Chapter 27 A Midwest-Tuscan Christmas Aesthetic
27
A Midwest-Tuscan Christmas Aesthetic
When I land in Michigan on Christmas Eve, my first meal is at Buddy’s Pizza. Usually, it’s Zingerman’s Deli—an Ann Arbor staple—but today, I want crispy corners and stringy cheese. It’s a quintessential winter day in southeast Michigan, meaning the skies are a dreary gray and the snow surrounding the strip mall parking lot is more of a dirty beige slush than a winter wonderland.
“They must have pizza in Minnesota.” My mom turns out of the parking lot, the smell from the pizza boxes on my lap filling the aging Chevy Malibu.
“Nah. They’re still figuring it out over there.”
“Well, that settles it. You’re moving back. Or at least moving to Florida.” She punctuates her flat delivery with a flick of her turn signal, oncoming headlights lighting up her curly brown bob.
“Yes, Florida—the state known for its pizza,” I respond dryly.
“Your father and I went to Clearwater last spring, and they had great food.”
“Were you meeting with L. Ron Hubbard for a slice?”
“Elron who? I never have any idea what you and your sister are talking about.”
“Nothing. A Scientology joke. They’re headquartered in Clearwater, Florida.”
“Oh, them? I left Scientology ages ago, back when they were mostly a bunch of boats.” She shrugs as she turns into our neighborhood, as if escaping Scientology is tragically mundane and not fodder for a ten-episode HBO series. Bored, she changes the subject. “Emma’s pregnant, by the way.”
I know my sister Emma has always wanted kids, but I had no idea she was trying to get pregnant. “She must be so excited. Can we stop at the bookstore for a baby gift?”
“She won’t be telling you. She’s not telling anyone yet, but she’s visibly pregnant, so I thought you should know not to bring it up. And don’t offer her wine or anything.”
“Why would I offer a pregnant woman wine?”
“Because you don’t know she’s pregnant.”
I point between the two of us. “I’m not participating in this, so I’ll just follow her lead. Anything else I should know?”
She shakes her head. “I printed some articles for you to look at on increased risk of skin cancer with brCA,” she says. “We can look at them after dinner.”
Slumping deeper into my pizzas, I lean my forehead against the window with such helpless melancholy, I put my inner high schooler—the one who wrote sad, strange poetry in pastel gel pen—to shame. Every time I get on a plane to Michigan, I tell myself this will be the visit when I don’t regress back to my seventeen-year-old self. This year, I couldn’t make it past the ride from the airport.
···
My dad doesn’t leave the den for dinner until my mom and I have finished eating and are settled on the couch searching for a Christmas movie. “Working or studying?” I ask him when he emerges.
He startles mid-yawn, as if the sight of me on the couch doesn’t compute, and adjusts his black Coke-bottle glasses. “Well, hi there, Alison. Studying. Classes start next week.”
I point to the kitchen. “Pizza’s in the oven.” For as long as I can remember, my parents have stored pizza, in its cardboard box, in the oven, at two hundred degrees. I never considered it a hazard until I got my own apartment and made the conscious decision never to do this, lest I burn the place to the ground. Still, whenever I visit, I instinctually stick the pizza box in the oven without a thought, as if basic fire safety doesn’t apply to childhood homes.
He makes himself a plate and shuts himself back in the den. When my mom got her cancer diagnosis, he went down to part-time at his job as a machinist. Worried her cancer might return, he stayed part-time. After years of clean scans and too many free hours, he decided to fill them with a master’s degree in medieval literature. For fun. It’s a decision I still find baffling, but I suspect he finds the women in his household a bit baffling himself.
My extremely introverted and cerebral father has always existed in sharp contrast to my extroverted, gregarious mother. I remember road trips to the Sleeping Bear Dunes where my mom spoke for hours on end as my dad received her words without response. Once, I followed him into the gas station and found him standing in front of a wall of Gatorades with his eyes closed. When I asked if he was sick, he responded, “No, sweetie, it’s just…your mom’s a verbal processor. That’s all.”
I’ve never viewed my parents’ marriage as a bad one, just one that has never made sense to me. I always assumed he was retreating to his study to escape his chatty wife and two loud daughters, but now that he’s an empty nester, I can see it’s who he is. My dad has always felt more comfortable in the quiet refuge of a book, where my mom only reads enough to get invited back to her many book clubs.
“How did the ultrasound go?” she asks.
“Fine,” I answer.
“Did the cyst go away?”
I throw my head back against the overstuffed chocolate-brown couch cushion. My parents last invested in home decor in 2005, so the aesthetic of the seventies split-level is Midwest Tuscan, all oversized brown furniture and red accents. My eyes rest on the faded, color-washed walls my parents painted themselves with yellow-gold paint, a wet rag, and a rerun of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition .
“I rue the day I told you about the cyst.”
“Well, did it?”
“Yes. My ovaries look perfectly ordinary,” I answer, irritation burning a hole in my throat.
“Why is my love and concern for you so annoying?”
I clench the brick-red pillow on my lap. “Because brCA’s the only thing we talk about.”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s not that bad. I don’t think you realize how much I worry about you. I passed this mutation on to you. I just want to make sure nothing bad happens because of it.”
I watch her braid the tassels on the throw blanket over our legs. I’ve spent so much time imagining how testing negative for the brCA mutation would have released me of guilt that I’ve never considered the guilt my diagnosis pressed into my mother’s chest. She’s as desperate to alleviate misplaced feelings as I am, but instead of forced hikes and ill-conceived camping trips, she’s ensuring I’m attending appointments and scheduling procedures. My mom, Adam, Rachel, Sam, we’re all powerless against guilt.
“At my last visit, I asked her about the article you sent—the fallopian tube removal. She agreed it’s a good option for me, but I have to take these steps on my timeline. No one else’s. I can promise I’ll take care of myself, but I need to be able to talk to you like my mom. Not my genetic counselor.”
As she nods, her face stiffens like she’s working to hide an emotion from me. “I didn’t realize we were talking about it that much. I only want to know what you’re thinking. It’s like pulling teeth with you sometimes.”
“Yeah, I’m realizing I don’t like discussing how to avoid cancer with you, of all people.”
“Why me ‘of all people’?”
“Because you had to actually survive cancer so I could skip it.”
“You think you skipped cancer? Like you overslept and…” She flicks her hand like she’s brushing something out of her way. “Missed it?”
“Not like that.”
“Explain it to me then.”
I turn toward her on the couch, perched on my crossed legs. “I have this mutation, and because of it, I was supposed to get cancer. In an alternate timeline, we don’t know I have the gene yet, and—”
“Alternate timeline? Is this like a Marvel thing? You know I can’t pay attention to those movies.”
“No, but, absent medical intervention, our bodies were supposed to get cancer. Yours did, and you fought for your second chance. You had to suffer through chemo. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t lose anything. Why do I get to cheat cancer when you couldn’t?”
“You didn’t lose anything? Honey, you lost your breasts. You will lose your ovaries. In an alternate timeline, we’ve figured out a way to keep you healthy that doesn’t involve removing body parts.” She reaches for my hand across the couch, her familiar gold rings cold against my knuckles.
“I’m working through it with Denise, but I’ve been overwhelmed by this feeling that I’m not deserving. Like my life isn’t big enough to justify what I’ve been given. I can’t quite explain it yet.”
She fusses with one of my rogue curls, unable to help herself. “No, I think I know what you mean. You know the breast cancer support group I went to? I swear to you, I had the best prognosis of the bunch. I felt like such a jerk every time I talked about my fears or the treatments when the Stage Four women had no idea what was happening next. One of them was even a little younger than you. She’d just had a baby when she was diagnosed. I remember thinking that she was really fighting for her life, while I was just…I don’t even remember what I thought I was doing. I only remember feeling so guilty that I was going to live when some of those women weren’t.”
She shifts on the couch, settling in. “You know how your dad went back to school? I was the one who first wanted to go back to school. I was going to get an MFA and write the next Great American Novel like I’d always said I would back when I was getting my teaching certificate.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to write.”
“Ugh. I don’t. I barely like reading—it’s all too solitary—but in the back of my brain there was this thought spinning round and round. What if the cancer comes back? What if this is your only chance? What if it comes back because you didn’t do this? But you know what was so much more terrifying than owing a debt to the universe? Realizing it’s all random. And that’s the truth, there’s nothing to pay or prove. We’re all just living.”
I feel a bit of my guilt lift from my chest. Those feelings I clung to—that living life to the fullest was objective and identifiable—don’t fit so neatly beneath my ribs anymore. My mom turns on the couch cushion and faces me straight on when she tells me, with the steadiness and certainty reserved only for moms, “You don’t need to prove you deserve your life to me or anyone. You deserve it, because everyone does. When they die or get sick or have to get a mastectomy, it’s not because they deserve it. It’s not fair, and it’s random. There’s nothing we can do other than live how we want to live.”
I don’t realize I’m crying until I rub my eyes with my hand, and they come away wet. “I hate hiking,” I blurt. “I want to like it, but there are so many bugs.” My voice is so pathetically weepy, my mom can’t help but laugh at me.
“I know, honey.” She pushes the top of my hair back and kisses my head like she did when I was little, and I feel protected in the same way I did back then. “I want to watch Meet Me in St. Louis, ” she says, grabbing the remote.
“I love that one.”
“I know you do.”
I snuggle against my mom as the black-and-white image of the familiar St. Louis house transforms into that dreamy 1940s Technicolor, and we watch Judy Garland—in all her glory—croon about the boy next door.
—
Emma waddles across the travertine tile floor in her red velvet maternity dress, conspicuously holding her belly. Her wife, Theresa, trails behind, balancing a Pyrex of her mother’s cuccidati cookies, greeting the house with a cheery “Merry Christmas.”
Emma grunts.
I grab the Italian fig cookies from my sister-in-law’s hands and set them on the counter, freeing Theresa to help her wife flop into a chair at the kitchen table.
“How’s life, Em?” My hands move from the table to my neck to my arm with transparent awkwardness.
Her nostrils flare. “Mom told you I’m pregnant.”
I suck in a breath. “She told me you wouldn’t be telling me you’re pregnant. So, yes? No? It’s unclear.”
Emma snatches a carrot from the veggie platter. It cracks in half between her teeth. “That woman could never keep a secret.”
“I think your belly is the tip-off,” I say, pointing to Emma’s bump. Theresa’s laugh sprays cracker into her hand.
Emma lifts her sandy blond waves off her neck to reveal droplets of perspiration. “Alison, you don’t tell a pregnant person they look pregnant. Don’t you know anything?”
“You’re my first pregnant peer. I don’t know the rules.”
“You’re supposed to say you’d never know I was pregnant if I hadn’t told you and that I’m glowing even though it’s clearly sweat.”
I refill the bowl of green and red M&M’s I ate for breakfast and tuck the bulk bag back in the cabinet. “So…lie?”
“Don’t listen to her, babe,” Theresa says, flipping her long, dark hair. “You look like a pregnant celebrity who’s so tiny she can still shoot her movie. So long as she’s carrying an oversized bag or a houseplant at all times.”
Emma leans across the table to flick my shoulder. “You’re both the worst.”
I wince and swat her hand away. “Why single me out?”
“Because you’re the worst person in this house. And the closest. And a bad influence on Tree,” she tacks on.
“I’m not even the worst Mullally daughter in this house.”
I love Emma for her boldness, but no one’s mistaking her for the sweet one. The running joke in the family is that 30 percent of her sentences start with “You know what I don’t like about…”
“I’ll leave you two to duke it out.” Theresa kisses her wife’s temple before escaping to watch TV with my dad.
“So how’s the pregnancy going?” I ask.
“Good. I had morning sickness for like eighteen weeks—second trimester is easy, my ass—but now that I’m at twenty-one weeks, the Linda Blair memories are starting to fade.”
I pluck a stalk of celery from the tray. “Why didn’t you want me to know?”
She scoops a handful of M&M’s into her mouth. “It’s not just you. I haven’t told Tree’s family.”
“Do you hide behind large pieces of furniture at Sunday dinner?” Theresa has a giant Italian family that gets together for mandatory weekly dinners at her aunt’s house. Neither illness, weather, nor a light coma will excuse your absence.
Emma glares at the suggestion. “I’ve only gotten bigger recently.”
“Sure, you don’t look that pregnant for a pregnant person, but you look quite pregnant for a nonpregnant person. I think they’ll start to suspect.”
“IVF was this whole thing”—she waves her hand in an attempt to simplify something that’s too emotionally fraught to describe over a Kroger veggie platter—“and I didn’t want to bother you with my fertility stuff with everything you’ve been going through.”
I stare at her, snapping open the Christmas Coke can in front of me and waiting for her to fill in the dots.
“You’re going to get your ovaries removed. You don’t really want to hear me cry about my egg retrieval.” She picks a loose strand of hair from my sweater sleeve and frowns at it. I know my sister well enough to spot this bit of misdirection when I see it—her attempt to distract from how Emma Mullally just admitted to tears.
Is this how I sound with my mom when I compare our burdens? “I love you and Theresa, Em. You don’t have to hide stuff from me just because you tested negative. I want to be there for you through all this stuff. This baby too.”
She folds her lips shut, holding back whatever’s bubbling underneath. Emma’s always felt more comfortable roasting than emoting. I watch her wrestle with the urge to pinch me rather than continue on the path of sisterly vulnerability.
“How did it all happen?” I ask, taking a sip.
“So when a woman and a woman love each other very much, then Dr.Kirby—”
“Not that, you idiot. How did you know this was the moment to take that step? How did you know it was what you wanted right now?”
“I didn’t.”
“What?”
“How am I supposed to know if any time is a good time for anything? Does anyone? You just have to make the choices that feel true to the life you want and hope like hell it will all work out.”
“The life I want has been a bit of a moving target lately.”
“Yeah, your social media’s been all over the place. Were you in a hot-air balloon at some point?”
“I was. Yes.” The hot-air balloon pilot took the photos for me while I held my knees to my chest on the floor of the basket and did breathing exercises.
“This is just like when we were kids and you tried out for track even though you’re a garbage runner, because you liked the idea of it better than the geeky stuff you did with Dad. You only let yourself be all obsessive with that train thing during Christmas. Theresa thinks it’s why you’re such an unbearable Christmas monster.”
“I thought it was my fun quirk.”
“Alison,” Emma huffs. “It’s literally the most unbearable thing about you. You watch The Holiday year-round. It’s deranged.” The future mother and person in this house most likely to put me in a headlock kicks me in the kneecap for emphasis.
“Stop with the violence,” I demand, resisting the impulse to tack on or I’m telling Mom . “Nancy Meyers transcends the holiday season, and Cameron Diaz is criminally underrated as a comedic actress.”
Emma furrows her brow. “You know what I don’t like about Cameron Diaz?”
I throw a red M&M at her face, but when she catches it in her mouth, we’re both too impressed to remember what we were arguing about in the first place.
Dinner goes by in a blur of mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and honey baked ham, and I can’t help but wonder what slow-cooker creations June’s made for the Berg family today.
For dessert, my mom passes the cookie tin around the table as she weaves her culty tales.
“What’s even weirder”—she bites into a jelly thumbprint shortbread—“is I was supposed to go to the Rajneesh compound with that roommate, but Emma and Alison’s father got the flu. The girl said it was a yoga retreat, but yeah, she was in the documentary.”
“Ms.Mullally, you seriously need to write a tell-all book,” Theresa implores.
My dad rubs small circles between my mom’s shoulder blades. “I’m always saying she has a story to tell,” he agrees. My mom eyes me knowingly.
Emma stands, making a meal of every minute articulation of her bones. “I love you all. This was wonderful, but I’m too pregnant to be up this late.”
My mom gasps theatrically, clutching her chest. “You’re pregnant?!”