Sarah McLaughlin

The family arrives—the uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents and grandparents-in-law and step-grandparents and new girlfriends and long-term fiancés—stepping over the threshold one by one, carrying trays of cold veggie pizza and bowls of potato salad and plastic cartons of store-bought chocolate chip cookies, like worker ants marching through the sand back to the hill with their picnic spoils.

            Hey it’s been a while since I’ve last seen you

            You hug, one-armed, right, left, two for your grandmother, after you take her brown-boxed apple pie and place it on the corner of the kitchen counter.

            Hot out there huh

            The driveway’s lined with shiny SUVs, rusted pickups, compacts dulled from years of white salt and yellow pollen. New glasses, new haircut, new tattoo, new surgery, new diagnosis, new pregnancy of a second cousin twice-removed. Settle in, everyone, take a seat, guys are at the counter, women are on the couches, teenagers hover behind their parents’ shoulders.

            You feel your pulse quicken with every new voice, every new sentence, every hey did you hear and can you believe.

            Crack, pop, clink, fizz, rosé, seltzer, gin, vodka, cabernet.

            The cooler’s right there

            Is no one gonna talk about it? Maybe no one’s gonna talk about it. Nothing like good old Irish Catholic repression. We never show affection and always avoid the difficult conversations, until we’ve had a few.

            Glug glug glug into the delicate little glass.

            Doug likes his gin

            Someone’s brought gifts like it’s Christmas, wrapped in red and white paper like a candy cane or the flag that hangs outside off the garage. From the aunt and uncle and cousin who’ve come from furthest away; they flew in last night to T.F. Green. It’s a painting in a gold frame of St. Patrick, hooked staff and pointy gold hat and emerald robes with the white Y-shaped stripes. He even holds a shamrock in his open palm. He’s banished all the snakes from Ireland, unless he’s hiding some under that thick fabric.

            Cordial, soft exclamations of thank you, it’s beautiful, where did you get it from. Tight smiles, but you know they’re real, they’re as real as they get.

            Your dad walks in from the back porch, screen door slamming, since he couldn’t hold it open all the way with the tray of blackened burgers and hot dogs in his hand; the smell of meat fills the kitchen.

            Your temple hurts with a sharp pain and you’re not sure why; you get migraines from the sun, from the rain, from hearing too many voices, from staring too long at your phone, from the noise of the vacuum as you prepared the house this morning, from the bright white lightbulbs on the ceiling, from squinting to read the oven instructions on the back of the cake mix.

            One group arrives a little late, the doorbell blares on your mom’s phone with a loud, persistent jingle, because technology is so advanced these days. Your fifteen-year-old cousin is wearing an N95.

            She’s a little bit sick she got a cold from the kids at work

            Your heart beats faster when you think about what people might say today about things that happened yesterday.

            The tray of burgers and hot dogs your dad sets on the counter, squeezed in the small space between the apple pie and the chicken caesar salad like a game of musical chairs. You stack the burger and hot dog buns and hope they don’t get squished.

            One of your uncles grips a beer, condensation dripping down the can, down his thick fingers that grow sprouts of dark hair. His sons aren’t there today; one had to work the day shift at Cumberland Farms.

            He’s been experimenting with these organ meat supplements

            Your dad reaches over the tray with a clear plastic fork and stabs the thickest, juiciest burger, catching it underneath with a white plastic plate.

            You cleaned out two Welch’s grape jelly jars and filled them with metal cutlery and put them on the table this morning. The purple box of the plastic utensils sits proudly on the counter in the center of all the food, open and bleeding its contents like a broken piñata. Between the glass jars on the kitchen table you’ve filled another with blue hydrangeas cut fresh from the front mulch bed.

            Where’s Ryan he’s not coming he’s a little weirded out by you know that stuff

            In your socks without sneakers—who wants to wear shoes in their own home?—you duck backwards into your bedroom with a glass of lemonade, the small guest room in the front, which you chose when your parents decided to downsize because you thought you’d be out by now, but it’s your room all the same, and you’re grateful for it, you’d never not be grateful, and you open the child-safe lid by pressing down hard and you pour out two Tylenol onto your dresser, and you grab the orange bottle next to it open the lid and pour out one buspirone, and you take all three with one swig, feeling the sweetness and the acid burn. The buspirone leaves behind a thin white powder against the dark wood, the powder that collects at the bottom of the bottle.

            Before you go back out you reach under your clothes and put a hand flat against your stomach and a hand flat against your chest, just like your free college therapist taught you, the one who your parents don’t have to know about, feeling both the steady pulse and the uncertain grumbling. Your waist is small and your tits are large and you cover them both with a baggy gray t-shirt advertising Boothbay Harbor. Your arms are skinny and your shoulder blades and collarbones and ribs cast their own shadows like dark tattoos. You go back out and try to hide them with store-bought chocolate chip cookies and brown-box apple pie, hide them from the people who’ve known you since birth.

            Standing by your bedside table, you take one last look at the framed 4x6 of you and your girlfriend who lives in Maine and your coordinated Junior Jam dresses in the college auditorium.

            Then close the door behind you quietly.

            Your little sister is eighteen, a freshman in Connecticut; she holds a White Claw in one hand and an iced coffee in the other, sitting on the couch between your aunts. The one who brought the painting, she’s the only nonwhite person in the room; her family is from South Korea and she has long, silky, straight hair. It flows over her shoulders and her exposed collarbones and her deep green cardigan, which is wrapped around her arms and covering the top half of her black sundress, not flat-ironed, not keratin-treated. You gaze at the way the ceiling lights glint off of it as she turns.

            He’s a popular saint in Ireland

            And then your reverie is broken, sliced open and bleeding like your beating heart by the uncles in the kitchen.

            We heard Trump’s been shot Trump’s been shot and we’re like what

            Your mother, face flushed or sunburned or layered in blush, swirls her half-empty glass of red like a sommelier.

            Yeah I had it on in the car ‘cause I wanted to hear the VP if he announced it

            The aunt in the green cardigan gets up and pulls you in with her arm around your waist and walks you to the corner where the upright piano meets the bookshelf and leans close to your ear—

            I wanna meet your better half when do I get to meet her

            It’s quiet but is it quiet enough, your head feels dizzy like you’re light as the air like you’re underwater and maybe it’s the buspirone, and your aunt knows because your uncle knows because your mom told him because he’s the younger, hipper one who’s lived in Seattle, Boston, Portland, Chicago, Austin, all the places where it’s more okay, but everyone else doesn’t know, your grandmother doesn’t know even though she’s the sweetest thing because you just don’t know how she’d feel, and your grandfather doesn’t know because he thinks Pope Francis is a fraud, and your other aunts and uncles don’t know because they’ve said all sorts of things, like if their own kids were that way they’d send them off somewhere to get fixed, like they’d want to stay away as if it’s some sort of transmissible disease, like they’d have all sorts of invasive questions about who does what and how it works in the bedroom.

            Is it quiet enough was it quiet enough?

            Oh you say you’ll meet her soon you say she doesn’t like getting on planes you say you’ll see her at your brother’s wedding next year because she’ll be there as your friend.

            And this Biden administration he’s not doing right by anybody

            You shift the conversation to as many other topics as you can think of, hurling them out of your mouth like a Thanksgiving meal’s worth of vomit. Sipping White Claw, slurping the iced coffee, your sister joins in, but everyone else’s voices still bounce across the white walls.

            I’m glad I finished high school when I did everybody’s using AI to write their papers

            The dizziness feels warm in your forehead, or maybe that’s the Tylenol kicking in. You grip the cold part that’s left at the bottom of your lemonade glass.

            Ryan’s generation they’re big tippers they know what it’s like to live off tips

            You press your stomach against the back of the couch where your sister and grandmother sit, so in case you fall forward, you’ll fall face-down into the soft beige suede cushions.

            It’s gonna get even worse it’s gonna get harder to tell what’s real

            Carrots and broccoli and red bell peppers and cucumbers are sliced behind you on the kitchen counter as your mom prepares the salad. Recalling the debate that you and your sister had this morning, about whether it would be worse to break your toe from dropping a hammer on it or slice your toe from dropping a knife, the thought of blood pumping in your veins from your heart down to your feet makes your hands feel numb.

            We can see it on the TV we can see the destruction

            An advocate for team knife, you thought that even if you risked hitting a major artery—if there were any down there—and bleeding out, at least your toe might remain intact and functional after you got stitches.

            Ryan’s getting reckless with his money he just donated forty dollars to Trump’s campaign and he bought a mug

            If you survived, your sister retorted. On team hammer, she argued that a shattered toe could heal, a severed toe could not always be put back on. You tried to reason with her that a falling kitchen knife wouldn’t have enough force to cut it completely off, just to break the skin. She bit back that a small mallet like the one your mom was holding to pound the chicken breast wasn’t heavy enough to completely shatter your bones, just to cause a clean break or fracture.

            But it’s not a local war it’s not a small war you see the cities you see the towers

            You’d rather deal with some stitches than a toe that got so broken you couldn’t use it right anymore, you told her. But there would be scar tissue, she said, scar tissue that might get so big and so tough that it restricts your range of motion.

            You didn’t know quite how to respond to that.

            Now, your grandfather has come over and is asking about your sister’s trip to Europe and she’s talking about how she saw the place where Franz Ferdinand got shot. Your mom is by the bookshelf showing your cousin her copy of Anne Frank’s diary because she has to read it for school next fall. Your dad and the uncles are stabbing hot dogs and burgers and slotting them between buns, except for the ones who are gluten-free.

            He’s buying meat hundreds of dollars I’m just concerned about his all meat attitude

            Apple pie, chicken caesar salad, sliced peppers and carrots and cucumbers and red bell peppers, hot dogs and burgers, you think of them all, your stomach cramps, but you’re not sure if it’s from hunger or if you don’t want to eat at all. It could be both at once. Your dad starts going around the room with his tray and the plastic plates, asking everybody what meat they want. One of your cousins is a vegetarian.

            Can’t hear you through that mask

            When he asks you, you tell him you’ll take a hot dog, and he passes it to you on the plastic plate with a plastic fork, and who needs a fork to eat a hot dog; maybe he expects you to go up to the counter and get some salad. Your mom asks your dad if he wants some salad and he laughs; he doesn’t eat fruit or vegetables these days.

            Twelve years hasn’t killed me yet

            Second bottles are opened and second cans are popped to go with the food, and somebody’s playing videos on their phone, scrolling scrolling scrolling, one voice after another, grating, it’s one candidate, it’s the other, it’s shouting men, it’s laughing men, it’s the men at the kitchen counter, your aunt hears them, glug glug glug—

            Doug loves his gin

            Your grandmother is on her own phone, tapping with her arthritic index finger, tapping the same place over and over, staring at the screen without a frown, with all the patience in the world—

            He’s getting involved with the stock market too

            You try to focus on nothing but her, her olive and brown-spotted skin from years spent without sunscreen, her black hair laced with white and gray but still hanging on to its original color, her nose that has a bump on the ridge just like yours, her white sweater with its silver buttons that she wears even on a ninety-degree day because your dad keeps the A/C at sixty-eight, her eyes that look uncanny because she always wore glasses when you were growing up but she just recently had cataract surgery and doesn’t need them anymore, but she clearly can’t see well enough to use her phone, what is she trying to do with her phone?

            I want to take a photo

            Like a parade, all of you file out the front door to stand on the front steps—aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone in rows, tallest in the back, shortest in the front, your grandmother on the white-stained bricks, holding her silver smartphone between her delicate, delicate bones.

            I’ve been seeing videos all over the place people were running around

            She waits still holding it up in the air so patiently waiting for the aunts waiting for the uncles waiting for someone to put their beer down on the steps—

            Pull down that mask just for a few seconds

            Waiting for someone to tuck in their shirt waiting for someone to fix their hair; since when did all these Irish Catholics suddenly care what they look like outside of Mass—

            They were telling the secret service there was a gunman

            Finally people are ready and she presses the button and then she says to hold still because she’s waiting for the flash, but the flash isn’t turned on your sister says, it’s not going to flash—

            It’s destroying the world

            So your sister gets off her place on the middle step and takes the phone to help her turn on the flash, and your mother is saying we don’t need a flash, we’re in broad daylight, and your grandmother apologizes, and your sister turns off the flash again and says the first photo is blurry and somebody had their eyes closed, so you have to go again, and then she’s waiting again, waiting for your sister to get back into her place, waiting to make sure everybody’s eyes are open wide—

            The police did nothing there’s already people trying to say it was a hoax

            Click, the artificial camera sound from her phone, and she takes one hand off the phone to give a thumbs up, and in the same moment, it slips from her fingers, it lands on her foot, it bounces off, it crashes onto the white-stained bricks.

            She cries out, more in surprise or pain you’re not sure yet, and your mother rushes off the steps to grab onto her, and your sister bends down to pick up the phone; its screen is shattered.

            Five minutes later, assessed by your aunt who is a nurse, your grandmother’s toe might be broken; her bones are fragile in her old age.

            The phone turns on, your sister reports, but she shows everyone the white and pink and green lines running vertically down the screen like scratches from a cat’s claw. Your sister’s finger is bleeding from the broken glass, your mother scolds, she shouldn’t be holding it like that.

            But she does, and she shows your grandmother the photo, which is at least not blurry beneath the vertical lines. She explains that the lines won’t be there anymore if she has it printed for her scrapbook.

            The lines cut your family into five or six fractions, and one of them goes straight through the bump on your nose.

            And now the rest of you wait while your nurse aunt helps your grandmother shuffle into a sitting position on the steps and somebody goes inside to fetch an ice pack.

            The hydrangeas are so blue this year