Cat's eye

We sit around the table, eating our Christmas dinner. There’s a student of my father’s, a young man from India who’s here to study insects and who’s never seen snow before. We’re having him to Christmas dinner because he’s foreign, he’s far from home, he will be lonely, and they don’t even have Christmas in his country. This has been explained to us in advance by our mother. He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there. I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all. My father sits at the head of the table, beaming like the Jolly Green Giant. He lifts his glass, his gnome’s eyes twinkling. “Mr. Banerji, sir,” he says. He always calls his students Mr. and Miss. “You can’t fly on one wing.”

Mr. Banerji giggles and says, “Very true, sir,” in his voice that sounds like the BBC News. He lifts his own glass and sips. What is in the glass is wine. My brother and I have cranberry juice in our wineglasses. Last year or the year before we might have tied our shoelaces together, under the table, so we could signal each other with secret jerks and tugs, but we’re both beyond this now for different reasons.

My father ladles out the stuffing, deals the slices of dark and light; my mother adds the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and asks Mr. Banerji, enunciating carefully, whether they have turkeys in his country. He says he doesn’t believe so. I sit across the table from him, my feet dangling, staring at him, enthralled. His spindly wrists extend from his over-large cuffs, his hands are long and thin, ragged around the nails, like mine. I think he is very beautiful, with his brown skin and brilliant white teeth and his dark appalled eyes. There’s a child these colors in the ring of children on the front of the Sunday school missionary paper, yellow children, brown children, all in different costumes, dancing around Jesus. Mr. Banerji doesn’t have a costume, only a jacket and tie like other men. Nevertheless I can hardly believe he’s a man, he seems so unlike one. He’s a creature more like myself: alien and apprehensive. He’s afraid of us. He has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities we will expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers.

“A little off the sternum, sir?” my father asks him, and Mr. Banerji brightens at the word.

“Ah, the sternum,” he says, and I know they have entered together the shared world of biology, which offers refuge from the real, awkward world of manners and silences we’re sitting in at the moment. As he slices away with the carving knife my father indicates to all of us, but especially to Mr. Banerji, the areas where the flight muscles attach, using the carving fork as a pointer. Of course, he says, the domestic turkey has lost the ability to fly.

“Meleagris gallopavo,” he says, and Mr. Banerji leans forward; the Latin perks him up. “A pea-brained animal, or bird-brained you might say, bred for its ability to put on weight, especially on the drumsticks”—he points these out—“certainly not for intelligence. It was originally domesticated by the Mayans.” He tells a story of a turkey farm where the turkeys all died because they were too stupid to go into their shed during a thunderstorm. Instead they stood around outside, looking up at the sky with their beaks Wide open and the rain ran down their throats and drowned them. He says this is a story told by farmers and probably not true, although the stupidity of the bird is legendary. He says that the wild turkey, once abundant in the deciduous forests in these regions, is far more intelligent and can elude even practiced hunters. Also it can fly.

I sit picking at my Christmas dinner, as Mr. Banerji is picking at his. Both of us have messed the mashed potatoes around on our plates without actually eating much. Wild things are smarter than tame ones, that much is clear. Wild things are elusive and wily and look out for themselves. I divide the people I know into tame and wild. My mother, wild. My father and brother, also wild; Mr. Banerji, wild also, but in a more skittish way. Carol, tame. Grace, tame as well, though with sneaky vestiges of wild. Cordelia, wild, pure and simple.

“There are no limits to human greed,” says my father.

“Indeed, sir?” says Mr. Banerji, as my father goes on to say that he’s heard some son of a gun is working on an experiment to breed a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two drumsticks and two wings, because there’s more meat on a drumstick.