26⎜The Holiday
“I feel like this holiday was made for you, Eric Wilson.”
I studied her face quizzically for a moment, not entirely understanding the assertion she had just made. So, I asked her about it: “How so, Ari Pomegranate?”
“Well, historical accuracy aside, Thanksgiving is probably the most American holiday after the Fourth of July that I can think of,” Ari began to list off the reasons why the holiday was “made” for me. “There’s apple pie, Americans, football, and a parade. To me, that just embodies Eric Wilson to the utmost degree. Kind of like Scott and Christmas, Kay and Easter, and Houston and New Years.”
“What are you talking about, Ira?” Scott interjected with a snort. “Why does Houston get New Years? I want New Years! Besides, he’s totally a Fourth of July type of guy.”
“How?” Ari questioned right back, her face pumped with skepticism.
“Barbecuing, fireworks, seersucker shorts, bowties, America, and red, white, and blue. How is that not Houston?” Scott voiced his reasoning for linking their other friend to the summer holiday commemorating when the United States of America gained its independence.
“Fair enough,” Ari complied, “but you’re still Christmas.”
“Why? I love getting drunk and counting down on New Years. I’m, like, the best partier I know!” Scott then defended his thought-process as to why New Years was to be his holiday.
“Yeah, but on Christmas you get drunk, there’s snow, Christmas carols, and presents. You love opening up presents and watching Christmas specials more than a six-year-old girl,” Ari pointed out, her argument one I thought to be valid and winning.
Scott seemed like the type to go crazy during the onslaught of winter holiday explosion. Here though, in California, I wasn’t really sure if Christmas was celebrated the same way it was back home—in New York. We had cold weather. We had leafless trees. We had oodles upon freaking oodles of holiday spirit. Like, there was probably enough to suffice for the rest of the country. Alas, it was only but Thanksgiving, so I had yet to see how this state approached Christmas. Regardless, Scott was clearly a Christmas type of guy.
“And what about Kay?” I inquired, wanting to know why exactly Ari had paired one of her best friends with the holiday most commonly associated with bunnies, chicks, and spring.
“You’re kidding, right?” Scott laughed, looking at me as if he actually thought I was joking about what I had just asked. “You have met Kay Rodgers, correct?”
“Yeah,” I shrugged, not comprehending how that related to anything.
“Kay is like a walking and talking and breathing Lilly Pulitzer ad,” Scott said with a laugh. “The girl wears pink and green year round, and lives by those two colors. When Easter comes, it’s like she is literally on meth. No joke. Kay Rodgers lives for Easter.”
I sucked in a breath at the mention of drugs, but didn’t say anything. Making light of drugs with metaphors wasn’t exactly the funniest thing to a recovering addict like myself. It was pure insensitivity and ignorance. Most didn’t know what being on meth was like. I had tried it once. It wasn’t fun. Thankfully, I managed to stop and only stick to pot, but all of it was bad. Some looked at drugs like an unattainable entity that was about as absurd as a unicorn. They thought that drugs were only for lowlifes and criminals. A nice quarterback from a suburb could never touch them. Why would he, anyways?
When I got back from rehab, there was a short time period before I moved out to California when I was crashing at home in New York, avoiding everyone. They all knew. Even if they claimed that they didn’t, they were just pretending. Everyone in the town knew about Eric Wilson—quarterback gone drug addict. My coaches were ashamed, my parents’ friends were horrified, and everyone else just tried to forget it. They thought that I could go back to being the golden boy—the boy who wore boat shoes and was perfect in each and every way. Unfortunately, I had changed.
Word got out that I was back in town. There had been many speculations about where I was over the summer, and my parents had essentially lied to the community, claiming that I was “at a summer program for teens.” Technically, they hadn’t exactly lied, but they certainly didn’t come out and say, “Rehab.” Most took their words and assumed that I was at football camp or had gone to California early. Others didn’t know what to think.
With a face and reputation like mine, hiding from the entire town wasn’t exactly a viable option. I listened to a lot of music in my room over those couple of weeks. Staring at my bedroom wall and all the sports awards and physical markers of my achievements was what consumed the majority of my time. I had gotten a new phone number, and had finally gotten around the deleting my Facebook.
Ah, yes. Facebook. In my formative years, I spent a great deal of my time worrying about whether my profile picture would get five hundred likes, or a measly three hundred. My ego was un-proportionately gigantic at the time (it still was, just slight less), so having something like Facebook at my immediate disposal wasn’t exactly the best thing in the universe. I would post a picture, it would get liked by people I had probably never had a conversation with, girls would comment, saying something like, “OMG! Ur soooo hawt!!” and my head would just inflate until it was about ready to burst.
The thing that I didn’t understand about Facebook was that people were essentially asking to get cyber stalked. I was worse than some of the girls that I knew, constantly checking my phone to see who had liked my posts and who had added me. The amount of times I would get messaged by random people was innumerable, and I always felt a little remorse when I didn’t respond, even if they were, well, strangers. For me, Facebook was not a good thing. No form of social media was. It wasn’t healthy, so I got rid of it, and deactivated my account. There was a lot less stress in my life after that.
Anyways, when I was back at home for those weeks, I did a lot of thinking, just as I had in rehab. My parents had gotten rid of all the pot in the house (even the stuff I had hidden under the floorboards and in my underwear drawer), so that wasn’t really a factor. They (meaning my mom) had even gone to the lengths of spraying SUPER strong cleaning solution that smelled like lemons EVERYWHERE in my room. I got caught up on sports news, and worked out in the confines of the home gym my dad prided himself on, though rarely ever used due to his work schedule.
My dad was out most of the time, but my mom wasn’t. Like every other day of my existence, my mom was home, keeping up the house, going to the grocery store, having book clubs, parties, and watching her prized possession: me. Before I told my parents about my drug addiction, my mom treated me like the perfect son. Like I was on a pedestal and no one could even touch everything I had achieved during the course of my life. After I came back from rehab, I wasn’t the perfect son anymore. I was tainted and tarnished, and my mom treated me like I was a glass bowl, about to shatter at any moment.
Anything I wanted I would get, and she literally made me hot dogs (one of my favorite foods) seven meals in a row one week. It was a little bit excessive, but I understood that all she was trying to do was be a good mother in the best way that she could. To her, me turning to drugs wasn’t my fault (which it was), but rather her fault. She thought that the reason I had done what I did was because of her and how she hadn’t been a good mother (which was obviously entirely false). In her mind, she needed to pay retribution for my misdoings, and I felt awful knowing that that was how she felt. I told her that all I needed from her was to be supportive from an emotional standpoint, and just be someone for me to talk to. Eventually, the coddling decreased to only slightly more than its normal amount.
Once, she had one of her garden parties. We lived in the suburbs. We had land. We had a nice house. We had a garden, of which my mother spent a great deal of her time cultivating during the summer and spring. Aside from me, the garden was one of her greatest joys in life. She would spend hours pretending to be someone who loved every single speck of dirt on the planet, and go into a trance the second that she put her garden gloves on. Because of her love for the garden, she would often throw gatherings with other women in the area, and they would drink lemonade and eat pastries, while gossiping about the neighborhood.
At this particular garden party, I was told to make an appearance. Instead of thinking in my room for hours on end in my favorite New York T-shirt and gray sweats, I was told to get dressed in a way so that I didn’t look like a “homeless model with no fashion taste.” I took my mother’s words to mean that I needed amp up my inner prep as much as possible. After throwing on a pair of orange gingham shorts, a blue collared shirt, and a pair of boat shoes, I felt like myself again. I loved clothes. I really did. Clothes were a direct reflection of how one was feeling, and putting on the right pair could really alter one’s mood drastically. When I put on my boat shoes and J. Crew, I felt better.
Eventually, I willed myself to leave my room and face the masses of middle-aged women head on. They were swarming my backyard when I went outside, all wearing sundresses with hats and pink glasses of lemonade in their hands. It was the perfect example of what suburbia looked like in its purest form. Well, at least to me. I went over to where my mom was standing, and kissed her on the cheek like the good boy that I was.
I recognized the lady with whom she was chatting, but didn’t actually know her. “Eric!” the woman had said with a large smile painted across her tanned face. “How are you, sweetheart?”
“Good, and you?” I returned, turning up the charm and trying to exhibit my politest tone. It was the least I could do for my mom.
“I’m great, thank you for asking,” the lady smiled. “How was your summer, dear?”
“Good. Really rejuvenating,” I replied, keeping up the surface conversation. The woman was probably dying to ask me if the rumors were true about me and rehab and drugs, but thankfully her upbringing prevented her from doing so. The rest of the garden party was a lot like that exchange, in how it was fake and really just so that my mother could prove to all her friends that her perfect son was still as perfect and amazing as ever. It was fake. I felt fake. Suburban moms were fake. After that party, my desire to go to Stanford multiplied even more, if possible. I was done with fake. I wanted Stanford.
“It’s true,” Ari’s rainy voice sounded, managing to partially pull me from my thoughts. One of her fingers was tracing my kneecap, and the feeling—no, the touch brought me back to reality. “Kay loves Easter almost as much as she loves Houston.”
“More, probably,” Scott speculated, and I tried hard to focus on the conversation at hand—I really did—but it was just so hard.
“Definitely more,” Ari declared, though I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.
“Scott! How’d you sleep last night?” asked somebody else, from behind us. The three of us were currently sitting on the couch in a living area, watching the Macy’s Day parade come to an end. Ari wasn’t a fan of parades in general (go figure), but Scott insisted that we watch it because it was his “favorite part of the entire holiday…after the food.” Thus, we had watched all the Dora balloons and high school marching bands pass, and were now eagerly awaiting the athletes to appear on the screen. It was two teams that nobody in the room actually cared about, but football was football, so that small detail didn’t matter.
“Surprisingly well, Mr. R.,” Scott replied to the man who owned the condo in which we were spending Thanksgiving. “This couch doesn’t look that comfy, but I’m actually pretty okay. You should ask Ira how she slept.”
“Ari,” her father began, “how’d you sleep?”
“Fine,” she answered in a concluding syllable.
“Ask her who she slept with,” urged Scott.
“Who’d you sleep with, Ari?” Eli sighed, giving in to Scott.
“Me, myself, and I.”
“Liar!” Scott shouted, pointing an accusatory finger at her.
“That would be you, Scotty-boy.”
“She slept with Eric!” Scott proclaimed falsely.
“No, she didn’t,” I said, just as Ari said the same thing, though with a personal pronoun geared towards her: “No, I didn’t.”
“Scott, please don’t start trouble,” Eli begged. He seemed like the type of guy who wasn’t into bullshit. Alex—my best friend who essentially dumped me for being hooked to pot—was the same way.
Alex didn’t like when people lied, which was probably why our friendship hadn’t survived. I lied to him about my extracurricular list for years. It wasn’t something small, either. I hadn’t lied about when I had lost my virginity, or even something as ridiculous as my favorite color. What I had lied about was something big. It was an addiction I had developed. That wasn’t something little or trivial. It was something important, and even if it would’ve impacted me even more negatively, I should have told him sooner. He shouldn’t have found out because I was pressured into telling him. Alex was a standup guy. He never deserved a best friend like me.
“I’m not starting trouble, Mr. R.!” Scott protested fervently. “They slept together! I swear!”
“I slept in the guestroom,” I articulated simply.
“I was in my room the entire night,” Ari said.
“We didn’t sleep together,” I deduced the honest truth.
“Scott’s just jealous, because out of the two of us, Eric would totally want to sleep with me over him,” Ari then slipped in. I wasn’t sure from where her words had formed, and I didn’t really want to find out, but I had strong hunch that they were a jibe at her best friend’s sexual preferences.
“What the hell, Ira?” Scott demanded, his mouth agape as he stared at her in pure distress.
“Oh, so are we not bringing up how you have a total man crush on Eric?” Ari inquired innocently. Innocent rain. It could be an album title ranging from the genres of gospel to Lady Gaga.
“What are you talking about?” Thankfully, the two currently quarreling were sitting next to each other, instead of having to lean over me. The only downside was that I couldn’t act as a barrier and was sitting beside Scott. He was getting pretty loud, and I knew that he hadn’t even begun to reach his maximum volume level.
“Remember when you said that thing?”
“What thing?”
“About Eric’s abs.”
Scott then groaned. LOUDLY. “That was one time!”
“All I’m saying is that maybe you’re jealous that he’d rather sleep with me than you…”
“All I said was that he had nice abs!”
“Sure.”
“Really!”
“Uh huh.”
“Okay, then! We’re going to end this discussion and go eat now!” Eli proclaimed with an air of authority to him. If his daughter sounded like rain, then he probably sounded like snow. Not cold or fluffy, but rather heavy, thick, bleak, and comforting.
Not even attempting to refute what he had said, we all hopped off the sofa, and trooped over to the kitchen table. It was set like a middle-aged (straight and non-metrosexual) man was trying his best to evoke his innermost Martha Stewart. There was an orange tablecloth slightly askew, white dishes, napkins, cups, and silverware. The silverware and cups were placed on the wrong sides (my mom had garden parties practically every week during the summer and I lived in the heart of where the concept of “suburban” was practically born—I knew a few too many domestic things that would help me get laid one day), but it was the effort that really counted. Eli had tried his best, and that was all anyone could ask.
Over in the kitchen there was a spread of food steaming. From what my blurry vision could deduce, the meal would include turkey (staple food for the holiday), potatoes, some type of green, some sauces, water, and a few more things that I couldn’t actually see. Scott told me that Eli couldn’t cook to save his life, so always resorted to Whole Foods whenever an event that required edible food came up. Evidently, this was a Whole Foods Thanksgiving.
We all sat down, the two members of the Remon family at the heads of the table. Scott and I sat across from each other. Warm aromas were wafting from the kitchen beyond, and Scott looked as though he was about to start drooling more than a dog deprived of a bone. Both Ari and Eli possessed stark expressions, and I noticed that tears were beginning to spring from the creases in the younger’s eyes. It was vain to think, but someone so beautiful shouldn’t have been crying on such a festive Holiday like this one.
“Before we start eating, let’s go around and say what we’re thankful for,” Eli declared. “Scott, you go first.”
“Why me?” Scott immediately whined in objection of the idea. Eli sent him a silent message transmitted through his eyes, and Scott sighed, giving in. “I’m thankful for food. And Ari. And the frat. And lacrosse. And California’s weather. And meeting Eric. And Houston Walker.”
“What about Kay?” Eli questioned.
“Oh, yeah, her too,” Scott offhandedly added. “Eric’s turn!”
“Uh, I guess I’m thankful for getting the help I needed, Stanford, and everything good that’s come from Stanford,” I said, thinking back with a small smile to what I had achieved over the past few months.
“Like me!” Scott chimed in. I nodded, dimly grinning. “Ari, you go!”
“She used to make the best stuffing,” Ari sniffled in a bittersweet tone of rain. Once she had composed herself slightly more, she said something that was probably supposed to be uplifting, though it sounded absolutely morbid to me: “I’m thankful to be alive. Dad, what about you?”
Eli swallowed with an intake of air. “I’m thankful to be here, right now, enjoying Thanksgiving with my daughter and her two friends. Now, who wants to eat?”
If I hadn’t known it was he, I would’ve mistaken Scott for a bullet train right then and there with the amount speed, power, and persistence that he utilized in going over to the kitchen, and stacking his plate full of food. The holiday would definitely be a memorable one.