Me Talk Pretty One Day (27 page)

We used to return home for Christmas every year, my brother, sisters, and I making it a point to call ahead, offering to bring
whatever was needed for the traditional holiday meal.

“No, I already got the lamb,” our father would say. “Grape leaves, phyllo dough, potatoes — I got everything on the list.”

“Yes, but
when
did you get those things?”

An honest man except when it comes to food, our father would lie, claiming to have just returned from the pricey new Fresh
Market.

“Did you get the beans?” we’d ask.

“Well, sure I did.”

“Let me hear you snap one.”

Come Christmas Day, we would fly home to find a leg of lamb thawing beneath six inches of frost, the purchase date revealing
that it had been bought midway through the Carter administration. Age had already mashed the potatoes, the grape leaves bore
fur, and it was clear that, when spoken to earlier on the phone, our father had snapped his fingers in imitation of a healthy
green bean.

“Why the long faces?” he’d ask. “It’s Christmas Day. Cheer up, for Christ’s sake.”

Tired of rancid oleo and “perfectly good” milk resembling blue-cheese dressing, my family began taking turns hosting Christmas
dinner. This past year, it was my turn, and those who could afford it agreed to join me in Paris. I met my father’s plane
at Charles de Gaulle, and as we were walking toward the taxi stand, a bag of peanuts fell from the pouch of his suitcase.
These were not peanuts handed out on his recent flight but something acquired years earlier, back when all planes had propellers
and pilots wore leather helmets and long, flowing scarves.

I picked up the bag and felt its contents crumble and turn to dust. “Give me those, will you?” My father tucked the peanuts
inside his breast pocket, saving them for later.

Back at the apartment, he unpacked. I thought the cat had defecated on my bed until I realized that the object on my pillow
was not a turd but a shriveled black banana he had brought all the way to Paris from its hiding place beneath the bathroom
sink.

“Here,” my father said. “I’ll give you half of it.”

He’d brought a pear as well and had wrapped it in a plastic bag so that its pus wouldn’t stain the clothing he had packed
a day earlier but bought long before he was married. As with his food, my father is faithful to his wardrobe. Operating on
the assumption that, sooner or later, even the toga will make a comeback, he holds on to his clothing and continues to wear
things long after they’ve begun to disintegrate.

Included in his suitcase was a battered suede cap bought in Kansas City shortly after the war. This was the cap that would
figure into his story later that night, when we joined my sisters and a few friends at a nice Paris restaurant.

“So,” he says, “I found this brown-colored something-or-other in my suitcase, and I must have chewed on the thing for a good
five minutes, until I realized I was eating the brim of my cap. Can you beat that? A piece of it must have broken off during
the flight — but hell, how was I supposed to know what it was?”

My friend Maja finds this amusing. “So you literally ate your hat?”

“Well, yes,” my father says. “But not the whole thing. I stopped after the first few bites.”

An outsider might think he stopped for practical reasons, but my sisters and I know better. Because it didn’t kill him, the
cap had proved edible and would now be savored and appreciated in a different way. No longer considered an article of clothing,
it would return to its native land, where it would move from the closet to the bathroom cabinet, joining the ranks of the
spoiled to wait for the coming famine.

ALSO BY
DAVID SEDARIS

Barrel Fever

“Shrewd, wickedly funny.… These hilarious, lively, and breathtakingly irreverent stories… move way too fast to be summarized
or described. They made me laugh out loud more often than anything I’ve read in years.”

— Francine Prose,
Washington Post Book World

“Fortunately, not every page of Barrel Fever will leave you laughing so hard that it’s impossible to breathe — thank goodness
for the droll but manageable Table of Contents — but still, this is one of those ‘Open at your own risk’ books.…
Barrel Fever
is wacky writing par excellence: original, acid, and wild.”

— Michael Dorris,
Los Angeles Times

Holidays on Ice

Six of Sedaris’s most profound Christmas stories — collected in one slender volume perfect for use as a last-minute coaster
or ice scraper

Naked

“Sidesplitting.… Not one of the seventeen autobiographical essays in this collection failed to make me crack up; frequently
I was helpless.”

— Craig Seligman,
New York Times Book Review

“Sedaris brings X-ray vision to this strip search of the human psyche, sparing no one — including himself.… His work is characterized
by a brazen candor, a heart of gold, and the sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humor that might have resulted if Dorothy
Parker and James Thurber had had a love child.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

Available in paperback wherever books are sold

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