24
Thanksgiving brought lowered skies and cold, drenching rain. Lily normally enjoyed Thanksgiving—it was the one day of the year that her mother cooked American food, which always seemed like a novelty—but this year she felt trapped by the gloomy weather. As she helped her mother peel chestnuts and chop onions and laap ch’eung* for the glutinous rice stuffing, her thoughts returned over and over again to the Telegraph Club.
She and Kath had decided to go again on Friday night. Jean was coming home for the holiday weekend, and Kath wanted Lily to meet her. Lily couldn’t remember much about Jean from school, and she was curious about what she was like. Kath often spoke of her in such admiring tones, as if Jean had been a heroic explorer of new worlds, but Lily remembered Shirley’s disgust at Jean and what she’d done in the band room. Lily knew it was ungenerous of her, but she couldn’t help thinking that Jean must have been stupid, to let herself be discovered like that. She should have known better.
“Are you finished yet?”
Lily nearly dropped the knife as her mother’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“Pay attention,” her mother admonished her. “I need to start frying that laap ch’eung. Hurry up with that last one.”
Lily bit back a sigh and returned her focus to the narrow red links of dried sausage. When she was finished, she took the whole cutting board to her mother, who had already begun frying onions in the cast-iron pan. Her mother slid in the laap ch’eung in and gave it a stir.
“Bring me the mushrooms,” her mother said, gesturing to the bowl on the kitchen table.
The telephone rang on the landing. She heard running footsteps as one of her brothers sprinted down the hall to grab it, and then Frankie yelled, “Papa! It’s Aunt Judy!”
Aunt Judy didn’t come up to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, since it was only a couple of days and Uncle Francis’s family was much closer to them in Los Angeles, but she always called long distance. She would talk to her brother—Lily’s father—first, and then the phone would be passed around to all of the children. As Lily waited for her turn, she washed off the cutting board and knife. The rain was still dripping down the kitchen window, and she hoped that it would stop before Friday night. She wondered if she should wear the same skirt and blouse to the Telegraph Club. Would anyone notice if she did? She wished she had a new dress to wear—something as fashionable as the dress that Lana Jackson had worn. Would she be able to pull off a dress like that? She was dimly reflected in the kitchen window, and she scrutinized her figure critically. She didn’t think she had the necessary curves.
“You’re daydreaming again,” her mother said.
“Sorry,” Lily said. She dried off her hands and brought over the glutinous rice, which had to be mixed into the pan of laap ch’eung and mushrooms, and then seasoned with salt and soy sauce. It would be stuffed into the turkey, which was waiting on the kitchen table behind them. Lily’s mother had rubbed salt all over the skin earlier, and now as they approached with the stuffing, Lily thought the bird looked particularly naked, the breast glistening and bare. Her mother dipped her hand into the pan of glutinous rice and inserted fistfuls of it into the turkey cavity, holding the bird in place with her other hand. There was something disturbing about it, and Lily was relieved when her father appeared in the kitchen doorway and said, “Your aunt wants to talk to you.”
Out on the landing, Lily sat down on the bench beside the telephone table and lifted the heavy black receiver to her ear. “Hello? It’s Lily.”
“Hello, Lily,” Aunt Judy said. Her voice sounded a bit fuzzy over the line from Pasadena. “How’s school?”
Lily dutifully reported on what she was learning in Advanced Mathematics, the only class her aunt was truly interested in hearing about. “Oh, I also wanted to tell you,” Lily said, “that a friend of mine gave me an issue of Collier’s with an article in it by Wernher von Braun about going to Mars.” She had never before mentioned Kath to anyone in her family, and a flush of happiness rose inside her.
“I’ve seen it,” Aunt Judy said. “We were passing that issue around at JPL. I’ve seen him too, Dr. von Braun. He was at the lab recently.”
“Really! What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. And if I did, I couldn’t tell you,” Aunt Judy said teasingly.
“In the article Dr. von Braun said that we won’t be able to go to Mars for a hundred years—not until the mid-2000s. Do you think he’s right? Can’t we go before then?”