Jesus
My mother, my two younger sisters and I went to Christmas Eve mass at St. Magdalene’s church off of Flemington Main Street. The inside of the church had been renovated, the green carpet torn up and replaced with a deep burgundy, and a massive golden pipe organ was installed above the altar. People go to Christmas mass to feel like they’re the best of the upper-middle class, to see what everyone else looks like, if they’re happier or richer or nearer to God than everyone else is. There were no seats left for my family, so we walked across the street to the overflow mass held in the Parish Center, the gymnasium attached to classrooms and offices.
My sister, Virginia, complained because the gym was poorly lit and we had to sit in folding chairs with leather seat covers that gasped whenever someone sat down.
“This is what it’s supposed to be like,” I told her. “People gathered in houses or gymnasiums, giving their praise to God. Jesus is with you wherever you go.” She shrugged and busied herself with pretending not to notice her friend sitting on the right side of me. It was the first Christmas without my father, so I thought the gym seemed fitting.
I sung the gathering hymn so loudly that people stared and my mother leaned over Isabelle, my smallest sister, and hit me on the shoulder with her song pamphlet. The priest was new to the Parish and smiled too much, like Jesus was actually sitting in the first row of chairs waving back to him. There wasn’t even a manger in a nativity set up around the gym, just people standing in the back because all of the chairs were filled. The priest told us in his homily that his evidence of God, of Christmas cheer and hope in the world was found at Shoprite, the grocery store I work at five days a week.
“I was in Shoprite today, just picking up a few items, and they had ushers at the check-out! Can you believe that? And an elderly couple didn’t realize how the system worked, but the entire line of people agreed to let them cut in before them at the register. There is good in the world!”
People laughed and I cringed with the same numbness I feel when I’m making small talk or overhearing it. If anything, that grocery store has given me doubts about God’s existence.
People complain about everything in Shoprite, about a bruise on a peach, a dented bottle, their brand of canned tomatoes being out of stock, and my weary, sad expression that hangs on my face every minute I’m there. Strangers ask me what’s wrong and I tell them to look around. One day the bananas were sold out, and as if they only wanted what they couldn’t have, people hurried over to the stand and made small talk about the absence of their sacred fruit. A woman poked every live lobster that was piled on ice and asked the lady in seafood, a stout black woman with a sly smile and a loud laugh, why none of them were moving.
“It don’t matter. You’re gonna boil it anyway,” she told the woman.
There is an ancient man who works at Shoprite, Archie, who’s famous throughout the entire town because he’s pushing 170 years old, the ripe age for retirement, but he’s vowed to work until the day he dies. Everyone loves him. The elderly ladies hobble up to him, holding their large fur hats on their shrinking heads and balancing in their orthopedic shoes, croaking their hellos and sputtering how nice it was to see him. He hugs and kisses them. “Archie loves the ladies”, he says.
The lowest pieces of scum work there. Dan works at the Courtesy Counter, and he looks like a lion. He has long golden hair that he keeps tied in a crusty ponytail. He always asks me the same thing.
“Have you found that Victorian dress yet?” He told me once that I look like a woman from the Victorian Age, or something. Old World Beauty, I think.
“Nope.”
“Waiting for your sugar daddy to get it for you?”
“Yep”. Then I would wheel my cart into the frozen aisle and hide from him, and everyone else, for the rest of my shift.
He isn’t the worst. Sometimes homeless people come into the store if it’s raining, and this man always came in during bad weather, so I assumed he had nowhere to stay. He’d follow me around the store telling me things, I’d nod, and he’d ask if I wanted a swig from his gallon of apple juice or hip flask.
One day in the summer I drove to the Wing Dam to get out of the house. It’s a large rock that juts out into the middle of the Delaware, and people go to stick their feet in the water and sit around. When I clambered back up the rocks to get to the path back to the parking lot, there he was, that toad man I’d always see at Shoprite. He followed me, asked if I wanted a joint, asked if I played pool, if I wanted to come over to his house, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me I was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen.
I dove into my car and backed out of the Karate Studio parking lot without a backward glance. That night I went to the store to pick up my paycheck, and there he was, sitting on the park bench inside, next to the registers and the gumball machines. I haven’t seen him since, so I’m pretty certain he must have died by now.
The priest finished his homily and I stopped thinking about that place. I was the only one of the entire congregation who didn’t go up to receive the Eucharist, and I can’t figure out if it’s because I don’t believe in the divine nature of Jesus and that cracker, or if I wasn’t in the right place to be worthy of taking it.
Christmas morning my mother cried while my sisters and I opened our presents because her neck was stiff. We ignored her, for lack of something better to do with the situation. Her neck might have bothered her, but my father’s absence was hurting her more.
Virginia microwaved a heated pillow for her later in the day, but I stole away with her heating pad for her back, wrapped it around my waist and wore it around the house.
Christmas-mas, the day following the day, was spent at my father’s apartment. He sleeps on a mattress because he doesn't have money for a bed frame. The place is a cavern; it’s hollow, there are only beer cans and a half-eaten cheesecake in the refrigerator and a single loveseat couch in the living room. He bought the three of us bracelets he picked out with his girlfriend, and I knew he tried, but what bothered me the most was that he didn’t seem to know me at all, like he was suddenly my uncle who bought sterling silver charm bracelets with butterflies on them. He seems like an extended relative now.
My father took us to my Grandparent’s house, where we used to spend Christmas Eve and Day, but that house is empty now too. My grandparents both smoke, and during the winter they stay inside so the ceilings are yellowed and there’s a cloud that hovers in the family room and over the kitchen table. I remembered having Christmas Eve dinner in the dining room. Now it’s a storeroom for the Santa Clause statues my grandma collects, but there’s still the Jesus picture hanging on the wall. It’s the same one I kept with me, the one pinned up in my room in Baltimore. This one is a larger version, and has been there forever, framed with brittle, dead palm leaves from many Palm Sundays ago.
I went outside for an after-dinner smoke on the porch where they kept the soda because there was no room in the freezer. I looked in the garage and considered bringing up my request to take the canoe that had been there forever, buried under junk and dust for decades. It probably had holes in the bottom. I watched a tree stump for awhile out in the distance, at the edge of a clearing, because I thought it was a deer emerging from the forest. It was snowing, and the brightly-colored plastic toys left on the ground began disappearing.
I walked into the family room and was scolded, jokingly, for smoking.
“I’m just continuing the legacy,” I said and shrugged onto the couch. My grandparents were smoking inside and told me I could if I wanted to, but I said that’s alright. I felt like if I had, I’d ruin all of the innocent childhood memories of holidays I had in that room. I remember red velvet and lace dresses on Christmas and cheap Easter baskets with plastic grass in the springtime. I didn’t want to blow smoke onto them, haze over what I remembered and forget them.
An hour later I said goodbye to the Jesus picture and we left because the snow was falling harder and the roads were icing up. On the way out I wished I had had a smoke in the house, because the memories there were pretty shitty anyway.
I don’t know if I’ll always have Jesus with me, like I told me sister, but there will always be pictures of him around me, and unfortunately, my godforsaken family will be there too.
A few weeks later I went to my great-grandmother’s wake. I saw the picture of Jesus propped up with photos of her next to the casket and pointed it out to my grandmother. People in my family that I’d never seen before remarked on the faces of my sisters and I, saying we had inherited the family pudgy face. I pinched my sister’s sharp cheekbone and she did the same to me. A woman asked if I was my father’s wife.
My grandmother bummed me a cigarette and I left the funeral home to sit outside on the carpeted steps for a half hour, ignoring the cold.
