Cathleen Schine - They May Not Mean To, But They Do

The other man introduced himself as Karl. “And this,” he said, gesturing toward his plump, red-cheeked caretaker, “is Marta. She is kind, though strict.”

“I go coffee,” she said in a heavy accent, Polish, Molly guessed.

“Would you like coffee, too?” Karl asked. “Marta, can you get this nice young lady and her delightful father a cup of coffee?”

Molly pulled her wallet out, but Karl put up his hand and said, “My treat.”

He was a good-looking old man, silky gray hair nicely cut, beautifully dressed. Molly shot a glance at her father. The cookie crumb had been dislodged. His beard could use a trim, but it wasn’t too bad. Her mother took very good care of him. Better than she took of herself, but there are only so many hours in the day, as Joy said when Molly pointed this out to her.

Marta returned with four cups of coffee, and they sat there drinking the scalding coffee in the cold November air.

“Chilly for two old geezers like us,” Karl said to Aaron.

“Not like the war,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

“I don’t know why people call them flying rats,” Karl responded. “Listen to them. They coo like doves.”

Neither Aaron nor Karl seemed to mind the gaps, the non sequiturs, in their conversation.

“We had cold showers in the jungle, but boy oh boy, we sure didn’t mind.”

“Just listen to them cooing. Like lovebirds. They’re pretty, too. Don’t you think?”

“ Oh that I had wings like a dove! ” Aaron said. “ For then would I fly away and be at rest .”

“Dad? That’s beautiful. Is that a poem?”

But her father had no answer for her. He smiled and turned his face up to the golden autumn sun. Molly looked on, a little envious, as the two men sat in a companionable silence, side by side, while the pigeons cooed like doves.

When the groceries arrived on Thanksgiving morning, Joy was astonished. “What are all these boxes? There’s no room for them!”

“Don’t worry,” her daughter said.

“Don’t worry,” her daughter-in-law said.

Joy allowed them to usher her into the living room. Her original plan was to order Thanksgiving dinner from the coffee shop, but Molly had given her that you-are-crazier-than-I-thought look.

“Don’t look at me like that. The kitchen gets too hot when you cook in it.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” Molly said soothingly, as if that were reassuring. But Joy did not want her daughter to take care of everything, she wanted to take care of everything herself. As she always had, but no longer could.

“The coffee shop has wonderful turkey. Moist. And it’s sliced.”

“That is so depressing, Mom.”

Joy knew she should find Thanksgiving turkey from the 3 Guys coffee shop depressing, too, but she found the thought comforting instead. Everything would be done, there would be no banging of pots and pans and oven doors; there would be no grease, no smoke; there would be calm instead of chaos. And she would be in charge.

She said, “I can’t take the disorder of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, the crazy mess, the hot steam in the kitchen, the millions of dishes. It’s too much for me, Molly. But I don’t want to give up my place as the matriarch, I suppose. What foolishness. But it’s true.”

Molly looked at her with interest. Then she laughed and said, “So the 3 Guys will be the new family matriarch?”

“I said it was foolish.”

It was Danny’s wife, Coco, who came up with a compromise. Coco liked to smooth the waters in the family. She was a fidgety intellectual woman who had a fondness for any problem she might be able to solve — her children, for example, presented wonderful puzzles. It was the chemistry teacher in her, Aaron used to say. Coco suggested they order everything ready-made from one of any number of high-end grocery stores. “Zabar’s, Fairway, Fresh Direct. We live in New York City, people. We’ll get a whole turkey, it’s not carved, but you don’t have to roast it, and everything else comes with it. You just heat everything up. No cooking.”

Joy could not really see the difference between cooking and heating everything up, but she agreed. When there were no problems available for Coco to handle, Joy felt uneasy, almost guilty. Her daughter-in-law’s intervention in the Thanksgiving-dinner difficulty provided a rush of satisfaction.

But Joy had not expected so many boxes.

“Where is Aunt Freddie?” Danny’s daughter Ruby asked. She had just turned twelve. Her sister, Cora, was eight. Ruby and Cora — Joy never could understand how two nice little Jewish girls had been given such names, the names of women who waitressed in diners in 1932, but then, they thought her own name was odd, so there you were. Such sweet, pretty girls, flowering vines, wrapped around each other as usual, the two of them giggling and tangled on the couch.

“She’s coming soon,” Joy said. “She took a red-eye.”

“A red-eye,” Cora said. “Ew.”

“It means a flight at night and you have to stay awake all night and your eyes get red,” Ruby said.

“Aunt Freddie has blue eyes,” Cora said. “So there.”

Joy had marveled at first at how blasé the girls were about their Aunt Molly marrying a woman. She still marveled. It’s very strange , she wanted to say sometimes. Don’t you see? “Aunt Freddie will be here soon, in plenty of time for dinner,” she said instead.

Ruby had recently gone through a Katy Perry phase, mercifully short, when she wanted to dye her hair blue. She settled for a blue wig on Halloween. Then, just a week ago, she’d done an about-face. She still dressed in incomprehensible combinations of sparkly garments. She was wearing such an outfit now, an undersized flared skirt in a strawberry print, each strawberry a collection of layered red sequins, leggings decorated with clown faces, a gold-and-pink-striped lamé T-shirt. But she was now reading Tom Sawyer with the same intensity she’d previously reserved for Katy Perry songs and gossip, and she was now intent on getting a pet frog.

“No more Katy Perry karaoke?” Joy asked. It had been cute, Ruby lip-synching the pop songs, until she began shaking her hips in suggestive ways.

“I don’t want to be stereotyped,” she said.

Daniel flopped down beside his mother. “As what? A teen pop star?”

“Don’t tease me,” said Ruby. “Mommy said her father teased her about the Beatles and she never got over it.”

“Mommy’s a stereotype,” Daniel said.

Joy listened to the noises from the kitchen. Plenty of banging and crashing, but she found she didn’t mind as much as she had anticipated. Still, they didn’t know where anything was, those two, Coco and Molly. Joy got up and went into the kitchen, pointed out the roasting pan, the carving knife. The women smiled at her tolerantly until she went back into the living room. Fine, fine, let them look high and low for platters and gravy boats. If they needed any more of her help, they knew where to find her. She would sit and put her feet up and watch her grandchildren. That was matriarchal, too.

Ruby pushed her younger sister away and kneeled on the floor at the coffee table. She pulled an ornamental wooden box toward her and began to rummage through old photographs that were kept inside. Two years before, Ruby’s teacher had asked the class to construct their family trees. Ruby had formed an immediate attachment, bordering on obsession, with the heavy ancestral mustaches, the billowing knickers, the bows and fancy perched hats. She still gravitated to the photographs when she came to see her grandparents. She knew the names of every second cousin on both sides of the family. The old man with a long white beard spread across his chest who was wearing a fur hat was Aaron the First, as she put it — her grandfather’s grandfather. He had eyes like an angry crow.