked to be half-dragon and asked them to help her with the bird. Between the four of us, we managed to heave the hundred-pound platter of meat off the counter, across the crowded kitchen, and into the waiting mouth of a huge, black, iron oven. The heat kicking out of it was enough to sunburn my face, and Tilly and I had to tuck our heads under our arms and let the dragon uncles (who were immune to the heat) guide the platter in. Tilly closed it with a loud clang and wiped the sweat off her face, grinning and thanking her dragon uncles in a deep, guttural language that I couldn’t understand. They replied in kind, smiling, and then turned to me with jagged, pearly white grins.
            “Merry Christmas!” one told me in slightly slurred English, and the other raised one hand in the Vulcan salute. They then both walked away with their heads held high, their tails swinging behind them with every step. Tilly told me that they’d been working on their human languages lately, and that they were very proud of their progress.
            The turkey was ready two hours later. By then, just about everything else had been cooked and laid out in the dining room (which, unsurprisingly, was even bigger than the kitchen and was decorated with malachite columns that stretched between the tiled floor and an arched ceiling painted in the likeness of the Andromeda galaxy). The dragon uncles and a pair of women with red skin, pronged tails, and delicate, curling horns jutting from their shaggy black hair worked together to pull the turkey back out of the oven, not a one of them using a hot pad. The rest of the family formed a huge procession behind the main course, cheering and stomping their feet as they paraded into the dining room. The turkey was set down in the middle of the table on a gigantic Kevlar hot pad to keep it from burning the table, and everyone swarmed the tables and took their places. I sat next to Tilly somewhere in the middle, across from one of the dragon uncles and next to a very attractive young man dressed in a black robe with a cowl drawn over his head. At least, I tried to sit. The instant my rear touched the seat, the mahogany chair gave a rattling shiver, and with a querulous creak, it darted backwards underneath me and bucked me over the backrest, sending me sprawling on my face on the floor. The little purple-skinned boy I’d seen before scampered out from underneath the table, laughing, and took off running with the chair loping alongside him down the length of the hall and out the door. A woman with purple skin just like him shouted and lurched out of her chair, yelling after him in another foreign language as she ran after him. Tilly found me another chair, apologetically explaining that I’d just been subjected to one of her cousin Id’s practical jokes. Apparently, he and his pet chair Somi pulled that one every year, though everyone had started getting wise to the joke. I was a newbie, and so he knew he could get away with it.
            Without further mishap, we settled down for the meal. We said grace (which took forever, because there were so many different cultures assembled and each one had a different religion), and then everyone eagerly lunged for the food with forks, knives, and bare hands. I managed to snag a couple cranberries right off the bat, and Tilly snuck me some corn off her Aunt Sylvia’s plate to her left. There was no order to the whole ordeal. You grabbed whatever passed your way and hoped you liked it, and you guarded whatever you did snatch carefully for fear of your neighbors stealing it. I didn’t guard myself carefully enough at first, and for a while all I was able to eat was what I could stuff in my mouth with each passing of the platters. I got some of the turkey, which tasted like turkey, and some mashed potatoes (but no gravy) that didn’t taste like mashed potatoes, and I managed to hang onto a mug of some sort of hot liquid that tasted the way pine trees smell. Eating was exhausting work, but in the end, I managed to utterly stuff myself, and judging by the sated looks of the rest of the table, they did too. There were a lot of leftovers in the end, which a troop of avian women in white robes set about packing up, stuffing everything in Tupperware containers for people to take home with them at the end of the day.
            The rest of us remained at the tables, talking. Tilly was talking with her dragon uncle, and so I ended up in conversation with the cowled man sitting next to me. I found out that he was from a world someone in the region of Alpha Centauri, and that he’d been going to college as an artist for the past three years. I was majoring in art as well, so we hit off well, and I must admit, I found him attractive. He had the dark hair I tend to like in guys, and dark purple eyes that looked green in certain light. We were interrupted from time to time by Tilly’s dragon uncle, who was still trying out his English at every opportunity. Whenever he recognized something we said, he would tap me on the shoulder, nod emphatically, and say, “Platypus”, to which I would reply, “Very good” and nod back encouragingly. I passed a very pleasant hour or so this way, and was almost disappointed when it came time for the competitions to begin. Almost.
            Tilly’s father (who worked at the college and whom I had met on several occasions) stood up at his place at the head of the table and tapped on his glass with his fork for attention. He announced that the competitions were about to begin, and that we should all move to the auditorium. The cowled man I’d been talking to (his name was Rennac, I’d found) grinned and told me he was participating in the Sukil event this year, to which I replied that I had no idea what any of it meant. He just grinned again and told me to wait and see.
            The whole family got up as one with a collective noise of scraping chairs and clattering plates, and we all moved as one into the next room over—the auditorium. The place was built like a Roman theater, with a round, flat stage down at the bottom and layered benches surrounding it in a circle. Most of the place was filled even before I could make it in, and so Rennac, Tilly and I had to find a spot near the top back. I wasn’t disappointed, because I had a fantastic view of the entire auditorium and could people-watch at my leisure. Once everyone was settled, the games began.
            First up was a group of Asian-looking people, who were dressed in tight, glossy black jumpsuits that looked to be patterned with scales. They competed against the avian women who had been cleaning up earlier, performing a series of acrobatic maneuvers. They went back and forth, each group one-upping the other until one of the avians fell (she took off flying, so she wasn’t hurt), and the Asians claimed victory. Next was a wrestling match, in which both dragon uncles, a skinny, mouse-haired young boy, and three men who looked like Vikings took part in, wrestling one another in turn and eliminating down to two. In the end, it was one of the Viking men versus the mouse-haired boy, and the boy won with a move somewhere between a pile driver and a half nelson. The Viking shook hands with him and walked away, looking disappointed but not overly surprised. Tilly whispered to me that the boy (her second-cousin Eli), had been the champion for four years straight, and it was everyone’s dream to beat him someday.
            The Sukil was next, which I found was a form of martials arts that apparently originated from Rennac’s home world. He fought one of the avians, cousin Id, two professors that I recognized from the college, and Tilly’s dad, and beat everyone until he came up against Mr. Anderson. Tilly’s dad was a tall man of about forty, with black hair shot through with gray and a pretty good physique, and he beat Rennac like it was the easiest thing in the world. The two of them were set in the middle of the stage facing one another, each armed with a long, flat bat like a cricket bat that was covered with blue paint. They began circling one another, knees slightly bent, and the paddles held out to one side and dripping little lines of blue across the stage floor. Rennac moved first, which was his mistake, and received the first splotch of paint across his back for his trouble. Tilly’s dad moved out of the way when Rennac tried to return, and received only a faint splatter of blue across the front of his shirt. They went back and forth like that—dodging, lunging, and trying to smack one another with the blue paint. Towards the end, Rennac had only one small patch of non-blue on him (under his armpit) that he was frantically trying to guard. Mr. Anderson hadn’t gotten more than the droplets on the front of his shirt. In a desperate attempt to turn the tides, Rennac tried to feint and then dodge behind Tilly’s dad and get him in the back. Mr. Anderson, however, anticipated the move, and he spun with the smaller boy and scythed his paddle up so that it slipped underneath Rennac’s tightly-clenched arm and scored the final splotch of paint under his armpit. The match was called, and Rennac slunk off the stage like a beaten dog, hiding his blueberry-colored face. I didn’t see him again after that. Tilly told me later that he left immediately after the Sukil.   
            The rest of the competitions were much like that. There was storytelling, music, more fighting, and even a spitting competition that a froglike man with oversized eyes won. Cousin Id and Somi won a problem-solving event together (they had to reach and disarm what looked like a bomb strapped to the ceiling in under five minutes), and one of the dragon uncles won one of the feats of strength. The grand finale involved everyone; we all had to gather around the upper ring of the bleachers, and try to throw a ping-pong ball all the way into a little iron bucket in the middle of the stage. I didn’t get it, but I got pretty close (my ball hit the rim and then bounced off). Tilly and twelve others made it in, and they each got to choose a song for the avian women and Tilly’s mom to play on their assortment of instruments. Tilly chose Carry on my Wayward Son, someone else picked Stardust, and the rest were either earth songs I didn’t know or were from a different planet. I sang along what I knew, faked the refrains of others, and stomped in time to the beat along with the rest of the family. When the last song played, everyone concluded by pelting one another with the extra ping-pong balls we’d been given.
            After the songs, people began trickling out of the house, returning to their respective homes, galaxies, etc. I stayed for a while, talking with Tilly and one of the dragon uncles (his name was U’Gamar), and exchanging stories about campus life. When I finally left, I had a Tupperware container of leftovers (stuffing, turkey, and something blue and gelatinous I was told was from a planet somewhere in the Rigel star system), which Tilly’s mother told me would keep for a month so long as I kept it refrigerated. I received several different forms of goodbye from various people on my way out (the dragon uncles apparently thought it customary that parting friends should stomp on one another’s feet. In a friendly way, of course), and was told to come back next year for the next Thanksgiving feast.
            Despite Tilly’s invitation to come back for Thanksgiving, I never took her up on it. My family likes having me home for Thanksgiving, and though they aren’t quite as interesting as the Andersons’, they are my family, after all. New Years, however, is quite another matter, and I must admit, the Anderson New Year party tops their Thanksgiving.


            Believe it or not.

THE END

Happy belated Thanksgiving, and happy reading!

S.R. Koch

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