Someday at Christmas

(December 30, 2001)

"I left home because of a cat," says my mother. "They said either the cat goes, or you go." So she went. She was just sixteen, and it was 1970, and the thing about leaving home at sixteen in the 1970s is, you can end up crashing at some guy's place, get pregnant, have me, and thirty years later I'm writing about it on the Internet.

Some days, I don't know what to do with this kind of information.

"Anyway, so we'll have Elvis with us," I said. I'd just gotten off the phone with Maggie, making Christmas plans. And among all the things that are uncertain in life, one certainty stands out like a fart in church: my Elvis is not going to be subjected to Maggie. He's just a harmless little kitty. There are laws. A new plan was hatched. Hub and I would drive all the way to Roxbury, leave Elvis in my brother's room, then go on to New Haven where Maggie lives. If you don't know Connecticut, that's just about like passing your destination by an hour and then and doubling back.

An additional modification to the plan after talking to my mother (who laughed her ass off at my re-telling of the conversation I'd just had with Maggie) was that my parents would come with us to Maggie's. They hadn't seen her for Christmas either. But first we'd stop in Woodbury and have breakfast.

So we three (me, Hub, Elvis the cat) piled into the car at Dark o'Clock on Christmas Eve day. Prior experience with cats in the car means:

1) Don't even think about keeping them inside a carrier and
2) Don't even think about NOT keeping them inside a carrier

What. It's a cat. That's a real rule.

"Do we still have that sixty yards of mosquito netting left over from when we bought a hundred yards of mosquito netting that time we tried to make our own tent?" I asked the night before. Hub, who's the only one brave enough to venture into our "storage area" in the basement, found it. We rigged a makeshift sort of divider between the front and backseats. When we drive on the highway, we like to not die in a fiery crash when a panicked cat leaps onto the driver's head. (Elvis, it turned out, is a perfect little traveler, but the mosquito netting was a good idea anyway).

So, breakfast at Phillip's with Louie and JoAnna. On to Maggie's.

Breakfast was a bad idea. When I eat breakfast, I like to, you know, keep it down? See, here's the thing about Maggie. She's 87, and as my mother's theory goes, every few years since time began, instead of clean the house, Maggie just moves out of it into a new one. She's had over twenty addresses that I can remember, and a whole bunch from before I was born. If not for certain aunts (Maggie's got like ten sisters, but don't ask me which is which, even when they're all lined up in front of me like little gray munchkins) my mother, as a little girl, wouldn't have learned that you do clean a house. Toilets must be scrubbed. Sinks must be scoured. Dishes must be really washed, not just rinsed and put away.

Oh yes, it's that bad. "Hub is such a good sport," my mother has marveled in the past. "It took Louie like, fifteen years before he could stay in that house for more than five minutes." He really is; Hub's even come with me while I cleaned the place. He walked in once when I was cleaning out the fridge. Walked out a second later, a bit ashen. But still. That's a real man, right there.

The goal, in case you haven't figured this out, is to scrub up before you enter, do not use the bathroom under ANY circumstances, and consume as little as possible. "No gram, don't cook anything. We want to take you out to lunch for Mother's Day!" Or, "You love Dunkin Donuts coffee. We'll bring you a big cup on our way!" It's an art form, really. Takes some getting used to, but you acquire a certain grace after awhile, to sidestep taking a single bite or drink that could potentially poison or kill you, without Maggie realizing that you are, in fact, grossed out beyond belief. Keeps the peace in the family, you know how it is. Or good god...what am I saying...I hope you don't. (Lola understands. Lola's mother comes from the same moldy mold. Lola once found a spoon baked into a cake. THAT'S a hoot, eh?)

One time a few years ago, Maggie sets out this chocolate cream pie. She hacks off a slice and puts it in front of Hub. "None for me gram, I'm on a diet!" Quick thinking on my part, I thought. Hub takes a nice big bite. "Good, innit!?" Maggie yells. "They make a good pie. They keep! Guess how long that pie been in the freezer! A YEAR!"

We get to Maggie's new apartment. The first thing I notice when we walk up the steep, dark stairs? That they're steep, dark stairs. The second thing I notice upon entering Maggie's tiny, cramped apartment? That it's a tiny, cramped apartment. See, Maggie quoted three reasons for moving out of the last place.

1) Steep dark stairs
2) Too small
3) No laundry facility on the premises

"So Lexi, the new place is smaller than the last one...and still has stairs? Oh, but there must be a better reason she moved. There's laundry facilities on site, right? Lower rent?

You'd think so. But no, and no. Plus, the place is a pit. Too much furniture, boxes tumbling with saved-up string and rubber bands, stacks of newspapers, knick knacks everywhere, a tumble of confused...stuff...on every surface. It's like...it's Maggie's place, but crammed into half the space. I can't...I just can't give a play by play of the visit. Some of you know me. Buy me Tequila shots and I will tell you more.

I can tell you a few things. For one, it must have been awhile since my mother visited because, you know that "acquired grace" I said you get after doing this for a few years? Right the fuck out the window.

"Have some (some word that means fried fish in Italian)!" yells Maggie. She proffers a plate that had been sitting out on the table. Whips off tinfoil. Little flat fried fish cakes. I ate one. Kinda hard, like a fishy cork. I swallowed, too. What the hell. I lived. There's my Christmas miracle.

"UGGGGGHHHH!" suggests my mother, mouth agape and eyes wide in a ghastly mask of horror.

Subtle.

Here's how you do it. Watch Hub. He took one enthusiastically. Then he faked nibbling a bite behind his hand. He secretly broke off what LOOKED like about like a bite (a distraction helps. "Hey, is that All My Children and did I just hear a gunshot?") and stuck it inside a crumpled napkin. Then he walked around with the offensive little death puck for awhile and, when all was clear, dashed into the bathroom. Broke it into little pieces and flushed it.

"There was still a film of grease after two flushes," he announced later, after we were all safely at my mother's construction-site-she-pretends-is-a-house.

My mother was not so clever as Hub, and not so clever as she thought. Gripped with what she THOUGHT was a good idea, JoAnna accepted a glass of orange juice from the plastic jug on the table. Safe, store-bought, what could go wrong, right? From store to Maggie's house, the juice is inside a clean, safe plastic jug and it's got Vitamin C. As she drained her cup, I reached out with one finger and casually turned the jug towards her so she could see the front. In the background, Louie's trying to have a conversation with schizophrenic, medicated Uncle Tony, which is a feat in itself because the smell of Tony could knock a buzzard off a shit truck at a hundred yards. And Maggie's yelling at Hub to sit down. "No, I'm good," he says. "You're in my fuckin' way!" she says and ushers him into a chair. My mother's wondering what my point is, with the OJ jug. I point with my eyes. Then she sees it. Yeah, it's your run-of-the-mill standard plastic jug like what any brand of orange juice comes in. And like what milk comes in. It's not new juice; it's a Hood milk jug, which means the juice is either frozen or powdered, made by Maggie, and the inside of the jug has a brownish film...

"UGGGGGHHHH!"

THAT time I really thought she was going to hurl.

Louie ate nothing. Probably helped that he was the only one that got near Tony and had to look at his T-shirt, which was blue, sleeveless, and caked with what looked like several babies' feedings worth of dribbled food, concentrated over the beachball-sized mound that is Tony's stomach. Who could eat under THAT circumstance.

Dysfunction junction, what's your function?