My husband has rented a Volvo for our Christmas holiday in Martha's Vineyard. He rented a Volvo to please me, and I think, as I sit on its heated leather seat beside him, that it's

the kindest thing anybody has ever done for me. He remembered something I said to him a long time ago, a fantasy I described to him before I even got pregnant--a silly fantasy I had of us

driving up to my mother's house in a Volvo station wagon with a baby in our backseat. In my fantasy it was summer, and it is winter here now--the island is emptied out, barren, like a

photographic negative of itself--but it doesn't matter, because I am in a silver Volvo with my husband beside me and our baby is cooing in the backseat and I feel like I'm in the

car's virtues. I've been susceptible to car commercial fantasies ever since I was small. Car commercials and sitcoms and movie families have embedded themselves under my skin. I

used to whine and plead with my eccentric mother, "Why can't you be a real mother?" Real to me was what I saw on TV. And right now, from where I sit in this Volvo, it feels

like maybe I've made it, I'm finally there, living inside the car commercial, not on the outside anymore. Volvos have a particularly special place in my imagination. They were the

cars driven by the fathers I never had—fathers with sensible shoes and kind eyes who loved their daughters, preparing them for a life of loving men who loved them back. As we drive toward

our destination, it does cross my mind that my husband looks not like those white dads of my youth but rather like my own father, the same copper skin tone, the same soft black curls, the

same vaguely mixed features. And so perhaps I've rewritten history by making a black man who looks like my father drive a Volvo. It's raining when we arrive at my mother's

house on the West Tisbury–Chilmark border. It's a classic Cape Cod house, the kind with weathered brown shingles and white window boxes. Tonight the windows glow yellow. I can just make

out the edge of a lit Christmas tree inside. It looks like a gingerbread cottage under the rain-darkened sky. It looks like a house from a dream or a fairy tale, like a place where nothing

bad can happen. But as we pull into the driveway, something interrupts my reverie: my three-year-old nephew comes running around the side of the house with his hair soaking wet, naked from

the waist down, in a T-shirt and a pair of mud-drenched socks. He's laughing and screaming, and my mother is on his heels. She looks wild herself, with a blue bruise on her chin and her

blond hair wild and tangled around her face. Through the windshield I watch as she grabs him and tries to drag him back inside the house. The child flails and tries to break free, his face

alight with taunting laughter. For a moment I had forgotten how mad my family is--all of them--how far from a car commercial we really are. The Volvo's engine is still running, and we

watch my nephew break loose from my mother's arms and run off screaming naked through the rain, and my mother seems to finally see us parked there in front of her. She wipes wet hair

out of her face and gives us a weary smile. "You can turn off the engine now," I say to my husband, who is still sitting inside the car, his hand frozen on the key, staring out at

the rain. . . . We have our Christmas Eve dinner in the clutter of my mother's house. She and my brother have pushed a series of small tables together so that it has the feeling of a

long line of child's tables rather than one adult one. My cousin Rebecca and her husband Jeff and their daughter Iris have come from New York City. They are white and Jewish and add to

the feeling that none of the parts fit together. My sister's three children are half Pakistani, and they all live in England. My brother is married to a woman who is half Chinese and

half white, and they have a nine-month-old daughter named Xing. My father is there too. He showed up at the crack of dawn this morning, without warning, after a thirty-sixhour bus trip from

Canada, wearing a rumpled suit. My sister glanced out the window to see him meandering across the lawn, like the ghost of Christmas past, like Lov Bensey of _Tobacco Road_, who walks seven

miles home eating a raw winter turnip. Tomorrow, his long-lost sister, Carla, the secret child of his black mother and the Irish priest, will show up on the island with her Indian

girlfriend. They too are part of this picture now. That night my father and my mother sit at one table like husband and wife, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. All of the

children are sick with the flu, and they take turns sticking their germy fingers in the baby Xing's mouth. My father cuts the chicken and serves tiny portions to the hungry guests.

There really isn't enough food for this many people, and so we each eat a dollhouse version of a meal: on each plate a few peas, a teaspoon of mashed potatoes, a single cut of chicken,

a paper-thin slice of beet. Nobody has dared to mention that there isn't enough food except one of the children, who screams, "I'm still hungry!" while the rest of us

smile and nod and cut the tiny bits of food into even tinier pieces, trying to make it last the length of a normal meal. A few years ago, in this same house, a white man tried to break in

during the night. I awoke to my mongrel dog barking and the sound of somebody trying to remove the screen from the window. He was an island drifter who had developed an obsession with me

based on our small interactions at the corner store, where our dogs would play together. Now, seated here, I imagine somebody, maybe that intruder, staring in at us all. I wonder what the

person on the outside would make of this motley group--if they would see a table of strangers, or if they would know, from the way we interact, from the invisible history that echoes through

our every interaction, that we are family, that we have known each other for a long, long time, that we have always been linked. Some of us are linked by blood and are only now just

meeting. Others are linked through the pain as much as the joy we've brought one another. There is _history_ at this table. My mother has a bruise on her chin from the

three-year-old's head butt. It is a fresh mark, but I can't look at it without remembering the ancient, now faded bruises my father inflicted on her face and body once upon a time

with his fist. There are reverberations here in this room. My sister and I barely speak. We have hurt each other too. My brother and his wife hide in the bedroom, enraged at my mother and

sister for letting the other children infect Xing, their baby. My infant son stares around the table with the biggest, blackest eyes I've ever seen on a child, his plump lower lip

falling out, adding to the aura of bewilderment on his face. My cousin's daughter--the Jewish one with the bright red hair--is only eleven but has recently declared herself a lesbian.

She is dressed in drag today, the way she dresses every day, hoping to confuse strangers into calling her "sir," as the waiter did at her eleventh birthday dinner, to which she

wore a suit. Her father jokes around and says she is the son he never had. She is a child out of a Woody Allen movie, all sardonic and alienated and wisecracking. She has written a novel and

wants me to blurb it. My sister's children, the Pakistani-English cousins, seem quaint, old-fashioned in comparison, like characters from one of the _Noddy_ books we used to read as

children. In this spirit, perhaps, the English-Pakistani cousins have brought from across the ocean a Golliwog doll--coal-black face, white bug eyes, red felt smile, a snappy pinstriped

suit. They present it to their cousin Xing as a gift. My brother loves it and says, "Anybody who finds him offensive can get the fuck out!" My sister informs us all that the term

_wog_ is not so offensive as it seems. She says the letters stand for Westernized Oriental Gentleman. Somebody has propped the Wog on top of the Christmas tree in lieu of a northern star. I

look at the racist caricature strung up in the tree and think it's a kind of inverse of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." The multiracial family has lynched a Golliwog

tonight, put him in his place. My sister's three children, three Westernized Oriental gentle boys and girl, sit together beneath this tree shaking presents and trying to guess the

contents. A palpable excitement is building among the Jewish and Muslim brethren of our clan on this most Christian of holidays. As dessert is served--the only part of the meal during which

we actually have enough for everybody--the three-year-old runs across the room and does a flying leap into the pile of presents. We all wince at the sound of breaking valuables, crunching

boxes, ripping wrapping paper, destroyed gifts. My mother rushes toward the child, where he lies on the heap, flailing his legs and laughing maniacally, and drags him into another room for a

time-out. My sister, disapproving but not rising from her seat, sighs and rolls her eyes and says to nobody in particular: "My mother just loves to discipline my children."

Despite these craggy moments, or perhaps because of them, I have the sense as we sit together that maybe this dinner is a victory--a sign that we have survived the terrible blows we have

inflicted upon one another, that we have wrestled history itself, in all of its brutality and all its deceptions, to the ground. I imagine there is a sign above the table reading,

"Anybody who finds this offensive can get the fuck out." Tonight this awkward, meager meal is a victory so subtle, you might just miss it if you weren't looking. EXCERPTED

FROM _WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?_ BY DANZY SENNA, PUBLISHED MAY 2009 BY FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, LLC. COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY DANZY SENNA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see

more, visit https://www.npr.org.