Thanksgiving has always been at home, the place she still thinks of as home, though it hasn’t been that for years, her room transformed, anonymized, the perfect place for guests. She’s never been able to bring herself to spend a night there, sipping coffee after dinner, then proclaiming her own alertness, rushing out to catch the train. The pale purple carpet, which she’d chosen, had loved as a girl then loathed as a teen, had been ripped up, replaced by that wood flooring you buy at the hardware store then snap together like a child’s toy, her dad, who had always been handy, doing the work with her younger brother Adam over the course of one weekend. The twin bed had been replaced by a full, flanked now by matching nightstands with a box of tissues and a coaster: all the comforts. There was a framed poster, from when all those Monets came to the Met. She and her mom had played hooky, gone into the city to see them, a jaunt that seems out of character, now that she thinks about it.
Thanksgiving is a Brooks family specialty. Her mother cooks amiably and ably, checking measurements against handwritten notes decades old. Her dad was a chemistry teacher, once upon a time, so he does the baking. “Baking is science,” he says. He wears an apron, though he doesn’t need one: He works with a scientist’s precision and doesn’t spill. Thanksgiving, he does pies, both pumpkin and pecan, and bread, a beautiful, warm thing, perfectly shaped and very soft inside. The day’s rites haven’t changed much over the course of her life; there are no grandparents left, so there are no longer grandparents in attendance; instead there’s Alexis, Ben’s girlfriend, but otherwise, it’s the same as it ever was. Lauren finds Alexis uninteresting. A little too pushy, a little too proprietary inside the house—it might not be Lauren’s house anymore, but she doesn’t want to think of it as Alexis’s. And at the previous Thanksgiving, Alexis had made a fuss about Lauren’s bag.
“Ba-len-ci-ag-a.” The enunciation was meant to be indicate awe. “That must have cost a fortune.”
“It was on sale,” Lauren lied. It had most certainly not been on sale, but she didn’t want to defend having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag to Alexis, and discussing having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag at the holiday table was as unthinkable as discussing anal sex or Israeli settlements. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is not the same Lauren who shops at Barneys. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is her parents’ only daughter, the smart one, the one with drive, the one off in the city living the sort of grown-up life parents want for their children. Since Lauren’s never entirely been certain what her parents’ image of that life entails, she glosses over most of the details. She’s shaved a third off her rent, in the telling, and her parents still think it an astronomical sum. Still, they never appeal to her to move to Jersey City or Hoboken. That would be a concession of some sort, they realize. That would be losing at whatever game it is their daughter is playing, and at least she’s in the game—better than poor Adam, with his deep voice and an adolescent reluctance to make eye contact, despite the fact that he’s fast approaching thirty. Adam’s bedroom decor has changed, too, but unfortunately, he’s still occupying the place. Anyway, her mother hasn’t mentioned law school in at least three years, which is a relief.