A bit of everything

 A bit of everything 

December 23, at home, continued from here.
     Her new husband, Brainerd, comes, bringing mostly silence and an eight-pack of Guinness Stout Draft.
     Everyone brings something to drink or for dessert. For the rest, Roz orders Chinese.

Bel brings a nice Pinot Grigio and Nils a Sauvignon Blanc. Axel brings two bottles of Malbec, one quite nice unopened, the other in which he has been stewing fruit and fruit juice to make Sangria because “What goes better with Chinese?”

Ramos Gin Fizz.
Click here for a recipe.

Giggly Polly brought all the ingredients to make loopy Ramos Gin Fizzes for before dinner. Uncle Albert had ordered a case of Perrier. There were no deserts except I had laid in three cartons of ice cream, one vanilla, one chocolate, and one butter pecan, just in case. And not everyone wants dessert anyway, or more than dessert than their fortune cookies (smelling of sesame and vanilla. Axel’s fortune is, "You haven’t come this far to come only this far.” “But where would I be going?” he asks. Bel’s is, “Sometimes silver exceeds gold.” And Brainerd’s is, “There is travel in your future, but you will go nowhere.”
     I can’t drink with my meds, so usually I don’t and never at these parties. Instead, I drive everyone home that isn’t walking. They make their own way back usually to get their cars the next day. Or the day after. I say “usually” because once I had to pick up Maggie after she had called Roz to say her car had been stolen.

“Why do you do this?” I asked Roz. This was the morning after. She uses the good china and the good glassware and the real silverware, all of which we have to wash by hand.
     “For you, of course,” she said. “I know how Christmas gets to you.”
     “No,” I said, “I’m okay. Really.”
     “Yes, I know you are. You are okay. But not really.” She takes the plate I’ve pulled out of the suds, runs it under the hot water and puts it in the drainer. When the drainer is full, we dry and put away; and we start again. “Actually, it was Dwight’s idea.” Dwight is my sister Hannah’s I-always-thought-humorless, consumerist husband. Double major in Economics and Philosophy, or so she claims, but then on to dental school and getting rich by taking over his father’s highly successful practice. Really, he had to have majored in Business, I think. He can’t have majored in Philosophy, or Economics — much less both. He had to have majored in Business.
     I winced. “No!” I thought — not Dwight.
     “Yes. It makes sense what he said, even if I can’t explain it very well,” Roz said. “Something about your benefiting from embracing the absurd, then you would come out on the other side. A philosopher named Grand, Joseph.” She gave both names a French pronunciation. So she was kidding, I was almost sure.
     “Wait,” I said, handing her the last plate and draining the suds from the sink. “He’s not real. He’s a character in The Plague.” “Is he?” “You know he is, the one that can’t finish even the first sentence of his novel.” “No,” she laughed.
    “Yes,” I said. “Does he survive, do you remember?”
     “He does,” Roz said, reaching across and handing me the sink drainer basket to carry to the garbage because the disposal is making a funny noise again.

                                                                       01.09.23