“Mamà! Mótina! Mótina! Stop! Can we please have a Christmas tree?!” begged Cecilia, tapping my mother’s knee insistently as though this would make the car stop.
“You a’ready had one in de school. How many you need?”
Cecilia needed a pair of blunt scissors with which to make four-leaf clover looking snowflakes and that was about how much our mother was going to invest in anyone’s commercialized American Christmas for that year.
“One for at home just once in our lives! Please!”
“You a’ready had one, you don’ remember?”
My mother kept a mental list of all that was already done once in anyone’s lifetime. Repetition to her was superfluous; it was even more abominable; it was a waste.
“No!” wailed Cecilia, who never lied.
Cecilia had been too young. I still remembered our mother in her shaggy fur coat, Cecilia and I used to pretend we were brown bears in it, and an axe, chopping down a pine tree in New Hampshire and dragging it back to the car on the outskirts of a highway. Its tip swished in the snow like a dragon tail. I distinctly recall this detail because I was worried that the trail would scare away the forest fighters. I was commissioned to walk ahead, and warn them if I saw anybody coming, because the forest, our mother warned us, was full of criminals.
“Well, me, I remember. De needles, dey fall an’ make a mess. Dey block my vacuum cleaner, de sac is a’ways full. De wood, wha’ we do wit’ it after? We have no chimney in Flor’da!” What she seemed to be getting at was, “No.”
Cecilia sobbed, stating that we never got to have anything. For a split second, I saw my mother’s eyes in the rear-view mirror guiltily staring ahead, and not quite at the road. She took Cecilia more seriously than she did me. Cecilia was easier to please.
As soon as we got home, my mother slid open the linen closet and stamped her foot.
“Here! An’ don’ bother me no more!”
She tossed Cecilia and I a Christmas tree about eight inches high. It was actually a napkin-holder someone at church had given to her, that she had been saving as a gift for someone else. It was composed of two side by side flat wooden Christmas trees, painted picnic table green. The inside, where napkins were supposed to stand, was bare unvarnished pine wood, with visible knots to vouch for the once outstretched branches. Cecilia beamed with joy.
“You. Wha’ you say?” my mother threatened me.
I was regularly starting to have what she called, “dat look o’er my face”.
“Thank you very much, Mommy,” I recited, feeling the look accentuating.
Cecilia and I hesitated where to place it. The dinner table elevated our tree to an appropriate height, but on it, it really looked like a napkin-holder. My mother’s record player was out of the question, it might scratch. The floor was problematic; it accentuated the puny size, and gave one the impression the napkin-holder had fallen off the table. Anyone walking by would pick it up and put it back on the table. I finally suggested “Fool’s Stool”, which I sensed I had outgrown. Cecilia positioned our Christmas tree on top of it. I wound my bathrobe around the base. I knew no needles would fall, but it made the composition look fuller. My mother took a picture.
We didn’t have a manger, but annually, our mother let us have things from the kitchen to make one. Jesus, like every year, was an almond wrapped in exactly one square of pink toilet paper. Mary was the whitish, bottom part of a stick of celery, the only thing we could find that looked like a flowing gown. Joseph was a small carrot. Three cauliflower heads were the sheep. That was all we were allowed to have, besides a cutting board on which to arrange them. Cecilia requested some broccoli for the landscape, but my mother dryly replied that there were no trees in Jerusalem.
Jesus was all that had survived by midnight mass. Mary, Joseph and the three sheep were sliced into a Caesar’s salad when they had begun to wilt. At first I screamed, but my mother assured me this would not hurt their resurrection. As I ate them, I wondered if things eaten by me would resurrect with me, as part of me, or if eaten things would resurrect directly out of me,
I rubbed my eyes sleepily. The church bell, a recent donation of the Knights of Columbus, tolled midnight. Cecilia was sound asleep at my mother’s side, despite the organ that seemed to pump a strange, spiritual life into St. Andrew’s cement vaulted veins. In a corner, a statue of the Virgin Mary offered her breast to Jesus, a happy, healthy baby. Jesus as an adult was unrecognizable; He was sickly looking, emaciated, unhappy; I felt weak looking at Him as He bled and bled on the cross. Mankind must stop sinning or Jesus would soon be eaten away. As it was, His ribs had nearly broken out of the skin of His torso; there were more tendons on His arms and legs than meat; His feet were so bony, one could discern every detail of their skeletal structure; and yet the blood continued to drip, and mankind continued to eat Him, though anyone would have to admit, He was far from appetizing.
The priest’s voice roused the congregation. In oneness, it stood and was seated, bowed and lifted its head, sang Hallelujah and Hosanna, breathed Amen. Only an occasional cough or infectious snort broke the charm, reminding us we still had our feet on the earth.
The priest preached, “See, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.”
To my dismay, an image invaded my mind, an horrific image of Jesus, lamb, roasting upon a rotating cross. The lamb’s skin was evenly crispy; juice and melted fat fell freely from the small, pitiful body … I closed my eyes to make it disappear.
The priest preached, “Keep your senses, be watchful. Your adversary, the Devil, walks about like a roaring lion, seeking to devour someone.”
I knew it was time to eat Jesus, for the baskets were being passed down the rows. Mass was more like a self-service cafeteria where one pays then eats, than a restaurant where one eats then pays. My mother put in a nickel for me, and a dime for her. She wasn’t about to pay for Cecilia, who was sleeping. My mother, I noticed, was always friendlier with her neighbours before the Eucharist, when they would shake her hand and say, “Peace be with you,” than when they passed her the basket.
The priest held a wafer out to me: “The body of Christ.”
I saw myself as a composite creature of the Middle Ages. My mouth was open like a young bird’s, my tongue flat as a cow’s, and my teeth as buck as a rabbit’s. As the wafer laid on my tongue, I tried not to think that Christ’s entire body was in my mouth, compressed to a bite-size portion for my own salvation.
With my tongue, I tried moving Him from left to right but He stuck to the roof of my mouth and though I knew it was bad manners, I had to use a finger to get Him down. However I attempted to encourage myself, I could not bring myself to chew Him. My saliva rose and eventually softened Him, until He was like a tiny mouthful of dough, which I swallowed. If I am completely honest, I must admit that I was glad to be rid of Him; He was far from the most delectable thing I’d been forced to eat. I concentrated on my body to see if I felt a difference now that He was in me, becoming an integral part of me. I know this will sound strange, but it felt as if the dough began to rise, to expand until He filled me, stretched me out. My skin tingled everywhere and I was filled with a sensation of well-being I had never known before. Organ music and voices of all ages mixed. Christ was in me. I could feel Him, it was like love growing. It was rapture.
A bit of stray Eucharist found itself trapped within the crevice of my molar. With my tongue, I nudged it out, wondering if it weren’t by chance the finger or some other small leftover from Our Saviour, when an amazing thing happened. Where for so many years the idea of eating flesh had accumulated into a mountain of revulsion, this last thought suddenly pushed my revulsion to such an extreme that it was like toiling up one side of the mountain before tumbling down the other side. I was unprepared. I had only seen the first half of the mountain I thought went eternally up.
Something new was opening up in me, a strange new appetite from somewhere below, a pleasant tug which I wished to satisfy, and then again, did not.
I squeezed my knees together like Jesus did on the cross. I wanted to hold my arms out wide open and hug anyone or anything, even a pillar. The Holy Spirit, I thought, was flooding me with love, a love so great I could have eaten any of my neighbours. My heart thumped wildly at this thought, as I stared at the strong veined hand of a man in the pew in front of me. In my mind, I nibbled at the webbed skin between his strong fingers. My body tensed with an ever growing hunger.
A woman was holding a baby so chunky that its arm was dimpled where there should have been an elbow. Each time the baby began to cry, the woman simulated eating it. I wanted to groan, scream, tell everyone I loved them, and would gladly eat them. I imagined the fattest women in the church, Belinda Moors, naked on all fours as her doughy breasts dragged on the floor. I imagined kneading them with my hands and face, tugging at them with my teeth.
That thought was the drop that made the bowl spill over. I gasped loudly, clutching at my stomach as my whole body underwent a series of contractions. Those in my vicinity, including my own mother, looked at me alarmed, as though I were going to be sick. The woman with the baby offered me a putridly sweet smelling rag.
“You. Wha’s de matter wit’ you?!” my mother asked me as we left mass.
For some reason, I felt horrendously ashamed. Pleasure seemed more embarrassing to confess than did pain.
“It felt like someone kept stabbing a knife into me, here,” I misled her as I pressed down on my lower stomach.
Belinda Moors smiled at me before getting into her old dented beetle. I turned my head the other way. The blood that had invaded my lower parts rose to heat my face with shame.
I helped my mother carry Cecilia back to bed. As soon as the lights in the house went out, I slipped into our bathroom. I expected, anxiously wrenching my underwear down to my knees, to find blood, or some side effect of the newly opened hole. All the way home, I’d sensed my crotch was drenched. I was bewildered to find nothing of the sort, let alone a colourful drop.
Upon closer examination, I discovered a gooey substance, that of egg white, that had miraculously dripped out of my flesh and onto my underwear. I pinched some off the fabric, though it was not at all easy to seize. As I slowly opened my first three fingers like an orchid come to life, I studied the tightrope lines it left in between, like when someone sleeping yawns and a similar gooeyness trails between their upper and lower teeth. If beaten, would it make a meringue, I wondered, at the same time fascinated by and disgusted at Mother Nature’s recycling ability.