Accommodations

The long-distance book group is going really well. Every Sunday at noon Pacific my sister calls me from Saint Louis. I then hit the flash key and dial Oklahoma. Then I press the flash key again and there we are, my sisters and I. We’re reading War and Peace, which is astonishing, I think. This past Sunday, the book group was a bit of war and a bit of peace. That’s because in spite of the fact that the commercials have thus far been mercifully sparse this year, the holidays are, as they say, right around the corner.

In my family, the holidays are all about power. And if you want to take a really wet and sloshy piss to mark the holiday tree as your very own territory, there is no better way to do so than to throw your spouse and your offspring into the mix and use them as collateral to alter the schedule for everyone else. For years, my sister in Oklahoma managed to move Christmas from the 25th of December to the 26th. Her husband, who is a doctor, was the alleged reason for this. While he made his rounds at the hospital, she and the girls did their own excessive Christmas thing at the house and then, the following morning, flew to Saint Louis, where they bestowed upon our parents the greatest mandatory gift they could have ever dreamed of: their granddaughters. And there was nobody who bitched more relentlessly about this than the father of my two nephews. How rude, he said, over and over again, how inconsiderate.

In 2009 my sister in Saint Louis moved into the house where we all grew up. This year, she’s decided to have Thanksgiving at what another one of my brothers pompously calls “our ancestral home.” And my brother the daddy, his two boys and his wife are going to honor the family by tearing themselves away from my nephews’ mother’s family’s table in California and going to Saint Louis. There’s just one small glitch, which was discussed at length during this week’s book group meeting: my brother told everyone he was flying in on Monday and leaving on Friday, so my sister in Oklahoma made reservations for her family, which is arriving on Wednesday night and leaving on Saturday, at a bed and breakfast right down the road from the ancestral place. The problem, of course, is that my brother didn’t actually make reservations – he only checked the schedules and the fares. He has two young children, and his time is more valuable than any of us could ever imagine. And now seats are scarce and fares are high (that’s called supply and demand, I believe). So, assuming he’s actually purchased the tickets (and that would not be a wise assumption, an observation I kept to myself on Sunday), he and his will need to fly out of Saint Louis on Thursday morning.

So let’s do Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday.

And here’s the real beauty of it. I didn’t have to say a word. I didn’t have to recite the tale of planning our mother’s memorial service, which we’d decided to have at the end of May. My brother started throwing grenades all across the land over that one because the exact date had not been confirmed by the second week in January, and, having a child and all, he needed to make his reservations in advance ... five months in advance. I couldn’t plan my way out of a paper bag, according to him. The standards are different for him, of course, which is just one of the many things I find loathsome about him. But on Sunday, I held my tongue for the most part. I’d like to say that’s because I’m reasonable and wise, but that would be a lie. The reason I shut up is that I couldn’t have gotten a word in had I tried because my sister in Oklahoma, who successfully rescheduled Christmas for two decades, went on a bit of a tear. “Does he ever think of anyone else?” she asked finally. I believe I was expected to say something cruel about my brother at that point; I’ve done so so many times that I think it’s probably considered something of an agenda item. Instead, I simply enjoyed myself: there is no amount of money that could buy this brand of entertainment, so my contribution to the conversation was a question rather than a condemnation: “Do you two think that Prince Andrei is going to hit it off with Natasha Rostov?" I asked. "It’s sort of leaning that way, I think.”