If you do nothing else this Thanksgiving

It’s the very least

Moments after Thanksgiving dinner one year when I was a kid, itching in stockings under a corduroy dress, drooping with exhaustion, I saw and cursed my fate for the first time.

It started like a choreographed dance all the women had rehearsed. First, as if summoned by an imaginary bell, my aunt stood up, smoothed her dress and signaled to her teenaged daughters, who stood. So did my other aunt and my uncle’s new girlfriend. My mother stood and pushed in her chair, I saw her sigh. Tight smiles on all of their placid faces. I remember thinking they were going to sing.

Silently, they started gathering plates, poking their elbows and extending their forearms over the men and kids - their husbands and sons, and me, the youngest girl. I watched their hands with their gold rings turn the forks sideways, congealed gravy pressed to the porcelain under their thumbs. To the kitchen and back again with clean forks for pie.

I looked at my uncles still saying whatever they were saying before, tossing a “Thanks, honey” over a shoulder. I turned to my little brother, half conscious in a sweater vest, and I was filled with rage. “He is so lucky,” I remember thinking. “He’s so lucky he won’t turn into a woman.”

If there’s one thing you do tomorrow, gently, subtly (you know exactly how), get some men involved in clearing the table. The kids are watching.