An American cliché that I really wouldn’t trade.

Thanksgiving Day, 2005, begins with a phone call to my parents around 12:15pm.
My step dad answers.
“Do you guys have Cool Whip ™?”
“Well lemme see…no Cool Whip.”
“Ask Mom if Grandma has it.”
“Helen, does your mother have Cool Whip?”
My mom, in the background announces that [my aunt] “Mary is bringing the Cool Whip and the buns.”
I get ready to hang up the phone but then hear my mom making exaggerated, shrieky complaining sounds. She yells, “Come save me Jenny!”
“What is wrong with her?! She sounds nuts again!” I say to my step dad.
He says something about oysters that I can’t completely understand, and I tell him to tell her to calm down, I’ll be there in 45 minutes.
***
I arrive in Oak Creek with my pumpkin pie an hour later. Their townhome smells like turkey, as my mom bakes it now and we transport it to my grandma’s. We are also bringing an Apple Pie in the Bag ™. As usual, my mom is in the half bath that is off of the kitchen, teasing and mercilessly hairspraying her hair. My step dad is getting anxious to leave. He has to pass the time somehow, so he is up in the den. He runs downstairs to ask her a question about the Christmas gift is ordering for online from Macy’s; he wants to know if she prefers the tote bag or the cosmetics bag as the free gift that will accompany the perfume purchase. She goes upstairs to make her selection. Oddly, I forget to ask her what she chose, but I was more curious to know why my mother was behaving like a tard earlier, so I ask:
“What was the deal with the oysters earlier, Mom?”
We both hover around the kitchen island.
“My house smelled like Thanksgiving and he opened a can of oysters!”
I just smiled. That is so my mom to protest the slightest infringement on her delicate constitution. And that is so my step dad to eat something quick and disgusting for lunch instead of taking the time to heat up a can of soup or scramble some eggs.
***
We arrive to my grandmother’s house in Kenosha, near the Steam Baths, my former elementary and junior high schools, and Tenuta’s Italian grocery and spirits around 2:15. My uncle, aunt and my aunt’s mother will be arriving within the hour. Grandma has not put out her vegetable snack tray this year, but we make do with some Claussen’s garlic pickles, my favorite kind. They, too, offend my mother.
My mom and I help my grandma with various kitchen tasks like baking the rolls, making the gravy, setting the table, scooping out the store-bought jello (we didn’t even have cranberry sauce this year!) The turkey is a fifteen pounder, a Butterball, of course. It is the moistest turkey I remember having in years (even though for the previous 10 or so years, I didn’t always eat turkey or, like the time two years ago in NYC during our Friendsgiving feast and Judi the food stylist’s turkey dinner, I snuck pieces of it and ate it guiltily because I was “mostly vegetarian”).
Our dinner went on as it usually does. People ate greedily, although we generally added “please” or “thank you” when commanding someone to pass the stuffing, gravy, butter, or salt. It is slightly tense at times when my working class, pizzeria owning aunt fed the dog she cares for with my uncle, named JD (for Jack Dudeck), carrot chunks from the table. My step dad can not STAND having an animal lurking near the table. I don’t blame him, but I always worry he is going to go off on her about the dog like he did that one year, which resulted in her leaving in a huff.
Always during our family gatherings, crass jokes are made. People cuss, and fart, and then make fart jokes. (My uncle, who I refer to as a “Harlier” due to his penchant for buying brand new, shiny, Harley Davidson motorcycles every other year, is the premier farter, but I believe he did not fart at the table this year.)
The crass talk was surprisingly scarce this year. However, my aunt’s mother, sporting a blue fleece sweatshirt splashed with tie-dyed smiley faces, made one attempt. She began to make a comment but then switched gears because “it was too nasty.” My mother, looking to avoid conflict when there isn’t any, and also knowing full well anything goes, said not to say it, then. Meanwhile, I’m shrieking that it being nasty has never stopped anyone before, and my cute, sassy 82-year-old grandma, clad in a pink sweater, gray slacks, and the pink and gray socks adorned with an image of a deer on them that I bought her for Christmas last year, yells, “If it’s nasty, I wanna hear it!”
My aunt’s mother makes some comment about how men walk off kilter because they have three legs (I have no idea what prompts her to bring this up).
My grandma, unimpressed, aptly notes that “Well, we’ve heard worse!” and I turn to her and say, “I’ve heard you say worse!” We all laugh.
Later, we all consume too much pie, and my uncle, who outweighs my little step dad by 100 pounds, sits next to him on the couch, both of their bellies flopping out over their waistbands as they stare at the football game that’s on TV while my mom, Aunt and I wash, dry, and put away the dishes and I pack up bags of leftovers.