Christmas for Vegetarians

Paul Curley

It’s Christmas Eve, and we arrived at my in-laws’ house one winter ale ago.

Every other year is a St. Louis Christmas. Lindy grew up here, so she doesn’t go crazy over snow the way the kids and I do. On the way from the airport, we rubbernecked at the stuff that had been plowed to the side of the highway, remnants from a recent storm. It was grayish, but it was snow. I half expected our son, Max, to say something like, This snow sucks the big one, but he didn’t. Lindy was quiet on the drive, the kind of quiet that comes from worry. This is our first trip to St. Louis since Max became a behavior kid, as the principal called him. Lindy briefed her parents on the phone, but they haven’t seen one of his outbursts. As we pulled into their subdivision, Max and our daughter, Junie, oohed and aahed at the replica gas streetlamps, which were decked with real pine garlands and red bows. The islands of snow on the lawns and the reefs of ice along the edges of the ponds added that special touch.

Christmas in Oakland is sixty degrees and smells like eucalyptus. As a kid, I’d wake to fog and fantasize that it was a blizzard. I fell in love with the cliché. Inside, a fire crackling in the stone hearth while outside bitter winds whip up a whiteout so treacherous that a loved one might not make it for Christmas dinner. It’s a fantasy that I’ve promoted with the kids. This year, by Thanksgiving, we had already seen the holiday commercials with brawny Clydesdales hauling the Budweiser coach past the Arch on a snowy night, their breath coming in steamy bursts. Max and Junie listed all of their favorite traditions at Nana and Papa’s house, and we scoured the extended forecast for snow. We celebrated when a snowflake first popped up on the weather app for Christmas. A few days ago, the forecast was for a foot or more, and when we left for the airport this morning, they were still calling for three to five inches.

We arrived one winter ale ago, and our white Christmas has become iffy. From my in-laws’ family room couch, my view of the woods through the French doors has faded, replaced by reflections of the tree lights, the flicker of the fire, and us humans. If I work hard enough, I can conjure a Norman Rockwell painting. Lindy’s dad is in his armchair by the fireplace and Junie is on her belly in front of the Christmas tree, where she’s playing with the nativity set. Her candy cane socks swing in and out of the lowest windowpanes. Lindy is sitting on the other end of the couch, and Max is between us. I raise my beer to Lindy’s reflection and she raises hers right back. She’s relieved because Max didn’t lose his shit on the plane, and Max is brooding because of course he is.

He asks Lindy’s dad, “Papa, is it still supposed to snow tonight?”

Lindy’s dad looks away from Jeopardy on the TV. “Just might. We’re on the rain-snow line so we’ll have to wait and see.” He launches into a tedious explanation of cold fronts and high-pressure ridges.

Patty, Lindy’s mom, walks in from the kitchen with her manhattan and sits alone on the loveseat. When even Max has stopped listening, Patty says to her husband, “Lloyd, nobody cares.”

Lloyd turns his attention back to Jeopardy, but a smile lingers on his face.

Junie twists onto her side in front of the Christmas tree and scrunches up her nose to adjust her glasses. Her top front teeth are at different stages of coming in, like two window shades that aren’t pulled even. She holds up a piece from the nativity set. “What happened to Donkey’s ear, Nana?”

“Your mom dropped it when she was about your age,” Patty says. With a nearly imperceptible movement of the wrist, she whirls her drink around the large cube in her tumbler. Her eyes flit from Junie to Lloyd, who’s still smiling at Jeopardy.  If he has resting smiley face, Patty has resting fear-that-her-husband-is-dimming-too-fast face.

“Mom, that was David who dropped the donkey, not me.” There’s an edge to Lindy’s voice. Patty has a way of editing her son out of family stories.

“Lloyd, turn that damn thing off and stop smiling, you look goofy,” Patty says. “Alexa, play Christmas music.”

As I’ll Be Home for Christmas comes on, Lloyd lowers the TV volume just enough, and I know two things: one, he doesn’t mean to smile, and two, Patty wishes Alexa could wipe it off his face.

Something familiar comes over me. It’s been creeping into my Christmas fantasy slow and unseen like a warm front until I’m finally in it. It’s the feeling that Oh yeah, it’s like this. Now I see that it started as soon as we walked into the house. We entered through the utility room, just off the kitchen. The smells of Patty’s famous red sauce and fresh baked bread meshed with my fantasy, as did the gingerbread cookies cooling on the counter. Patty made a fuss with kisses and hugs, a kitchen towel flung over her shoulder. But then she said, “We’re having ravioli tonight, I assume you’re all still vegetarian,” as though being vegetarian were an affliction that should have passed by now, like a cold or a rash. Lindy and I have been vegetarian since college, the kids since birth.  So yeah, it’s like this.

Junie holds up the ceramic crib of hay. “Nana, where’s the baby?”

“We’ll put baby Jesus in the manger tomorrow morning, honey.”

“Who’s Jesus?” Junie says.

We prepped her on the plane, we really did, but she doesn’t take to the Catholic cram sessions the way Max used to.

Patty swirls the last of her manhattan, gulps it down. We’re between songs, the room now quiet enough that we can hear the Final Jeopardy music. I’m anxious about what might come next. Could be an uncomfortable catechism lesson, or maybe she’ll browbeat Lloyd for not turning the TV off, or for still smiling.

Instead, she places her glass on the coffee table and lowers herself to the rug next to Junie. She points to Mary in the nativity set. Who’s this? Then Joseph. Patty answers her own questions because Junie can’t. Lloyd looks on with his smile.

If Patty’s aggravated, it’s with Lindy and me, but she’s lovely with Junie. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree kicks up. “Alexa, louder,” Patty says. “May I have this dance, Missy?” Soon she’s leading Junie in the twist in front of the tree. Junie jumps around, so Patty shows her how to twist from the hips. She pivots away from Junie and extends a hand to Max.

Max rolls away from Patty’s invitation and faces Lindy, his cheek pressed into the back of the couch. “Can I go upstairs and play Minecraft?” he asks.

“We just got here,” Lindy says.

“We didn’t just get here. I don’t see why I can’t play.”

“Because I said no.” Lindy looks at me with OH MY GOD eyes. Here, Lindy feels like her parenting is under constant appraisal by her mother, which makes her less patient and more given to power struggles. At home, we’d let him play Minecraft. His case manager at school green-lighted it as a way for Max to take charge of his own emotional regulation.

“That’s stupid. Can we at least change the music?” Max asks.

Lindy squeezes Max’s leg and whisper-scolds him. “Maxwell David, you will be polite in Nana and Papa’s house.”

“Hey Max, go check the temp,” I say.

He walks around the coffee table, past Junie and Patty’s twist to the digital monitor next to the French doors. “Thirty-four degrees.” The way he says it signals that my redirection might backfire.

As Lloyd again explains the rain-snow line for the approaching system, Max buries his fists deep into his pockets, then walks behind the loveseat. He says, “Alexa, play rap.” By the time Kendrick Lamar’s Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe comes on, I can hear his footfalls on the stairs. Lindy starts to get up but I beat her to it.

I run my palm along the sharp tips of plastic holly on the banister, a satisfying mix of scratches and tickles. At the landing, I stop to look at the school portraits of Lindy and David. When we arrived this afternoon, Junie grabbed Max by the hand and led him here. One of their traditions. Lindy and I walked up with the bags as Junie was studying David’s pictures. “Mom, are you sad?” she asked. “Sometimes, but it was a long time ago,” said Lindy. Same question, same answer every visit, like the script of our own Christmas pageant.

In Junie’s simple view, if something happens once it must be tradition, implying that it will inevitably happen again. That thought makes me well with tears as I study one of David’s middle school pictures. I’ve stood here countless times over the years and wondered all sorts of things about David, who I never got the chance to meet. As I stare into his defiant blue eyes, I feel like I understand him better, because now Max has those same eyes.

Christmas decorations end at the landing. I find Max sitting in the dark in David’s old room, where St. Louis Cardinals pennants still hang on the wall. He is kicking his feet out, then letting his heels bang against the side rail of the bed. He doesn’t acknowledge me when I sit next to him and wrap my arm around his rigid shoulders.

“OK, dude, what’s up? All you could talk about for weeks was how excited you were for this trip.”

“So?” He won’t look at me.

“So did anything happen?”

“You think I want to feel like this?”

“How do you feel?”

“Mad, because Mom won’t let me play Minecraft. She’s treating me like crap.”

“Can you understand Mom wanting everyone to be together right now?”

Max starts to speak but stops himself.

“What? You can say it.”

“You don’t get it.”

“What, Max? Tell me what I don’t get.”

He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, then finally looks at me. For someone who hates being in trouble, he has such a hard time just saying sorry. Six months ago, this was the point when he would melt into me and bawl. Now he fixes his steely eyes on mine and says, “Shit bastard crap bitch tit butt boob shit.”

When it first happened, it was funny because he’s only eleven years old, but it was also terrifying because he’s only eleven years old. Lindy and I don’t yet know how to respond to it, even in our own house. I tell him he’s not to play Minecraft and I leave him there in the dark. My spirit drops with each step down the stairs, past David and Lindy’s school portraits, and back into Christmas.

 A plate of ravioli with red sauce steams in front of each of us in the dining room. After Lloyd says grace, he sends the breadbasket around the table, first to Lindy and me, then to Patty at the end closest to the kitchen, and finally to Junie and Max, who are facing the bay window so that they can watch for snow in the glow of the streetlights.

Junie tears a chunk of French bread from the soft middle, slides out of her chair and faces Max. She stiffens her body and tries to make her voice deep. “Body of Christ,” she says.

Max giggles and obediently opens his mouth. He’s a puzzle; for reasons that even he doesn’t understand, his mood has reset. If only it were as easy as saying, Alexa, play happy Max.

Lindy is nervous about her mother’s reaction, but Patty is smiling at this game of old-fashioned communion, as the kids call it. She must see it as hope that her influence may be enough to make her grandkids Catholic. I see it as a kind of tourism, like on our honeymoon when Lindy and I spun prayer wheels at temples in Thailand. It didn’t make us Buddhist.

In Oakland, Lindy belongs to a renegade Catholic community led by a female pastor. This tenuous connection to Catholicism is to please her parents, the only reason we put Max through First Communion training. When I objected, Lindy said, “Come on Tim,” which meant Can’t you just do this one little thing for them?

Max’s turn as priest. Junie eats the bread, then asks, “Can I eat the bread at your church, Nana?”

“Nope, you can’t,” Patty says.

“But I eat it at ours.”

“It’s consecrated at Nana and Papa’s church,” Lindy says.

I say, “The priest union pays God a hefty sum to only give men the magic,” which draws a scowl from Lindy.

Junie looks at Patty with a look of utter confusion.

“Consecration turns the bread into the body of Christ,” explains Patty.

“Who’s Christ?”

Max places his palms over his ears as though to keep his brains from boiling out. “He’s Jesus, dummy. Jesus Christ?” He turns to Patty. “So they mean it literally?”

“I believe so,” says Patty.

Patty explains transubstantiation, but Junie has moved on. “Body of Mr. Christ for you,” she says to Lloyd, who holds out his cupped hands until Junie makes him stick out his tongue.

With a furrowed brow, Max stares at his fingers, splayed on the lace tablecloth in front of him. “So then it’s meat.”

Lindy flashes her eyes wide at me, then tells Max, “No, Nana didn’t mean that.”

Patty looks the length of the table to her husband. “So now our grandchildren can’t be Catholic because they’re vegetarian.”

Junie walks around Lloyd, past Lindy and me, to Patty, who crab-claws Junie in the side. “I guess Santa must be a vegetable, because you sure like him.”

Lindy’s crying in bed. “I don’t know how to parent him anymore,” she says. “I feel like such a failure.” Max has long been the family mood setter, but he especially gets to Lindy. Especially in this house.

We were just talking about how nicely the night had ended with the kids. Even Max giggled as they performed their snow rituals — a spoon placed in the freezer, ice flushed down the toilet in the half bath off the kitchen, pajamas worn inside out. We laughed at Max asking for the hundredth time whether we think it’s going to snow. We were keeping it positive. I didn’t tell Lindy how the look in Max’s eyes spooked me, as though he needs the snow in order to believe in anything else — in God, Christmas, even in his own happiness. That look would be easier to dismiss if it weren’t for David. It used to be easier for me to tell Lindy that everything’s going to be OK, but tonight I’m having a hard time believing it myself, and all I can do is hold her.

The first thing I see when I open my eyes Christmas morning is the yellow Cabbage Patch alarm clock on the bedside table. I try to imagine that I had looked at it thousands of childhood mornings as Lindy had. The long strings of unremarkable school mornings, cartoon Saturdays, church Sundays and summer sleep-ins, interrupted only occasionally by the memorable ones, like when she woke with the stomach flu on her eighth birthday, or her junior year in high school, the morning after the St. Joe’s carnival where Lindy made out with her longtime crush Matt Dupree. And of course, the morning when police officers held their hats in the foyer as they broke the worst news.

I rapidly open and close my eyes as though seeing the yellow clock over and over will magically add mornings, and I might feel more at home here, more like this is my family and that David is my loss, too. After I add a few weeks’ worth of mornings, I remember the possibility of snow, slip out of bed and pull back the curtain. Green grass and wet pavement.

 The rows empty one by one into the center aisle for communion. We had to sit near the back of church, which prompted Patty to complain about the twicers who attend only on Christmas and Easter.

Max is sitting between Lindy and me. He tells Lindy again that he doesn’t want communion. He had cornered us in the bathroom before we left for mass, and I told him he didn’t have to, but I was quickly overruled by Lindy, who asked Max to do it for Nana and Papa.

It’s a mistake to force Max to take communion, but whenever Lindy asks if we can just do something for her parents, whatever that something is, it’s as though I lack the standing to object because it’s her parents who lost so much, not mine.

We stand for communion when the pew in front of ours is nearly empty. Max tugs on Lindy’s arm and says, “But it’s meat.”

Lindy tells him, “If you don’t do it, you can’t play Minecraft the rest of the trip.”

That would punish all of us.

Junie says too loudly, “I’ll have Max’s bread.”

“Church voice,” I tell her.

Junie and I follow the others into the center aisle. At the altar, I let go of her hand to receive the host from Father Dressler, then have to steer her by the shoulders to the side aisle when she sticks out her tongue for old-fashioned communion.

We catch up to Max and Lindy in front of the series of stained-glass windows, where Max is standing still, a hand cupped to his mouth.

“I got a bone!” he says.

“That’s not possible,” Lindy whispers.

Max gags, then says, “I did too!” He’s not using his church voice.

I can feel people stacking up behind us, and Lindy’s eyes betray her panic that Max is about to start cussing. I put my hand on his back. “Let’s go see if it’s snowing.”

We send a squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak as we step onto a patch of brown grass at the edge of the parking lot. It’s not snowing, but the bite in the air is promising. Max’s closed fist encases the partly masticated host like an acorn shell. He must wish he could make the whole episode disappear.

“Why did Mom do that to me?” he says.

“Let’s have a look.” I tap his fist with my finger.

He opens his hand, displays the glob on his flat palm.

“Oh yeah, I see it,” I say, pointing to the edge of the bread. “What do you think it is?”

Max looks confused.

“A finger bone? A toe?” I ask.

He smiles. “Maybe his nose.”

“That’s gross, right?” The squirrel is back on the ground, scavenging in jerky movements among the wet leaves and cracked acorn shells. “I wonder if squirrels eat meat.”

Max likes this kind of mischief. Two steps toward the squirrel, he holds his hand in the air. “Body of Christ,” he says. He flicks his hand away from his body, and the wet host plumps to the ground.

 After the gift opening, the kids stay by the tree as adults move to the kitchen.

Patty sends Lloyd to the basement to fetch hash browns from the chest freezer, and Lindy is at the island putting the finishing touches on an egg frittata. Her dead silence tells me that she’s pissed.

Max had scowled at the heavy rain through the French doors as we opened gifts. It would’ve been epic snow had the cold front pushed a little farther south. Papa played Santa. “To Max from Nana and Papa.” Max received the gift from Papa’s outstretched arms, and Lindy tried to keep her own voice merry, she really did. “I wonder what it could be,” she said in a tone that better suited Junie’s age than Max’s. He tore back the wrapping paper only until he saw what it was, a Mandalorian Starfighter Lego set that he already has. “Oh well, I’m sure we can exchange it,” Lindy said. When he tossed it aside like it was trash, it was all Lindy could do to keep herself together. “Say thank you,” she ordered. Max complied, but made no eye contact with Nana and Papa.

Now I peer out the window over the kitchen sink. Raindrops bounce off the hood of the car in the driveway. Come on, a good snow would go a long way right now.

Suddenly the rain becomes heavier and the drops look thicker, maybe a wintry mix, and before I can stop myself, I call, “Max, check it out!”

He runs into the kitchen and leans over the sink on tiptoes. His eyes search and search for any sign of hope in the downpour. Please, I plead with the rain. Finally, Max sets his heels back onto the floor and says, “I don’t see dick.”

Lindy, who’s been grating cheese with her back to the window, spins and grabs Max by the arm. Before I know it, they’re gone and the door to the half bath slams shut. I look outside again. Rain, that’s all it is. My bad.

Lloyd comes up from the basement with the hash browns and Patty is now next to the sink, drying a counter that doesn’t need to be dried. From the bathroom comes Lindy’s voice, whisper yelling but no discernible words, then Max’s decibels, words like bitch, shit, dick, and ass. Lloyd and Patty stare at each other — not even Lloyd is smiling now. I realize that they’ve seen this before, their grief now etched on their faces.

The bathroom door opens. Lindy wipes her cheeks with both palms as she beelines to me. “I just can’t,” she says.

“Ah, Hon,” I wrap her in my arms.

Lloyd sets the hash browns on the counter and walks to the bathroom. In a booming voice that I hardly recognize as his, he says, “Maxwell David, come with me!”

Lindy lifts her head from my chest, her face a question mark. Before we know it, the back door slams shut. We move to the window and stand on either side of Patty. Max and Lloyd walk onto the driveway and get into the front seat of the car.

“What in the Sam Hill?” Patty says. Her fingers are curled over the front edge of the sink.

Lloyd seems to be yelling. It’s the strain in his eyes and the sharp forward movement of his shoulders and chin, hurling pent up words like stones at the windshield. Max is frozen, his gaze downcast as though looking for an escape hatch in the floor. I wish I understood his hurt and how to stop it. I can’t hear Lloyd, but I want more than anything for him to stop yelling and to leave Max the fuck alone. Next thing I know, Max is yelling too, his body bouncing on the seat with each movement of his mouth.

That’s when it comes — a sloppy mix that quickly transitions to snowflakes the size of golf balls, the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen. I reach across the sink and slide the window open. The snow makes no sound as it instantly starts collecting on the grass. The only sound comes from inside the car, a torrent of obscenities from both Lloyd and Max. Damn, ass, shit dick, butt, boob — midlevel swear words. Their faces are partially obscured by snowflakes sliding down the windshield, but there’s no mistaking their enormous smiles.

Patty slips her arm through mine. She’s locked arms with Lindy too, tears rolling down their faces, both crying, both laughing. Then I start in. It may be as fleeting as our white Christmas, once the rain-snow line bends the other way, but for now I feel that everything is going to be OK.