by Nora Esme Wagner

 

Don’t bring your girlfriend to Thanksgiving. In one month, you will discover the naked photos she sent to the barista you both find cute, with an undercut and patchwork tattoos, whom you considered inviting to a threesome, before recommitting to monogamy. In portrait mode, her vagina pops out like a diorama. Better to seem single than to eat your words (mom, I’m going to marry her).

            Or do. She will wrap her pinky around yours as the plane drops dozens of feet at a time and tell you to stay calm, unless the flight attendants look scared. Then freak the fuck out. When one offers you chocolate quinoa crisps or a pouch of pretzels, study her face. Determine that you will live. Take the pretzels. Let their salt crystals melt on your tongue.

            Ask your mom to wait at the house, not to bother with ordering an Uber, the long way from Scottsdale to PHX. Text her three reminders, the number of times she taught you to repeat someone’s name after they introduce themself, so it sticks. But when she is standing outside baggage claim, bowed like an umbrella handle, don’t lose your shit. Pinch the webbing between your thumb and index finger, a stress-relieving pressure point. Swim through the sea of college homecomers, flustered grandparents, boarding school students, and introduce your girlfriend as your roommate, because for fuck’s sake, don’t come out next to the luggage carousel. Hug your mom.
            Take the middle seat in the taxi, even when the smell of your mom overpowers you, stale and sour. It has been two years since you sat elbow-to-elbow. Tolerate her nerves, her wonder about the jabbering woman you brought home, whose head rests on your shoulder. Wear the heterosexual costume for as long as possible, like your Mary Janes that outlasted three long-term relationships, and two evolutions of sexuality, with soft, emaciated soles. You threw them away after an earthquake, when the sidewalk’s rattling breaths traveled through the shoes. Below, plates realigning.

Steer your girlfriend around the ranch house with pride. Its low, popcorn ceilings. The inconvenience of two half-bathrooms, rather than one whole. Your growth chart on a door frame, smaller versions of yourself stacked. Forget the calm green walls of her West Village apartment. Believe that she loves the place, because it is the petri dish that cultured you.

The small rooms transform your mom into a larger, healthier woman. Touch her fuzzy cheek like she is a peach that you have decided to buy. Remember that she hates physical contact. Kiss her anyway.

Don’t fuck on the pullout couch. Even when your girlfriend’s hand scuttles beneath the Minnie Mouse pajama shorts you’ve had since middle school, and her heady scent sweeps the room, tart and salty, and she whispers into your ear: “let’s do something bad.”

In the morning, keep up the roommate shtick for your aunt, her two small kids, your uncle, who is still grumbling about the tofurkey, glaring at your girlfriend’s boobs, emblazoned with “friends not food.” Scratch the tingly inside skin of her wrists, jokingly propose a sex-for-rent scheme, call your uncle Leery Davey. He taught you how to ride a bike, subbed in for every activity requiring a father’s participation at your school, is a good guy who likes to eat real turkey at Thanksgiving (and so do you). But this will make her smile.

For dinner, braise mushrooms. The vegetable has a satisfying, meaty taste, but will not offend your girlfriend, wearing her judgey t-shirt. Submerge the mushrooms in a Dutch Oven, where they fan out like pleated skirts. Pat the kitchen stool next to your girlfriend, so your mom will sit down, relax, take a break from trying to entertain her nephews glued to their iPads. She will grouse about the women whose nails she paints, non-tippers with dirty toes, barking orders. Recognize that your girlfriend is not unlike these women, that you secretly handed her manicurist 10 extra dollars, but that she is also here, nodding her head to your mom’s stories.

Spit it out before your aunt says Grace. Or wait until your mom’s mouth is full of sweet potatoes. Give it three, four more spoonfuls. Serve everyone wine. Hear if they like the mushrooms first. Corral your cousins back to their seats, imagining they are your own children, that your girlfriend hadn’t been so sullen and fidgety at the IVF appointment. Ask for more nail salon anecdotes, more time.

When there is only a smear of cranberry sauce on your plate, and your mom looks at you expectantly, about to ask if you’d like some pie.

Then.

 

Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.