Telling His Family’s Fortunes
By Raheem Hosseini
Sixteen years ago, my cousins’ Uncle Bill descended on our Thanksgiving celebration with his three ex-wives and their full brigade of offspring. Bill was an infrequent presence in my life, but his reputation as a Southern-born raconteur cast a mighty shadow.
I remember this gathering like a fever dream. I couldn’t turn without bumping into some fourth cousin by marriage who knew more about me and my side of the family than I did about them and theirs. And in the middle of this cramped circus was Bill, prestidigitating tales from his impoverished childhood and feral adolescence.
I remember something about a blinding and a can of Crisco. I remember he and his brother (my uncle) Don taking an Air Force entrance exam and one turning to the other.
“Hey, how do you spell ‘rat’?” the one whispered.
“R-a-t,” the other whispered back.
“No, like ‘rat now’!” the first brother corrected.
Bill must have been sick then, but I don’t think I knew it. He looked like I remembered, like Paul Bunyan’s traveling salesman dad, with a voice that boomed through walls, usually followed by thunderclaps of laughter. Several hours into the boozy reunion, I ducked into the backyard and was flagged down by three drunks on a patio deck. Two were my parents.
They insisted I get my palm read by Tante Jane, the most bohemian of Bill’s ex-wives. She wore shawls, was “fun” crazy and had the raspy timbre of a lounge singer. Before I could protest, she yanked my hand into the Bermuda Triangle of her under-bosom and began reporting from the ephemeral realms. The news was bad. She shook her head reproachfully and scoured me with goldfish eyes.
“You have no love in your heart,” she said, swaying from side to side.
It went on like that, with Jane excoriating my soul while my oblivious parents sat by. After Jane’s spiritual colonic, her kids sheepishly thanked me for indulging her.
No problem, I said, marking the encounter for posterity. Some day, when the world is paralyzed by contagion and the thought of gathering in the same hot zone splits the country into screaming halves, I’ll write an unsolicited essay about the meaning of Thanksgiving. And Tante Jane will feature heavily.
The postscript happened the following winter. Bill had died. The same Thanksgiving crew, plus or minus a few guests, boarded a chartered yacht and crawled across Lake Tahoe’s gray skin to scatter his ashes.
Jane was carting an oxygen tank that fed two clear tubes into her nostrils and sat with my mother, soldiering through her second decade with multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer that would eventually take her.
They summoned me to their small white-clothed table. Jane began apologizing before I set my drink down. She assured me it was the wine and reefer talking—pedestrian spirits, not supernatural—and that she hadn’t really detected any repressed desires during our last encounter. Her words half-registered. I stammered out an absolution to make them stop.
After Jane struggled to her feet to circulate, I whisper-scolded my mom for meddling. She threw back her shoulders defiantly. It clearly upset me, she said, that Jane read my palm and concluded I was gay.
My brain skipped. I’m sorry, Jane said what now?
Mom repeated herself. Jane told me I was gay and that’s what upset me.
You know when someone says something you know to be false because you lived it, but their certainty makes you question reality? Of course you do; you survived 2020.
Somehow my mother had twisted the story I’d told her of Jane’s reading into something else entirely. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. In my teens, Mom visited psychics, in part, to keep apprised of her broody sons’ internal lives. Plus she once told me she’d love me more if I was gay—I think because I was a late bloomer who hadn’t yet brought home a first girlfriend and because she would do anything to reassure her boys that unconditional love was real.
Jane’s kin took turns approaching with wide grins. More than once I found myself saying, “She didn’t say I was gay. She said I was a bad person.” Eventually I heard what that sounded like and stopped saying it. I had been “outed” on a 70-foot pontoon named The Tahoe Princess and could only hope that, if there was an afterlife, Bill was there laughing his head off.
At some point the funeral stopped being about my disputed sexuality. We scaled the cabin steps into the frosty air. A fair-haired little girl read a poem to her grandpa. Red balloons were taken by the sky. (Sorry about that, Tahoe.) And Jane, always the life of the party, grabbed the urn and shook her ex-husband into a strong headwind.
Like he did when he was alive, Bill got around.
That was 15 years ago. I’ve attended many Thanksgivings and a few funerals since then. I sat numb in a San Francisco ICU as what was left of Don vomited ice chips into a pan. I held my mother’s hand as her body convulsed, hours after all recognition left her eyes. Somewhere in there Jane passed, too.
Each holiday after a death feels like a Xeroxed copy of the one before. It’s like we’re actors in a play missing its leads, straining to keep the illusion going for a silent audience.
I’d give just about anything for one more adventure with my mom, one more opportunity for her to be accidentally hilarious, to botch a tale on my behalf, to unnecessarily come to my rescue. I think about how, if she were alive today, I would use a flamethrower to shoo people from her depleted immune system.
But Death closes a lot of doors. I refuse to help it. If that means skipping a couple of holiday dinners, I have no problem with that. As long as it means avoiding another funeral, too.
This essay is part of our series on the topic “Holidays?”
Raheem Hosseini is news editor of the Sacramento News & Review and a freelance journalist whose reporting has been published by The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, CalMatters and other outlets. He’s currently hacking away at his first novel.