Thanksgiving

As the shattered glass rained down around Andie’s bare feet, landing with a tinkle on the kitchen floor's yellow, checkered linoleum, she wondered again if she should start looking for a therapist. 

The brief silence that followed was a welcome relief from the screaming and table-pounding of the past 45 minutes. 

“Great, do you feel better!?” Her mother screeched at her older sister, Jane. “Now Andie is covered in glass, and someone is going to have to drink wine out of a mug!”

“Oh, I’ll give you the 75 cents mom!” Jane countered. “I’m allowed to have feelings about my parents helping put a literal rapist in the White House. You have daughters, for Christsake! You know what? Andie is going to have bigger problems when her rights are slowly stripped away from her over the next four years-”

Jane kept talking, but any further points she tried to make were drowned out by Uncle Richard’s interrupting insistence that tariffs would fix the economy, and liberals were overreacting. Their father mumbled something about reading the Constitution from his corner seat at the bar top. 

Andie could clearly remember when holidays at the Fisher household were fun. Well, not fun, but comfortable. Too much food, obnoxious Christmas music, and the same movies playing in the background that no one ever watched, but everyone knew the lines to. Kids in the basement, parents around the bar. So predictable, so mundane.

As her family tried to outshout each other, Andie looked down at the sparkling shards that had turned her into an island. A kitchen island. The thought made her smile. Lifting her legs, she shook the glass from her pajama pants and hopped over the halo of splinters. The cacophony dimmed as she left unnoticed and climbed the stairs to her old bedroom. 

She stayed in this room at least once a year, but it never felt the same as when she lived there. Her parents kept it preserved, mausoleum-like, a shrine to a time when they were all close and happy. To Andie, even the glow-in-the-dark star stickers and high school theatre photos felt beige now. Jane’s room was the same, although she refused to stay in it anymore, instead renting an Airbnb 20 minutes away to make the point that she would not live under the same roof as fascists. 

The loud stomach rumble reminded Andie that she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Her mother quoted a 2 pm sharp start time for dinner, but when the screaming started, the cooking stopped, and Andie doubted food would be hitting the table anytime soon. 

Peeling off her pajamas, she dug around in her suitcase until a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved henley appeared—no need to be formal.

Her snack drawer was equally untouched, Rolos and Snickers from the late aughts moldering away at the bottom of a particle board desk. How many haphazard papers on the fall of the Byzantine empire or energy flow in the food chain had she slapped together the night before they were due at this desk?

“I have never let schooling interfere with my education,” she quoted to herself as she sunk into the plastic chair and munched a Twix so stale the caramel cracked under her teeth. Downstairs, the screaming crescendoed, and something else broke.

She wondered briefly if Jane would refuse to come for Christmas, followed by the thought that maybe she, too, should refuse to come for Christmas. After all, this wasn’t quality time anymore. It was the Battle of Gettysburg every time they got together. The country eating itself one plate of turkey and stuffing at a time.

Tossing the candy wrapper into the wire basket by the door, she turned the chair around and propped her feet on the desktop. Someone was sobbing in the kitchen, and her dad’s voice sounded a low rumble of disapproval. It was funny; she couldn’t even remember a time when politics were a topic of conversation around the dinner table before That Man came on the scene. 

She wasn’t even sure her dad would have been able to tell you who was president 15 years ago. Maybe they voted in the time before, but she wouldn't have been surprised to find out that they didn’t. Slowly, and then not so slowly, her parents had seemed to grow angry, then bitter, and intolerant of others in a way they had never been. Instead of facts and statistics, they quoted Twitter and YouTube. Talking about anything beyond how your day went quickly devolved into a tirade of distorted realities where conspiracies were everywhere, and anyone in power was in on it. Everyone but Him, the one and only beacon of reliability.

In contrast, undergrad politicized Jane, like so many young people. She now fancied herself a citizen of the world, finger on the pulse of the geopolitical landscape, ready to fight for the underdog. Rarely did she listen to what others had to say, but as a middle-class, straight, white woman, she loved to talk about inequality, homophobia, and racism. If you didn’t see things her way, you were a bigot. If you weren’t speaking out as loudly as she was, you were complicit in the injustice of America. Like their parents, Jane seemed utterly incapable of moving a single inch on any topic. 

For her part, Andie had tried to stay neutral. Though it quickly became apparent that they disagreed, at first Jane and their parents had tried too. They had brushed across political topics like they were poison ivy, sometimes unavoidable on the trail of conversation but to be skipped, jumped over, and sidled past at all costs. 

But as the years dragged on, the pressure built until poison ivy grew in every crack and crevice. An innocuous question like, “What did you have for lunch?” turned into an argument about labor rights and illegal immigration. Eventually, the tension flared before anyone had to say anything. Just by being in the same room together, the air turned thick and hummed with the kinetic inevitably of verbal combat.

Andie was tired. So tired of being uncomfortable when home. Nothing she did seemed to help. Changing the subject just turned everyone to a new topic of debate. Calling any one of them out manufactured defensive hostility. Grey rocking was the only strategy that didn’t escalate the situation, but it did nothing to ease her broken heart. 

She missed her family. The decades of inside jokes, of stomach flus and gymnastics classes, of watching each other try and fail, then try and succeed, of vacations and boredom and adventure, of Christmas mornings and birthday parties and funerals. They had always been by each other’s sides as long as she could remember, cheering each other on and being there when things went wrong. Now it was like all of it had been eaten away by some insidious acid that came out of nowhere, corrosive, relentless, and indestructible. 

Sometimes, it felt like they truly hated each other.

Tears pricked her eyes and began to fall, and she pulled her feet from the desk so she could curl over herself. No one was listening anyway, so she allowed herself the moment to mourn. It was so hard to be here.

The sobbing from downstairs had stopped, and she could hear her mother’s voice growing in volume again. 

How much longer can they do this?

A sudden wave of rage crashed over her, sweeping her off her feet. She felt her face flush and her hands curl into fists, and before she knew what she was doing, she was stomping back down the stairs.

Her uncle was gone, and her dad had taken up his corner seat again. Jane and her mother stood by the stove, inches from each other’s faces. Her mother was yelling, and Jane was taking a breath, preparing her counter yell.

“-an abortion at 38 weeks, and you think that’s not murder!?”

“A woman’s body should never be legislated by-” 

Mother and daughter gasped as a fistful of ice cold mashed potatoes squashed over their head, chunks of soggy root vegetable seeping through their identical long, brown hair and down the back of their necks into their bras.

Wordlessly, they turned to look at Andie, hands covered in mashed potatoes scooped from the long forgotten bowl by the stovetop. 

“Shut. The fuck. Up.” She shook her hands so pieces of mash flew in all directions, and her father ducked under the countertop. Andie pointed at her mother, “You. The shit you are spouting is insane and moronic. And you,” she pointed at Jane, “are absolutely insufferable and stroppy.”

“Stroppy?” Jane raised an eyebrow. “What the fuck is stro-”

Another handful of potatoes hit her in the face. 

“Look it up!” Andie turned, pointing at their father. “And you! Stop your mopey mumbling from your little hidey-hole. If you have something to say, then say it.”

“I-”

“What has gotten into you!?” Her mother shrieked, trying in vain to comb the food out of her hair with her fingers over the sink. “You’re acting like an insane person!”

“I’m insane? Have you listened to yourselves over the past 8 years? You’ve acted like you’re from different planets rather than the same gene pool. If you keep this up, eventually, we are never going to talk to each other, never going to visit, never going to meet each others’ partners or kids….” Sadness at the thought made her trail off, but she could see they knew she was telling the truth from their faces. “All because of a bunch of rich and powerful assholes who will never even know you existed. Like, we all get it. You don’t agree. Is fighting about it going to change a single goddamn thing outside of ruining this family?”

A heavy silence settled over the kitchen as they looked at each other, eyes dropping in shame. For once, the Fishers were speechless.

Letting it sink in, Andie turned to wipe her hands on a dish towel when a glob of green bean casserole smacked into the side of her neck. She gasped. Swiping as much as she could onto the floor with the dish towel, she looked at Jane and their mother, but both looked as surprised as she was. 

Their father stood, hunched over a glass baking dish, beaming. “I think this is overdue.”

“Dad,” Jane turned to the sink and scoffed, “don’t sink to Andie’s level. This is so immature-” 

She reached to turn on the water when their mother shoved a handful of canned cranberry sauce down the back of Jane’s shirt, the jelly rolling in large clumps down her spine and out the bottom, falling to the floor with a squish. 

“I’ve wanted to do that all day.”

Jane and Andie looked at their parents, each clutching their chosen ammunition, hands already in scooping formation and ready to fling. Andie’s eyes flickered to the mashed potatoes on the counter, Jane’s to the pumpkin pie on the stove top. 

They dove.