Cleaving (21 page)

Josh grabs my hand. "Let me see."

Again I'm submitting to inspection, again my wrist is being turned back and forth under peering eyes.

"Dude, your hand's fucked up."

"A little," I admit. "It's okay. It was fine for a while. I'm just getting a little tired."

"Well, then sit the fuck down and rest, brain trust."

"I'm almost done with this--"

Jessica, who always overhears, has come over and is looking at my wrist too. "Has this been going on long? Have you tried
massage? Acupuncture really works, too."

"I haven't tried anything. It'll be fine."

"Well, if you wind up suing us for workers' comp--"

"Oh, please, I'm not going to
sue
you."

"No, I know, but you know what I'm saying. Sit. Have some soup. Get some ice on that."

Josh very nearly throws me into a chair. "No way you're working anymore today."

"It's fine. Look, it's not even two, and you guys are going to need help with the--"

"You think you're going to win this argument?" Josh flutters his blue eyes at me. "How
cute
."

Sighing, I submit to Josh and Jessica's smart-assed version of solicitude. I get my mug of soup, sit at the table in back,
will the feeling to return to my crippled limb. But they're right, everybody's right. My hand has given notice.

"Look, you oughta go spend the day with the fam anyway. Decorate trees, drink nog, do what you people do."

Resistance, I now realize, is futile. Besides, maybe Josh is right. I should not be hiding on Christmas Eve eve.

Wait. Not hiding. Working.
I shouldn't be working,
is what I meant.

"Oh, fine. Fine. So you guys coming by for dinner tomorrow?"

"Got nothing better to do, sure. What should we bring?"

"Oh, the usual. Booze. Snacking accessories."

"Sounds good. And Steph and Matt coming with? That cool?" Stephanie and Matt are old friends of Josh and Jess, a couple who
own a house up here and come from the city every weekend. Since I'm usually up during the week, our schedules thus completely
opposed, I have met them only once or twice.

"Sure. More the merrier. Jesse already said he's coming for sure." I've invited everyone in the shop. I've already posted
a map and directions, scrawled out on a big sheet of butcher paper in red Sharpie and stuck up on the wall with masking tape.
"And what about you, Juan?" I call, raising my voice to reach the kitchen. "You in?"

"What?"

"My house? Tomorrow?"

Juan wipes his hands on a white terry-cloth towel. He's elbow-deep in dishes. "I'll try."

"You can get a ride with us," Josh offers.

"Or me," adds Jesse from the counter. "Your place is right on my way."

"Yeah, okay. I'll try. Thanks."

I
HEAD
back to my apartment with my enormous paper-wrapped pork roast and six pounds of lamb stew meat. Rob meets me at the top
of the stairs with his usual casual interest, but a "Hello?" reveals that Eric isn't around. No doubt helping my folks with
groceries, tree shopping, or some such. I've left him a text or two, but haven't heard back. I wedge my meat into the refrigerator
with some difficulty, fill a bag with ice, and lie down for a bit. Robert the Dog pulls himself heavily up onto the bed at
my feet, as he always does when it gets cold. I should really make him get down, but I don't.

"Julie? You here?"

When I open my eyes again with some alarm, the room has gone dim with evening. Of course the sun is setting early these days,
but I must have slept, I don't know, three hours at least. My ice pack has melted into a Ziploc of cool water. I sit up with
a guilty start, much as I do the mornings after I black out and can't quite recall how the night before ended or if I did
something stupid like drunk-dial my ex-lover or get into some teary fight with my husband. "I'm here, yeah."

Eric walks into the bedroom, bundled up in his coat. "You sleeping? We didn't know where you were."

"Sorry. I texted you."

"Ah. I let my phone run down. Crap service up here anyway."

"Yeah, I figured." Rob and I both climb out of bed, both of us creakily. My wrist is still pinging away.

"Well, we got the tree. And stuff for cooking. Talking about just going out tonight."

"Going out? Where?"

"I thought you'd have some suggestions."

"There is fuck-all around here. You can barely get pizza delivered."

"We'll figure something out. Anyway, we should go down to the cottage. Tree decorating and nog."

"Yup, yup, yup..." I'm still in my meat clothes, sticky, stinking T-shirt and jeans. "I don't guess I have time to take a shower.
What time is it?"

"Go ahead and take one if you want. It's five thirty. We'll have to figure out a dinner plan, I guess." Eric's squatting to
give Robert his belly rub. Utterly unfairly, I am sometimes annoyed by the attention Eric offers our dog. I try to transform
it into affectionate exasperation. "You spoil that dog--"

"Everybody needs a good belly rub. Don't they need a belly rub? Don't they need a belly rub?" His nose is up against Robert's,
play-growling as the dog snorts blissfully.

"Should we feed him here or there?"

"I'll feed him. You getting into the shower?"

"Nah. Oh, yeah. I guess. Blar."

Eric stands at last and brushes the dog hair off his jeans. "Where did that come from, 'blar'? You say that all the time.
It's weird."

God, marriage is a strange thing. Everything clear, nothing said.

"I don't know. Just picked it up somewhere."

I know exactly why Eric is asking me this. He knows I know. My vaguely defiant tone is the closest we will get to a discussion
of the fact that he thinks I picked it up from D. (Which I didn't, as it happens, but all new vocabulary not part of the official
marriage jargon is immediately suspect.)

"Well, I'll feed this one. Shower will make you feel better, maybe."

"Maybe." I strip down, throw the dirty clothes in the general direction of the duffel bag I live out of when I'm up here.
We have always been casually naked around each other, slept in the nude, wandered the house without a stitch on. Long ago,
I used to think it was a mark of our sexy, adult coupledom. Now I fear we're just completely immune to the sight of each other's
bare skin. I don't even merit a second glance; Eric heads to the kitchen, Robert following with pricked-up ears, while I go
into the bathroom.

It takes the water forever to get warm.

D
INNER IS
some pasta with store-bought sauce we dig up in the pantry. The tree is a funky-looking thing with bald spots and a crooked
trunk, just the way we like it in our family. Mom has decided she doesn't want to get pine needles all over the carpet--not
sure why we didn't think of this before--so we wind up putting the tree on the front porch, adorning it with the lights, tinsel,
and the sparse decorations I've brought up from where they usually live in our storage unit in the city. We huddle around
in our coats, squeezing between the branches and the side of the house to get the decorations hung. When it's done it's rather
lovely, if odd. Ten minutes later as we're sitting down to dinner it blows down in the wind, and Dad and my brother spend
another twenty minutes securing it to the porch beams and handrail with twine.

Christmas Eve Day is, as usual with my mom and me, spent in the kitchen. While the boys--Dad, my brother, Eric, and Robert--toss
around a football in the front yard, I roast poblano peppers over the gas flame of the stove, brown lamb stew meat in bacon
fat and olive oil. Mom toasts pecans in the oven, crumbles up the corn bread that needs to be thoroughly dry by tomorrow for
the crown roast's stuffing. I hold ice to my wrist, which again kept me awake through the night. I stared at the ceiling,
listening to Eric's and Rob's contrapuntal snores, as tears leaked down into my ears for no particular, immediate reason.

Jesse is the first guest to arrive, by quite a few hours.

"Hey, I like your tree! I haven't had a Christmas tree for years."

"Yeah, well, we'll just be lucky if it doesn't blow down again. Where's Juan?"

"He wasn't answering his phone."

If I'm honest, I hadn't really expected him to come, but it's still a disappointment. I've not expressed this to anyone, but
I'd gotten sort of set on having everyone from Fleisher's there. "Ah well, come on in. Want something to drink? We got wine,
eggnog, booze of all description... water?"

"Eggnog sounds great. And some water too, actually."

"Come on in. We're still cooking, of course."

"Of course."

Jesse is just exactly like he is at the shop--a little slow-moving, quiet, engaging. He offers to help, and within minutes
my mother has him tearing up slices of bread and they are chatting about gerrymandering and the Democrats' chances for the
2008 election.

By nightfall the rest of the gang--Josh and Jessica with Stephanie and Matt, and another of their friends, Jordan--has found
us, after a bit of searching and a nasty incident involving a U-turn gone wrong on a patch of ice and a resultant churned-up
mess of mud on a stranger's front lawn. The lamb chili stew and some mulled wine are both bubbling away on the stove, filling
the cottage with their aromas. Robert is behind the bench out on the stairwell, and the small house is so full of people that
there is always someone to give him pats, until eventually, after enough drinks and the persuasions of a bunch of people who
are not so keenly aware as everyone in my family is of the landlady's "no pets" rule, and of, in general, all the dangerous
ways there are to step on other people's toes and take up more than his fair share of space in the world, he's released to
roam the house.

The stew is delicious and potently spicy. It is a dish that Mom and I make often, though generally only for family or Texas
expats, as most of my New York friends are sensitive to heat--but I knew this crowd could take it, and they can.

"This is fantastic, Kay," Jessica tells my mom, and the sentiment is echoed by a chorus of agreement so effusive as to fall
on my family's ears, we who are so chary of compliments, as obscurely insincere. I know that insincere is the last thing these
people are, and, as exquisitely sensitive as I am to the tiny vibrations of mood and secret thought of every member of my
family, most especially my mother, I can't relax for knowing that she doesn't quite see this. My brother, never a spurting
fountain of conversation, has gone almost perfectly silent and, while attentive to the flow of talk, has that tiny half smile
and the slightly shaded eyes that tell me he's got his bullshit meter out and is scanning the beach, listening for that telltale
quickening tick. My mother has a version of the same shadow in her eyes--they are so alike, my mother and brother--though she
never stops talking. My mother is a woman who could converse with a goat, who is found universally charming even when she's
thinking mean thoughts, which she does from time to time. Her failure to respond to Josh and Jessica, Stephanie and Matt and
Jordan, as instantly and warmly as I have, irritates me.

But after all, these five are old friends; they bring their entire history into the house with them, a history that makes
them ebullient together, loud and bursting with inside jokes and stories that then have to be explained. It makes the cottage
feel more crowded than it is. As much as I've been looking forward to this meal, to introducing my butchering family to my
blood kin, I can understand why the fit is a little awkward, why my polite, sardonic, retiring relatives are a little bowled
over by this walking circus of a group. And on Christmas Eve, designated "family time." It is making my mom prickly, I can
feel it, though of course she would never betray that to guests. Later, when I ask her opinion of them, it will turn out,
as I suspected, that Jesse is the only one she's entirely one hundred percent on. Of Josh and Jessica she will say, "They're
very nice. And I like anybody who likes you as much as they obviously do. They are a little, well, New Yorky." She doesn't
even realize what it is that "New Yorky" implies. I will be embarrassed, and angry, and will start to argue, then let it slide
because what's the point, really, except that having my mother not love what and who I love, just as much as I love them,
disturbs me more than it should.

Shortly after D moves back to New York, before he's gotten me into bed but after I've begun to suspect that that's where it's
heading, if I'm not careful, my parents come to town for a visit. As usual, theater, expensive meals, and lots of booze are
the prime activities on the menu. I've bought us tickets to see Mary-Louise Parker in a revival of
Reckless,
and I made us reservations for after at L'Impero. We wind up with an extra ticket. And so I invite D. Natural enough, I tell
myself. Officially speaking, he is now Eric's and my friend
.

Of course what I'm doing is presenting him for approval. And the jury is definitely out on that. Hell, he even sets my bullshit
meter ticking, like he's walking around with a scoop of yellowcake in his coat
.

"I can't stand Scorsese." (My mother often makes pronouncements like this. She can work herself into a rage at any mention
of, say, Nicole Kidman--"She looks like a lab rat!"--for years on end, and then all of a sudden the actress will be good in
something or get dumped by her insane cyborg first husband, and all of a sudden Mom will not only do a complete one-eighty,
but will also claim to never have felt any way but positively about the lovely girl. It's rather charming, actually, and something
of a family joke, these violently held opinions, hilarious except when one finds oneself in a screaming match about Bill Murray
or getting a frying pan thrown at one's head over a fine point of evolutionary theory.)

"Sure you can."

"No, I really hate him
. Taxi Driver
? Fucking
Goodfellas
? Overrated, macho crap."