“I can’t believe you stole my Meemaw’s ring,” Magdalene burst out. She steered the ancient Honda along a two-lane highway in North Texas. She accelerated to match her fury, taking her eyes off the road to glare at the angular figure lounging in the passenger’s seat. Peter stared out at the horizon sullenly, careful not to meet Magdalene’s accusatory glare.
Knees drawn up to his chest, Peter’s thin frame appeared all angles: sharp chin, shoulders, elbows. Peter yawned and pulled out another cigarette. Magdalene continued to fume, “I mean, how did you expect me not to find out? You posted a picture of it!”
Peter carefully flicked his lighter, watching the orange glow take hold and delicately taking a drag. “You know what Ayn Rand said about the irrationality of her persistently smoking cigarettes? She said it was evidence of man’s desire to be a god: to control fire.”
“Ugh! That is just like you! Change the subject, say something bizarre and esoteric to show how artistic you are. You’re such an ass. I saw the picture you posted with the ring! How did you think I wouldn’t? Answer me!”
Peter reverted to sullen silence, breathing in smoke. The picture that so enraged Magdalene was a carefully orchestrated artistic display: Peter, his blond hair meticulously arranged to appear nonchalantly unkempt, drumsticks positioned in his hands to give the illusion that Peter could manage the drum set in front of him, his thin frame perched on the edge of a swiveling stool, his slender thighs sheathed in skintight dark denim. On the index finger of his right hand was a large oval turquoise ring, “Meemaw’s ring” that Magdalene was so upset about. Peter didn’t consider it stealing, just borrowing with no specific intention of returning the ring. He had access to it in Magdalene’s filthy apartment on the outskirts of their college campus in the middle of Kansas farmland.
During their senior year, the pair had come close to dating, gradually spending more time together, drifting in and out of cluttered apartment bedrooms shared with classmates. Amongst the discarded trash and crumpled clothing and papers littering Magdalene’s room, Peter’s slender fingers extracted the large, cool stone. He slipped it on his finger to pose for Magdalene, much to her amusement until, weeks later, she couldn’t find the ring. Weeks after graduation, she saw the picture Peter posted, immediately recognizing how many hours were devoted to composing the artistic persona and the prominent placement of the turquoise, a suggestively androgynous quality to the ensemble.
Peter flicked ashes out of the cracked window, glancing at the brown grass and leafless trees of early winter. He wondered again why he was making the trip to New Orleans to spend the long Christmas weekend with Magdalene’s large family. Having spent the fall doing grunt work in an office outside Dallas, Peter didn’t have the money to fly to Minnesota to see his family and was not surprised to discover that his parents would be in their native Denmark through New Year’s anyway. Left adrift, without enough money to take a better trip, Peter accepted Magdalene’s offer to pick him up on her way down from Kansas. He was curious to see the strange family she mentioned occasionally, a large crew of idiosyncratic siblings marked variously by their ideologically intense upbringing.
Magdalene continued to mutter about the ring, but as always happened with Peter, she gave in and started to smile at his self-centered musings and factoids about favorite authors. The miles dragged by under a gray sky as they moved southeast.
As dusk fell, the Honda sped down the illuminated streets of the city, hitting potholes at regular intervals. Peter looked out the window with a dull expression of restrained interest. Abruptly, Magdalene pulled the car to the side of the road, a battered truck blasting Christmas music through open windows barreled past. “This is it!” she announced, “My grandmother’s big Southern mansion!”
Peter looked about at the topiary decorated with white lights, the traditional front porch with massive columns, the four-foot nutcracker standing guard under a flaming gas lamp in the entryway. “Wow, I didn’t realize it was so massive.”
“I told you,” Magdalene sighed, adding, “But, of course, you never listen.”
The pair carried their sparse luggage from the old car up the large slate tiles leading up to the impressive front door. Not pausing to knock, Magdalene tried the large, elaborate handle on the double doors and found it unlocked. As the door swung open, noise flooded out onto the porch. From the first, Peter’s impression of Magdalene’s large family was noise and motion, both constant and uncontrollable. Children ran around the ornate sitting room, adults lingered talking loudly in the kitchen toward the back of the house, and loud exclamations could be heard at the top of the staircase.
“Maggie! Glad you made it!” a balding man in a crisp dress shirt and pristine loafers, drink in hand, leaned over to give her a kiss on both cheeks. “Maggie is here!” he shouted to the assembly in the kitchen..
“Magdalene, so glad you could come!” the woman Peter assumed was Magdalene’s mother came around the kitchen island to give her a hug, her smile illuminating her tired face carried warmth. “And who is this?” she asked turning to Peter.
Peter, forgetting he was present in this unfamiliar scene and not merely a silent and invisible observer was taken aback. “Oh, this is my friend Peter. We met at school,” Magdalene said airily. “Peter, this is my mom.”
Turning her warm smile toward Peter, Magdalene’s mother said, “Pleased to meet you, Peter. Call me Tabitha.” The hand she extended was soft but worn, making Peter think of a cozy bathrobe dirtied with wear. Her figure was petite, but Peter noted a slight bulge around the waist of her floral dress, perhaps, he wondered, an indication of the decades of childbearing that accounted for Magdalene’s long list of siblings.
From there, Peter entered a whirlwind of handshakes, kisses, slaps on the shoulder, and introductions. He met other uncles, like the one he met in the door, some of Magdalene’s brothers who were grown men, some who were teenagers, sisters-in-law, sisters who were clearly older than Magdalene, young girls, and Magdalene’s stately grandmother, whose artfully coiffed hair paired perfectly with the classic elegance of her sprawling home on a historic street in Uptown.
Peter was bewildered by the steady stream of names and faces, noise and excitement. He was disturbed when he was taken upstairs for yet more introductions, these to Magdalene’s loud nephews and her disabled sister. Peter averted his eyes from the dull but happy eyes of the sister. She couldn’t speak intelligibly, but she smiled toothily at him when Magdalene dragged him over to meet her. “This is Therese,” Magdalene said, unphased by the peculiarity of her sister, smiling in a way that Peter noticed was quite like her mother’s gently radiant smile.
Peter was relieved when Magdalene steered him out of the room and back down the stairs. Magdalene’s sister Ginny met them in the entryway. “Grandmama says y’all are staying out in the carriage house. But you have to sleep separately, of course. Peter, you’ll be with the little boys. Good luck,” Ginny, a slender blond whose slight crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes betrayed her years, smiled wryly.
Bewildered, Peter followed the sisters onto the back patio and out to a small, converted outbuilding, which was revealed to house a jumble of cots and bunkbeds littered with sleeping bags and action figures. Used to the silence and privacy of a house with solitary adults, Peter felt panic rising in his chest. How would he ever sleep in this mess with all these loud people? When he snuck a glance at Magdalene, he was surprised to see her excitement. She clearly enjoyed the chaos and looked happier than he ever remembered seeing her. Peter thought wearily how grateful he was it was that it was already the twenty-third. They only had to make it through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Then they could get back on the road and be done with all the noise.
Back in the kitchen, there was a constant bustle of activity as Tabitha and Grandmama orchestrated simultaneous preparations for the upcoming Christmas feast and dinner for that night, a large vat of meatballs and another of spaghetti close to done. Peter stood mutely against the wall watching the flurry of activity. The balding uncle he met first sidled over and struck up a conversation in the genteel way of older Southern men. “You said you know Magdalene from school? You still there like her or you move on to other things?”
With labored effort, Peter answered questions and tried to quell suspicions that he was romantically involved with Magdalene. He was bewildered to observe a man he assumed to be Magdalene’s older brother perched on a barstool in the corner of the cacophonous kitchen placidly reading through horn-rimmed glasses. When Magdalene caught him staring she said, “Oh, that’s Blaise. Actually, you and Blaise should meet. He’s a literature professor. Blaise!”
Barely noticing the shout, Blaise glanced up from the page and seemed surprised to discover the array of people before him. After introductions, Magdalene explained that Peter was a writer working to get his short stories published. Blaise lit up, expressing eagerness to read. Peter shrank back from the attention, preferring to quietly observe the activity swirling around him. He was pleased when their conversation was cut short by the summons to spaghetti dinner. Tabitha paused while transferring a large pot across the kitchen to say, “So sorry, dear, you’ll have to sit at the kiddie table with Magdalene for now. She didn’t tell us she’d be bringing a…friend with her and we don’t have a spot at the big table just yet.”
Magdalene led him to a pair of folding tables bearing festive checkered table clothes, already crawling with hungry children. Peter recoiled when he saw the disabled sister sitting at the “kiddie table,” shuddering to imagine having to watch her eat. He wondered why as plates were doled out she didn’t get one but he was temporarily put at ease.
He looked to his other side to see Magdalene laughing with a pack of little boys, a pudgy toddler girl smeared with snot and food in her lap. After what seemed an interminable meal, the many guests scattered to their preferred corners of the house. Peter glanced at the tablecloth splotched with sauce and wandered after Magdalene to the room with the Christmas tree and the piano.
Blaise proved to be the center of attention, confidently moving his hands across the grand piano and leading the family in song. Magdalene disappeared for a while to help wash dishes, leaving Peter in a cold sweat. To be abandoned among singing strangers was a nightmare for the slender, solipsistic artist.
As the minutes ticked by with renditions of “Lo, How a Rose e’re Blooming” and other carols, Peter itched to get back to his laptop. He felt he was on the verge of a great short story and he needed adequate time—and quiet—to revise it. He religiously wrote two thousand words a day, and the day’s driving had cut into his writing time leaving him with a paltry four hundred words before he was debilitated by car sickness.
He noticed not everyone was enraptured with the communal singing. Ginny, the older sister who showed him to his lodgings earlier, hung at the edge of the group, arms crossed, not singing along. But even she smiled occasionally. Peter noticed how tightly her jeans hugged her hips and speculated idly what she might look like from a different angle. She looked up when he was still puzzling over the topography of her jeans, and he was ashamed when his pale cheeks flushed crimson.
Magdalene popped back into the room carrying the snotty toddler, beaming at Peter. He stared at her, not believing that she had convinced him to come on this horrible trip with her strange, loud family. He tried to gesture that he needed to go write, but the singing just kept going. One of the nephews was now in front of the piano plodding out some atonal attempt at “Silent Night.” Peter finally couldn’t take it any longer and looked for the nearest door, his hand grasping for a cigarette in his coat pocket.
Only once he emerged on the front porch did he realize how warm it was inside with all the people crammed together. His tweed jacket, selected for an authorial air, was damp in the armpits but he stubbornly adjusted it and kept it on. As he took his first inhalation of chemical smoke, he was surprised to catch out of the corner of his eye someone else who was smoking on the porch. Turning to see who it was, he recognized one of Magdalene’s uncles, pipe in one hand, a book propped open in the other. Peter’s first feeling was one of plummeting disappointment at the realization that he was not the only literary-minded smoker in the house. His next feeling was a glimmer of interest as to who this person was. Magdalene made her family sound so rigid, he was shocked to find someone smoking.
To be continued.
