That one particular Thanksgiving, our grandmothers went berserk and came up with their outrageous and twisted plan to have dinner together as they hadn’t done since they left their parents’ home as girls getting married fifty or more years earlier. After so many years of divided opinions, this grand plan of theirs to have all of our extended families together under one roof for one Thanksgiving dinner was the first and only thing that all of them unanimously had ever agreed on in their entire lives.
Naturally, the rest of us did not share their level of high enthusiasm for the idea, at least initially. We had our doubts and reservations about it all. There were more than just a few good reasons that we felt this event should not occur. But just the same, we held our tongues, laughed a hearty laugh, indulged our grandmothers and went along for the adventurous ride.
So you will have a scope of how massive this gathering would be, I tell you that my grandmother had a dozen other siblings, three brothers and nine sisters. The thirteen of them had 53 children, 112 grandchildren and two great grandchildren. Including the spouses of my grandmother’s siblings and a few step children for those in their second marriages, the total number of people at that Thanksgiving dinner rose to just under 200 people.
It was early October that year when they first started talking of and then building momentum about having this Thanksgiving dinner together. However, privately I think a few of them were designing this plan for some time before then and wanted to have it all coordinated before any of us skeptics were consulted. Originally, our grandmothers envisioned this gathering to take place for a traditional Italian-Catholic seafood Christmas Eve dinner that usually features 19 or so different delicious varieties of fish and seafood-- but also the dreaded salty buccala that never caught on in popularity with any generation younger than my mother’s.
However magical and wonderful it would have been to have this gathering in December, several grandchildren out of state would not have been present on Christmas Eve. The dinner was then bumped up to Thanksgiving so that each and every living descendant of our grandmothers would be there.
These nine aging Italian women were extraordinary to say the least. Yes, they got on our nerves sometimes when they were sticklers for detail and dead set on perfection. They also tested the patience of their adult children when they needed help due to aging, just could not wait for help and ended up in the emergency room for falling off a ladder or pulling a muscle when trying to lift something too heavy alone.
Though our grandmothers sometimes frustrated us because they were so darned stubborn and impatient, we were in awe of each of them. Their impatience came from years of independence. All of us cousins were close to our grandmothers and practically grew up with them. Some of our grandmothers were professionals and others were homemakers who could have run the country blindfolded without a Rolodex. They were the nicest church going ladies who could appear naive, intelligent, witty, charming, business savvy, street smart or whatever they needed to be. The bottom line is that they didn’t give anyone any grief, and they certainly did not take any from anyone.
Considering they were born and grew up in an era when women just did not have the combinations of careers, marriages and children, some of my grandmother’s sisters who went off in the early 1940s as a group to college while their children were in grade school and junior high, were pioneers of sorts for married mothers and wives.
One of their funniest stories that they loved to tell was one I heard for the third or fourth time around my grandmother’s table when the Thanksgiving dinner was being planned. Two of the sisters 40 years earlier appeared before the dean of education to ask why they were denied admission to become teachers, in spite of acing admissions testing and having impeccable references from clergy, politicians and professors. The married sisters asked in person again why married women with children were automatically denied admission.
All of my grandmother’s sisters were so secretly ashamed to be related to mob figures out east, but decided that the two education major wannabes should use those relatives as references in their new applications. Then they had their youngest brother dress in a suit to drive them to the college for their meeting with the dean of education.
The gun molls were allowed to enroll in college that day. They still laughed 40 years later at how the dean always quickly turned around to dart in the opposite direction if any of their paths started to cross on campus and how quickly he initiated writing letters of references for them as they came closer to graduation to get hired by neighboring school districts.
The ones who were homemakers privately never fully accepted that their working sisters were not always home, yet would defend their sisters’ right to have careers to outsiders who raised their eyebrows over it. The sisters who did not work helped the coeds out by sending over dinner or helping their nieces and nephews with homework. Nonetheless, the act of a few going to college created the first division of the sisters into two smaller cliques. It had been like that all my life at least at any gathering. The homemakers to this side and the working sisters to the other, by design of the homemakers.
That first afternoon when I learned of the plans underway for a massive Thanksgiving dinner, I watched the sisters around my grandmother’s table taking notes and outlining each other’s behind the scenes responsibilities. I just shook my head at their imagination, humor and strategies for problem solving.
This Thanksgiving dinner united them as perhaps only the death of their mother did for short period a decade or so earlier. They worked so well together as a team. The phone rang constantly, as someone was always looking for one of them. The long chord from the black wall phone reached all around the table. About all I accomplished that day was answering the phone and reaching it over to one of them.
My grandmother left the table once when a man called asking me if that was the residence of a woman who once was a midwife. It never occurred to me that she sometimes kept babies born to women who did not want them until authorities found adoptive parents for them. She sometimes received calls from adults looking for their birth parents. In most cases, the mother had already come to her wanting details of what happened to her child. I saw my grandmother put the phone down a few times while I lived with her and refer to a book she kept in her bedroom locked up.
However, this particular day when the Thanksgiving dinner was being planned, she did not have problems remembering that man’s birth or his mother’s name. She wrote down his phone number and told him his mother was the only one who never gave her permission to give out her name or whereabouts. However, my grandmother told him she believed she could reunite him with his mother soon.
My grandmother was the oldest, and as a midwife delivered many of the babies in their village from the 1920s for about twenty years. The other sisters who worked were in teaching or business. All of these sisters, regardless whether they worked or managed their homes full time, were born a few generations too soon.
When I graduated from college and lived with my grandmother for several months, her sisters were part of my everyday life there. They were all then in their 60s and 70s and except for one, were still in fairly good health. They were very funny ladies individually. But when they were together as a group, it was amusing just to kick back and watch them as you would a movie in the room. Their humor and wit were out of this world and you just couldn’t lie to them without them knowing the truth was all over your face.
When nobody was around, my grandmother and her sisters smoked, swore, talked about their sex lives or lack of, wore out the pages of dream books and made calls to their bookies to play numbers that were listed by dream topic. Their husbands never knew about their gambling winnings. When my grandmother was hospitalized and received flowers from two bookies, I pulled the cards off and hid them at her request. The sisters helped keep the numbers racket afloat and got angry when the bookies wanted to extend credit rather than make a pay off.
The day that three of them went to successfully collect a sizable amount from one such bookie was also one of their favorite stories that was not shared with the extended family. The afternoon that they planned the Thanksgiving dinner was the first I had heard of that brave but foolish outing. One of their sons who was a policeman showed his mom a new thing out called a stun gun and he could never figure out why he couldn’t find it later. They never used it, but had it in one’s purse “just incase” the bookie didn’t pay them off. How could he not? They knew of an affair he was having with the magistrate’s secretary and so easily could his wife.
That money they got from him was used to put on a new roof on their parents’ home where their youngest sister who never married lived. She lived in the city for a while and returned home to take care of their parents in the late 1950s. She became a recluse. Once my great grandparents died, she called my grandmother occasionally, but had little to do with the majority of her other siblings unless one drove over to see her. Nobody talked about it but just said that was her choice. Most of their gambling winnings went to buy her things or to a child or grandchild in need. Only once did the sisters spend the money on themselves when they all went to New York City for a couple days and took their youngest sister with them.
That they trusted me with their secrets was an honor in ways since no child or other grandchild was the wiser. Before they ended their meeting that afternoon, all was planned for the Thanksgiving dinner except where it would be held and the exact time.
The group also welcomed just two of the wives of three of their brothers as two more sisters. The third brother had several wives, all considerably younger than he. The sisters referred to those wives of their youngest brother as Number 1, 2 or 3, hardly ever by name. These sweet smiling grandmothers could also be viscous when they wanted to be and could get away with it -- because when they were sweet, they were so sweet.
One of the beloved sister-in-laws arrived with the good news that her church would rent its social hall for the dinner on Thanksgiving. The trade off was that Aunt Mary agreed to allow a few homeless people to eat dinner with us since the priest had planned to feed them there.
“That priest isn’t coming!” one of the sisters exclaimed. My grandmother’s sisters did not like Aunt Mary’s priest because he was not Italian and he had a girlfriend and a few children to her. How could she confess her sins to a sinner they asked her. They went off in Italian about what a hypocrite he was. The four homeless people certainly were welcome, though, and the sisters immediately inquired whether the homeless people needed food or clothing in the meantime.
The second to the youngest sister, Aunt Rose, was the hold out, in respect to the twisted plan to have one large family Thanksgiving dinner. I answered the phone when she called.
“What is wrong with my sisters? Do they know how much work this is going to be? My sisters are afraid I’m going to die, aren’t they?” she asked me. She was recently diagnosed with breast cancer then.
“You? No, I don’t think that’s why they’re doing this. They just want to get dressed up, for us to seat them at a head table and then wait on them hand and foot as they’ve waited on us all these years. The idea has grown on me. I think it’s a good idea.” I told her.
But we all knew that is why they planned the extended family dinner. Her diagnosis and poor prognosis caused them all to consider their own mortality. My grandmother had started to slow down.
Aunt Rose sighed and said she would be there and bring all her kids and grandchildren instead of having them at her house for dinner. She wasn’t really up to cooking for 20 people anyway. The requirement was that two or three cooks from each original sibling’s extended family step up to bat. I told her that I would do her cooking for her if her lazy daughter-in-laws opted out. I knew that would make her laugh.
She still had two reservations. Two of the brothers had not talked to one another for several years and one of their sisters, the youngest, truly disliked all the rest. Were they all invited, Aunt Rose wanted to know? “Yes,” I said and laughed. And were they all coming? Yes.
Aunt Rose complained in Italian that this peaceful Thanksgiving dinner no doubt would turn into a free for all before it was over. Either the two brothers would argue or the one sister would cause problems.
“That’s OK., one of the molls is probably still packing a stun gun,” I told her...
Reluctant as she might have been, she laughed and said she would love nothing better than to sit in a nice dress and eat Thanksgiving dinner with her brothers and sisters as she had done as a child. Aunt Rose said Thanksgiving was the only sauceless holiday they celebrated and her parents looked forward to that American holiday to celebrate how glad they were they were here more than they did on July 4th. It was the one day they were American Italians as opposed to Italian Americans.
Count her in for the full baker’s dozen. From her I learned then that the 10-year feud between the brothers started when one ordered the wrong headstone for their parents’ grave. Cherry blossom leaves were on the bronze marker as opposed to the agreed upon dogwood leaves. They got into a fist fight over this?
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I said to Aunt Rose. No, she wasn’t. As for the one sister who hated the rest, Aunt Rose said that only my grandmother seemed to know all of the details and recommended I ask her.
“Aunt Mary’s coming,” I said to my grandmother as I covered the phone.
“Damn straight she’s coming! Or we’ll go in and carry her out of that house,” was my grandmother’s answer to me. All the heads around her table that day shook and nodded in agreement. And, yes, they would have. I returned to the phone call.
“Are you bringing that nice Irish boy you’re dating?” Aunt Rose asked.
“No! And have him meet everyone at the same time...don’t think he could handle that,” I said.
“I want to meet him,” Aunt Rose said. “He seems like a nice man. Did he get a haircut yet?” she asked me. No, and anticipating her next question I added that his hair was still longer than mine. She said a prayer in Italian.
My love life interested the sisters as no other grandchild’s did. They all thought they had every right to know its every detail. The truth be told; they were the nosiest bunch of women to be found on this earth. My face used to get red from their questions and often just from being taken so off guard at what trash talk could come from these beautiful faces and mouths that said the rosary daily. Continue