Authors: Joan Thomas
Most of the gifts under the tree are for Sylvie. Sadly, there are no hand-planted cactus gardens for the members of her family. For her father Sylvie bought a pair of goats for a family in India. “That’s in honour of your being an old goat,” she says. For her grandpa she bought a beehive for a family in Ethiopia. He studies the card for ages, though he can’t read it and doesn’t get the concept. For her mother she bought a satchel of school supplies for a girl in Kenya. “A very worthy cause,” Liz says.
From her dad Sylvie gets a new iPod, loaded with his own top-fifty playlist. “This is a pity gift,” Sylvie explains to her grandpa. “Dad feels sorry for me because he thinks his music is so awesome compared to mine.”
“Sylvie’s got that exactly right,” Aiden says. “The harmony bands, the Beatles, the Byrds – there’s a sweetness to them. Even though they were stoned for decades. Even though they were fighting like beasts in the studio. And the lyrics. Those dudes could write. Dylan – what a poet!”
“I never really got Bob Dylan,” Liz says.
“Well, that’s the brilliant thing about him,” Aiden says. “He’s always just on the edge of meaning.”
When they’re finished with the gifts, Liz goes out to work on the dinner and Sylvie manages to slip downstairs. But her dad won’t let her go. He follows her, shaking the bead curtain she’s hung at the entrance to her cave, as a way of knocking.
“Got a minute?” he asks.
“I guess.” She turns her back on him and dumps all the consumerist beauty crap her mother bought her on the old trunk she uses as a dresser. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what lover-boy got you for Christmas.”
“None of your business.”
“Aw, come on.” He leans against the pillar and looks around her cave. He’s wearing the sweater he got from Liz. “I’m not trying to pry. But I’ve been wondering, how are things going with the two of you? How did Noah react when he heard the news?”
“You’re not trying to pry?” she says. “You’re insatiable.” But he looks so pathetic that finally she gives in. She tells him that Noah was just really quiet.
Her dad keeps watching her. “Well, it’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Sylvie says. “If he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t say anything. You don’t have to pick through a lot of bullshit. Noah is a cat.” This is her dad’s own theory: some people are cats and some people are dogs. Sylvie herself is a dog. Her tail wags and her tongue hangs out; everything she feels is obvious as soon as you look at her.
He’s still watching her. The other day she could not get the crying stopped once it had started, and she’s determined not to start again. In fact, she and Noah are still not over the taxi ride from the airport, when he wouldn’t talk. He just kept glancing warningly at the back of the driver’s head, as if the guy could hear them through the Plexiglas, as if it
mattered
.
“This vehement thing,” her dad finally asks. “Is that bothering him?”
“He’s not a freak, Dad,” she says. “He’s just committed to other species surviving on Earth. There are far too many of us, you say – I’m going to stop breeding. But what are you supposed to do? Condoms sit in landfill for a thousand years. So I started that fucking pill. But every time I peed, a bit of it went into the river. And now the fish are growing two heads. And it didn’t work anyway.”
The tears are coming now, and he sees it. “Hormones are natural, you know,” he says. They’re sitting on the futon and he’s holding her hand. “And this is partly hormones. They make you more emotional.”
He reaches over to the old trunk, trying to find a Kleenex. She’s got a pile of handkerchiefs and she digs one out.
“Come upstairs,” he says. “We can play Chinese checkers. Or Risk. You love Risk.”
“We don’t have enough people.”
“Parcheesi, then. Grandpa could handle Parcheesi.”
“Maybe later.” She wipes her eyes and her nose. The handkerchief is useless – she made it from an old pillowcase and it just moves the snot around.
“And talk things over with your mother, eh? This is exactly the sort of situation your mother knows about.”
She tosses the handkerchief in the direction of her dirty clothes pile and wipes her nose on her sleeve. She squeezes his arm to say, I’m fine, thanks. It’s over. “If this was only a computer game,” she says, “I could reboot. I would have saved it when I was on a roll and I could start again from there.”
“Where would you have saved it?”
“I don’t know … After I met Noah at the lake last summer. I wouldn’t want to have missed that.” He smiles, and so much love
shines in his eyes that she wants to keep talking. “You know, Dad, it’s really weird, but I think I knew I was pregnant before the doctor told me.”
“What do you mean?”
So she tells him about meeting her friends to plan the Fringe play, and how they talked about a restaurant deep in the ocean and she pictured fish tapping on the glass. And then later, sitting bent over on the toilet, she felt a
tap, tap, tap
against the wall of her stomach,
from the inside
.
“You’re probably right,” he says. “No doubt you knew on some unconscious level. It was too big for you to let yourself think about it openly. But something took you to the doctor that day.”
“I know – that’s what I was thinking! And something made me wait to see her, even though my own doctor was away. Even though I had so much work to do.”
“You know, Sylvie,” he says, kissing her tenderly, “you have all sorts of wisdom. Far more than you know. You can count on it in the next few months. You’re going to be all right.”
He goes back upstairs. He meant what he said to reassure her, but actually it makes her feel worse. Because it’s not just her body that has a secret life, her mind does too. The way it sent her scurrying to the clinic, totally oblivious to what she was doing.
Once when she was little and slept upstairs, her mother was reading her a bedtime story and they were distracted by the sight of a silver moon out the window. A crescent moon tipped on its back, a moon like a sly smile. “It’s growing a little bit every day,” her mother said. “Just like you are.” Then she kissed Sylvie goodnight and closed the blind and left. When she was gone, Sylvie got out of bed, dragged her chair over to the window, and knelt on it, looking out into the night, the window blind draped over her back like a turtle shell. That was when she saw it, for the first
time ever: the dark, stony, gloating round of the whole moon.
There all the time
.
“W
hy don’t you boys play cards?” Liz suggests. She serves them each a glass of red wine and some crackers and tapenade and cheese. Aiden pulls out the cribbage board and sets up, but Rupert just looks suspiciously at his cards. His eyes are strangely bright; he looks like Buster Keaton. “Try him with your reading glasses,” Liz says. Aiden does, but it’s hopeless.
The monster turkey fills the oven as though it has expanded in the heat. Liz slides it out and bastes it. It’s glistening with real fat and juices, not that cheap hydrogenated oil they inject under the skin of supermarket turkeys. She ordered it at the butcher shop in early December, back before Charlotte and her kids had pulled out, when she thought they were having ten people for Christmas dinner. Up till Wednesday, they were still six. Wendy’s son and his wife are in Hawaii, so Wendy was planning to come and bring her Somalian refugee. But she’s got the flu, she’s been sick all week. And after the Blessed Annunciation, as Aiden’s taken to calling it, Liz cancelled the Somalian refugee. “We don’t even know him,” she said to Aiden. “Wendy hardly knows him herself.”
“Mary Magdalene Calhoun,” she whispers, rinsing the baster under the tap. Maggie Calhoun, into the “alternative fabric movement,” running a hemp and bamboo store in a strip mall on Corydon. Liz sets about crimping foil over the wings and drumsticks so they won’t brown too fast. It’s a fiddly job and she feels strangely worked up doing it. It’s the memory of those anatomically correct dolls, which brings with it a thought – a welcome thought – that in some perverse but deep way this situation is Maggie’s fault.
Why? Because those dolls speak of a dangerous ideological purity, and ideology so often trumps sensible action.
Maggie’s ideology was not so evident at the meeting. What was striking was her perfection: the perfect, serene bow of her upper lip; her gentle, even voice; her Mona Lisa smile. None of which can be real, given what she must be feeling, and which therefore reveal her as a perfect fraud. This is a woman who had a child with George Stonechild, a white guy from East Kildonan who braided his hair with rawhide and said
meegwetch
at every opportunity. He fooled no one.
They’ll need a leaf in the table, there are a lot of side dishes. She glances into the dining room to see if the candleholders need fresh candles, and she’s caught off guard by the sight of a window with curtains blowing in a summer breeze. The
trompe l’oeil
fresco on the north wall, with its painted curtains perfectly matching the real curtains – it actually tricks her eye. It’s brilliant; nobody believes she painted it. The blue for the sky is three shades brighter than most amateurs would have dared. She and Aiden were at each other’s throats that summer, and she was trying to keep herself busy. She can see herself in the dining room with cans of paint on a drop sheet at her feet, a redhead in shorts and a halter top (she was a redhead that long-ago summer).
Oh, that summer. Thanks to Sylvie, the house feels crammed with people from that summer, or an even earlier one. Sparky, a brave little boy with two state-of-the-art shiners, and the self-righteous, bleating
GAP
mothers. The beauteous Mary Magdalene and her evil ex. Liz sees her old self, a restless, reckless woman she never expected to meet again, stopping in at George Stonechild’s one night when he lived on Dominion with a fallen-down maple in his front yard. Everybody knew that house, for the tree that had been growing sideways for decades and for George’s incessant drumming.
Liz was walking home from an evening drinking wine at Mary Magdalene’s when she heard the drumming and George Stonechild drummed her into his yard. Swiftly he popped a beer for her. Somehow he knew where she’d been, at the house on Greenwood with the purple steps.
“So what were you lovely ladies nattering about?” he said.
“Terminology,” Liz said, taking a long drink. “We were arguing about what to call a certain neighbourhood ex. Whether he’s a prick or just an asshole.”
“And what am I?”
“Sadly, just an asshole. According to Mary Magdalene.” She went so far as to explain: “You’re not smart enough to be a prick.” She could see him trying to find some way to take this as a compliment.
How extremely drunk she must have been to say such a thing to his face – it’s unbelievable. As she pulls down serving dishes from the cupboard, she peers into a yard where the yellow light of a street lamp is falling through the boulevard trees and watches George crowd her up against the fallen-down maple, leaning in for a kiss, sees herself shove him away, sees him laugh. But still she stayed, long into the night, avoiding going back to the house on Augusta Street she was suddenly allergic to, the kitchen smelling of mouldy leftovers and the upstairs hall eerie from the little fish nightlight Sylvie loved. Sylvie muttering in a bed rocky with disassembled toys. Aiden lying on his back snoring, on a sheet that hadn’t been washed in two weeks. She had another beer and another and lounged against the tree, soaking up George’s gaze, taking in his puerile flattery, not enjoying George so much as she was enjoying herself, her fast-talking, careless self.
When Rupert has fallen into a doze with his head against the cushions, Aiden comes out to help. He’s quiet and gentle, which is always his way when he’s troubled. He peels the potatoes and sets
the table and then drifts off for a while. When he comes back, he mashes the potatoes. Liz works on the gravy and the side dishes, a butternut squash gratin and braised red cabbage with apple. She glances at the turkey resting on a warming stone. It has browned perfectly, as if varnished for the cover of a culinary magazine.
Aiden calls Sylvie and she wanders up from the cave. Liz asks her to light the candles and she does, and then she leads in her grandpa. They all sit down and look at each other in that little moment of recognition that stands in for grace. Sylvie has her vivid hair up in a knot on the top of her head and her bangs pinned back with a tiny silver bluebird clip. She’s a Renaissance beauty. She called Mary Magdalene right after she found out. This fact still burns in Liz, with such pain that she can’t look at her daughter for longer than a second.
“Isn’t this a feast!” Aiden says. He pours the wine. It’s a Montravel Sec they bought in celebration of their anticipated trip. He glances at the label but doesn’t comment.
“Your father loves Christmas,” Liz says to Sylvie. She picks up the carving knife. “When he was young, it was always winter and never Christmas.”
“Because you belonged to a cult, Dad?” Sylvie asks.
“Something like that.”
Liz carves because she’s better at it. She passes Rupert a plate with all dark meat, as per his preference when he was still able to voice one. She passes her daughter stuffing only – since she was twelve or so, Sylvie has declined to eat her friends. She passes Aiden two slices of thigh, two slices of breast. She follows this with the pear-and-ginger chutney.
“When did chutney enter the Western diet?” Aiden asks.
“Your father always references prehistory when he’s trying to decide whether he likes something,” Liz says. “It’s all ‘What would
Cro-Magnon man do?’ ” Sitting in the soft light of the antler chandelier, she feels the full weight of her anxiety again, pressing on her like one of those lead vests you wear for dental X-rays. She flattens her potatoes for gravy; then the gravy comes to her and she passes it on without taking any. If only Charlotte had come.
“So why was your mother so religious?” Sylvie is asking.
“My mother was never religious,” Aiden says. “She just hung out with the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were always prepared to fight with her.”
“But you never got a Christmas present?”