By Amelie Langland
Y’all go on, I’m just piecing at the turkey, my Baba would quip to the in-laws as we sat around her table, and humoring her as always, my mother and I laughed, fiddling at the placemats around her table.
After the pies and wine, the children gone to bed, we’d pour coffee and watch the Siamese cat curl up in her favorite hand-me-down wingchair. Avoiding current events as the family diplomat around her table,
I ask Baba about growing up in Citronelle, waiting for one of her classic yarns of precociousness to unspool, knowing the older her memory, the more she’s gilded the lie. Smiling, I wish that around her table
I could rewind the handmade clocks my Papa fixed and go back to when I didn’t have to act and let the name thing go. To be a woman with women. Instead we pretend, gossip, and chitchat around her table—
did you hear he’s divorced; did you hear he’s working at Publix now; did you hear she walked out into the bay and drowned. Those years of oyster stuffing, Alsatian wine, great-grandma’s crystal, watching Aristocats around her table.
Before tearing into a beast, a truce from our daily trespasses, we toast the women we’re grateful for and name Adele, Elise, Venetia, Isabelle, Josephine. Never hinted at, never listed, I’m never Amelie around that table.
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