Really Good, Actually(44)

At 8:30, the doorbell rang. The delivery driver shoved the package into my hands with a brusque “Happy holidays.” Fair enough. This man probably had somewhere to be—a loving family or devoted partner waiting for him at home, missing him terribly. It was unfair that he had to work on Christmas Eve, delivering packages to lone morons who, if they had their life even remotely together, could easily have borrowed or rented a car, driven to Ikea, and picked up their mid-range bed frame themselves. As I tried to express some garbled version of this, he took what I assumed to be the world’s least flattering photograph of me, unwashed and be-turted, balancing the cardboard box on one hip like a long, bad baby.

I went back inside and cut it open. A little baggie of screws and plastic fittings fell out, along with the instruction booklet. On the first page, an angular cartoon figure stood with a pencil behind his ear and an X over his entire body. He was looking down at a pile of furniture parts and frowning. Beneath him was the caption: “Best completed with two.” Farther along the page a pair of angular cartoon friends—or lovers, the relationship was unclear, but they seemed to have an understanding—smiled together, ready to finish the job as a team. I decided to construct the bed frame later.

I’d spent the Christmas Eves of my childhood staying up late with Hannah, eating cookies and clementines, deliberating about how early we could reasonably run downstairs and expect our parents (parent, later) to join us. We continued sharing a room on Christmas Eve well into our teens, stopping only when the omnipresence of her boyfriend made the arrangement undesirable. She was still with that boyfriend—a sardonic, lanky boy called Ed. They shared a rickety apartment off Princess Street that they sublet for long stretches, traveling to Colombia and Thailand and New Zealand, taking beautiful photos of beaches and each other and strangers on ethically complicated boat tours. They did not have individual nicknames for each other but referred to themselves as a unit as “Mom and Dad.” They were in no rush to get married but would clearly be together forever.

I ate a few clementines and got back in bed, wishing I’d gone home to be with Hannah tonight. I dragged my laptop onto the pillow next to me, the SKURNSK looming in the corner as I watched a talented young baker realize she was the spitting image of a beautiful, world-weary duchess, and holiday hilarity ensued. I drifted off sometime after an averted crisis at the televised baking competition, but before the festive double wedding.

The next day I woke early and took the train to Kingston. The automated voice announced the cities we’d arrive at in English and in French as the carriage rocked us slowly back and forth like infants in a bassinet on a dryer. The lake looked beautiful and cold, the sun glinting off the ice at its edges. I knew the city itself would be a mix of bad gray (brutalist libraries, melted snow) and beautiful gray (old limestone, smoke from chimneys curling up through the sky), all quiet and emptied out of students from the universities. My dad met me at the station in an enormous knitted hat, and we drove to his place to open presents and eat bagels and drink mimosas with Ed and Hannah. When I got there, Ed said, “How you holding up?” and Hannah slapped him hard on the knee, then came toward me with a cup of coffee and a hug, saying, “I panicked and bought you pants at the last minute. Risky move.”

The year my parents split up, they were appalled to learn that each had modified Christmas in the exact same way: “Since you’re having turkey at your dad’s,” our mom had said, “I thought we’d do ham this year.” The next day, the smell of pork wafted out of our father’s kitchen, greeting us before he did. Each of them bought us plush new slippers as gifts. Both of their plans for Christmas 2.0 involved breakfast booze.

Though they’d now been separated longer than I’d known them together, I was often struck by the similarity of my parents’ advice, how many values and first instincts and turns of phrase they still shared. They had been together thirteen years, after all. The love had gone away, by my calculation, sometime around my eighth birthday, but their impact on each other was not so easily undone. They did not seem to relish hearing this, which I understood better now. I was still buying eggplant on autopilot and had only recently realized I did not favor the left side of the bed. Without Jon’s playful sparring, my daily life had become less argumentative, and I discovered I preferred it that way. It was hard to learn traits I’d considered mine alone had been forged with or borrowed wholesale from someone else. How embarrassing, to have to figure out what was Me, what was Him, what was Us. How much more embarrassing, to find out you’d got it wrong.

By now our broken family had a practiced routine, alternating an intimate Christmas morning with one parent and an extended family dinner with the other. This year was Mom’s turn for dinner. My mother’s family is huge and, like the families of many caucasian North Americans, passionately if theoretically Irish. You could tell me any white person in Canada was my cousin, and I would believe you. I had many childhood memories of my mother dragging me over to some stranger in the grocery store, shoving my hand out to shake theirs, and telling me this person I would never see again was secretly a dear relative—such and such level of cousin, so and so amount removed. Holidays with her clan started early, ended late, and involved a lot of Drambuie and affectionate yelling. Typically, three to six people cried.

This year, these were the highlights:

a cousin’s husband I hadn’t seen since last Christmas asked where Jon was before I had even taken off my coat;