Fakebook (14 page)

“Your mother treats me like one of her kindergartners,” Ralph said in a tone closer to pride than shame.

“My kindergartners listen!” Mom chimed in from the kitchen, where she was stirring a pot of sauce.

I walked over and gave my mom a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Is he giving you trouble, Mom? Normally I don't pick favorites, but on Thanksgiving, I love you more than Dad.”

My mom scooped out a couple of meatballs, and making good on her Fakebook promise, she served them to her son who had come home.

“What a momma's boy,” Ralph said as he grabbed a handful of blueberries from the refrigerator. The closing door offered a glimpse of the Thanksgiving feast to come.

“That's breakfast food!” she yelled out.

“He's only acting out for the attention,” I said in as patronizing tone as I could muster.

“You guys like to gang up on me,” Ralph said, as he turned away to protect his prize.

It's true, we do gang up on him. After all, a poorly behaved kindergarten student isn't the worst description of my dad. He's usually in trouble for stealing treats between meals or making a mess when he comes in from the yard. It's also true that he likes the attention. He was smiling ear to ear as he cried victim.

Besides, it's not like he shows restraint when someone else has the target on their back. In fact, by bellowing out the made-up term of “breakfast food,” my mom placed it squarely on herself. Early bedtimes and rigid routine are a couple of her hallmark areas for teasing.

“It's almost seven,” I said to Mom. “I thought you'd be in your pajamas by now.”

“She wishes,” Ralph said with a mouthful of breakfast food.

“Yeah, he's right,” Mom said with a laugh. “As soon as I'm done with the dishes.”

Within a half hour she was dressed for bed, and we all sat down to watch TV. Their DVR held nothing but backlogged episodes of
Say
Yes
to
the
Dress
and
House
Hunters
, the perfect cocktail to bore the hell out of me. After two hours of watching strangers buy things, my solar-powered Mom went to bed, and Ralph had already dozed off. I looked at the clock, barely past 9:00 p.m. Now what?

I woke up to the sound of a vibrating phone on a wooden end table. “Whaaaa…what time is it?”

“Dude. It's only like 10:30,” Ted answered.

“Oh…You in Red Bank?”

“Yeah. I'm with Steve, and it sucks,” Ted answered.

“Wait, why are you calling? You guys haven't given anything away, have you?”

“No, we're keeping your secret,” Ted said with a little more bite than I expected. “It's easy because people are ignoring us. They seem angry at us.”

“Angry at you? What for?”

“Probably for the way Steve and I have been treating you online. For all the things we write.”

I thought about how so many people, including those who resented Ted and Steve, were reluctant to even post on the Fakebook wall. I thought of the many Facebook-era conversations I'd had that disingenuously started with “What have you been up to?” I thought about how distracting all this secret public knowledge could be.

Then I remembered the specific things Ted and Steve had been posting.

“Well,” I said in a sly tone, “you were saying some pretty harsh things about that sweet Amish girl.”

He hung up.

I texted an apology. I had been completely out of line. Fakebook was my Frankenstein's monster; now Ted and Steve were out there facing the scorn of the townsfolk to defend it on my behalf. I went back to sleep feeling awful. In the morning, there'd be work to do.

I woke up around six and went downstairs to an empty kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I looked at all the prepped food for the afternoon feast and snuck a pinch of uncooked stuffing.

It was peaceful, the quiet before the storm of overlapping cooking times and family arrivals. Soon enough, my mother was up and running around the kitchen. Any offer to help was rejected—she wasn't letting me anywhere near her masterpiece. It was just a matter of sitting around and waiting for Thanksgiving to start.

So I sat around in front of the TV. America's favorite new genre of unscripted television—obnoxious people with quirky professions—began to take hold of me. I sat there for hours, watching encore presentations of fat guys building theme motorcycles. It was mind numbing, and I felt myself both wanting to see how it turned out and wanting to jump out a window. It made me nostalgic for the days when cable TV was all about minor celebrities remembering stuff from past decades. I finally turned it off, itching to do something productive.

Naturally, I turned to Fakebook. In light of last night's revelations, my original plan of acknowledging Thanksgiving with an exterior shot of a Boston Market didn't seem sufficient. So with that same mix of boredom and anxiety that had triggered Fakebook in the first place, I was inspired to create a new picture.

I looked at the clock and saw it was almost 11:00 a.m. I'd have to work fast, so I began a frantic search for images. This work was going to be rushed and barely passable, but it felt important. Besides, with the option of attending my high school's homecoming football game squarely off the table, photoshopping was the best way to pass the time before Mom finally let us unwrap the antipasto.

I scoured the Internet and took poorly lit photos with my parents' Canon PowerShot, locking myself in the basement to meet this pressing deadline. I could hear my brother Jeff and his wife, Elisha, arrive from the airport around noon. I heard the footsteps of Mark and his fiancée, Lisa, enter the house an hour later. By 2:00 p.m., all my aunts, uncles, and cousins had arrived, and the house got very loud.

I'll say hello as soon as I can,
I thought,
but
I
have
to
get
this
image
made. I'm under deadline.

An hour later, I had Fake Dave post from a homeless shelter:

I closed my laptop, feeling a little uncomfortable about what I had just done. It wasn't just the very, very poor Photoshop quality this time. It was the content. Right after I posted it, I realized it was an utterly obnoxious thing to show. Even though this never happened, it still felt exploitive. In the moment, I found it impossible not to think of Fake Dave as me. We shared the reputation I'd just soiled and that suddenly bothered me.

But it was done. All I could do now was cross my fingers. Ted and Steve were getting a hard time for calling me out as the bad guy, so I owed it to them to prove them right. Above me, I could hear the loud din of the full family.

Sometimes I try to look at us through the eyes of my sisters-in-law—what we must have looked like to them as they first shared a holiday with us. It's a good family. We love each other; we all have lived upstanding lives free of police records, substance abuse, and most other black marks; we look good on paper. But get us all together, and we are chaotic and loud.

At first glance, other than the lack of spray tans and hair spray, we don't offer much to dispel the stereotype of a big New Jersey Italian family. At any given time, everyone is engaged in at least three loud conversations—two of them arguments. Politics, personal lives, nothing is sacred. Anything anyone says is mocked, interrupted, or undermined.

But from the basement, all the overlapping arguments compressed into the single sound of steady laughter. It was a good reminder of why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It's not about what you can get; it's about appreciating what you have. It promises nothing more than sharing a meal with your family. It's uncomplicated, even this year. It was my home, my town, my family—all as they are.

There's honesty to it.

If only the whole Thanksgiving holiday could have ended with pumpkin pie, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and a football game. It would have been a nice ending after a frustrating start. But the thing about Thanksgiving is that it's on a Thursday.

By the time Saturday night rolled around, the holiday weekend was seriously getting to me.

If my brothers hadn't been in town, I would have bounced Friday morning. I'd be back in the city that was big enough for me to be anonymous. I'd be able to grab a drink in a place where the bartender wouldn't know I was supposed to be outside of Harrisburg.

Ironically, if I wasn't supposed to be in Harrisburg, I wouldn't have been so eager to go back to the city. I would be going out with my brothers in the town that was abuzz with how exciting my life was, instead of tagging along on my parents' DVR routine before turning in early. I was beginning to forget what 10:00 p.m. looked like.

And Saturday night…I couldn't even count on TV with my parents. It was pizza night.

Luigi's Pizza is the one thing that we, as a family, all agree on. While there's good pizza in New York, there is no Luigi's. Luigi's doesn't have a brick oven. It doesn't burn coal or wood or use fresh buffalo milk mozzarella. Instead, it offers a true pizzeria pizza, just perfected.

As I tortured myself with the Food Network—watching an attractive lady I'd never meet cook food I'd never eat—Mark, Jeff, Lisa, Elisha, Mom, and Dad were sitting at a table with multiple square pies coming out of the oven.

I imagined the thin but substantial crust—how it never yields under its own weight like a lesser slice. The bottom is crispy without being burnt and has inherited the textile quality of the large-grain flour the raw dough once rested on. The crust is soft on top, absorbing the flavor of the shredded mozzarella—just a hint on the salty side and with a touch of oil, but no grease—and, of course, that spectacular sauce. It's a vivid red with a touch of sweetness, and the occasional tomato chunk accents the otherwise smooth composition. And when you eat the crust—and in my family, you'd better—it's like a palate-cleansing sorbet, ensuring that “first bite” sensation remains from slice to slice.

It's the best. It bonds us. But for all our love of Luigi's Pizza, no one in my family has ever savored a bite. To savor one bite is to endanger the next. Everyone at that table—including my mother and sisters-in-law (my brothers made sure their wives were Cicirellis in appetite before they make them Cicirellis in name
3
)—wants every single slice. Of course you want the corner slice and the biggest slice and the one with the air bubble. Each is different and special in its own way, and each selection is a Sophie's choice: You know that choosing one slice means there's another you will never have.

So to secure the first pick of the second round (and third round and fourth…), we eat quickly. Really quickly. We're like an elite black-ops team. We swoop in with speed, efficiency, and minimal conversation and then leave, with no evidence that our target ever existed. We're a school of piranhas, and after a few minutes of frenzy, all that's left are an empty tray and the unused metal server.

And before you know it, we're in the car on the way home, expressing astonishment at how slow that one family with all the leftovers was. We're a family. Luigi's is our second home.

But I was stuck on house arrest, trusting my family to eat their fill and then bring me home a personal pizza (but, you know, sized for a family) in one piece. Mark promised me they'd bring me home pizza, one piece. I didn't even feel secure in that.

“Hey, Dave!” Ralph said as he walked through the front door, with the rest of the family closely following. “You wouldn't believe this one family,” he continued as he carries a large delivery box. “They had pizza on the table when we got there, and they were still working on it when we left!”

Before I even got up from the couch, the pizza was on the island in the kitchen—surrounded on all sides by people still wearing coats. I jumped into the fray to grab a slice, but I would have had an easier time freeing a gazelle carcass from a pride of lions.

“You too, Mom?” I said as she grabbed a coveted corner piece.

“Well…I thought I wasn't hungry anymore. But now that I'm eating…”

I knew better than to continue to talk, but I darted Mark a look that said, “I thought this was my pizza.” He didn't even notice.

I got just enough to get a taste, enough to crave it and feel wildly unsatisfied. This, I imagine, is what half a fix feels like.

I hated Fake Dave. Estranging me from my friends—so be it. Ruining Steve and Ted's reputation…well, there was bound to be some collateral damage. But this? Just a day before, I'd felt bad for Fake Dave—for making him act so immaturely at that homeless shelter. After missing pizza night, however, I was more than happy to have him reap what he sowed.