The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(31)
Hail, Full of Grace
At the Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it didn’t matter that Mary insisted on keeping her nails painted black or that Joseph had come out of the closet. On December 25th at seven and nine P.M., three Wise Women would follow the Wise Men down the aisle, one wearing a kimono and another African garb; instead of myrrh they would bring chicken soup, instead of frankincense they’d play lullabies. The shepherds had a line on protecting the environment and the innkeeper held a foreclosure sign. No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn’t—so they made it about the songs and the candles and the pressing together of bodies on lacquered wooden pews.
My daughter Emma was the Jesus understudy. Five months into the adoption and the word still sounded strange.
“Your daughter’s our backup baby?” the minister had asked.
“Emma is, yes.” I shifted her upward in my arms. “She was just telling me how she hopes the leading Jesus sprains an ankle.” He stared at me, but I thought it was funny.
*
I don’t usually volunteer babies for debatably experimental Christmas pageants but Jared called me seven times the day before. There was a crisis. Jesus had to go to San Antonio to visit his grandmother in the hospital and the First Parish’s annual nativity was famous for live babies. I was back in my hometown for Christmas and Jared, my best friend from high school, was the Community Outreach Chair and didn’t want to talk about it. According to his phone, the church was only ten minutes from my house and Honestly, Audrey, do you really have an excuse? I didn’t.
I was bored anyway. The newspaper had given me six months off and I was already craving deadlines. I’d come home a few weeks early before Christmas to spend time with my mother, who recommended the early arrival after she heard me describe the strangeness of having Emma alone in my apartment. The first month had been silent. I’d put music on sometimes but I was afraid of having the TV too loud. There was no fighting or laughing or lovemaking squeezed perfectly into the hours she fell asleep, and at my Monthly, Dr. Berenson recommended I talk to the baby. So I did. Just monologued while she was feeding or staring or falling asleep on my chest.
She was four months old, but I’d told her everything. Told her about my job and being bored with my book and the reason why I got her. Told her I was sorry I couldn’t nurse her, sorry she had no father, sorry I kept talking to her all the time when she probably just wanted to sleep or eat or start mapping her world. One night, when she wouldn’t stop crying, I told her about Julian. Told her how pathetic I was for still thinking that far back. I’m forty-two, I’d whispered while she gripped at a finger—you don’t know this yet, but that’s old to hold your hand.
I’d dated Julian from sixteen to twenty-three. We got together our sophomore year of high school and didn’t break up until a year after our college graduations. Christmas meant coming home, and coming home meant Julian and I were thrust into the same eight-mile radius and forced to revisit the whole ordeal. I kept his holiday cards in a drawer in my apartment year after year: his three children aging and waving from beaches and backyards and trips to pick pumpkins.
*
On the evening of the twenty-fourth, I had Jared pick me up for the rehearsal. He was busy, but I didn’t know how to get there and I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t need convincing.
“You’re saving my life, Audrey.” He made a kissing noise into the phone. “I’ll be there at four.”
“Is Brett coming?” I caught him before he hung up.
“Why? Do you not want him to?”
“Either way.”
“I’ll leave him at the church.”
“You’re a doll, Jerry.” I hung up before he would make the kissing noise again. It was a habit he’d picked up from Brett since they’d moved in together and it always made me hate him.
Emma pushed Cheerios off her high-chair tray when she heard his car crunch down the driveway of my old house. It was day five of cereal eating and Emma had already mastered the art of throwing. She stared at me once the cereal had successfully spilled off the edges and I imagined her throwing Cheerios out from inside the manger. It cracked me up, which cracked her up, and when she reached her arms into the air, I carried her upstairs with me to grab a red scarf for festivity. It was my mother’s phrase, for festivity.
*
“Do I have to come?” I said when Jared opened the door.
“Nice to see you too.” He plucked Emma out of my arms and cooed. “I’m taking baby Jesus regardless, so I’m guessing you’re gonna want to get in the car.” He walked straight in through the door like he had since he was ten.
“Tell me no one from high school is going to be there.” The question hadn’t occurred to me on the phone, but the prospect of parading Emma to my old friends as Jesus incarnate was horrifying. Jared didn’t answer. “Is there any way to specify in the program that I didn’t volunteer?”
“But you did volunteer!” he grinned, picking up the car seat and walking out to his Volvo. “I asked you and you said yes!”
Jared was the only one of us who’d never really left, but he understood that coming home was hard for me. Seven years is no small amount of time to date someone, no matter how young, and practically everything in our small town reminded me of Julian: our high school years when we went to proms and movies and our college summers when we passed the time smoking pot in his car, squealing to 7–Eleven with Jared and Lucas and Sarah and trading off sleeping in each other’s twin-size beds. We were that couple. The one the single teachers envied at prom, the one everyone took for granted, for untouchable. Our senior year, we lost Cutest Couple to Skylar and Jillian, but it was only because Jillian’s best friend was editor of the yearbook and Julian’s soccer team voted against us as a joke. In the summer we traveled with each other’s families and in the fall we ate at two Thanksgivings. He was nerdy but earnest, handsome but flirty. And I loved him.