The Marriage Files

When you marry, you marry not just an individual, but also a family and a holiday schedule. Eventually you find your place in it, and over the years, it has fallen to my husband K— and I to host Thanksgiving. As with all meals, our usual arrangement is that I cook and he cleans. But Thanksgiving is a BIG meal—the biggest one on the meal calendar, which is how I’ve come to think of the annual cycle of holidays—and a BIG meal requires a BIG effort on both our parts.

About a week before the holiday, the moaning begins. “I can never just enjoy a Thanksgiving,” he whines. “There’s too much work involved.” (Translation: why, oh why can’t the house clean itself and the table set itself and all the other preparations take place without one bit of effort on my part? Oh, the unfairness of it all!) The problem, of course, is that he waits until the day of the holiday to do the work. He’s generally just stashing the vacuum in the closet as the guests come to the door.

After 8 years of this, last Thanksgiving I decided to be proactive. On T-minus Three (the third day before Turkey Day), I took K— aside and said, “Look, I’m doing all the shopping and cooking for this event, which is no small job, so here’s how you can help. Do not clean on Thanksgiving Day. You’ll be rushed and unhappy, and you’ll just be in my way. The floor needs to be vacuumed, the bathroom needs to be cleaned, the dishes, glassware and serving pieces need to be washed, the tablecloth needs to be changed, and the table needs to be set. And don’t go overboard on the bathroom. No one’s going to be living in there. Now, you’ve got three evenings before the Big Day. That’s plenty of time. But please DON'T CLEAN ON THANKSGIVING DAY!”

Thanksgiving morning dawned…and out came the sponge, bucket and rubber gloves. I could have strangled him. At that point, it would have been better if he’d just left everything undone. I had twenty kinds of raw foods spread out on the kitchen counter, and he was spraying Lysol ten feet away.

At noon I checked on his progress—he’d been cleaning our 5-square-foot second bathroom for nearly three hours—only to find that he’d disassembled the cold and hot water fixtures on the sink. An hour later the fixtures were back together, but inexplicably, he was scouring out the bathtub. “Whatever happened to not going overboard on the bathroom, not to mention doing the cleaning before Thanksgiving?” I asked. A hostile glare was the only reply. I shook my head and retired to the farthest corner of the kitchen. I just couldn’t bear to watch.

As I steamed hotter than the peas and carrots bubbling away on the range, I reflected on the fact that preparations are called that because they’re supposed to occur before some planned event. They’re not coparations or postparations. After all, I hadn’t waited until 3 PM on Thanksgiving Day to buy the ingredients for dinner, had I? Had I?

Standing there doing a good impersonation of the pressure cooker, I had an epiphany. I realized that sometimes giving in to an overpowering force is better than fighting it. In this case, the overpowering force was K—‘s penchant for procrastination. I realized that there was no point trying to get him to clean before Thanksgiving Day. The only thing over which I had control was whether I was cooking while he was cleaning, and I was going to exercise that control.

So, this November, I’m going to make the same Thanksgiving bargain with my husband that we’ve had for years. I’ll say, “I’ll take care of the meal; you do the cleaning and the cleaning up.” As always, because he doesn’t know how to cook and has no choice, he will agree. And here’s how Thanksgiving Day will go. At 8 AM I’ll ensconce myself in the kitchen with a good book and a pot of coffee. I’ll close the door, and every 30 minutes or so I’ll rattle some pans and dishes. For effect, I may even light one of those holiday candles scented with cinnamon and other spices appropriate to the season. As long as I keep the door closed, K— probably won’t realize that I’m not actually cooking anything, because when there’s a lot of food preparation going on, he’s as disinclined to enter the kitchen as he would be to, oh, enter a women’s restroom or any other incredibly foreign environment, especially one in which he might be recruited to perform some job.

At 4:30, after many relaxing hours engaged in reading some good fiction, I will call the pizza parlor and place the order for five large pizzas with various toppings. K—‘s people are pizza people anyway, not turkey people, and they were very enthused when I tested the water a while back with a joke about going Italian for Turkey Day. Why make them eat squash and cornbread when they’d rather have the Meat Lover’s Special? As a nod to tradition, I may just order one pie with turkey sausage on it.

On the way to the pizza parlor, I’ll stop at the supermarket to get some bottles of soda and a cheesecake—one dessert I can be fairly certain won’t be sold out. This, too, is giving in to overpowering force. K—‘s people are soda people, not cider people, and they are cheesecake people, not pumpkin pie people. I see no reason to force them to be otherwise.

And then I’ll return home. Everyone will be happier. I’ll be stress-free. The guests, after years of politely eating the conventional fare I’ve prepared despite their preference for other things, will get a meal they really want. K— can clean all day without contaminating dinner and, as an added benefit, there will be a lot less clean-up. We’ll eat off compostable paper plates with compostable paper napkins and drink out of compostable paper cups. At the end of the meal, I’ll ferry it all out to the compost pile, and K—can wash the single non-disposable utensil we will have used: a pizza cutter, which, happily, we can also use on the cheesecake.

I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m pretty confident that finally I’ve found a great Thanksgiving recipe, or rather, a recipe for a great Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey (Pizza) Day!

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