Jena Webb

The blue jay swooped out in front of us and, appropriately, into a blue spruce, which of course isn’t blue at all. It is a comment on grey. The bird disappeared into the branches for a moment and then emerged flying directly at us with a beige pinecone in its beak. I flinched, but when instinct subsided, I giddily thought it was going to put me out of my misery and I wouldn’t have to go the homecoming I was sloshing toward in the wet snow, boots soaked through. Alas, at the last minute it changed course, leaving me, despondently, to mine.  

And that path included the uncles. The uncles were the worst really. My parents had finally, reluctantly accepted my orientation. Had probably begrudgingly known before I myself did, considering that I spent all of my time in the woods in overalls playing make-pretend games – with myself and no one but myself. But my uncles, the born-again Christian and the millionaire businessman, didn’t approve. And they were anything but discreet about it.

I had warned Carmen. But Carmen, she was out to change the world, one uncle at a time. She was anything but daunted and as indiscreet as my uncles, which worried me, to say the least.

The first thing that came into view when we turned onto my street was the Witness Tree. It looked just the same. Frozen not only in this frigid landscape, but in time. Carmen inhaled deeply and breathed back out, “Oh, il est majestueux!” I had been wanting to share my history with the Witness Tree with Carmen, who was hopping by my side to stay warm. But the Witness Tree loomed like a minefield. It knew too much about me. Besides, my earliest memory with the Witness Tree is years after the Witness Tree’s earliest memory of me. Where would you start? So, I left her invitation at awe hanging there like a fallen branch caught in the canopy.

When I opened the door, my mom clasped my shoulders and said, “Oh, Bridget, you’re home.” This could have been read as love, but I knew it as an admonishment because my brother had managed to make the trip from Montréal to Sherbrooke despite the pandemic, his job and family, while I, jobless and familyless, had not. I had had an embarrassingly long streak of false starts at university. The most preposterous of which was in Fine Arts when I fancied myself a poet. Imagine that. My longest stint yet was the Poli Sci degree where I met Carmen. I was in my second year. Maybe I’d lasted that long because for most of it classes were online, and I didn’t actually have to go. Or maybe it was Carmen.

My mom held out her hand to Carmen and faux friendly said, “mi casa es su casa” in faltering Spanish. I was mortified. Carmen received the gesture without comment, despite being as thoroughly Francophone as they come.

Carmen’s parents each came to Canada from Chile as refugees in the early 1980s. They settled in Montréal and became active in the anti-Pinochet movement where they met. Artists both, they raised their children in the most fervent of environments, quite the contrast to my waspy, conventional upbringing. The three children all went to school in French, as per law 101. Though her parents remained active in the Chilean dictatorship resistance, they were also staunch Québec sovereigntists. Carmen grew up in the 1990s in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve during the fever pitch of independence. When philosophizing with Carmen, a common occurrence, I often had to remind myself that she had South American roots.

But her lush, olive skin, full lips, jet black, wiry hair, and ample hips, all screamed Latina. She wore her hair cropped short. It was so thick that it stood on end in whichever direction she had last run her fingers through it, even without gel.

We had arrived a day before the others, on Christmas Eve. A little offering to make up for my absence over the past two years. My parents made the arrival as formal and cold as possible, as per Anglo-Saxon tradition, and when we finally headed up the stairs to my old room, I was even more apprehensive of the moment we would have to decide who would sleep where than I had been anticipating. It really seemed like the world upside-down: that my conservative parents would be expecting their lesbian daughter to be sleeping with her “lover” in her childhood bed, but that the vivacious, fiery Carmen wouldn’t let me touch her. For the millionth time I wondered if she was a closet Catholic after all. 

“Euh, tu peux prendre le lit,” I stuttered. “I’ll sleep on the floor.” In lieu of response, Carmen threw her bag on the bed and beamed at me.

“This place is amazing,” she breathed in French, “I mean, the grounds, the view, that tree, the, the cachet.” I forgot how impressive our house was. Not ostentatious, but authentically Victorian and spacious. Very Eastern Townships anglo. It was the type of place that had nooks and crannies to discover and in which Carmen had probably never had reason to set foot. I wished I had the gumption of my 8-year-old self to show her all the secret hiding places. She would have liked that, but in an instant the nostalgic spell was broken. They would have all been antisepticised of anything whimsical by an overzealous cleaning crew anyway.

Instead, I walked over to the gabled window and rested my knee on the settee in the dormer where I used to spend hours daydreaming, looking out over the sprawling yard and scattered mature trees pretending that the rest of the street wasn’t an ordinary suburb, but a kingdom. Where had that child phantasmagoria gone? In its stead was the most metallic, material, and mocking outlook on life. Perhaps it was that the fantasies offered to me in books and movies grew more and more uncomfortable with each passing year. Instead of throwing away the outdated tropes, I threw out the mode altogether. From here I could see the canopy of the Witness Tree, its outermost branches reaching up like feelers, gauging the changes in the day. If it had any sentience, would it have noticed the change in me? The distant sound of a neighbour’s heat-pump kicked in and drew me out of these musings. I knew I needed to offer something to my partner, if that is what I could call her. She was here anyway, that meant something. It certainly merited an uptick in our status, wouldn’t it?

At a loss as to what to offer myself, I realized that my mother would not be. There would be a spread of appetizers and a full selection of drinks downstairs, all done up nicely with handmade Martha Stewart decorations she had tinkered with inartistically but methodically throughout December (or maybe even the entire fall) until perfected. But there would also be small talk. Hard choice – good company and sexual frustration here or a whisky and inane banter there. The whisky had full dominion over the negotiations.

Downstairs, old-fashioned Christmas music played softly in the background from surround sound speakers and somewhere something was creating the scent of mingled spruce and cinnamon. My parents were stiffly trying to look casual in the formal living room. Like cats about to pounce. The low coffee table was laid with enough food for a boatload of African migrants on the Mediterranean and I spied a bottle of Bushmills on the side table with four crystal glasses. There was enough here to keep us civil for a few minutes anyway. 

After the drinks were served and tidbits nibbled, my mom got us started, “So, Carmen, Bridget tells us you’re a community organizer, working with…”

I could tell the red blotches on my neck were making an entry. But I couldn’t tell who this made look more stupid – my mom for not remembering, or caring, or me for not having explained Carmen’s passion with enough emphasis to make it stick.

“Recently arrived women in situations of vulnerability.” And Carmen took it away. She could talk about this for hours. I sat back and tried to relax into my whisky but remained on edge, hyper vigilant for something that would set off my parent’s federalist, conservative leanings.

I was also wound up because Carmen was looking so tantalizingly sexy in the wingback chair kitty corner to me. I kept stealing glances at the way the flesh of her upper thigh made a slight bulge in her turquoise jeans. She was running her hands up and down her quads in what was probably a nervous tick, but which seemed to be inviting me to look all the more, drawing my gaze toward the crease in her thighs. I had to give a little shake of my head – which I hoped passed off as a reaction to a particularly large sip of whisky – to get a hold of myself.

Both the whisky and the chit chat were having their effect. That is to say, I was feeling tranquil and provoked at the same time. I abruptly stood and asked Carmen if she wanted to go for a walk with me. The sun was just setting when we headed out and the western sky was awash in aquamarine and peach, just like Carmen’s retro 1980s outfit. Carmen didn’t seem to be aware of my mix of pent-up sexual tension and severe annoyance with my parents. Perhaps it was because I am just a jaded person in general, prone to a snarky, running commentary about the world we live in.

“Ils disent que la température va chuter.” Yes, I spoke of the weather. Don’t judge. I was floundering, sick of false starts and not a little tipsy.

“It’ll be like the Christmas’s of our childhood,” Carmen meant it cheerfully, a sweet nostalgia, but it stung to think that we were losing a whole way of being to the vagaries of unbridled capitalism and climate havoc. I kept this to myself though.

Our conversation turned to the news. Covid cases rising, a woman in Chelsea told she could no longer teach wearing a hijab as per Bill 21. We walked and talked and while the nature of our conversation was much more meaningful than the small talk in my oppressive living room, it annoyed me nonetheless. Annoyed and awed me. Annoyed me because it was never, absolutely never, about us. Awed me because Carmen had been in the social justice movement since she was born. On the receiving and mending end of prejudice, always. Yet, she had an unfailing spark in her. And, I, a product of privilege, was given over to bitterness, despondency and self-pity. I was a disgrace.

I was swinging us back toward the house after about an hour of ambling, homing in on the canopy of the Witness Tree, which stood high above everything else in the distance. The walk wore off both the acute irritation of middle-class banality and the whisky glow. Ironically, to get back to the latter I had to walk right into the former. As we rounded the final corner, the moon came into view. It hung like an eyelash shed on a cheek and made me want to reach out and brush the snow off Carmen’s. 

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