Jena Webb

 
THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke chaste. My brother arrived with his family first. His impeccable sense of decorum and integrity was, in truth, a welcome counterpoint to my parent’s cluelessness and complacency, but it made me resent him all the same. Especially in light of the fact that Carmen seemed to have taken a shining to him. While I busied myself wrapping the few presents of mine that had arrived, she and he were fast becoming friends.

All through the afternoon, more family arrived. I tripped through introductions, trying to feel confident and comfortable introducing Carmen to homophobes. Luckily, everyone was too sober and socially pandemic-stricken to make a scene. Eyes seemed to have nowhere to rest, hands fluttered in self-deprecation, the simplest polite formulas came out confused, syllables stuck on tongues so long out of use. Even air hugs missed their mark. 

Dinner was informal and gift sharing, well, you know, hit or miss. We were at that part in the festivities where we pretended we were in the olden days by making a mockery of time-honored traditions. My uncle’s fingers were like spiders on the piano keys. He always creeped me out. I don’t believe anything untoward ever happened, but, you never know, the subconscious can be a powerful thing.

Carmen sidled up close to me as a hush fell over the house. I loved the way her ass fit so snugly in the triangle created by the coming together of my legs and flat pubic bone. But despite being officially out for over ten years, I felt scrutinized whenever I brought a girlfriend home. It didn’t help that none of my relationships ever lasted. As such, I couldn’t even fully enjoy this rare closeness to my crush.

It was amazing that any of these people could stand the sight of me, really. I had been such an angry, naively politicized teen. I made every family gathering into a trial, each person’s lifestyle was under scrutiny. They endured me ungraciously. Then I had the audacity to be a lesbian. 

After a few dozen Christmas carols Carmen went outside for a smoke. I decided to venture a conversation with my cousin, Tyler, my father’s brother’s son. We hadn’t seen much of each other in recent years, but we were close as kids. I couldn’t stand playing with my girl cousins and Tyler was a bit of a loner, so we gravitated toward each other. Things had changed, but he still seemed a safer bet than anyone else at the party. “What’s on your mind these days, Tyler?” It was meant as a fairly general opening, could go anywhere.

“I was thinking about the different kinds of liquid paper. You remember the kind we used to put on with a tiny brush? It was always so lumpy.”

So much for my gamble. I had to stifle an outburst of mirth at the stupidity of his thoughts. Then, I considered which of the options was likely to be the most environmental, but this was exactly the line of thinking that got me so despised in earlier years, so I let it go. Finally, since I was at a complete loss as how to further this conversation, I filled his champagne glass.

I was not the only one filling glasses. I glanced around the room and noted that everyone had a drink to hand and that some people had already seemed to have had too many, the two-meter distance we were all going to keep had flown out the window as people swayed dangerously close to one another.

Carmen came in with a gushing of cold air. The gust seemed to suck the murmur of conversation and background music from the room, and everyone turned to look at her. Either she didn’t notice the attention, or I was imagining things, because she proceeded to take off her winter clothes in the most conspicuous and unabashed way. She had chosen a pair of black skinny jeans and a tight, black mohair sweater with sparkles in the waft. The fabric hugged her breasts in a way I could only imagine doing myself and the softness of the yarn seemed to mock me, giving me a premonition of the smoothness of the skin underneath.

I couldn’t even enjoy the scene because I could feel the disdain in the air. I had had just as much to drink as everyone else, I realized, as I tottered over to her to help her with her coat, but not before my uncle Steve got there.

“So you’re living in Montréal, are you? Where are you from?” interrogated Steve. Carmen says she gets this every day of her life, despite having been born here and having not a speck of accent in French. She has a stock answer.

“I’m from Montréal. Where are you from?” She asked politely while she waited for the second part of this formula.

“Well, I’m from here. I mean, what’s your ancestry?” Steve postured, not without a bit of each of the opposing forces of pomp and waffle.

“My parents came from Chile. What’s your ancestry?” This question always throws White people off, even the most well-meaning. Not that they don’t know, mind you, just that they’re not used to being asked. Such a simple response and it is amazing to watch how people get so flustered. Either they think it’s impertinent (for themselves but not the other) or they have finally clued into the insensitivity of their opening line and are feeling like bigots – unintentional bigots, but bigots nonetheless.

After an obvious hesitation in which my uncle’s discomfort was palpable, he went with bravado and entitlement as a response. “Why, I’m from here, of course. And, well, before that my ancestors were from various parts of Europe, a very long time ago,” he replied, waving away the question with his hands. I looked out the window to the Witness Tree, wishing I could hide away in the non-existent treehouse.

Carmen doesn’t usually let them off the hook easily, “Oh, how interesting! From which parts of Europe?” My uncle’s face was ballooning, his cheeks puffing out in indignation. He didn’t want to be having a conversation about where he was from. They were supposed to be having a conversation about where she was from. Carmen was expertly turning the tables with no small amount of avoidance, sarcasm and pleasure. A conversation that he was supposed to be controlling had turned 180 and he felt the squeeze of it. That squeeze landed directly on his ego and the only tools he had to reduce the pressure being exerted on this fragile organ was to lash out. Bluster is the only word I can think of for what happened next. It’s amazing how very close to the surface vileness lives.

The exact words he said were, “You’re like a watched pot”…loaded pause… “of Chili. It never boils.”

My other uncle had doddered over to join us by this point, and he chortled at this. I wondered what my father would have done, but only for an instant, because part of me was afraid to know and I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I glanced again at the Witness Tree. It rose there stoically, as always.

Nothing I could say would make those words disappear, or even convince anyone of anything, but I couldn’t say nothing.

“You heinous, racist, old man,” I spluttered.

To Carmen I said, deliberately in French, which most of my family from that generation hardly understands despite, as my uncle was so careful to have pointed out, living in Québec ‘forever,’ “On décâlisse.” “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I punched the Witness Tree’s trunk as we bolted past, my mitten only deadening the blow somewhat. There was nothing I felt I could say to Carmen to make things right. So, we both fumed – her literally smoking a cigarette and me like that pot that had finally boiled over and was steaming on the stove top.

My redhead complexion always betrayed my feelings. I hated to think what I might look like now, splotchy with hot, raw anger and shiny-purple blotches forming from the cold, so I pulled my scarf higher up over my face and sunk into myself.

Carmen hadn’t asked where we were going, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell her if she had. We walked like Quebeckers do in winter – like children in a walking race. As my murderous thoughts about my uncle, and by extension my family, subsided, I began to wonder what matters most in these moments? What makes the biggest difference? What constitutes solidarity? Carmen wasn’t offering guidance, and it wasn’t up to her to do so, anyway. But I didn’t know the answer to those questions. And, so, I stayed silent.

The party had been coming to a close when we stormed out and I guessed that our dramatic exit would have precipitated that end. After about an hour of walking, I led us back to my street and, through the bare branches of the Witness Tree, saw that most of the lights in the house had been closed. It seemed safe to venture back in.

No one was there to apologise.

We extricated ourselves from the multiple layers of winter clothing we were wearing as quietly as we could and slipped upstairs.

We both lay down in our separate beds, in our separate heads, and Carmen fell asleep.

I, myself, couldn’t even shut my eyes I was still so livid. Even seeing Carmen’s long lashes flutter in her dream-state didn’t calm me. Instead of going out the window like I used to, I went straight out the front door. Quietly, mind you. I leaned my back heavily along an indentation in the Witness Tree, crossed one ankle over the other, and lit a joint. At -5 it was a balmy Christmas night and I swear that the tree was emanating a soothing heat even though I knew Maples are dormant for the winter. I felt like the tree was reading me, sending warm feelers into my core. Or maybe it was just that I was still searing with anger.

Along my parents’ lane of majestic old estates, the neighbours’ places were some distance off and the streets were empty of people this Christmas night, so I felt no compunction talking to myself and the Witness Tree. I turned to face it, leaning my tuque padded forehead on its solid trunk and started to murmur in a hoarse whisper about the indignity of my life, “Where do these people come from? And why are their heads so clogged up with decades old liquid paper? Frozen solid in the 1990s. My uncle’s joke wouldn’t have been funny even if it wasn’t racist.” I had a few more choice things to say about my coloniser family and the crescendo was rising. With nothing but rolling, snow-covered lawns behind me and the Witness Tree before me, and considering the hour, I began to gesticulate and cry out a jumble of grievances. “Who serves Christmas dinner on STYROFOAM PLATES for God’s sake? Only my Mom. STYROFOAM at CHRISTMAS in 2021! I didn’t even know they SOLD Styrofoam anymore!”

I laid my head on the Witness Tree’s unyielding trunk again. A shiver went through me from the centre out. Followed by an eruption. “And my Dad! He’s cut from the same cloth as my uncle! Could he have said such an odious thing?” I recoiled at the thought and then I simply screamed, the Witness Tree’s porous wood absorbing my wrath. Now, instead of my whisper being hoarse, my throat was.

My thoughts turned to Carmen. “What must she think of us?” As I shook my head, my cheeks brushed against the Witness Tree’s rough bark. “Why, why, whenever you open your mouth to say something to her does it have to be so fucking acerbic, Bridget? There she is, being sweet, which is actually what you like about her, for once, and you repay her with sarcasm and bitterness.” My shoulders dropped, deflated, and, again, I shook my head. “Or worse, silence,” I whispered. The steam had run out of me, like the roach I had flicked into the snowdrift built up around the base of the Witness Tree.

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