Merry Random Christmas

by Julia Kent

  And a showdown between my mother and Madge qualified.

  Trevor poured a cup of coffee and watched my mom and the old waitress. I faced him and tried to catch his eye. He looked at Darla instead, who shot him a grin and rallied.

  Great. Nothing like bloodsport to cheer up our girlfriend. Darla would have fit in under Caligula’s reign.

  “Are you deaf, or does all the Botox you pump into those veins bunch up in your ears and block your hearing?” Madge said to my mom, who inhaled sharply.

  If I turned around, I would become a pillar of salt. I knew it. Instead, I moved slowly toward Darla’s side of the booth and slid in next to her, careful to move slowly lest I catch the attention of a predator.

  Using peripheral vision, I watched the two of them face each other, Madge’s cat-butt mouth twisted with what I thought was a smile. Mom’s eyebrows were raised. Yeah, they were. It didn’t look like it, but they were.

  My mom put her hand up to her ear and cupped it. “I’m so sorry. I can’t hear you over the sound of your nipples dragging on the ground, like fingernails on a chalkboard. You used them to dig the trenches for the original Boston subway system, right?”

  “Ewww,” Darla and I said in unison. Trevor’s eyes flicked down to look at Madge’s chest, and he shuddered.

  Madge’s face split into a smile. Either that, or it tore wide open, like a mummy’s arm being exposed to sunlight.

  “Jesus, Joanne, how long’s it been?”

  The two hugged.

  I caught Trevor’s eye. “What the fuck did you slip us?”

  “Huh?”

  “I must be high as a kite, and it’s got to be your fault, because my mother and Madge are next to us, insulting each other and hugging, which can only mean one thing.”

  “What?” Darla asked, her eyes still on the huggers.

  “Trevor slipped us a bunch of bad shrooms and this is all just part of some drug-induced dream.”

  Darla shoved a long-handled spoon into a peppermint ice-cream sundae and stuffed half a scoop of ice cream in her mouth. “Tasty delusion,” she muttered around the lump on her tongue.

  “Twenty-five years,” Mom answered Madge, rolling her eyes up to pull the exact time frame from memory. “When we lived in that little hovel a few blocks away and Herb and I were managing Joey’s medical issues.”

  Madge’s eyes went troubled, the skin bagging around them like a loose elephant’s pelt. She turned to me. “Joey. Baby Joey.” She smacked her forehead. “You mean this little uptight asshole is baby Joey?”

  Trevor grinned at me.

  “This is better than any peyote I’ve ever eaten,” he said, digging in to share Darla’s sundae.

  I flipped him the middle finger.

  He stuck an onion ring on it.

  Darla

  As if the night couldn’t get any fucking weirder, there I was, sitting in Jeddy’s, stuffing my face with a peppermint sundae and more fried food than my Uncle Mike can eat in a week, and Joe’s mom turns out to be bitchy besties with Madge.

  Madge!

  I fully expected most of the booths to empty, for driverless cars to crash, and for me to be left behind (duh) as the Rapture took the chosen, for the end was definitely fucking nigh.

  “Ignore them,” Joe ordered. He opened his mouth to ask me a series of questions that I knew would come out like I was being cross examined, so I inserted a glob of ice cream sundae in his mouth.

  And then my boobs started to vibrate.

  I reached between them to answer my phone and found a half-licked piece of candy cane stuck under one of them. When you are big breasted, all kind of things get stuck under the girls. Bobby pins. Food crumbs. Smartphone screen protectors. Condoms (not used—don’t be gross).

  Don’t judge. Unless you’ve been cursed with an overabundant supply of mammary parts, you wouldn’t understand.

  You know how there’s that thing called “the pencil test” in middle school? Where you take a pencil and put it under your naked boob and if it stays put, your breasts are big enough?

  Yeah. I played that.

  Only I could do it with a baseball bat.

  In fourth grade.

  My phone was actually ringing. From a call.

  It was Josie.

  The night was getting worse.

  “This better be important because I smell like camel urine and am wearing a shirt that has jail jizz stains on it,” I announced into the phone.

  “Uhhh,” said a deep man’s voice. “Darla?”

  It was Alex. I supposed I should have apologized for that greeting, but I was about as apologetic as Donald Trump at a feminist rally.

  “Yep. I’m here. What’s going on, Alex?”

  “Josie wanted me to call and just check in about tomorrow.”

  “Hold on.” I looked at the clock. “It’s 11:14 p.m. Why on earth are you calling me so late?”

  “I just got off my shift. Christmas Eve. Do you have any idea how many people decide tonight’s the night to get those giant candy-filled plastic candy canes out and use them as butt plugs?” He sighed. “It’s been a long evening.”

  I was speechless. It takes a lot to make me unable to talk, especially after having a woman named Camel Toe Sanchez snuggle up to me in jail and ask me to pull out the two cigarettes she was hiding in a condom up her ass (“I’ll share one with you!”).

  Alex just trumped that.

  “Darla?”

  “I’m here. Barely. Thanks,” I croaked. “I’m supposed to have visions of sugar plums dancing through my head tonight. Instead, I get to imagine a Target holiday checkout line special shoved up random strangers’ poop chutes.”

  Did Jeddy’s suddenly go silent, or what? Maybe the stereo system crapped out, because every set of eyes was suddenly on me.

  “What?” I shouted to Joe, Trevor, Joanne, Madge, and the other losers stuck in a twenty-four-hour diner on Christmas Eve. “You people never heard a woman talk to her uncle about other people shoving things up their asses?”

  “No. Remarkably, I can’t say I have,” Joanne said.

  “Well, Alex does this for a living.”

  “He removes items from anuses for a living?” Joanne’s smirk made me twitch.

  “Right. Bet he could help you with your head.”

  “DARLA!” Alex boomed into my phone.

  “Doesn’t the peppermint burn?” I asked him, distracted by my wondering. “Because once, I got my vaginal yeast cream mixed up with someone’s tube of BenGay and let me tell you—”

  “I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT WORK RIGHT NOW!”

  Who knew Alex could yell?

  “Geez,” I muttered into the phone. “I wasn’t talking about work.”

  “Your nether regions are not my preferred topic of conversation on Christmas Eve.” If my daddy had lived, I have a feeling this is the exact tone of voice I’d have heard, oh, eight hundred times or so by now. But my daddy died when I was four, and Uncle Mike never talked to me like this. He just bellowed and threw the TV Guide at me when he didn’t like something I said.

  “Since when did my nether regions become work for you, Alex?” I replied. He couldn’t see my smirk, but somehow, I got the sense he felt it.

  “You want me to count the ways?” Yep. I was right. “First, your friend Amy and the cell phone she got caught in her vagina. Then there was the giant chunk of wallpaper and your anus after your party here at the apartment. And if that weren’t bad enough, the gerbil claw extraction from your boyfriend’s ass involved a consultation on my part—”

  “You sound like Josie! They say couples who spend enough time together start to take on each other’s personalities, Alex, but man, the lecture....”

  “Time,” he snapped.

  “And besides, only one of those incidents involved my nether regions. Technically.”

  “TIME!”

  I heard a female voice in the background say, “Who are you yelling at?”

  “Tell Josie I’ll be there tomorrow at
two o’clock. And ask her if she knows any good defense lawyers.”

  “I heard that!” Josie shrieked. “It’s Christmas Eve! What’s she talking about, defense lawyers? Darla Jo Jennings, what kind of mess have you gotten yourself—”

  Click.

  Joe

  I could hear Josie through Darla’s phone. I watched Darla pluck the thin silk of her neckline forward, then reach down between those luscious breasts, sliding out her phone from where she often tucked it in. Her shirt was stained and it sagged, as if someone had pulled on the cloth and overstretched it.

  Her eyes had that slightly-hollow look to them, the kind of expression you get when you can’t quite believe that this is what your life has become.

  I remembered that feeling all too well.

  Hanging from a window naked, bleeding, my broken bones grinding against each other as I clung for dear life to Trevor’s hands, a gerbil trying to turn my ass into the Chunnel.

  So yeah. I could relate.

  “What are you charged with?” I asked her, my heart racing. Might as well get to the point. I knew I shouldn’t ask, but...

  “Prostitution.”

  “For what?”

  “Blowing Santa Claus behind the vegan restaurant for a $5 gas card.”

  I didn’t know my brain could explode into a thousand pounds of glitter the color of Darla’s eyes, but there you go. It just did.

  “You—what?” Darla doesn’t even own a car.

  “I know,” she said, eyes wide with disbelief. “I tried to tell the chick who worked the counter at the restaurant that swallowing is, in fact, vegan, but she—”

  “YOU WHAT?”

  She snorted. “Kidding!” Palms up, an act of surrender I’d never seen in Darla before, she looked at me. As seconds passed, her eyes filled with shiny tears. Her face began to tremor, tightening with the movement of tiny muscles reacting to an outpouring of emotion.

  My God.

  She was falling apart, right before my eyes.

  Whether she really gave a BJ to Kris Kringle or not, I wasn’t going to stand there and watch her crumple like a tissue. My arms went around her, hands filling with wild, unruly blonde waves, and as she sank into my chest, I felt her relax.

  Then tense.

  “Why are you covered in oil that reeks of the perfume counter at Nordstrom’s? And you smell like money.”

  Oh, shit.

  “I was stripping,” I replied. Honesty is the best policy. Lying to Darla was like watching a presidential primary debate. You’d end up more confused in the end, and it was a pointless waste of time.

  She made a dismissive sound in the back of her throat that made my hair stand on end. The unoiled hairs, at least.

  Darla sounded exactly like my mother when she made that sound.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said in a voice that made it clear this was only the beginning of a fiery, self-righteous blowout that was going to end with her screaming and, possibly, incredible make-up sex that would end with hair pulling and bite marks all over asses.

  I was getting hard just thinking about it, but then I realized my cock couldn’t stand up all the way. It was stuck.

  That candy cane one of those women had shoved down my pants left a sugary sheen, making my foreskin cling to my lower abs like the NFL clung to Deflategate and just would not let go.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” Darla continued. “I am standing here smelling like camel urine, wearing flip flops from the local Salvation Army, a pair of Santa pants with suspenders, and a silk long john top that is so filthy it might as well be made from ground up silk worms that crawled out of a West Virginia coal mine.”

  I nodded and shifted, trying to unstick my dick without shoving my hand in my pants and escalating this situation.

  “And I have criminal charges against me that involve being accused of putting my mouth on the head of a penis owned by a homeless man named Tortilla, who has a chicken he keeps on a leash. A chicken named Popsicle.”

  I nodded again. Silence was the best approach when Darla was about to go batshit nuclear.

  “Your mama came and bailed me out of jail—jail—because she was snooping through your text messages and decided to hunt me down to find you.”

  I didn’t nod. I didn’t move. This Darla fit was taking a turn I had not anticipated.

  Wait. My mom? My text messages? I opened my mouth to ask, but—

  “And you’re going on a family ski trip without meeeeeee.....”

  Whoa. Plot twist. I half expected to see Fonzie ride right past us on a jet ski dragging Jaws behind him.

  “Meanwhile,” she sobbed, “You and Trevor have started stripping? Stripping? Taking your clothes off for money?” Her cheeks looked so deliciously pink after her time in the cold, winter’s night, the moonlight from outside bouncing off the stains on her silk top as it glittered through the plate glass window at Jeddy’s.

  She was disgustingly glorious, and my penis sprang loose from its sugary incarceration with a dull thud that made the strain of the g-string twisted between my ass cheeks cause me to squint.

  Ow. A hair was caught somewhere along that piece of butt floss, like an anal epilady.

  “Why are you winking at me?” Darla raged.

  “I’m not.” Shift. Ow. Wink.

  “Don’t lie! You’re doin’ it right now!”

  “I’ve got a pubic hair caught in my g-string.” With a massive yank, I jutted one hip up and ripped the thing out from the root.

  “That is a sentence no woman ever, ever expects to hear from her man, Joe.”

  “That is a sentence no man ever expects to utter to his girlfriend, Darla.”

  Silence yawned between us. She cracked first.

  “You done talkin’ about the hair across your ass? Because I got ice cream and fried foods that ain’t gonna eat themselves.”

  And then suddenly, I was kissing her. She tasted like candy cane and a sweetness that came from a sugar in her soul. Not on her tongue. A warm, wet sigh came from the back of her throat, like she was humming my name as our tongues played together, finding joy in an endless string of hours that felt like a giant joke.

  When my hand slid against the nape of her neck and pressed her closer, my fingers found the silky strands of her blonde hair, matted and caught, like a tangled web designed to make me stay in place.

  This time, it was me who sighed, my breath like a mantra that said only Darla’s name.

  We paused the kisses, foreheads touching, her chest rising and falling with the deep breaths of someone who could finally take their fill of air and catch up to baseline. To normal.

  Whatever that is.

  She felt dirty and soft, vulnerable and strong, and while my eyes nearly crossed from being so close to her, when I looked at Darla, I saw more than a ragged, exhausted woman who’d been in jail earlier for committing a sin against God and, maybe worse, against a beloved Christmas icon.

  I saw my future.

  “My mom mentioned the family ski trip,” I said, gathering my thoughts. It was hard to do that when all I wanted was to breathe in every bit of air Darla let out into the world, so I could take in as much of her as was humanly possible. My arms shifted around her, my body half covering hers, as if I could shield her from anything more that might cause hurt.

  “Have fun,” she said bitterly.

  “I won’t go if you aren’t allowed to go. And Trevor,” I added.

  She jolted in my arms. “Then you’re not going, because there’s no way your mom’s letting me and Trevor go on something that important.” She was skeptical. She was negative. She was right.

  But there was something else in Darla’s voice in that moment, and it made me realize I’d said exactly the right thing. We’d been together for two and a half years, and experienced so many travails, from Trevor’s disappearances to my multi-bone breaks a few months ago. I knew how to comfort her. Challenge her. Gentle her and obey her.

  And every time I said or did the righ
t thing to make her feel better, it was like realizing I could perform a miracle.

  Best feeling on earth.

  We looked up and over, my eyes catching Trevor’s. He’d finished off half the food and watched us.

  “Family ski trip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “To Sunday River?” That was the ski resort in Maine my parents favored. While Stowe, Vermont, was where all the status-conscious people went, and was the place you’d expect my mother to choose, her love of Sunday River came from a place of genuine enjoyment. It was an aberration.

  “Right.”

  “And you’re going to ask your mom to let me and Darla go?”

  “Mmmm hmmmm.”

  “Good luck with that.” He reached across the able to give me a fist bump.

  His confidence was underwhelming.

  My Mom and Madge chatted like best friends catching up after a long absence. Mom had been a Jeddy’s regular? Madge had met me when I was a baby? How much more was there that I didn’t know about my mother? I’d spent nearly all of my life making assumptions about her. Correct assumptions. Assumptions based on her behaviors.

  And yet it turned out she was far more complex and nuanced than I’d ever given her credit for being.

  Between her revelation that she, Dad and Gene were in a long-term, permanent threesome and how she reached out to rescue Darla in her moment of need and now learning she used to come to this dive diner in—

  Wait.

  Hold on.

  Mom rescued Darla in jail.

  How did Mom know to rescue Darla in jail? What was this about my text messages?

  “How did my mom know where you were?” I asked Darla, ignoring Trevor.

  “She’s been monitoring your texts.”

  “She what?” I snorted. “I thought you were joking.”

  Darla just raised an eyebrow.

  “No fucking way.”

  “Way,” Darla said.

  Trevor just let out a low whistle. “That’s bad, man,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re a quarter of a century old and your mom’s still trying to wipe your ass.”

  I leapt to my feet and was across the diner, blind rage drawing me to my mom. I interrupted her conversation.