Reasons to Be Thankful

The first thing I notice when I poke my head in the university's Indigenous Peoples' Appreciation Club is that there are only two members, one guy and one girl. The second thing I notice is that neither is Indigenous.

They sit at adjacent desks in the corner of the classroom. The girl, whose platinum hair is brighter than the overhead lighting, poses for a selfie, closing one eye and flashing a peace sign Nixon-style. The guy preoccupies himself with a game of Pokémon Go, swiping violently at his phone screen and cursing his rotten luck. Rows of empty tables and chairs flank them. The walls are cluttered with pictures of pumpkins and turkeys.

I'm standing there in the doorway, the threshold between my world and this unfamiliar territory, when the guy drops his phone on his desk, groans, leans back. Our eyes meet. Before I can escape, he springs to his feet and beckons, makes his way to me. "Please, come in, come in! Don't be shy."

Behind him the girl shakes her head, deposits her phone in her pocket, follows his lead.

"What brings you here today?" the guy asks. He hasn't blinked or taken his eyes off me; he's been too busy inspecting me like a gemologist appraising a rare find. I can practically see the Venn diagram forming in his mind: one circle comparing my thin brown arms to his thin pale ones, another contrasting my black ponytail to his copper crew cut. There is very little overlap. "Come to join the fray in the fight against Indigenous oppression?"

"Uh, not exactly," I say, and admit to only stopping by because I saw one of their Xeroxed flyers in the hallway. All over campus there are drawings of a Cherokee in a headdress shaking hands with a grinning turkey, while the decapitated head of a pilgrim sits on a plate between them. And, inexplicably, Uncle Sam looms in the background, pointing his galvanizing finger while the words "I Want You For Indigenous Peoples' Appreciation" hover beneath him.

"Thanks," the girl says with a turkey-like grin. "I designed those myself."

"Heavens, where are our manners?" the guy says, clapping the girl's shoulder. "I'm Clancy, and this is Darla."

"Anakin," I say, and we all shake hands. Clancy's face falls when I inform them my last name isn't Skywalker. Without missing a beat, Darla offers a Vulcan salute and says, "May the Force be with you."

"And also with you," Clancy replies, his voice reverent as a prayer. They bow their heads.

Then Darla turns to me, asks, "So, what are you?"

"Huh?"

"What kind of Indigenous Person?" Her words come out slow and stilted, like a drunk person being asked to recite the alphabet backwards.

"Oh," I say, and let the word linger a bit. Darla looks unfazed, so I add, "The Navajo Nation."

"No way!" she shrieks. "My stepdad is one-sixteenth Navajo!"

What she wants me to do with this information is unclear. Before I can find out, Clancy taps the table twice with his palm.

"People, people, we'll have plenty of time to spill the tea after the club meeting," he says, walking back to his desk.

Darla huffs but returns to her table. When she motions to the desk beside hers, I know it's too late to leave. In a gesture of reverse chivalry, she pulls out the chair, waits until my butt collides with the hard plastic, then tries unsuccessfully to push my seat in.

Clancy checks his wristwatch, announces that it's now four o'clock. "All right, now that we're all here, let's get this meeting started. First order of—"

"Wait, this is it?" I ask. "It's just us?"

The two of them exchange glances, a semaphore of blinking and winking and eye-rolling. It is Darla who says, "The other members currently have food poisoning and couldn't make it." Now she speaks with the tone of a drunk person being asked to recite the alphabet backwards, three times fast.

"Oh," I say, and let it linger.

"First order of business," Clancy continues, undeterred. "Thanksgiving is in a week and this year we'll be having our Appreciation Club dinner at my place."

Reaching into his knapsack, he withdraws another flyer and passes it to Darla, who passes it to me. I can tell she designed this one too. It's identical to the ones in the hallway, with the same Cherokee and grinning turkey and beheaded pilgrim, except for Uncle Sam's caption, which now reads "I Want You For Dinner." I try not to read too much into that.

"Now, I know what you're thinking," Clancy says, holding his hands out, his palms angled toward me. "And no, we don't condone Thanksgiving. We know the history, what it means for Indigenous peoples. But this dinner is tasteful. It's light. It's fun. Right, D?"

Darla sacrifices a moment of her precious time to glance up from the flyer, to look away from her handiwork, and offers a perfunctory "Yep."

Then Clancy turns to me and winks, and for a moment, even though it's over, I feel included in their semaphore. I feel like I'm a part of something bigger than myself.

He says, "And you're invited, Anakin." And now he's grinning like a turkey too.

***

Being here at the university hasn't been easy for me. It's harder than I expected, not having my family or anyone to talk to. Before coming here, my parents told me to make friends, to find a tribe of my own. And I've tried, but my dormmate refuses to talk to me ever since I took the bed that he wanted on the first day of orientation, and my classmates haven't been much better. That's why I accepted the invitation to the dinner party. Clancy promised the other club members would be here this time.

Today is my second chance, my chance to find my tribe.

As it happens, Clancy's home is an apartment a few blocks from the campus, funded entirely by his parents. It's one of those new-school complexes, with wide windows and a communal swimming pool and a modicum of front yard. Someone three stories above stands on their balcony with a wispy cigarette, filling the cool autumn air with a haze of smoke. A plane passes by overhead, shrouding us in shadow.

As instructed, at the entrance I push the apartment buzzer and wait for Clancy to respond. Instead, half a minute later, Darla's staticky voice eases through the machine. "Who is it?"

When I tell her, she says, "Oh," and lets it linger. Clancy's voice floats in the background, and Darla shouts my name to him. Then she goes, "What's the magic word, Anakin?"

Suppressing a sigh, I give her what she wants to hear, the word she told me to remember last week to gain entry into the building: "Tofurky."

Which is exactly what's loitering on the dining table when I enter, imbuing the apartment with warmth and the stench of plant-based meat substitute. The walls here are adorned with brown-and-white pennants bearing our university's name. A potted yucca plant sits in the corner of the room. Darla is lounging on the couch watching TikTok videos. Clancy is in the kitchen opening and closing the oven door.

There is no one else here.

"Just us?" I say, a beat too late. It takes everything in me to keep my tone light, casual. Neither of them have designated a good place to sit, so I idle by the doorway. "Did everyone else get food poisoning again?" I ask, eyeing the Tofurky.

Clancy looks over his shoulder to the couch, blinks twice. And maybe they practiced their routine before I got here because it is Darla, eyes still glued on her phone, who once again answers. "Nope. They all went home to their families. Holiday and whatnot. You understand."

No, I don't, I want to say, but she's too busy laughing at people's sloppy dance moves.

"Sorry, buddy," Clancy adds, unleashing another ripple of heat when he opens the oven door. From this angle I can't tell if there's anything inside there or not. "I was so looking forward to you meeting the others."

"Yeah, me too," I mutter.

The doorknob presses into my lower back. It would be so easy to cross the threshold and leave these two behind, to forget this club and this dinner invitation and the weeks' worth of social media friend requests Darla's been sending.

But when she looks up from her phone and motions to the spot beside her on the couch, I know it's too late to leave.

Clancy joins us in the living room, and the three of us spend the next thirty minutes playing a game of Charades. I'm not sure when exactly it is—maybe when Darla puts an invisible cup to her lips and pretends to gulp a pumpkin spice latte, or perhaps when Clancy wattles his neck like a turkey and places his fists on his ribs to imitate the flapping of wings—but I start to feel my stomach unknot and my muscles relax. The air around us is warm and filled with the sound of our laughter.

Neither of them ever guess right when it's my turn. When I punched an imaginary speed bag like Rocky Balboa, Clancy guessed Last of the Mohicans. When I twirled my arm like I was working a tire jack, Darla blurted "kayaking." And when I threw a lowball and pretended to be the Statue of Liberty, bringing my feet together and holding one hand to the ceiling and the other over my chest, they scratched their heads and blinked.

I'd like to think that means I'm winning. I try not to read too much into it.

Clancy is in the middle of performing the Y.M.C.A. dance when his wristwatch beeps. "Ope, it's time to eat," he declares, breaking his silence and the M-pose. He slips into the kitchen, returns to the dining table with an anemic mound of mashed potatoes on a paper plate, places it by the Tofurky.

That's all the food there is. I'm not quite sure what he was doing with the oven door when I showed up.

"Looks good, looks good," Darla says as we gather around our meal. Of course, she's scrolling through her album of selfies right now, so whether she means the food or the photos is anyone's guess.

Clancy does his best job of cutting the Tofurky, but it fights back, tough as a boxer. He makes uneven slices, lancing the meat substitute at improbable angles and distributing chunks and scraps on our plates in equal portions. Satisfied, he nods and looks first at Darla and then me.

"I think it'd be lovely if we went around the table and express our gratitude," he says. "We should say the reasons we have to be thankful."

"Kay," Darla agrees. Without consulting me, she points to Clancy like she's Uncle Sam. "You go first then."

"Okay," he says, cupping his chin in his hand and closing his eyes. "Okay, how about this? I'm thankful for the Indigenous peoples who worked so hard to make this land what it is. There. Your turn, D."

Darla's eyes crawl up to a spot on the ceiling where there's a dark stain. She's still staring at it when she says, "I'm thankful for the Indigenous Peoples' Appreciation Club and its loyal members for sacrificing their time to be here today." Her voice is surprisingly earnest, like a sober person reciting the alphabet forwards.

Then they both turn to me, their faces contorting with expectant smiles. I can see them waiting, willing me to bestow my Indigenous experience and knowledge, to regale them with stories of my time on the reservation. Waiting for things I can't provide them because I grew up in the city, just the same as them. Clancy is not-so-subtly casting his gaze on the yucca plant in the corner, as if my looking at it will provide me with the anecdote he's looking for.

It takes me a while before I stumble upon my answer. "Instagram," I say. "I'm thankful for Instagram."

Darla gives a swift, modest nod of approval. Clancy's face falls the same way it did a week ago, when I told him my last name is not Skywalker but Todachine.

"Okay," Clancy says after a half-minute of silence. His voice is syrupy with hesitation. "My turn again, right?" And he says, "I'm thankful that the Indigenous peoples still live here and didn't emigrate after what our ancestors did." 

Darla, already grasping at straws, says, "I'm thankful for this delicious-looking Tofurky."

When it's my turn again, I tell them I'm thankful for Netflix.

The third time around is when Clancy snaps, right after I give thanks to Taco Bell's cravings value menu.

"That's not what you're supposed to say, Anakin," he announces.

"It's not?" I say, feigning ignorance as best I can. "What am I supposed to say then?"

"You know," Clancy replies.

Darla stabs the Tofurky with a fork repeatedly, maybe as a distraction, but it's too late now.

"No, I don't know, Clancy," I say. "Tell me. What is it you want me to say?"

He opens his mouth, closes it, blushes. But none of that stops him from saying, "We want to know what it was like growing up. You know, 'out there.'" He uses air quotes around the last two words, just to be safe.

I sigh. It's not the first time I've been asked this. "Look, I hate to tell you this, but 'out there' is Brooklyn. That's where I'm from, the borough. New York. I wasn't raised on a reservation. We didn't live in teepees. There were no smokes signals, no horses. I'm sorry to disappoint you." My voice comes out louder than intended, more aggressive, less forgiving.

Clancy stares at his plate of Tofurky, his mouth twisting into something that looks like a broken smile. He lowers his head. His body heaves forward, jolted by little hiccups. I only realize he isn't laughing when his face starts to glisten from a thin trail of tears.

"I'm so stupid," he says, then again. Darla rubs his back, makes a consoling cooing noise.

Whatever anger I felt has now been tamped down by the gravity of the situation. "It's okay," I tell him, feeling the heat from the Tofurky on my face. "You didn't know. You couldn't have."

He sniffles. "But I did. I did know." 

"Shh," Darla says, but Clancy shakes his head.

"My ex-boyfriend was an Indigenous person," he says, his voice quiet and strained. "I did know."

And it occurs to me that Darla is probably in the Indigenous Peoples' Apprecation Club because of her one-sixteenth Navajo stepdad, but I haven't discovered a reason for Clancy's membership, for his being the club leader. Until now.

Darla stares at me, and it's clear from her expression that this isn't part of the routine, that this isn't something they rehearsed, that maybe she didn't even know this about Clancy. She blinks slowly, a semaphore of her own, then leans in closer.

"But it was different with him, different than what you experienced," Clancy says. "I guess I just. . .I just thought that maybe," and he stops, gesturing to the room as a whole, the yucca plant and the Tofurky and me.

We let his words linger for a bit.

And before I know what I'm doing, I reach across the table and pat his hand. His skin is hot to the touch. "Look, man. I appreciate it. Really, I do. But you don't have to do all this. To me, this is just a day like any other, and I just want to spend it with my friends."

And it isn't until the words are out in the open that I realize they're true: these people are my friends. My tribe. I know it's too late to leave now, and maybe I'm okay with that.

I say, "Can't we just do something normal, like watch TV or something?"

"Yeah," Darla agrees, and grins her turkey-like grin. "I'm thankful for TV. And for movie marathons on Thanksgiving."

Clancy sniffles, wipes his face with his shirtsleeve. "Yeah. Yeah, all right. We can do that."

"Sweet," Darla says, grabbing her plate of Tofurky and heading to the couch. We follow her as she turns on the TV and flips through the channels so fast that I'm wondering if she's even paying attention to the screen. I have my answer when she stops abruptly on a familiar movie.

We sit together on the couch eating rubbery faux meat and watch as, on the screen in front of us, Anakin Skywalker is getting ready to embark on an arduous journey. He's stepping through a door, crossing the threshold into unknown territory, when Obi-Wan calls his name. "May the Force be with you," says the master to the student.

"And also with you," Clancy and Darla say together through mouthfuls of Tofurky, bowing their heads. And this time I say it with them.