Wet Noise

On Sunday - with Thursday's rain still coming down in sheets - I feel the beginning of a black mood coming on.
It's been a little less cold these past few days but I'm worn down by the relentless storm.  It seems to have parked itself directly overhead and show no signs of moving on.  A stationary front, the news calls it and shows images of rainclouds for the whole of next week.  Enough! I feel like shouting.  I hear it thudding on the roof, battering the deck, slapping against the windows and running in rivers down the street.  I'm tired of the dark skies and muddy yards and wet noise.  That it's Thanksgiving Week doesn't help.

The first Thanksgiving we ate out, my grandmother had made reservations at an upscale and quietly elegant Cambridge restaurant on Pleasant Street.  We all dressed in our Sunday clothes and were on our best behavior but I hated the discreet waiters and waitresses and the dimly lit atmosphere and the cardboard food.  My mother and grandmother were thoroughly thrilled at not having to cook or clean up and it only took the one meal for a new tradition to be born.  After my grandmother's death, the holiday was moved to a family-style restaurant midway between Massachusetts and Maine.  Sunday clothes gave way to pressed jeans and button down shirts, plastic tablecloths and a serve yourself, all-you-can-eat buffet.  It was no improvement except that it was over sooner.

It's a paradox that much as I detested and dreaded family holidays and the fragile pretense they demanded we all slip into, I still missed the anxiety and that sense of never knowing when they might explode.  We were all far too self-conscious and too well behaved to make a scene in a restaurant - well, not much of one anyway - there were moments when my mother, well fortified and a little dazed by her morning martinis, might drop a lit cigarette into her  creamy mashed potatoes or sway slightly in her chair after flirting with the waiter but my daddy or one of my brothers would rush to her rescue and we would all pretend not to notice.  We might not have been a Norman Rockwell painting, but we had cover up down to a science.  All it takes is practice and an unwavering dedication to keeping up appearances.  Without the studio audience, things had a tendency to run their natural course - and often explode - small snipes led to quarrels and quarrels to border skirmishes and border skirmishes to all out wars.  It's unsettling to realize how at home you are in the middle of a vicious family fight.  You cheer for whichever side you happen to be on and hope for victory but win or lose, it's the wet noise that draws you in.  If it isn't loud and abusive, if someone doesn't finally break down in tears or denial, if it doesn't turn hateful and really scary, then you're doing it wrong.  

All the drama I learned at home came into play during my second marriage and touches of it stay with me even today.  Sometimes I wonder if I don't turn down holiday invitations for fear I'll be bored.