Sirenita

It’s Christmas Eve, I’m at work, and there is nothing for me to do, actually. SO I figure, what the hell, a holiday story.

I don’t have a particularly amusing Christmas story. Almost all of my Christmases have been pretty nice, except of course last year I spent it scheduling the physical therapists for dying patients at a hospital from 6 a.m. til almost 8 p.m. The nice thing about having gone through a hell year last year is that this year’s holidays look so much nicer and shinier in comparison. However, that’s dull.

So: I will talk about Thanksgiving instead.

Possibly the weirdest Thanksgiving I ever spent was at my exboyfriend Ingmars’ relatives. Ing is Latvian, first generation American, and his family speaks mostly in Latvian when they’re together. There is nothing about Latvian that sounds anything like English. You know how you can pick out a word or two that you understand in Spanish or French? You just can’t pick out a thing in Latvian. It shares no word roots with English, is closest to Sanskrit according to Expert Scholarly Linguists, and it’s full of sounds that I don’t think a native English speaker can ever make. Try this: make a rolling rr noise. You probably learned to do that in a Spanish class sometime, after a lot of practice. Now: make that into a rolling z sound. Yes, that’s right. A “Z” sound, with a sort of breathy “R” in it, and now make that sound come from deep back in your throat. That is a very common Latvian sound.

Therefore, regardless of the fact that Ing and I have known each other for, jesus, 18 years now (!!!), I have only successfully said colloquial phrases in Latvian that translate to things like “Lick my squirrel” (it means something dirty). I got a phrasebook out of the University library and tried to teach myself once, but the book had been written in about, oh, 1870 or so, and so it was good for teaching me useful conversational phrases like “The peasant’s horse is sick.” I got through a chapter and bogged down in the part about whether I should choose to use words meaning upper meadow, lower meadow, marshy meadow, snow-covered meadow or shit-covered meadow when I was going to describe where the sick horse was located.

Therefore again: my ability to converse in Latvian with Ing’s relatives was, shall we say, limited. There are not often occasions when one can turn to your boyfriend’s 90 year old grandfather and say “I want to tongue your big penis.”

So. I had been invited to Thanksgiving with the Latvians. The dinner was being held at Ing’s grandparents’ house in Vacaville. His grandmother and grandfather were very elderly and had never completey adapted to American life or, for that matter, recovered from WWII, so the house was neat as a pin but had carefully handcrafted cupboard door handles made from bottlecaps, bent paperclips, and electrical tape. Because you shouldn’t waste.

Ing and I disappeared for a bit so he could show me the koala he had as a kid, made from real koala fur. His family had fled to Australia during the war, or at least, the few of them that hadn’t been sent to Siberian work camps. We wandered around in the guest bedroom, looking at the pottery with intricate Latvian stars worked on to it, and I examined an interesting closet door repair made from, if I remember right, part of a ballpoint pen.

When we came back, a few more relatives had arrived, and everyone was beginning to sit down at the long table. His grandmother had labored long and hard on a traditional Thanksgiving day meal as seen in a Lady’s Home Journal saved from 1952. So every single dish was photo-perfect, beautiful, and inedible. The cranberry sauce was exactly, perfectly, the shape of the can it came out of, glistening on its plate. The turkey was polished and brown and cooked until brittle, and cold. (It doesn’t say anywhere in the recipes that turkey should come to the table hot, so she had cooked it the day before and carefully preserved it on the back porch). There were also a few Latvian “treats,” mostly involving cold fish in various sauces.

It was when we started passing dishes around that things became even more interesting. One of Ing’s relatives had married, as it turned out, an Iranian man, and he had brought quite a few of his relatives with him. They spoke only Farsi, but everybody had a lot to say, so there was almost instantly a soft roar of Persian. Ing’s grandparents knew approximately 25 words of English, and they spoke almost entirely in Latvian. Ing and his brother spoke to each other sotto voce, in slangy Latvian, making convoluted jokes that they refused to explain to their dad. Ing’s dad, gradually becoming roaring drunk and effusive at the other end of the table, spoke Latvian EXTREMELY LOUDLY, pausing occasionally to say the punchline of an inexplicable joke in English for the benefit of the rest of us. (Since the whole rest of the joke had been in Latvian, this meant that usually what happened is that his dad would roar down to me, “TEDDI! Ve vere chust saying, dat you dun’t SHIT on a t’ree-legged stool! HA!” and so I would try to laugh politely without betraying that I hadn’t got the faintest idea what the hell he was talking about).

Every request to pass a dish had to be translated, sometimes several times, and often meant that I would find myself holding the still-untouched cranberry sauce bowl again, instead of the butter I had asked for. As I passed a bowl of cold greenbeans across the table to somebody’s Iranian grandma in a headscarf, tried to chuckle at something that must have been risque in Latvian from the look of horror on Ing’s grandma’s face, and politely turned down a big bowl of hagfish in creamsauce, I realized: it was going to be hard to find a more American Thanksgiving, really, happening anywhere else.