The First Part of Chapter 17: Three Families, Three Christmases

The morning after the midwinter solstice was a cold one, and very clear, as the sun shone weakly on the glittering snow that covered everything by the road to a depth of nearly a metre. Ryan thought the iridescent crystals, which caught and refracted the reflected light off nearly everything, looked very pretty as they sparkled in all the colours of the rainbow. He and Patricia were celebrating Christmas that day, to accommodate Clarissa, who was to go to Toronto to visit her mother over Christmas. The day was a very busy one, of course: Ryan prepared the roast goose, while Patricia got the hors d’oeuvres in order, which consisted of an assortment of cheeses arranged on a plate with bagel crisps, shrimp, and cracker-thin foccacia. The presents had been wrapped, and were under the Christmas tree; the scene looked like a postcard, all awash in warm colours in contrast to the cold grays and blue tones that dominated outside. By three, almost everything was in order; it just remained to roast the goose and bake the bread. The oven was small and the goose was large, which meant that the bread would be going in first, resulting in them eating bread that had already cooled down, and everything would be ready at seven. Things didn’t go entirely to plan, however: the bread was burnt at the bottom, and Patricia prodded it.

“It will become soft in time for dinner,” she said.

The goose, on the other hand, was not quite ready in time for dinner, and Ryan nearly
forgot to put the liver in with the bird: “Oops! That’s my favourite part of the bird,” he said when he discovered this, and that resulted in a red and still-runny liver, which Ryan served to himself.

At four, Clarissa arrived; she was quite well dressed, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Clarie! How nice to see you, and Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas, Patricia,” she replied. Patricia thought the half-smile that accompanied the greeting was at least a little insincere; perhaps she was still grieving a bit over James. She herself was, to be sure.

“You’re looking very well right now: nice and big,” said Patricia, referring to Clarissa’s now large stomach.

“Oh yeah; this keeps me going,”

Clarissa passed through the vestibule, and after removing her boots and coat, placed the gifts she had brought under the tree.

“I think something the Prime Minister said last week seems relevant to my present situation: ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty face from day to day’”

Ryan finished the quote: “––‘to the last syllable of recorded time’, yeah I’ve been wondering why he’s channelling Macbeth; it’s not so good to identify with him, especially at that point in the play; it foreshadows downfall,”

“For me, it’s relevant because life alone is wearing me down; between the pregnancy, work, and all sorts of other things, I’m getting older,”

“You don’t look any older,” said Patricia, who knew perfectly well this wasn’t true: there were faint crow’s feet traced next to her eyes, and there were shallow smile lines on her face. By “other things”, she assumed Clarissa meant her weekends volunteering at a local school, or growing workplace tensions about which she could only speculate: Clarissa did not talk about work to her.

Fifteen minutes later, Katherine arrived.

“Hello Kathy, how are you? Wait––are you crying? What happened?”

“I ran into my ex-husband when I was picking up some chocolates and a few groceries at the mall, and we inevitably started arguing. There was just too much going on, and he called me a money-grubbing bitch. I called him a control freak, and it got quite ugly from there.”

“Where did this happen?”

“Lincoln Fields. A lot of people were staring.”

“Oh, I’m sorry honey. Come in,”

Just our luck, thought Patricia; we had two kids get married, and neither of them worked out the way we had wanted. One gets divorced after five years, and the other died. How could two people grow so far apart over only five years? Hearing them talk was like hearing the radio on two different stations; they were on completely different pages, and both of them were screaming, “I want out!” They didn’t even have any children; maybe physical attraction was the only thing they had going for them, and there’s no denying, Michael, the ex-husband, was very handsome and well groomed. Maybe they weren’t having sex often enough; sure, Ryan and I have our arguments from time to time, but we’re always able to resolve our differences beneath the covers. It was still surreal to see their faces bent into scowls whenever they were looking at each other.

Then there was the other marriage, which ended in tragedy: why on earth did Jimmy have to die? Life’s just not fair; he died too young! Then she thought of something that had not previously occurred to her: their retirements were approaching, and Katherine wasn’t particularly rich, and Ryan and Patricia’s retirement funds were rather depleted, given that they were largely invested in stock, and they hadn’t sold soon enough to avoid the losses universally incurred during the stock market crash two years previously; she would bring it up with Ryan later.

After calming down and collecting herself, Katherine saw Clarissa standing down the hall.

“Oh, Clarissa! It’s so nice you could join us. We haven’t spoken since the funeral, so how are you dealing with his death? I’ll admit, it was a burden to me too, a sort of emotional hole. I thought about him at least every day, wondering what he would think of what I was doing. We were very close, of course.”

“I don’t know what a worse way for a marriage to end is: unexpected widowhood or a divorce. At least there’s no way I can share in the blame with widowhood, not that I blame you for that messy divorce from two years ago that you told me about. On the other hand, I would have liked to know him a bit better. Eight months is a little while, but it’s not years; I didn’t know all of his foibles. At the same time, he seemed distant to me occasionally, as if he were zoning out. Did your husband do that?”

“Well, sometimes he would be in his own world when I said that I wanted a kid. Other times, he didn’t do the dishes, and I quickly found his quirky habits irritating. But you felt he was distant at times? Does that mean that he was there but not there?”

“Sort of. I don’t know, it’s like, I would be telling him a story about that adorable kitten that belongs to the people on the next block, and his reply: uh-huh.”

“That’s Christine’s kitten Castor?”

“Yes, that’s the one,”

“Maybe it’s a guy thing; it is said that men tend to hold back their emotions,”

“At least we were close physically. I wonder why that didn’t lead to us being close emotionally,”

“You were close enough to conceive before you got married, which is more than I can say of my ex. What do you mean by ‘not close emotionally’? You got married, after all,”

“It’s more than that, though,” said Clarissa, and she looked as if she were about to continue, but trailed off.

Clarissa smiled a little. “That was a week before we were married; we were visiting my mother’s place, and I don’t think she was too pleased that conception occurred when she was so close, by which I mean close emotionally, as she’s very much attached to that house; she’s something of a prude that way. My father is also like that; they seem to be reflections of each other; they have near identical tastes, nearly the same wishes, and when you ask one’s opinion on something, you always know what the other thinks as well, because they are so much alike. Maybe it’s the effect of being together for so many years.”

“I think mom and dad went down the same route; there was always some sort of small argument, but they really have merged into the same person,”

“I wouldn’t say Ryan and I are the same, it’s more like we’re kindred spirits. You know what they say about the perfect pair complementing each other? That described us forty years ago, when we met. Now, I find that I am taking some of his opinions and ideas for my own, and he’s reciprocating.”

That might be that we have changing roles to play in life, thought Katherine. At one moment, you find your foil or your complement early on in life. In my case, I thought I had found my kindred spirit, but he turned out to be a reflection of all that I found irritating in the world, and what’s irritating for five minutes can be positively hateful when stretched into a marriage.

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