The Third Part of Chapter 10: Thanksgiving

Conversation had been winding through people’s work––the Government for Clarissa, economic consulting for James, teaching for Mary, software programming for Andrew, while Jacob and Alice had stayed silent, as the rest of the family save Clarissa considered approving credit card applications a boring affair.

Clarissa was saying, “That’s what the president said about the American budget: it had grown far out of control, much like ours, and had they not gone on a spending binge, they wouldn’t be in the position of raising taxes and cutting services, like they are now.”

James, at that moment, was not paying attention to the talk, but rather to his dinner plate, which as Margaret had noted, was piled high; he was eating, as was everyone else, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep track of conversation; his mind was on other things, as were his eyes and ears. He took in the house that he had last visited in August and marvelled at its museum-like cleanliness, and the fact that the elder Varettes were eminently tasteful in their decoration; every table had some small arrangement of objects, in each case achieving a careful balance and harmony with the others. On a large table in the adjoining living room, for instance, sat a porcelain figurine of a longhaired orange cat, unaccompanied by anything else on said table. On a small table with spindly legs sat a wooden bowl with wax fruit. In a glass cabinet were displayed delicate ceramic men and women in 1890s period costume, five to a shelf, arranged as in some kind of dance. The whole house spoke of a relentless effort to impose order, and within it was successful, in contrast to the inherently chaotic without. At this moment, the real cat strolled into the room, and indifferently surveyed the eight people sitting at the dinner table. The only difference between this cat and the porcelain cat was that this cat moved; it was, James thought, the only tasteless thing about the house.

Clarissa, sitting opposite James, had noticed his eyes wandering, and she smiled.

“Have you heard what some people are saying? Well, certain groups are petitioning for the ground rules to be changed; a sort of shirking of responsibility, as it were,” said Jacob. The certain people were the posse of lunch buddies he had at work in a gleaming office tower downtown.

Hyram was of the same mindset as his son: “That’s completely inappropriate; they went on a spending binge over the last twelve years under that doofus and his successor, and only now are they cleaning up. We went through the same thing, but they apparently had to discover what we had learnt back in the ‘90s: if you run deficits year over year, they will come back to bite you; there’s simply no avoiding that reality. What do you think of that giant spending spree?”

Margaret directed the question at Alice.

“They had to pay sometime, didn’t they? We see it all the time with people with poor credit histories. They, like the American government, wanted everything, and didn’t grasp the concept that they had to pay for it, and credit isn’t really a method of payment. It’s sad really, the disconnect between what people earn, and what they think they can buy; a lot of people’s eyes are far bigger than their wallets,” she said, putting a twist on the old figure of speech.

Her husband had more to add: “Oh yeah, there was this one guy I was reviewing at work, and he had five credit cards going, which is a warning flag right there; there really isn’t a need for more than one credit card if people know what they’re doing; more than that, and it will eventually get out of hand. I don’t know why people are allowed to pay one credit card off with another. This guy was also carrying about seventy thousand dollars in debt, even though his mortgage was paid off, and only had one car. The rest of that stuff came from knickknacks and expensive trips to Florida. He was rejected,”

Mary, however, could not get over something about the credit market that had long troubled her, and represented an obvious risk and was guaranteed to fail when left unchecked: “What about the part of the business where your best customers are those with dodgy histories?”

“Well, we do get to charge them high interest rates because of that,” Jacob admitted.

Alice added, “But we can’t have too many; that was one of the causes of the credit crisis.”

Margaret hadn’t been paying attention to the discussion about credit cards, being instead focussed on dinner, so she turned to a new subject with Mary, who was sitting beside her.

“Did you hear about Nicolas Pompon?”

“He’s Meach’s Quebec lieutenant, isn’t he?”

“Yes; anyways, there seems to be some sort of disconnect in him between brain and mouth; he said that Québec City didn’t matter to Meach.”

“That’s not a wise thing for someone from the Beauce to say,”

“He seems to have dropped a lot of balls lately,”

“That’s what Pretique Sid Nuit said,” said Mary, referring to the Montréal-based commentator who seemed to have it in for Nico Pompon, calling him everything under the sun, in both official languages. Everyone knew, although Meach denied it, that he was essentially a cheerleader, a job even he, in his otiose ways, did poorly.

Jacob asked Andrew, “I think the personalities are so interesting, don’t you?” This referred of course to American politics, which Andrew understood after he asked a question in return.

“You mean the way in which the guy is so flashy? I don’t find that particularly interesting; I don’t find his romantic dalliances that interesting either, whether they involve the wives of congressmen or actresses,”

Alice said, “I don’t know which affair was more lurid, the one with the congressman’s wife or the actress. You know, there’s something uniquely American about his politics: he goes for glitz, for big impact statements that are at the same time vacuous. Remember him at the opening of the new bridge to Detroit? ‘This link will play an integral role in bringing our peoples together, in bridging the divide that sometimes opens between us, and it is a reflection that all of us are fundamentally friends’, complete with the fluttering flags in the backdrop and the skyline. His PR people really know what they’re doing, and SEAN, PUT THAT DOWN!”

Sean, who had finished his dinner, was doing what two-year-olds did best: he was causing a ruckus. The object his mother was referring to was the life-size porcelain cat on the table in the living room. Sean, always attracted by things shiny, had climbed onto the couch beside the table and got a hold of its tail.

“But mommy––”

Alice did not answer him, but rather strode over, plucked the orange and white object out of his hands, placed it on the other end of the table away from his reach, and dragged him to the dinner table, where Alice said “I can keep my eye on you,” all the while ignoring his loud protests; the bowl of wax fruit on the spindly table was also a concern, and was simply asking to be tipped over by Sean.

Clarissa blocked Jacob on one side and Mary did so on the other side, while he, sitting opposite Alice, had his back to the buffet, and had not seen Sean in the role of miscreant.

James thought that Sean was cute, but was thankful that he did not have the duty of caring for him himself; he hoped that any children he had with Clarissa would be well behaved. The incident itself provided a welcome distraction from the dinner conversation, which he thought had turned boring; need we go into the irrelevant minutiae of that man’s neon-lighted glitzy persona? All that stuff was boring and he could not believe that CNN would report on only that. Infrastructure was relevant; health policy was relevant; what the Federal Reserve was doing was relevant, but a detailed analysis of the President’s speech patterns, presentation style and even clothing was decidedly not relevant.

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