California Pt 10 | Thanksgiving

Next day was the big day: Thanksgiving. I’d never experienced a real Thanksgiving dinner before, and I felt happy and a little nervous. Happy, obviously, to eat a gigantic mound of food. Nervous in case I said something fucking stupid at the dinner table and ruined everything.

I woke up on Thanksgiving a long while before the girls did. We weren’t staying in Annie’s parents house; the three of us had been given rooms in a beautiful house down the road that belonged to vacationing neighbours – we had the run of the place. Awake alone, I made myself a coffee and opened the door to the patio. Tall red-trunked pines lined the sleepy suburb, and behind the rooftops forested hills rose in the morning clear sky. The air was crisp and nourishing, and it reminded me of Toku Iwi and Seth and old adventures now finished. I felt a twist of yearning. Fields and trees and sun and frosty breaths through cold nostrils into warm lungs – pulling on gloves and hats and tramping out the door to do god knows what; I miss it. I was currently on an adventure, of course – but I miss the days when adventure was a lifestyle, not a yearly event.

I’d just finished my coffee when the doorbell rang: Annie’s family had arrived with Clover. I’d agreed to go on a morning walk with them the evening before (Annie and Tayler had said no the millisecond Annie’s mum suggested it). I thought it’d be a good time to get to know everyone, and to show them that Annie’s best friend is a good egg: someone who likes morning walks, someone who is responsible.

We wound around the sleepy estate, skirting a little man-made lake and some tennis courts.

“She can’t lie,” said Gary, about his daughter. “She just physically can’t do it. As a teenager you could just see it all over her face whenever she’d done something naughty.”

“Which was always,” said Clark, her older brother, and I laughed.

“But we learned eventually that Annie is immune to punishment,” said Gary. “We would warn her and warn her about what the consequences would be if she did something, but you could always just see her calculating whether the punishment would be worth it. And she always decided it was worth it.”

“The one thing that she did care about was disappointing people,” said Pam, Annie’s mum.

“Oh, she hated to feel like she’d disappointed anyone,” said Gary.

It was funny to be speaking to people who knew my friend so much better than me – everything they said rang true, though I’d never been able to articulate it properly. I am, by and large, a very rule-abiding person. Doesn’t matter if I think the rules are stupid – I’ll follow them to avoid causing a fuss, singling myself out, getting shouting at. I hate getting shouted at, by anybody at all, ever. It’s been that way since I was a child: idly drawing on a desk in school, so head-in-the-clouds I didn’t even realise I was doing it, only to hear my name shrieked across the classroom. And then my fight-or-flight would kick in, hard, but of course I’d do neither – just sit there, silently taking whatever telling-off I’d earned – and I’d feel tears forming and hope desperately that nobody could see how shiny my eyes had gotten.

Annie – well, she just doesn’t give a shit. She vapes in restaurants and cafes and bars, blowing the smoke down her jacket collar; she breezes into closed-off sections of nightclubs and starts playing her own music over the speakers; she hops fences and says ‘Yoo look how cool this is!’ about abandoned building sites. And when she gets caught (which is often) she apologises profusely to whatever authority figure has come charging over, then leans over to me to mumble “Dick” the moment they’ve left.

The thing about Annie’s bad behaviour is that she does it all with such innocence. She’s not malevolent, she doesn’t do bad things for profit or ego or to revel in the power of upsetting others – not at all, not ever. It’s as though she simply forgets, from time to time, that rules exist at all. She bumbles along with a foalish, tunnel-visioned sort of exuberance, curious and determined and forever touching things that aren’t meant to be touched – but no matter what she breaks or smuggles or pilfers, bollocking her is always dissatisfying. Because on some level, even if you’re annoyed in the moment, you know that if she actually listened to each of these tellings-off, changed her ways and hung up her Bart Simpson cap for good, her sparkler would dim, somehow.

‘Don’t put your boots on the coffee table,’ you hiss – and Annie’s reaction is so shocked, so genuinely, kicked-puppy confused at your sudden annoyance, that you begin to think more abstractly about rules, about what they’re even good for. I read a story once about Keith Moon; about how he exuded such an infectious devilry that he once convinced a hotel manager to trash his own hotel lobby. Annie – same thing.

Regulations, etiquette and social convention are useful and reasonable on the whole, I think – no blasting Tiktoks on public transport thank you please – but without people like Annie in my life, sooner or later I end up caged by the musts and mustn’ts I pressure myself to abide by. I get so wrapped up in the humdrum tasks of my days that I sometimes forget that rebellion is an option at all – that lines can be blurred, that rules can be bent, and that there are always, always more options available to you than it first appears. You’re never as trapped as you feel, and Annie reminds me of that every single time I see her.

*****

In the afternoon, when Clover had been walked and the girls were awake and ready, we headed over for Thanksgiving. There was still a lot of kitchen work to be done, so to empty the house while Gary finished the cooking, Pam led us all down the street to a sunny, palm-fringed ‘bocce’ court – an Italian name for a game the French call ‘Petanque’ and the English call ‘Bowls’. The premise is pretty simple: you have a long, thin strip of ground for a court, and you toss a small coloured ball down the far end. Then, in teams, players take turns to roll successive larger balls down the court, with the aim to get more of your balls closer to the little coloured ball than the opposing team.

We played for a couple of hours beneath a perfect blue sky, supping beers in our Sunday best (Annie had specifically told me to bring a nice shirt for Thanksgiving). I am very bad at any sports that require me to make the same precise movement repeatedly. I can throw a ball once and it’ll arc perfectly to its destination. I throw the same ball again, with the exact same conditions, and it pings off sideways into an old lady’s shopping basket. It was an endless source of embarrassment as a teenager in high school PE. As an adult, thankfully, I’m usually drinking while I play these sorts of sports, so I just blame it on that instead.

*****

When dinner was ready we sat down to eat, seven of us, and worked our way through the enormous amount of food Annie’s family had spent three days preparing. They don’t usually eat the traditional dinner, but they’d cooked one especially for my visit. I hope I expressed my gratitude enough at the time – stupidly, I was so nervous about the meal and about being a respectful, well-mannered representative of the UK (and not being accidentally crude or loutish and shattering their positive notions of the country), that I drank quite a bit of red wine to soothe my nerves. And, obviously, while it did indeed relax me, it probably relaxed me too much, and looking back I’m not sure I was quite as charming as I could have been. But everyone always tells me I overthink so – I don’t know.

I did forget to offer Pam a hand during the meal, however. That’s undeniable. I was so busy eating and drinking – so eager to show how much I liked and appreciated the food (which I very much did) that I had three fully-heaped plates in a row – that when time came to clear the table, I just sat there, stuffed and groggy and lightly sauced, until half the dishes had already been taken away. Burning with shame, I remembered at the last second and clambered fatly out of my chair to help.

“Thank you Dan,” nodded Annie’s mum with a smile, as I placed two solitary plates in the dishwasher.

“It’s the least I could do,” I said, wishing it wasn’t quite so literal.

*****

After dessert (two kinds of pie, which I ate both of to be polite), I waddled over to the living room to join the family in a game: a mixture of Articulate and charades, where we each wrote down five nouns, put them in a fishbowl, and then plucked them out one at a time to either act out or describe. Because I wasn’t paying attention when I was told to write the nouns (all my blood was in my gut), and I didn’t realise the game would involve acting them out, mine were all weird abstract things like ‘chrysalis’ and ‘envy’.

“Envy isn’t even a noun,” said everyone, when someone drew it from the bowl.

“It’s a noun,” I said quietly, torn between not wanting to contradict anyone but also not wanting to look like a lousy English teacher. “It’s a verb but it’s also a noun. Like, the feeling of envy. It’s like love or happiness. They’re nouns, too.”

“He’s a writer,” shrugged Clark, and the game continued.

*****

We didn’t stay late at Annie’s parents: everybody was sleepy and full and satisfied. Annie, Tayler and I walked up the street to our place in the evening, and before bed we played a little more Mario Kart on the neighbour’s massive TV. I really, really hoped, as I got into bed that night, that I’d done a good job of being a guest – that I’d been grateful enough, complimentary enough, helpful enough, interested enough. I think I did okay, mostly, and I realise I probably overthought the whole thing, but then – Annie and I had talked about me visiting her family ever since we first met, eight years ago. It meant a lot to me.

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