Thanksgiving Hurl-a-Thon

What do you do when the man you married rises from the bed ashen-faced at two in the morning, lurches into the bathroom, and then morphs into a terrifying human fountain of partially digested Thanksgiving feast? You wake your brother- and sister-in-law, gather a pile of their medicines, and then try to reassure them that nothing's happening in their guest bathroom-- not scenes from The Exorcist, not that stomach-dwelling thing from Alien-- and then you cower in the hallway and wait for the bathroom door to open so you can toss in Immodium and Pepto and Advil and words of encouragement.

Earlier that day: the husband and I are standing in a long line at one of San Antonio's Army bases waiting to be issued two soldiers to take home and subject to a family Thanksgiving. Always fond of pointless delay and formality, the Army makes 1,000 soldiers stand at attention for half an hour while the civilians are subjected to bizarre music blared over loudspeakers. "Proud to Be an American," which has to qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention, is followed by a strange rendition of "Under the Boardwalk," complete with totally-out-of-place Tejano yipping and "ay-ayyyyyy"-ing, and then finally, two smiling clean-cut soldiers in blindingly shiny shoes are issued to us. Thoroughly briefed on good manners and polite conversation, our guys were fun and easy to talk to-- which made it all the more difficult to break it to them that though it was now 9 in the morning, dinner would be at 6. A whole day to kill.

Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard. We played pool at my mother-in-law's house and ate her cookies, and then went over to the brother-in-law's for some X-Box and some taunting of the two-year-old nephew. (My nephew now has a fully-developed alter ego whom we have named "Lyle." Lyle announces his presence by issuing some kind of ear-splitting Comanche howl and then jumps straight up into the air, lands full force on his ass, and then lays back and thrashes and screeches. All because you stopped him from dialing Sweden on your cell phone.) Before we knew it, both soldiers were coated in a thick layer of dog and cat hair (just the ambient air of pet-dwelling homes is enough to do it when you're wearing nicely pressed dark green wool pants), the X-Box was exhausted, and it was time to head back to the mother-in-law's house for dinner.

My mother-in-law goes all out for major holiday cooking. Almost every other day of the year she and my father-in-law subsist entirely on cereal, but for big family gatherings, hers is the test kitchen from the Food Network, and she presides over it with the kind of nervous energy that makes everyone else subconciously hunch and tiptoe when they enter the kitchen. Part of this is the presence of her own mother, an ancient Oklahoma panhandle plainswoman, who sits in one corner by the breakfast table and watches the commotion, occasionally throwing out a remark that could be 50/50 "just making conversation" or "subtle, soul-crushing criticism." My mother-in-law rolls out homemade pie crusts with grim, tight-lipped competence, and I distract her mother with tales of my outlaw ancestors and my own shitty tomato-slicing skills.

The dinner was beautiful, the conversation amazingly light after all the stress of preparation, and the soldiers actually seemed sad to go when we took them back to the base. I found myself praying for each of them to break their ankles or something on the way back to the barracks just to be good and sure they wouldn't be headed to Iraq any time soon. They were both so young.

My husband and I returned to the brother-in-law's house to play with the dual personality nephew (as heinous as Lyle can be, the real nephew is angelic) and bed down for the night. And then 2 a.m. rolled around.

Your first marital bout of explosive diarrhea and unstoppable vomiting is really an underrated milestone. I believe scrapbooks should make room for this moment. Here is where you find out if you're both in it for the long haul. Are you willing to hold a trashcan in front of someone whose colon is rebelling so that they can simultaneously vomit themselves inside out? What about when that vomit is a stage by stage recount of your delicious Thanksgiving feast? And are you willing to find and point out weak bright spots like, "Hey, it's been 12 hours-- we're almost halfway!" or "I haven't seen sweet potatoes the last two times-- I think we're nearing the end of your stomach contents."

As near as we can tell, it was a virus brought home a week ago by Lyle, spread to both his parents simultaneously (imagine the irony of changing someone else's diaper when you could really use one of your own), and then passed on to the mother-in-law and possibly the great grandmother. Somewhere in all of this it found its way to my husband but not to me. Yet.

Remember that scene in "Stand By Me" where the pie-eating contest goes horribly wrong and the protagonist of the story, a kid named Lard Ass, sets off a chain reaction vomit melee? I've been riding out my probably temporary pocket of digestive health and fanatasizing, with no small measure of guilt, that this scene is taking place in a barracks packed full of young soldiers right now, and that any plans for deployment have been scrapped because of it. Permanently.

(By the way, try image googling "explosive vomit" and explain what that random woman is doing there.)