Sundays are gross. For the hour preceding ten o’clock, anyway. My problem with church is much like my problem with saying grace. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with a shared religion – in fact, the sharing separates religion from delusion – but I still don’t really get the ritualisation.
But even more painful than the regular painfulness of church on a regular Sunday is church on Christmas, on account of how a) the sermon goes for more than twice its usual length and b) we have to drive for over an hour to get there because my grandparents live over an hour away. This all leads to c) Christmas away from home, in a different church, with a family of devout Catholics.
We leave for my grandparents’ place just after seven (that’s another despicable thing about Christmas morning – the early wake-up call). Aaron spends the entire trip drawing a ridiculously detailed picture of a kelpie with these new pencils he got for Christmas. I envy Aaron for being able to shut out the world and focus on his work. I want to read (my Christmas gifts included several new books, along with some clothes and a computer bag) but doing so while travelling invariably makes me carsick, so I plug my earphones into my iPhone and listen to an audiobook.
My biggest problem with audiobooks is that you’re given somebody else’s interpretation. I mean, take the sentence ‘I never said she stole my money’. That sentence takes on a different meaning depending on which word is emphasised. ‘I never said she stole my money’ and ‘I never said she stole my money’ have entirely different meanings, both of which are substantially different from ‘I never said she stole my money’. I like deciding the emphasis for myself. Reading lets me develop my own characters in my head, which I find difficult to do through an audiobook. I guess reading gives me the freedom to do things my own way.
About halfway through the trip, Mum turns to us and motions for me to take my earphones out.
‘Remember Grandpa’s mind isn’t what it used to be,’ she says. ‘He’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, so if he’s rude or doesn’t remember things …’
I tune out after that. I’m not in the mood for an educational spiel about the medical background and entire history of Alzheimer’s, beginning with the birth of Alzheimer himself. I’ve heard it all at least sixty-three times since Grandpa’s diagnosis.
My mother’s lecture lasts for twenty minutes and covers the disease, its progression, how it’s studied, blah, blah, blah. Aaron listens intently but I can tell everything Mum says is laced with subtext directed at me: ‘This information is what you’re missing out on learning next year by not going into med school, Jennifer.’
‘So he might forget who I am?’ asks Aaron with a crack in his voice.
‘It’s possible,’ says Mum, ‘but not certain. Just be prepared; he might not be exactly the same Grandpa you remember.’
It’s about eight thirty when we pull up at the curb outside my grandparents’ house. My grandmother plants a wet kiss on my cheek and everyone gives hurried Christmas greetings before we all pile into cars and head to church.
The priest, Father John, is the same one who did last year’s Christmas mass. His voice has fewer cadences in it than a pure tone, so I’m mostly on autopilot for the whole mass. I stand up, sit down and kneel when everybody else does, and I move my mouth in the most general way possible, making absolutely no noise, when it’s time to sing. This huge clock hangs on the wall, directly above Father John’s head. It moves twice as slowly as usual, even by a church clock’s standards, and they already tick much slower than real-time clocks.
Father John shares stories from the Bible and it’s hard not to wonder how plausible some of these tales are. Some of the things he says seem to directly contradict hard scientific evidence. I’ve asked Mum about that a few times. As a doctor, she’s obviously a woman of science, and it’s always seemed strange to me that she doesn’t question some of these religious ideas. She told me that some of the stories are metaphors and that all of them have human error in their transcription.
I go back to sitting and staring at the clock. It’s ticking even more slowly now than it was five minutes ago.
I wonder if Dylan is sitting in church, too. Our first date was in a church, though I use the term ‘date’ very loosely. Our mums were talking outside the church before the mass started and they cleverly arranged it so that Dylan and I would sit next to each other. Judging by Mum’s excited whispers in Dad’s ear, I think she was already planning the wedding.
Dylan had smiled and winked at me as he sat down. That smile used to do strange and wonderful things to me. I miss the butterflies, especially the ones I’d get when he stroked my cheek with his thumb.
After church that day, Dylan and I had gone for a walk through the park. I was super-aware of how sweaty my hand was but Dylan linked his fingers through mine anyway.
Maybe I should put in more of an effort with him … It’s not really fair on either of us if I just keep cruising along, not really feeling anything. I haven’t always felt as if we’re doomed to fail. Maybe we’re just in a bad patch – all relationships have them. I’ll push through it. Besides, this way Mum won’t be devastated that her matchmaking didn’t work out. Everyone wins.
After mass is over, we all file back outside and climb into our cars, heading back to Grandma and Grandpa’s.
My mum’s sister is four years older than she is. They both had their first kid at the same age, so my cousin Katie is twenty-two. She stands at five eight and is built like a stick; the line from her ankles to her shoulders is perfectly straight and by turning sideways she could probably hide behind a blade of grass.
‘Jenny,’ she says in her sickly sweet voice, once we’ve arrived at the house. I hate it when she calls me ‘Jenny’ – it makes me sound like I’m a middle-aged woman. ‘So good to see you! What have you been up to?’
Her emphasis quickly gets annoying.
‘Not much,’ I say, wincing as she swoops in for a hug. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ve got a new job working as a receptionist and my boss is a creep but he pays me well so it’s okay and I broke up with the boyfriend I was with the last time I saw you and now I’m dating this new guy and it’s getting pretty serious like we might move in together soon and maybe even get married even though we’ve only been together for a few months but it just –’
‘Katie, Katie,’ I interrupt. I clench my fist and hold it out towards her. ‘Here are some full stops. Use them.’
‘Oh right. Anyway, I have a new cat …’
She continues to talk at a million miles an hour. It’s a relief when her mum comes over. ‘Katie, you’re not boring your poor cousin to death, are you?’ says Aunty Jane, placing her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and catching a handful of her blonde locks.
‘Ow, Mum, you’ll pull out my extensions.’
‘How are you, Jennifer?’
‘I’m not too bad, thanks. How are you?’
‘Oh you know, things just haven’t been the same since Bryan left.’
Bryan, Katie’s dad, had left Aunty Jane three years ago. If memory serves, he seduced a much younger woman and ran off with her to Europe. I feel bad for Aunty Jane but there’s only so many times you can express sympathy for the same problem.
‘I hear you got some good exam results,’ she continues. ‘What do you plan to do with them?’
I don’t know who told her they were good because it can’t have been my mother. ‘I’m not sure yet, I’ll have to wait for the offers to come out in a few weeks. Mum wants me to do year twelve again so I can get into med. school.’
Aunty Jane laughs. ‘She needs to chill out and let you live your own life.’
Aunty Jane always uses the lingo she thinks kids use. She’s the type of woman who describes herself as ‘hip’. ‘Tell me about it,’ I mumble.
Uni offers have been on my mind a lot, recently. Every time I see Mum on her computer I worry that she’s somehow found her way into my profile and is just about to see my new preference list. She hasn’t said anything so I know she hasn’t seen it yet, but I’m terrified that it’s only a matter of time. Sometimes I feel that I should change my preferences back to how they were, but I think the deadline might have passed by now. Actually, I’m not sure about the deadline, but I don’t want to check because if it hasn’t passed …
I just don’t want to change them back.
It’s not long before Grandma calls us into the dining room where a feast awaits. There’s ham, turkey and chicken, all sliced and waiting on aluminium trays. Roast pumpkin, potatoes, carrots, peas, corn, gravy … It all looks amazing.
Mum has set the table for eight. Grandpa and my dad are on either end (because we love the patriarchy) and my seat is at Dad’s end, next to Aaron.
Grandma says grace and we all begin to help ourselves to the food. For a moment I think cooking skills must run in the family as Grandma’s cooking is even better than Mum’s, and Mum’s food is amazing, but I can’t even cook a cheese toastie without burning it. Regardless of whether a cooking gene exists or not, the tender meat melts in my mouth, the gravy adds a smooth richness and the potatoes are crisp.
‘Make sure you eat, Dad,’ says Mum, almost shouting. You have to talk loudly for Grandpa to have any chance of hearing you. ‘Mum, make him eat.’
‘Yes, dear,’ says Grandma, and she coaxes Grandpa to eat his food.
‘The robbers were here last night,’ says Grandpa. ‘I heard them in the roof.’
Grandma explains that Grandpa is convinced that people are squatting in the roof, trying to steal all his stuff while he sleeps. She recruited the neighbour, a buff twenty-four-year-old, to climb into the roof and search for any sign of intruders. Nobody was up there, of course. I can just imagine Grandma offering this guy ‘pocket money’.
‘They were throwing rocks at me.’
‘Nobody threw anything, dear,’ says Grandma.
‘What?’ he almost yells.
She repeats herself.
‘Yes,’ he insists, ‘they did.’
I don’t speak much for the rest of the meal. Things are okay, the boyfriend is good, I’m enjoying my freedom – my stock answers to the stock questions.
‘Do you want me to cut it up for you, Dad?’ asks my mum from across the table.
He peers at her through his wire-rimmed glasses as if she were a mildly interesting news report.
‘Your food?’ Mum continues. ‘I’ll make it smaller so you can eat it.’ She stands and cuts what little food he has into fingernail-sized pieces.
‘Jane, do you want to slow down?’ she adds as Aunty Jane refills her wine glass for the fifth time.
‘No, I’m good.’
I roll my eyes. The conversation covers nothing but dull topics. Everyone gets involved except for Dad and me; we both focus on eating our roast turkey, looking up only to shoot each other glances whenever somebody says something stupid, which occurs with alarming frequency.
Eventually it gets to the point where I can no longer cram any more food down my throat and I have an overwhelming urge to puke. I pick at my third helping with my fork, shifting it around my plate with absolutely no desire to eat it, thinking about what present I might get. We always exchange gifts before dessert, giving us time to digest the main course and free up space for the sweets.
Our family tradition is to run a Kris Kringle system for buying each other gifts, the reason being that if everybody bought for just one person we could each get a single, more valuable gift, rather than a bunch of meaningless and cheap ones.
This year I bought for Grandma. (We all draw names from a hat at the conclusion of the Gift Giving Ceremony, allowing an entire year to plan our gifts.) It’s always easy to find a gift for Grandma because she never buys herself anything. Well, she buys food or maybe new clothes if she really needs them but, particularly with his declining health, she wants to spend all her money on Grandpa. Obviously she pays for medications that help slow his Alzheimer’s and keep his heart healthy, and for other things that keep him alive – doctors’ appointments, tests, things like that – but she also likes to take him on daytrips to art galleries, the beach or national parks. Wherever they go, it’s usually somewhere they once shared a moment together, like their first date or their first family trip. I figure it’s her way of stopping Alzheimer’s from completely consuming him. She doesn’t want him to forget their years together. I mean, they’ve been together for three-quarters of their lives – it makes me really sad to think he could forget all of that because of some stupid disease.
Anyway, as sad as it all is, it does make it easy to buy a gift for Grandma. I definitely inherited my love of literature from her, so books seemed to be the logical choice. I bought her several novels because a) she doesn’t like second-hand books because the previous owner could’ve dirtied them (this includes library books; she’s the worst kind of hypochondriac) and b) she doesn’t spend money on herself, meaning that c) she wouldn’t have had access to new releases or to books she hasn’t already bought and read before – and I can see what those are from her shelf.
We have a limit of one hundred dollars but I imagined Grandpa’s declining health had been quite tough on her so I put aside some money from all the extra hours I’d been working and spent closer to two hundred dollars. It’s my little way of saying ‘I hope you’re okay’.
Everyone shuffles into the living room, where Grandma has set up a small Christmas tree. Dad goes out to the car to grab the presents from the boot.
I hand mine straight to Grandma.
‘Oh Jennifer, these are simply splendid,’ she says, unwrapping the books. She really loves crime novels so I bought her a bunch of those, including a couple by Gillian Flynn, the ones J. K. Rowling wrote under the name ‘Robert Galbraith’ and The Girl on the Train. Her favourite book has been To Kill a Mockingbird since she first read it, so I also bought her Go Set a Watchman. ‘These will keep me busy for a while,’ she says. ‘I can’t wait to get started.’
I smile and she plants a kiss on my cheek. She reads over the back covers with a genuine smile while everybody else opens their gifts.
Aaron gets a thick jacket from Aunty Jane, Dad a briefcase from Grandpa and Mum a few CDs from Aaron.
Last is Katie, who bought my gift. She hands me a small, squarish package. I pull the sticky tape from the little Santa faces, careful not to tear the paper, and withdraw the box inside.
‘It’s a GPS,’ says Katie. ‘They’re like the most useful things ever I mean they can get you anywhere and I use it literally every time I get in the car like it takes me to work and then back home and to friends’ places …’ She has, apparently, lost the full stops I offered her before. ‘But seriously you can plan road trips and it works anywhere in the world and you can charge it in your car.’
I smile and thank her as sincerely as I can. I guess she doesn’t know that I haven’t got a car, or that I hardly ever get to use Mum’s because she doesn’t want me to damage it. (I asked her to add me to the insurance plan but adding a P-plate driver made it too expensive. I’m allowed to drive Dad’s car if I really need to go somewhere, but he usually needs it.)
‘Well, Merry Christmas all,’ says my mother. ‘Do we have The Hat?’ You can hear the capitalisation in her voice. Grandma collects The Hat from a drawer. It’s this straw cowboy hat, which belongs to Grandpa – the type of hat that should be used for any purpose except wearing.
Mum writes down everyone’s names on a notepad, rips off the little pieces and drops them into The Hat. Grandma’s frail hands shuffle them around a bit and then we each take turns withdrawing a name.
I dip my hand in and pull out a piece of paper, praying I won’t have to subject myself to the purchase of whatever superficial gift Katie would cherish. I carefully unfold the paper and sigh as I see my own name in my mother’s cursive handwriting.
‘I got myself,’ I announce and toss the paper back into The Hat. My second attempt draws Aaron’s name. Paints, pencils, sketchbooks – anything artistic will do. It’s always a relief when you know exactly what somebody will like.
After we’ve all drawn out names for next year’s Christmas, Grandma puts cheesecake, plum pudding and trifle on the bench. I have some of everything and immediately hate myself. I have way too much food inside me and the urge to vomit washes over me again.
Then we say our goodbyes, climb into the car and Christmas is over.