After five minutes of this racket, I emerged. Regina’s family looked extremely concerned. I reassured them. “No big deal,” I said. “I thought I was going to throw up, but I didn’t.”
A Jew had joined the family.
Over the years, a pattern developed. I would say or do something horribly obnoxious and offensive to Regina’s mother. Regina’s brother, Brett, who’d been a fullback at Auburn until he’d blown out his knee, would make a comment or two demeaning my manhood. My mother-in-law would get mad at Brett for accidentally dropping something down the garbage disposal. And the painted ponies went up and down. Though I cared about Christmas about as much as I cared about water polo, I wanted to show my new family that I could adapt.
By 2004, Regina and I had been married four and a half years. I was the father of a toddler. By degrees, I’d become a man. And on Christmas, a man cooks his ham.
I took my ham out of its bag as soon as I got it back to the house. It was majestic, but also kind of disturbing. I’d expected something bright pink that was ready for immediate consumption. This thing looked like it had just been unearthed in an archeological dig.
“There’s a lot of fat,” I said.
Regina, who’d been dealing with hams her whole life, shook her head.
Smithfields were very salty, or so I’d read. I filled the kitchen sink with water. Gingerly, I lowered my prize and went upstairs to hide from my mother-inlaw. A few minutes later, she knocked.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Yes?” I said.
“Why is that ham sitting in my sink?”
“It’s soaking.”
“Don’t you need water for something to soak?”
No! The sink couldn’t have drained! Stupid cheap sink! I needed every minute until that ham went into the oven. It had to be the perfect ham.
I soared down the stairs and into the kitchen. This time, I slammed the stopper down hard. I rubbed the ham. A little chunk of slimy fat lodged between my fingers. Eww, I thought. No, I corrected myself. Not eww. This is how hams are supposed to behave.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” I said.
Regina entered the kitchen.
“Are you giving that ham a massage?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It needs me.”
That Christmas, my mother-in-law had finally moved, but we had other problems. An epic ice storm hit Nashville, hemming us all into her town house, which would have been cozy and easily escapable in good weather but now had started to resemble Cell BlockH, with a toddler. The ham became a point of contention.
“That’s too big for my oven,” my mother-in-law said.
“No it’s not,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It is. I don’t have a pot big enough to cook it in.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
“I’m worried that it’ll be too salty,” she said.
“I’m soaking it,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“I really don’t see how you’re going to cook it.”
“Listen here,” I said. “I bought this ham and I am going to cook it!”
“Don’t get mad at my mom,” Regina said. “She’s just trying to help.”
Later, under my breath, I said to Regina, “She’s not trying to help. She’s trying to ruin my ham. I know she doesn’t want to eat it. I know that none of you does. But I’m making this ham and no one is going to stop me. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
“Mommy, Daddy,” Elijah said. “Pick me up!”
“Just a second, honey,” I said. “Daddy has to soak his ham.”
That evening, as I continued to massage my ham in its cold-water bath, I accidentally got into a conversation with my mother-in-law about faith. She suspected that there was a secular humanist in her midst. I tried to dodge.
“You don’t really practice, do you?” she said.
“Well, um, uh, well, uh, not really, but I still observe the holidays for Elijah, because I think it’s, uh, good for him to, um, know traditions and all. We light Hanukkah candles and have Passover dinner.”
“Eventually y’all are going to have to make a decision.”
“I think that if we raise him knowing about a lot of different faiths, it’ll be fine,” I said. “I kind of think of it as an education in comparative religion.”
By the look on her face, I might as well have told her that I will raise my son to believe that Satan is King.
That night, my son sensed that the golden day was drawing near. I desperately tried to be a good dad on Christmas.
“Santa outside!” he said.
“Soon,” I said.
“Elijah see Santa!” he said.
“Santa will come while you’re sleeping,” I said.
Regina had found a forty-year-old Little Golden Book edition of The Night Before Christmas. I read it to Elijah as a bedtime story, taking time between verses to stop him from drinking a bottle of Nana’s Wite-Out. He went to sleep at seven, but at eight we heard him rumbling. I went in.
“Elijah miss Santa Claus,” he said.
“No you didn’t,” I said. “He’s not here.”
“Elijah want open presents from Santa!”
“Elijah,” I said. “You have to go to sleep, or Santa won’t bring you any presents. He’ll bring them while you’re sleeping.”
“Waaaaah!” he said. “Santa!”
Regina had taken to bed again with her evil stomach bacteria. I was baking her yearly batch of oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies. I decided I could do anything in the kitchen.
“Daddy’s making cookies for Santa,” I said.
“Santa eat Daddy cookies!” said Elijah.
“That’s right,” I said. “Now can you go to sleep like a good boy?”
“Yeah,” he said.
So I went downstairs and lovingly mixed up the batter and put it in the oven while my mother-in-law watched Law and Order in the next room, petting her ancient, bitter cat, obviously wanting me out of her space. Believe me, I wanted out, too. The cookies got done and they were delicious. I put half a cookie and some crumbs on a plate, and put a little soy milk in a plastic cup, covering it with foil so the cat wouldn’t spill it overnight. Then I put the plate and cup by the fireplace.
“So Elijah can see it when he wakes up,” I said.
“Isn’t that sweet?” my mother-in-law said.
I’ve never believed in Santa. He wasn’t a presence in my childhood. But why shouldn’t Elijah? The kid was two, for God’s sake. What kind of dad doesn’t let his kid believe in Santa Claus?
“Mmm,” I said. “These cookies are good.”
In the sink, my ham soaked in its seventh change of water.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “you’re gonna shine.”
The recipe called for me to bake the ham in the oven for three hours plus in a roasting pan, wrapped in foil with four cups of water. Regina did the foil wrapping and the water pouring.
“Shit!” she said.
“What?” I said.
“The water keeps coming out onto the pan. Why didn’t you get heavy-duty foil?”
I gritted my teeth.
“Because,” I said, “no one told me to.”
“Everyone knows you cook ham in heavy-duty foil.”
“I don’t even know what heavy-duty foil is.”
Dinner arrived soon enough. The audience for my ham included: my mother- and sister-in-law, both of whom eat like rabbits that can’t wait to get to the gym; my wife, who had the aforementioned nasty stomach bacteria; my five-year-old nephew, Westlund, and newborn niece, Mackensie (Note: These are not Jewish names); Elijah; my brother-in-law; and me. The ham came out of the oven. Expecting something magnificent, I unfolded the heavy-duty foil that we’d picked up from Walgreens at the eleventh hour. The ham looked slimy and unappealing, like something on a veterinarian’s autopsy table. I spent forty-five minutes trimming off just enough fat to make it edible. And then I tried to make red-eye gravy, which just tasted like smo
ky water. My sister-in-law added extra coffee, and then it tasted like smoky, watery coffee.
The ham was very, very, very, very, very salty. I might as well have rubbed a salt lick in bacon fat and set it on the table.
“This is delicious,” said my sister-in-law, as she ate other things.
Regina and I cook all the time, and often with great success. But the ham tasted vile. After dinner, we had thirty pounds of it left. We tried to pawn some of it off on my relatives.
“We don’t really eat stuff that’s already been cured,” Brett said. “So it would be wasted on us.”
There are moments when a man sees himself clearly. That was, for me, one of those moments. I felt my heart disintegrate.
It wouldn’t do for me to throw ninety percent of my prize ham into the trash, so I started carving off the bone. I carved and carved. My wrists ached worse than after my typical four-hour workday.
“I’m done,” I said.
My mother-in-law turned the ham over.
“You’ve still got half a ham to go,” she said.
Regina and I took almost all the ham home with us on the airplane. For two days, it sat in the refrigerator. Then we froze it. One morning, I said, “Let’s have ham and eggs.”
We got a serving of ham out of the freezer. The fat had coagulated into thick yellow globules. We looked at it, and looked at each other. And I threw the bag into the trash.
“Next year,” I said, “we’re making lasagne.”
RUM BALLS
Roger Director
Every Christmas, thousands of wealthy Americans open their houses to some of the country’s most ragged, foul-smelling scum—their child’s college friends. These are individuals who, if they even got past the security gate would normally have been torn to bits by guard dogs, and yet they must be housed and dined simply because they share a bathroom or a classroom or a sexually transmitted disease with Junior.
If you’re the friend being invited, you’ve spent at least a semester hearing how screwed-up your friend’s parents are, and telling your friend how screwed-up yours are, and now you get to see for yourself. What better time than Christmas to watch a family at its most dysfunctional? This is when all Christians torture themselves trying to have a Christmas just like one they never had in the first place. What is that, if not mass delusion?
But this doesn’t befall everybody. Some escape. Being Jewish helps.
I didn’t know whether or not Penelope Gund was devout about Christmas when I was invited to spend the holiday at her home, but I knew she was the most un-Jewish person I’d met in two years at college.
The reason I was going was simple. I had a car; Penelope was taking her girlfriend Ryan back home for Christmas, and neither had wheels.
Ryan was a vivid freshman from Seattle whom Penelope had encountered at her first Bryn Mawr tea. Penelope was tall and tapered as a carrot and looked out over her granny glasses as if she didn’t care about a thing, whereas Ryan counted any day as bad during which for one second she had ceased pursuing her ambition to make an original contribution to mankind. She wanted to create so many new vaccines they’d have to invent new diseases.
I’d had Ryan in my sights since I met her. Now was my chance. I had a car. I would achieve a singular ascent in her esteem by making myself impossible to avoid. Lately, Ryan had been ingeniously evasive. For the past week, she’d begun altering her schedule and her movements—never in her library carrel after dinner; taking the West exit from the dining hall instead of the East—ever since, during a late-night study session for an art history test, I’d said, “If I have to look at any more of these fat, little Jesus babies, I’ll stab myself in the head.” She looked at me with one of those frowns that said I carelessly just had.
My nineteen-year-old logic dictated that the inability to avoid me would result in Ryan wanting to have sex. My plan had this working for it: Penelope had said she lived in “a small place” in Tunbridge, Vermont, and I pictured overloaded, haphazard sleeping arrangements that might induce Ryan to get a little less chilly.
Penelope’s boyfriend was coming, too. Jim. He was the biggest Christian I’d ever met. Literally. He weighed about 375 pounds. And he was an African from the West Indies. He was about six feet two inches square, with wavy hair that fell down way below his shoulders and an unkempt black goatee. He looked like a giant walking groin. Watching Penelope’s parents and four sisters meet Jim was going to be great theater. Ryan and I could only bond over that spectacle.
Penelope’s house stood at the end of a long drive between rows of sugar maples. “Small” turned out to be what folks of Penelope’s ilk called “a pile”—three stories’ worth. There were outbuildings. Real outbuildings. The only building I’d ever been in that started with the word out had no plumbing. Penelope’s “little” home in Vermont was, in fact, a compound.
James, Ryan, and I stretched and rubbed our arms and squinted at our own frosty breath and gaped at the tree-spired horizon while Penelope rapped on the red front door and glanced down at a heap of her younger sisters’ L.L.Bean snow boots.
Mrs. Gund turned out to be a stale-looking smaller version of Penelope. Her eyes rounded with cheer at the sight of her eldest daughter. The four younger sisters floated like sylphs toward the entrance, as if carried on a waft of cinnamon and clove spice and Christmas cookie baking.
In other words, this was the Christmas tableau you’d see spinning around on the metal greeting card carousel at the local pharmacy while you were waiting on line to buy a condom.
“Are you ready for the shit to hit the fan?” I asked James.
“For what?” James said. He was drawing a blank. Which is why I loved James so much. No matter his appearance, he walked with innocence.
Mrs. Gund had never greeted anyone at her red front door who was wearing a dashiki, not to mention one the size of a termite tarp. Maybe that’s why she held out her hand to me and said, “I’ve heard so much about you, James.”
“Mother, this is James,” Penelope quickly corrected, redirecting her mother’s attention.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Gund,” James said, like the proper Groton grad he was.
Mrs. Gund was soon back in the kitchen looking even staler than before, marinating her holiday specialty—bunny rabbit. Hopping had always been a disqualifier for me when I got to noodling the merits of food I loved. But this was Christmas. Mrs. Gund was also rolling out “rum balls” according to the recipe of an old aunt Audrey in Auburn, Alabama.
Meanwhile, James engaged the sisters, Avery, Anthea, Sally, and Jen. When he sat, his thighs became park benches. They took turns. Ten-year-old Avery perched on James’s vast lap, and he joked, “What do you want for Christmas, little girl?” and we all laughed because he was the perfect Santa.
Penelope’s father, Errol, was away at “the kingdom,” which, Penelope explained, was a swatch of hillside ten miles away where he intended to build a new Valhalla.
“Everyone’s got to see ‘the kingdom,’” she said. “Dad stands there and takes a deep breath and looks out. ‘Nothing but splendor. Far as the eye can see,’ he says.” Penelope used her dad’s deep voice and imitated the majestic wave of his arm.
Since retiring from the State Department, Errol Gund spent most of his time at “the kingdom.” Even though (as I instantly saw after, when we emerged from the woods) there was nothing there. At least, nothing visible to maintain. There was just Mr. Gund standing at the northwest corner of a stony, fifty-acre meadow that faced the Connecticut River Valley. Mr. Gund had a barrel chest and a chalky face and a noticeable overbite. He held a coffee mug, but the twist he gave his mouth every time he took a sip seemed to say he was experiencing something other than caffeine. A series of unfinished wood pegs were driven into the ground near his feet. Slender red string wound around them.
Errol Gund was standing in what would one day be his living room when Mrs. Gund said, “This is James.” Mr. Gund blinked and looked down at his pegs.
“Welcome to the kingdom, James,” Mr. Gund said.
“Thank you, Mr. Gund. It’s quite beautiful,” James said like the proper doctor’s son he was.
Everyone thought it was beautiful. Ryan shouted, “Merry Christmas!” and bounded downhill into the wind, in a gleeful, free-spirited gambol. She glanced over her shoulder, straight back at me. I realized maybe she expected me to take off with her, to gambol downhill alongside in ecstatic, liberated communion.
I didn’t. I wasn’t much of a gamboler.
Before dinner, Mr. Gund lifted his glass and, from memory, chanted in Old English what he said was a thousand-year-old wassail toast, something straight out of Beowulf:
“Wealhoeo malpelode, heo fore paem werede spraec…”
After rabbit stew, we sat by the fire, Penelope’s father in a pale yellow, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and tan cuffed pants. He’d brought his glass from the table. And a tray of Mrs. Gund’s special holiday rum balls.
I tried one of them. Mainly out of politeness. I gagged. It was all I could do to keep the eyeballs in my head. On my list of favorite spherical foods, they’d go way below matzah balls and meatballs. Mr. Gund popped them like Raisinets.
Two white sofas flanked the mantel, from which Christmas stockings hung. Mr. Gund and James sat opposite each other. Penelope involved herself in prodding and poking the logs. Her mother sat at the end of the couch closest to her. Mrs. Gund clasped some creased, stained song sheets for carols she intended for us all to sing. “I’m so happy you made it home for Christmas,” she told Penelope with tears in her eyes.
Ryan examined the Christmas tree, taken right off the kingdom’s own land. Ryan admired the ornaments, old and handmade.
“We have one back home in Seattle. It’s this hollowed-out sort of giant acorn with the Magi in it. It’s been in my mother’s family for generations. It was on her mother’s tree. It was on her grandmother’s tree. And it was on her great-grandmother’s tree.”
“There’s something about a beautiful old ornament like that,” I said, realizing I had no idea, yet hoping I didn’t sound too much that way. But Ryan didn’t seem to mind. She was warming to me. She liked telling me about her old Christmas tree ornaments. We paused to appreciate the crackling fire.
The Worst Noel Page 12