Thanksgiving starts on the tenth of November, whether you like it or not
By Delia Marchetti, Staff writer · · 2 min read
Yesterday a woman in a grocery store in Terre Haute told me she had already bought the turkey. It was November tenth. She said it like a confession.
She has sixteen people coming. She has had sixteen people coming since 1994, except for two years, and she does not talk about those two years.
The turkey is the easy part. The turkey is a thing you buy.
The pies are a thing you make. She makes four. Pumpkin, because it is Thanksgiving. Apple, because of her husband. Pecan, because of her mother, who has been dead since 2003 and whose pecan pie is the standard by which the living are judged. And a chocolate one, which she started making in 2011 for a grandson who did not like pie, and who is now twenty and likes pie fine, and who would notice if it were not there.
The hard part started last week. Her son's wife's parents want to come this year. That is two more chairs. She has fourteen chairs and two folding ones that nobody wants to sit on, and the two folding ones are already assigned, by tradition, to the two youngest adults, who are now thirty-one and twenty-nine and have begun to object.
So: who moves.
She has a diagram. It is on the back of an envelope. She showed it to me in the cereal aisle. The envelope was from the electric company. Her husband is at the head because he carves. She is nearest the kitchen door because she is the one who gets up. Her brother cannot sit next to her sister-in-law. That has been true since a Christmas she will not describe.
The envelope has a second diagram on the other side. That one is the kitchen: who stands where during the forty minutes before, which is the part of the day that actually decides whether it goes well, and which nobody who was not in the kitchen will remember. Her sister-in-law is not in the kitchen diagram. That is by design.
"I could put the new people at the end," she said. "But then they're at the end."
I said the end was fine. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has never hosted sixteen.
The meal will take about forty minutes. She has been working on it, in her head, for eight days. By the twenty-seventh she will have been working on it for seventeen. The sixteen people will eat, say it was wonderful, and go home. Some of them will help with dishes.
She has not solved the chairs. She said she would call me. She has not called.