Happiness of Fish (8 page)

He remembers early Christmases, when he and Patricia finished up their shopping on foot, zigzagging between Duckworth and Water Streets. They'd bought each other's big presents at a war-surplus store in the east-end. He got her a submariner's roll-neck jersey and a gas-mask pack for a purse. She bought him a long-skirted trench coat with bottomless pockets and a 1950 date tag sewed into it.

For their families on the mainland, they bought presents at her store, The Vales of Har, and at places that sold homemade trigger mitts and itchy toques and little souvenir killicks made out of twigs and beach pebbles. Some of this stuff drifts around Gerry and Vivian's house now. It came home to roost when he cleared out his mother's house and she went into an old-age home.

“You gave us that,” she'd say. “I won't have room for it. Take it home with you.”

Accordingly, the stuff that was supposed to evoke Newfoundland as exotic in Ontario drifted home to occupy odd corners of bookshelves or spare-room dressers, a sort of underlining of some mythical subtext of the everyday.

Gerry gets Vivian's Christmas boots in a store that was once a restaurant. They went there to eat when they were dating in the '80s. It still has some of the '80s brass and glass, but now it frames expensive shoes. The light is still restaurant dim. The leathers look roasted, glazed and edible.

“What would you recommend as a good, middle-of-the-road wine to go with those?” Gerry asks the clerk, looking around at the brick and stained glass as he puts the boots on his bank card.

“A nice Cabernet Sauvignon,” the clerk says without missing a beat. This is an upscale store.

Gerry meets his friend Philip in the street as he heads back to the wagon with the boots. Philip has just got off the bus, heading home from a shift at the call centre where he works. He's wearing enormous
troll-foot snow boots with felt liners spilling over the tops and a big shapeless parka. He's carrying a plastic shopping bag full of books, probably the homework for the humanist funeral or whatever else he's into at the moment. Philip reads heavy and smart. Gerry finds it's good exercise to even try to keep up, but it can get pricey. He paid better than full price for an out-of-print copy of Julian Jaynes's
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
. He needed to get up to speed on the voices of gods as auditory hallucinations.

“Can you join us for Christmas dinner?” Gerry asks. “I need someone to help keep the family at bay. Otherwise we'll be playing Born-again Barbie versus the Whore of Babylon on Game Boy all afternoon. I'll get you home at a civilized hour, I've got to drop down to the office and see if there's anything that needs doing. I'm on early mornings on Boxing Day.”

“I'm sure your family isn't that bad,” Philip says. “Dinner sounds very nice.”

Philip lives in a top-floor bed-sit in an old house downtown. He's been a regular at Christmas dinner with Gerry and Vivian for a couple of years. He's another come-from-away, although at a less-assimilated stage than Gerry. He's been around for five years and still gets more delighted and angrier with the place than Gerry does. He says he can't afford to live in St. John's. He originally came to be a hermit in an outport and not live in town at all. That never happened, so for months he's been mailing books home to his family in Toronto and saying that someday he'll follow them. Gerry points out that it would be cheaper to send a part load with a moving company, but there is something about the scale of making up the weekly book packages that suits Philip, tucking his literary soul into boxes and shipping it out a piece at a time. Unfortunately he keeps buying books, so the process has stretched out, even when he tries to short-circuit it and gives books away. Gerry's bookshelves have had several windfalls from Philip's proposed move.

Philip's job at the call centre is to field complaints for an American phone company. He talks to people in California about their internet service. He says the call centre is like a spaceship.

“The mother ship is in stationary orbit right over you,” he tells Gerry over coffee as afternoon turns into early solstice-time night. “I
can see your computer and it isn't fucking-well plugged in.”

“Where are you?” people on the phone ask Philip. Gerry kids him that new-age women in California want to party with an alien.

“We're only allowed to say Canada,” Philip tells him. “Explaining where Newfoundland is would take too long.”

Gerry can identify with the Californians a bit. He once listened to one end of a surreal cell-phone conversation in a sailboat, motoring in circles in Conception Bay. A friend of his was trying to get a fancy wind-direction indicator calibrated. They followed the instructions that came with the thing. They motored into the wind for a bit and then went around in circles but the instrument didn't want to lock in. The service call centre appeared to be in Singapore. Gerry's friend said the guy on the other end didn't seem to realize he was talking to a boat at sea. He just ran down a checklist of questions.

“He probably had another couple there, in case my coffee maker or my vibrator didn't work,” Gerry's friend remarked. “He only knows what he's servicing by model number.”

The day had been brilliant with a crinkled tinsel sea throwing diamonds in the air and a warm breeze blowing off the land and up the legs of Gerry's baggy shorts as they did their circle dance in the bay. A couple of minke whales came by to watch them go round and round in the summer sun.

Gerry thinks about the whales and the summer sun after he says goodnight to Philip and drives home though the winter dark, punctuated with the neon Morse of the Christmas lights.

Christmas Day is grey and mild with hardly any snow down. Gerry and Vivian had invoked their “Gran's House” rules so that the kids stayed up late and opened whatever present they wanted just after midnight. It keeps them in bed longer on Christmas morning while Gerry and Vivian get up early, put on a pot of coffee and stuff the turkey.

The turkey is big, but flawed. It had been selected, frozen-solid, out of a bin at the Dominion store. Now, it turns out to be a utility model, missing a drumstick although the thigh is still there.

“A children's Christmas classic is born,” Gerry says. “Stumpy the Christmas Utility Turkey, hopping along on his little crutch.”

“You're evil. You know that?” Viv says.

“God bless us every one!” Gerry says, hopping. “Then he settles down in the roaster and closes his eyes in blissful surrender. O Death, where is thy sting, or Gravy, thy victory?”

“Go on with you.”

The kids wake up for their second round of Christmas and everybody unwraps and nods and thanks. Melanie, Darren and Diana turn up from their house and the living room disappears in a welter of paper.

Gerry gets his sock, deodorant and aftershave supply topped up. It's a standing joke that, although he doesn't shave, he gets aftershave every year. As well, he gets a couple of shirts and a sweater from Viv. There are also a couple of books. Darren gives him a Tom Clancy thriller and Duane and Gretchen give him
The Purpose Driven Life
. They've given him a number of Christian books over the years. He's never quite had the nerve to counter with a copy of the
Tao Te Ching
.

When the gifts are dealt with, Duane and Gretchen and their kids take Vivian's car and head off to church.

Darren goes to sleep on the basement couch because he worked late on Christmas Eve. Melanie, Tanya and Vivian take second coffees into the living room and watch Diana try stuff on and play with her presents.

Gerry, meanwhile, finds that the salt meat has been overlooked in the Christmas shopping. It gives him a chance to sneak away for a bit. He hops in the car and heads out on a whirlwind tour of twenty-four-hour service stations, looking for a bucket of riblets.

The city is enclosed behind its curtains this morning, wrapped up in its families and presents. The streets aren't busy except around the churches. Gerry tries a couple of Irving stations for his riblets.

“We forgot the salt meat. Everything's on hold, veggies, pease puddin', the works,” he tells the girls at the cash.

At the first service station he draws a blank, but at the second, the clerk gets into the spirit of the emergency. She has long black hair and has gold bars diagonally through the rims of her ears. They remind Gerry of the skewers that used to transfix pickled pork-hock bar snacks.

“Can't have that,” she says, when he explains his problem. “We haven't got any, but I'll call Water Street West.”

She dials the phone, yells a Merry Christmas down it and asks about the riblet supply.

“They've got one bucket,” she says. “Will I ask them to hold onto it for you?”

“Yes, please,” Gerry says. “Thank you and Merry Christmas.” He drives across town, picks up the riblets in their little plastic bucket and heads home to pop them in the pot.

Around noon, Gerry is out and about again. He drives down to Duckworth Street to collect Philip. Philip comes with a large net bag of walnuts and a book each for Gerry and Vivian. For Gerry he has
Mistress Masham's Repose
, a kid's book Gerry read as a child and has been hunting for since somebody pinched his copy at a party he and Patricia threw. He has told Philip of this hunt several times.

“I hope you didn't already find it,” Philip says. “I'm sorry the cover's a little water-stained. It's the only one they had at the second-hand store.”

Philip's gift to Vivian is also from the second-hand bookstore. It's a coffee table book of Gothic carved angels in cathedrals. Philip is never quite sure just what Vivian is into. He accepts a large glass of wine and sits on a stool in the kitchen while Gerry cuts up apples and celery and mixes them with raisins for Waldorf salad. This is his CFA contribution to the family Christmas tradition.

“I wish I could cook,” Philip remarks. “There's something about home-cooking.”

“Like you're required to maintain a home to do it,” Gerry says. “You could have this tribe move into your bed-sit for a month and you'd start to cook just for the excuse to have a large sharp knife in your hand.”

About two in the afternoon they sit at the dining table with the kitchen table pushed against one end for the kids.

“That's the biggest turkey I think we've ever had,” Vivian says.

“It's the perfect Christmas trees that attract them,” Gerry says. “The biggest turkeys always roost in those magic best-we-ever-had trees. Poor old Stumpy here just couldn't resist.”

Vivian roots in the cabinet drawer for her camera and dinner passes in a series of snapshots.

Gerry proposes a toast to them all in cranberry juice and soda water.

Duane gets to ask another blessing.

Darren pours himself a shot of single-malt Scotch that Gerry bought for his more discriminating guests.

“That's the real good stuff,” Darren says and then mixes it with ginger ale. Gerry doesn't say anything because it's Christmas.

“I don't want the salad. There's black things in it,” Natalie says of the Waldorf.

“You don't have to eat it, dear,” Vivian says.

The plates of food have a mediaeval look with their heaps of boiled root vegetables and chunks of Stumpy, the primordial utility turkey. Gerry reserves the pope's nose and the gizzard as his special share for cooking and carving. He wonders how the politically correct handle the pope's nose/parson's nose debate. It's probably clergy person's nose if you're being picky. He remembers an aunt of his who was a giblet fan when the family had turkey when he was a child. His other aunts, her older sisters, would recall her saying she wanted “the lizard and the gizzard and the heart.”

“To the lizard and gizzard and the heart,” says Gerry, raising a glass of cranberry and soda.

After dinner the kids produce a board game, The Game of Life. It's like monopoly with career choices thrown in. Gretchen and Vivian do the dishes and Darren returns to the couch. Gerry has spirited the single-malt out of sight and left a bottle of Grouse out. Everybody else, singly and in syndicates, plays the game in that haphazard, only-read-the rules-when-you-have-to way that new board games are always played. Philip rapidly becomes a Game of Life shark. He becomes a brain surgeon, grabs the biggest mansion with a collection of art and retires to a private island in luxury while some players are still struggling with loans to pay for their education. He smiles and sips the good single-malt as his board game successes pile up.

“I don't believe your son-in-law knows what he's missing,” Philip says.

“I'm glad someone appreciates it,” Gerry says. “You're sure you wouldn't like Pepsi or whipped cream or a handful of Gummi Bears in that?”

In late afternoon Gerry drives the eminent retired brain surgeon back to his bed-sitter and drops by the radio station to make sure he has some updated news for Boxing Day. On desks in the office there are catering trays with sandwich crusts and wrinkly grapes and limp broccoli around empty dip dishes. There's the heel of a two-litre bottle of red wine on a filing cabinet. Gerry makes himself a coffee in his heat-saving thermal aluminium cup and gets on the phone.

There's a little secret society of people working on Christmas. Gerry's only a sort of honorary member because he has just dropped in for an hour or two. Still, the people on the other ends of the phone don't know that. He wishes Merry Christmas to the Constabulary and the Coast Guard search-and-rescue duty people and to the woman on the RCMP switchboard for the province. She's a familiar voice.

“Merry Christmas. Is that Stacey?”

“Yes it is. Merry Christmas to you too.”

Gerry checks to make sure that he's not missing any of the faxed news releases that have come in. It appears that he hasn't, so he thanks Stacey and settles down at the computer to write the terse little stories that will fit tomorrow's short holiday newscasts.