Triangle by Katharine Weber

Author:Katharine Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

“You don’t have to come with me, George. Seriously. Whatever it is, it’s small enough to fit in the smallest size safe-deposit box they have, so it can’t be very heavy. Even if she had a solid-gold ingot in there, I should be able to manage, since only one would fit in that box, and that would be only, what, twenty-seven pounds.”

“I love the way you know things like that. Anyway, I don’t doubt your physical strength,” George said.

They were in the coffee shop on the corner of Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue, with the Sunday New York Times and the rubbery western omelettes that Rebecca always required on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, which they had spent on their own, perversely eating spaghetti, despite no shortage of invitations from various friends and acquaintances. It would have been different at Scott and Aaron’s, since they were practically family, but they had taken Mya to spend time with her Cincinnati grandparents. Neither George nor Rebecca had especially wanted to join some other family’s traditional celebration as token lonely people with no Thanksgiving to go to, no matter how generous and openhearted it might have made their hosts feel, and anyway, both had an absolute horror of football on television.

They had always spent Thanksgivings with Esther, every year taking her out for a traditional Thanksgiving meal in a restaurant. This contradicted precisely how “traditional” the meal could possibly be, George would usually point out, a moment that Rebecca would then point out was part of their tradition. Meanwhile, Esther would be ignoring this conversation entirely while scanning the menu for creamed pearl onions, for which she had such a fondness that nothing else about any particular Thanksgiving meal registered one way or the other with her, just so long as there were creamed pearl onions on the menu.

Esther may not have especially cared about where she had Thanksgiving dinner at this late stage of her life, but she had always fussed over her own Thanksgiving feasts throughout Rebecca’s childhood, taking pride in her production in the little kitchen on Bleecker Street of all the traditional dishes for this truly American holiday that was for everyone, like the Fourth of July was for everyone, not like Christmas or Easter, which were reserved for the Christians even if they acted like the whole country was welcome to be involved. Making a Thanksgiving dinner for themselves was one of the ways the Auerbach sisters had tried to be Americans so long ago in their tiny room on Essex Street. Twice they had made a boiled chicken and something approximating a mince pie on the gas ring in their room, in the two years they had together as greenhorns working so hard, having so much fun, making themselves into regular Americans.

When, throughout her childhood, Rebecca helped Esther with the mince pie every year, Esther would always give her a little ball of dough with which to roll out a baby pie of her own, and as

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