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29 THANKSGIVING
Two-three hours passed us by,
Altitude dropped to 505,
Fuel consumption way too thin,
Let's get home before we run out of gas.
Now you can't catch me—
No, baby, you can't catch me—
'Cause if you get too close,
I'm gone like a cooool breeze.
— Chuck Berry
At the hospital they served Thanksgiving dinner in shifts from eleven in the
morning until one in the afternoon. Dennis got his at quarter past twelve:
three careful slices of white turkey breast, one careful ladleful of brown
gravy, a scoop of instant mashed potatoes the exact size and shape of a
baseball (lacking only the red stitches, he thought with sour amusement), a
like scoop of frozen squash that was an arrogant fluorescent orange, and a
small plastic container of cranberry jelly. For dessert there was ice cream.
Resting on the corner of his tray was a small blue card.
Wise to the ways of the hospital by now—once you have been treated for the
first set of bedsores to crop up on your ass, Dennis had discovered, you're
wiser to the ways of the hospital than you ever wanted to be—he asked the
candy-striper who came to take away his tray what the yellow and red cards
got for their Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out that the yellow cards got two
pieces of turkey, no gravy, potato, no squash, and Jell-O for dessert. The red
cards got one slice of white meat, pureed, and potato. Fed to them, in most
cases.
Dennis found it all pretty depressing. It was only too easy to imagine his
mother bringing a great big crackling capon to the dining-room table around
four in the afternoon, his father sharpening his carving knife, his sister,
flushed with importance and excitement, a red velvet ribbon in her hair,
pouring each of them a glass of good red wine. It was also easy to imagine
the good smells, the laughter as they sat down.
Easy to imagine… but probably a mistake.
It was, in fact, the most depressing Thanksgiving of his life. He drifted off
into an unaccustomed early afternoon nap (no Physical Therapy because of
the holiday) and dreamed an unsettling dream in which several candy-
stripers walked through the IC ward and slapped turkey decals onto the life-
support machinery and IV drips.
His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the
morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be
gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons' for a light Thanksgiving
brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and
"cute". Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn't discovered a
rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn't going to be
paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.
They had called him from the Callisons' around twelve-thirty and his father
sounded a bit drunk—Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody
Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis
himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded
Thanksgiving dinner—the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in
fifteen minutes—and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to
spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and
rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to
need a nap.
He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o'clock. The
hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual
babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The
candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had
enjoyed his "special dinner." Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was
Thanksgiving for her, too.
And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and
when he woke up it was nearly five o'clock and Arnie Cunningham was
sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day
before.
Dennis was not at all surprised to see him there; he simply assumed that it
was a new dream.
"Hi, Arnie," he said. "How's it hanging?"
"Hanging good," Arnie said, "but you look like you're still asleep, Dennis.
Want some head-noogies? That'll wake you up."
There was a brown bag on his lap, and Dennis's sleepy mind thought:
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