How I became the patron saint of gluten-free suffering while channeling my romantic humiliation into a Thanksgiving assignment.
It was the week before Thanksgiving in 2015, and I was on the phone with my sister Amanda trying to square away our plans for the holiday.
“You want me to make a gluten-free what?”
“A gluten-free casserole.”
“You want me to make a casserole. Without gluten.”
“Yeah. Kam and I aren’t eating grains right now.”
This was a problem. Kam, Amanda’s closest friend and the unofficial fifth daughter of our household, was in charge of bringing the dessert. If she wasn’t going to bring anything with gluten in it, what was she going to bring? A sack of apples? A bucket of honey we would pass around the table as we professed our thanks for the blessings in our lives, drizzling it into our mouths like we were bears raiding a picnic? What if she brought raisins?
An episode of Parks and Recreation flashed into my mind. Chris Traeger, tasked with bringing a cake to a dinner party, beamed as he unveiled a vegetable loaf sweetened with fruit relish on screen instead of the anticipatory baked sugary goodness. This would be our dessert for Thanksgiving, there was no question in my mind. I leaned into the sink to retch.
“What’s going on over there?” Amanda barked from the other end of the line.
Leaning against the wall in my kitchen with my head cocked and the phone between my ear and my shoulder while Amanda rattled on her plans, I eyeballed the oven and wondered if it would be big enough to fit both myself and the calamity I had been asked to bring these people who hated taste and all things good and appetizing. She may as well have tried to ask me to make ice cream without the ice. A fruit salad without fruit. A hot pocket without self-loafing.
I was staunchly opposed to this assignment.
During this time, I had been haranguing someone I had been seeing all week about coming with me to Amanda’s for Thanksgiving. He had said it might be too soon to meet family, but he’d consider it and get back to me. The fact of the matter was it was indeed too soon, but that I had only invited him out of the bleeding pity of my heart because he was an orphan. I wanted to to take him by the shoulders and shake him shouting, “You — are — an — orphan!”, just like the deleted funereal scene from Toy Story. “Your parents are dead and someone is inviting you to a holiday! For god’s sake, just say you’ll come!”
He danced around answering me for a day, three days, a week. Finally, Thanksgiving Day itself had rolled around and I was obsessively checking my phone every sixty seconds like a madwoman, wondering if any minute he would change his mind and make a sweeping gesture my way about the future of the evening, and, by association, our relationship. Conjointly, in every minute that passed in which he did not reply, I could feel our courtship wilting into the void like all the others before it.
As I was quietly boiling in my bath, trying to talk my way down from texting him again, it was then that my phone buzzed. I thrashed in the water and lunged for the towel I had been using to dry my hands while dangerously fucking around on my phone in the water while waiting for a text from the orphan.
New Message: Amanda.
“Hey, so… I don’t want you to freak out, but George might come tonight.”
A rock hit my stomach as I sat there with a stupid look on my face while steam rose around me. Of course he would come to our holiday dinner.
George worked at the same bar as my sister’s boyfriend, and I had been crushing on him for a while. The month before I had invited him to watch The Shining with me and left my number for him at the bar one night after I had spent the evening there flipping through pages of a David Sedaris memoir while flushed on gin and tonics. I was smitten with this man, and despite a projected interest in me, he had rejected both of my advances. I absolutely did not want to see him at this dinner where I planned to eat as if it were my last day on this rapidly burning planet, especially without a date.
New Message: Amanda.
“And he might bring Heidi.”
As the second message flashed on the screen, I let the phone fall out of my hand onto the tile floor as I dipped my head below the surface of the water and held it there, dramatically blowing bubbles out of my nose and willing myself to let go of any remaining survival instinct and just drown. My nightmare scenario was unfolding.
The sanguine orphan had left me on read.
The person I wanted to attend this dinner with would be coming, and he would be bringing his ex he was recently back together with after rejecting me.
There would be no gluten at Thanksgiving.
Dessert would most assuredly be a vegetable loaf, or a sack of apples.
God was humiliating me. He was laughing at me.
What would be next? A rolodex of the most dire situations imaginable flashed through my brain like memory cards, daring me to choose the correct answer. My roommate would back out over my cat in the driveway. A tree would collapse on top of my car, finally deferring the constant break-ins I encountered in the mornings I would leave for work. I would be stricken with bird flu, despite my resolution to never go near birds for any reason whatsoever. Perhaps my mother would show up into town unannounced.
Before I could land on any one disaster to be next in line, I was forced to come up for air and face the reality of my situation, which had settled like a heavy layer of cement in my stomach. There was nothing to be done about it but to arrive alone in my sluttiest-yet-classiest dress with the best gluten-free casserole known to mankind. So fulfilled by my would the members of this party be that they would simply forget that there was no real dessert to be had on site. In fact, they would declare me the hero of Thanksgiving, having defied the odds of such a monumental task.
For vague reasons, green bean casseroles had never been a part of our family Thanksgivings. In fact, I don’t have a single memory of eating green beans at all during my childhood. This may be due to the fact that the only vegetables we were supplied with consisted of canned sweet corn and potatoes that came in the form of dust caked inside a box. Whatever the reason, I did not have a green bean casserole until I was over the age of eighteen and had moved out of my mother’s house, and it changed all of my Thanksgivings thereafter. It brings me no joy to admit how much I crave this nuclear family slop. I know that in theory, culturally, nobody looks forward to green bean casseroles. But I had fallen in love with this disgusting dish, and that is what I decided to make for this dinner.
I made the stupid gluten-free casserole with a substitution of flax seed, and it tasted pretty good. The orphan did not text me, but George and his ex-not-ex did not show up, despite my dread throughout the night that they would knock on the door at any moment. I do not remember what Kam brought for dessert, but I do not recall being repelled by a vegetable loaf, a sack of apples, or a bucket of honey, so it couldn’t have been that bad. I wore my best dress for me and me alone, and doused it in a misfortune of turkey gravy more than once before the night was over. We had a nice time, and I didn’t miss the gluten, or the orphan, or George.
In the years since these events transpired, I have since learned to not invite fresh suitors to family gatherings for the holidays, even if they are orphans. I have learned that most of the time, gluten-free anythings taste as good as the regular anythings. I still keep a mental rolodex of possible impending disasters assured to strike at any moment in time, but I no longer anticipate Thanksgivings in fear that my current crush might show up with someone who isn’t me on their arm.
This year, while settling plans with my sister, I texted Amanda that I would be bringing dessert consisting of an apple crumble pie and vanilla ice cream.
New Message: Amanda.
“Does it have gluten in it?”