There was a massive crash in the kitchen that stopped everyone cold.
Silence. And then, weakly, Jerene called out: “Um, no one come in, please.” And after thirty more seconds: “Everything’s under control!”
And then Alma stuck her head in the dining room from the kitchen. “There’s gonna be a slight delay.”
Kate began to get up. “You need any help in there?”
Jerene from within: “NO ONE come here, please. Everything is under control!”
“While my sister is occupied,” Gaston said, now on his feet, “it is time for the decanting of the honorable Gaston Jarvis’s renowned cellar … Why look, a 1989 Lynch-Bages.”
History would show, Bo would conclude looking back, that this delay of an extra hour before dinner led to the horrors ahead. It set up Uncle Gaston in the role of Bacchus, filling the glasses tirelessly. Bo noticed Skip and Jerilyn took possession of their own 2000 Pape-Clément, and Gaston, permitting all, opened up another one, then another one. Bo counted empty bottles on the table … more than nine. Gaston must have had reserves in his car.
Annie exclaimed for all of them, “This is the best wine I have ever put into my mouth.”
Dorrie concurred. “Clearly I have never even had wine, just … grape juice.”
Joshua, the sudden connoisseur, was sucking air through his mouth with a mouth full of wine when he made eye contact with Dorrie and erupted in a laugh, spewing it everywhere on his plate of hors d’oeuvres … and in turn Skip nearly did the same thing, laughing at Josh.
“You know when Jesus turned the water into wine,” Annie began, looking at Kate and Bo, “do you think it was this good? Would miraculous wine taste like this?”
“I’m sure it was sweet Jew-wine, like Manischewitz,” Uncle Gaston suggested. “Speaking of the Levites, how go your real estate dealings, Duke?”
“Um, Mr. Yerevanian is Armenian, I believe.” Duke then raised his glass to Gaston. “I can’t thank you enough, Gaston, for what will prove a profitable introduction. We will, with care and reverence, develop the area around the historic site.”
“The Battle of the Trestle,” Dillard slurred. Bo and Kate had a momentary alarm she was going to pitch forward and pass out into her plate, on her cocktail of painkillers and Meursault-Genevrières.
“The Skirmish at the Trestle, my dear,” Duke smilingly corrected. “We’ll carry on with our historical re-creation next spring, and construction will begin soon after, leaving the site wooded with trails, a cannon or two, something. We’ll solicit some landscape architects for a design for the memorial park.”
Jerene burst in from the kitchen to announce that the goose was out of the oven and cooling; Alma—Bo could hear it—was flash frying the potatoes in the goose fat, ladled from the roasting pan. “Please help yourself to the starters on the server,” she said, despite knowing they had been picking at the bounty for the past two hours. Bo felt he was—well, they all were—too full of wine and starters now to want the dinner ahead.
“Well,” said Dorrie, piping up, “I’m sure my free ancestors had slaves and therefore next summer I want to participate in the Skirmish at the Trestle re-enactment, in complete dress gray. You’ll have to help me, Mr. J.”
Gaston noted, “My dear, there weren’t any women that fought in uniform.”
“I’ll pretend to be a man. Every week at the Harris Teeter the cashier calls me ‘sir’ because of my short haircut, so no one will know the difference.”
“Actually,” Duke said, looking at Gaston, “we re-enactors don’t mind cross-dressing. We don’t discriminate providing you appear to be a man.”
“She makes a good one,” Joshua concurred.
Gaston clapped his hands in pleasure. “You know, I think you’ll make a fine Johnny Reb.”
It was agreed that Josh would fight for the South as well, and they would bring some friends who could be aides-de-camp and slaves—
“Why can’t I be a slave?” Joshua asked. “A white indentured servant?”
“That went out in the 1700s,” Gaston said.
Dorrie nodded. “Maybe a very light-skinned slave who could pass. We might take you to a tanning bed so it’s a little more believable.”
Bo smiled. Dorrie was laughing at Uncle Gaston and his father, mocking them, and they couldn’t even tell.
“And you, Annie,” Dorrie said. “You could wear a big five-petticoat gown and call out after your beau, gone for a soldier.”
“I want no part of your neo-Confederate shamefulness,” said Annie.
Jerene entered with a giant platter of goose, surrounded, as if hiding in its own underbrush, by an array of verdure and vegetables. Everyone applauded. Jerene went around to everyone’s side and they served themselves … just not very much.
“Isn’t anyone hungry after all this wait?” Jerene cried.
“We’ve eaten everything but the candles,” Dillard cried out. Then she laughed drunkenly at her own joke.
“Glad to see someone’s feeling better,” Jerene said, making her way past her sister to Skip and Jerilyn, who also barely took a thing off the platter.
Annie served herself plentifully and began to eat.
“Annie, please wait until everyone is served and grace is said.”
“I’m trying to soak up the wine,” she said, “and whether the preacherman says his magic mumbo jumbo or not, the food will not be any different.”
“It’s not the food that becomes different,” Bo said, now feeling the wine himself. “The hope is that your heart is different. That you take a moment to be appreciative of the blessing that a meal like this is.”
Annie, while chewing, noted, “I am appreciative. Appreciative of this great food, the great wine…” She lifted her glass. “And most of all appreciative that I don’t have to believe in some petulant deity in the clouds who needs to be sucked up to before every meal.”
“That’s enough, Annie,” said Jerene Johnston, taking her seat at the head of the table. “No one’s religious convictions need be dragged into the light. It’s Christmas, after all.”
Did she mean that to be a joke? Annie said, “Good God, Mother is right about something. Pagan, warmed-over Druidical tree worship by way of German animists, celebrated on the birth of the Manichean sun god? For once I agree—Christmas is no occasion to discuss Christianity.”
“I’ll make the grace quick,” said Bo. “Father—”
Kate, oblivious, blurted out, “Annie, you look different.”
Bo could tell his wife was drunk. He decided to soften what seemed like an accusation rather than a compliment. “You do, little sister. Every time I see you now, you look … better, younger.”
“Almost like the billboard,” Joshua said, snickering.
Dorrie whispered something in his ear and they were then both snickering.
“Thanks.” Annie was curt.
“Do blondes have more fun, sweetheart?” Dad was trying to be light.
“I started seeing gray, so I … better blond than gray, I figured—what?” She turned to Dorrie and Joshua who, glassy-eyed with wine, were collapsing in laughter again.
“Nothing,” Joshua said.
“Tell me,” Annie insisted.
“Never mind,” Joshua stammered. “If you did or didn’t do something to your appearance, it’s none of our business…”
Dorrie: “On the billboards—I thought, we thought … We thought it was just Photoshop or something.”
“You want to know if I had work done?” Annie said, putting down her fork. “Like a boob job? I already got the biggest boobs in the family, maybe Aunt Dillie excepted.”
Dillard blanched, her breasts referred to at table; she uttered a low gasp … and reached again for the red wine.
“… oh maybe I might do reduction surgery before these babies go south.”
Jerene, forgoing the grace, began eating and soon they all followed with their first bite.
“No, the face,” Joshua corrected. He then
sucked in his cheeks and pulled back his face to look like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “It’s not just the billboards then, huh, it’s real life.”
“I’ve lost some weight,” Annie began unsurely.
“No one loses weight just in their cheeks,” Uncle Gaston chimed in. “What’s with all the hoo-hah? She looks lovely! Someone stuck a hose in and sucked all the fat out—what’s the big deal?”
“For some reason,” Dorrie mumbled, “I’ve gone off the pimento cheese.”
Mr. Johnston, slurring his speech now, looked very much amused. “Is tha’ what you did, darling? Well, I think it looks marvelous. It’s not dangerous, is it?”
Annie was quiet for a second or two. “Yes, I had some work done. Thanks to the genes contributed by two people at this table who will remain nameless, I looked saggy and forty-four years old at thirty-four and I thought who would buy a home from such a deteriorated old broad…”
“You looked fine the way you were,” her mother said. “Perhaps a bit heavy but you seem to be losing.”
“Thanks for that, Mom. I hadn’t noticed I have a weight problem—which, scientific research is now showing, is also a genetic predisposition, so thanks for that, too.”
“I’d be the size of a barn,” said Jerene, “if I didn’t watch what I eat. That’s all there is to it.”
Dillard: “No, you wouldn’t, Jerry—you’ve always been a stick. Annie’s right—it’s the fat gene. Once you’ve got it you have to have a will of iron not to get fat, and if you get a set of those genes from both sides of your family, you’re doomed. Like me.” She gulped another swallow of wine. “Who knows how my life would have gone if I wasn’t hectored night and day by my mother not to be fat, don’t eat, don’t even think about food or no man would have you. And Father…”
Gaston weighed in. “If this were forty years ago at the Jarvis dinner table, Father would be drunk by now and looking for someone to hit; Mother would be letting him do it, blaming us for provoking him. Who of us three ever heard a kind word from our parents?”
Jerene was stern. “It is not forty years ago, and that is another topic which can be added to the forbidden list. Why would we want to remember those godawful Christmases at home when all of us, even you, Dillard, have life so much better? Now someone pass the pumpernickel rolls.”
Annie mumbled, still burning from having to confess to the vanity of her face-lift. “That’s the Johnston M.O. Sweep it all under the rug.”
“That’s what rugs are for, sweetheart,” said her father. “Some butter, Jerene?”
“No, thank you.” And after a beat. “Watching my waistline.”
“I think,” Kate offered, trying to smooth over her opening the topic in the first place, “Annie, that you look great, procedure or no procedure. They can do anything now, so why not?”
“So you don’t think it’s wrong, condemned in the eyes of the God you serve, for me to have an augmentation or two of this body, this temple of the Lord?”
“Of course not.”
“So it’s my body, my choice to do with it what I wish.”
Kate saw where this chute was leading. “Aside from Ecclesiastes reminding us that ‘All is vanity,’ I can’t imagine much spiritual harm in cosmetic surgery, unless it takes over your life.”
Dorrie said, “Promise you’ll stop before the Michael Jackson limit is achieved.”
Joshua: “Who is that society lady in New York who took it too far?” Joshua enacted his Norma Desmond stretched-face demonstration again.
“I’ve always hated how one’s hands age,” said Jerene. “When they can figure out how to keep hands young, I’ll sign up for that.”
“Amen, sister,” said Aunt Dillard, holding out her own liver-spotted hands. “And these ridiculous drugs I’m on weaken the liver and make the spotting worse, I’m sure—”
“That’s good,” Annie continued, “because I never really am sure what your position is, Kate, on women’s control of their own bodies these days. It seems in our previous discussions you want it both ways—”
“It’s a nuanced position so, perhaps, you won’t be able to understand it,” Kate began, as Bo nudged her with his leg under the table. “I am pro-choice but very much anti-abortion.”
Annie: “So … you know that desperate and poor women will have abortions but you want to reserve the right to moralize about their choice.”
Gaston settled back in his chair and laced his hands on his belly, as if enjoying a spectator sport. Dorrie and Joshua looked at each other, as if to say Now we’re in for something.
“No moralizing afterward, of course. But some strong counseling beforehand.”
“So the Christians who gather at Planned Parenthood clinics to throw blood and yell murderer only differ with you in … in method.”
“They disagree with me in more than method for what they’re doing isn’t humane or Christian, and as I said but you steadfastly year in and year out refuse to hear, I am—” Kate hiccupped, inconveniently. “I am pro-choice, because I think there are situations that it is better not to bring a child into—”
“Speaking of children,” Jerene interrupted, just as determined as the women were to have this conversation that it not be had. “I note another Christmas come and gone without any grandchildren.”
Skip popped up to say he and Jerilyn were working on it. Then Jerilyn swatted his arm with a sharp look of disgust. When she moved her arm back she knocked over her water.
“Oh fuck,” she said.
“Jerilyn, my land!” said Jerene. Skip and Jerilyn piled on their napkins to soak up the water.
Gaston said, “I think there’s quite enough infantile behavior without another generation of squalling brats brought into the world. I’m anti-children. I think the Jarvis line should crawl moribund to its whimpering finale—can’t speak for the Johnstons. Diapers, four A.M. feedings, kids turning out to be monsters, and the spectacle of them screwing up as adults while the loved ones watch the serial fiascoes. I’d be happy to provide money for any and all abortions, just give your ol’ Uncle Gaston a call—”
Dillard: “You’ve just become so horrible, Gaston. That’s the kind of thing Daddy would say.”
Kate wasn’t through. “I’m an army brat, as you know, up from a military trailer park in Fayetteville, North Carolina, outside of Fort Bragg. I saw desperation there—desperation in women’s lives you can only imagine, Annie, although I suspect you can’t imagine it. Real difficult, impossible situations poor women find themselves in. With my mom dead of cancer when I was sixteen, and my father out of the picture, signing up for endless rotations of overseas duty, I ended up working part-time and living in the Cumberland County Women’s Shelter…”
Bo looked at his mother who regarded her daughter-in-law with a half-smile he had seen before. He could read his mother’s mind perfectly. Kate had committed the unpardonable sin, which was not bringing up unsavory topics or having cumulatively drunk a bottle of wine to become thin-skinned and emotional. No, she had shone a light on class, reminded everyone at the table of their privilege and wealth. He could hear his mother thinking, It’s all well and good you came from nothing and married into something but you are not to carry the nothingness with you, drag it into our house when we have lifted you up, brought you forward. The past, and all that is low and sordid, is to be locked in the vault—just as we have no interest in reliving what transpired in the tyrannical homeplace of my upbringing, with my alcoholic father and enabling mother. But then Kate did not support Jerene Johnston’s under-the-carpet sweeping, her codes and strictures; he suspected his wife really didn’t like her mother-in-law, even if she admired a certain fortitude about her. Maybe her feud with Annie was a substitute for the feud she dare not have with his mother.
“… and in the shelter,” Kate went on, “every day presented any number of bloodcurdling scenarios, for which sometimes the only answer was an abortion, yes.” Kate had a catch in her voice, and Bo had a horrified sense wh
ere this speech was headed.
Bo burst out, “Oh God, leave it alone, Kate!”
“I will not, it’s important that we talk about this.”
He felt a tide overtake him, saying intemperately what he would not say, had not said to her in private, now at the dinner table in front of the people he would least like to hear him say it. “Why can’t you let this topic go? It’s just like at church where they hate our guts because you cannot stop giving your complete exhaustive opinion when it’s not appropriate. The Women’s Circle and you going on about protesting the war, and they have sons in the military but your opinion just has to keep coming. You’re as bad as Annie in your way—”
Annie: “Shut up, Bo. I love talking to Kate—she’s the only one who’ll talk about anything real in this whole family!”
Bo snapped back, “You don’t like talking to Kate, you want to annihilate her rhetorically, like you do all of us. We all get to be crushed under the weight of your critical opinion no matter what we do. Forgive me if I don’t think your life has cornered the market on perfection.” Bo hopelessly deflected his temper to Annie but he knew he had done damage to Kate, and wished he could be alone with her.
“Oh I don’t claim to be perfect, but I’d put my work over your work any day, preacherman, for the betterment of the community. I have put hundreds of Hispanic families, first-generation immigrants, middle-class blacks who’ve been shafted by the racist banking machine into their first homes, at affordable mortgages. You should see the tears of joy when they turn the key to their new homes. Out of the housing projects or the trailer parks and into a fine new home with their family—do you do anything on that level for people? Just stirring around the old lies and myths and three-thousand-year-old commandments about making graven images and thou shalt nots.”
Kate, pointing to Annie with her wineglass: “Look, sister, you don’t have the swightest—slightest li’l idea what ministering to a congregation entails. And you’ll note we don’t get rich off it, driving around in a sixty-thousand-dollar car for all our good deeds.”
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