The eggs boiled. Sally looked through the bubbles at them. One of the shells had cracked. A thin white tail grew from the slit, tried to rise on the scalding tide.
Sally suddenly felt ill, and she covered her mouth with a palm. She looked away from the pot.
Her mother prattled on like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, all warble and distortion. Sally grunted and said, “I really have to get back to the eggs,” noting another three minutes on the timer. There was no rush to finish the eggs; she wanted off of the phone. She couldn’t bear her mother’s shiny, happy voice and her exhilaration of reunion with the various spawn of the Carter family. Sally believed the only thing to celebrate regarding her family was distance.
“Happy Easter, honey,” her mother said. “We’ll see you soon.”
Happy Easter. Now there was an oxymoron. A grotesque joke. An impossibility.
Did her mother even know what she was celebrating? Really? The woman thought it was a grand celebration of Christ’s rebirth, but Easter had been celebrated long before the Christians had co-opted its lunar date. Tammuz. Semiramis. Ishtar. Ester. Those were the first deities recognized with springtime bacchanals.
But the Christians had invaded pagan lands. Strategy and weaponry had given them victory, but they wanted more than compliance; they demanded converts. Faith had to follow flesh into submission. Like all good molesters, they presented the pagans gifts to make them compliant. They offered to allow, even encourage, the pagans’ festivals of spring, but over time added their own philosophy to the goings on, and eventually the church absorbed the power of these events.
And so Easter was born, with its bunnies and its bonnets and its marshmallow candies and its eggs.
The egg.
A symbol of fertility. Of actual birth, not rebirth.
And what did the fucking misguided children of Christ do with that symbol? They took the egg, and…
—Here is your innocence. Here is your unblemished whiteness. Let’s harden it with scalding water and then make it up with dyes and paints and bits of glitter and then we’ll break it open and peel away its alluring costume before we devour it whole.
YOU DON’T WANT TO stain your pretty white dress. Take it off.
ONE EGG DROWNED IN the blue dye and another soaked up green pigment like toxic waste. These were the last two. The once-white shells were now stained sickly pastels. After they dried, Sally would attack them with the glue stick and the glitter. She’d use the pre-printed decals and the paint pens to finish them off.
Normally, decorating and hiding the eggs was Eric’s job. Sally had made it clear that she would have none of it, but this year Eric had pleaded with her. He’d been called into the hospital three days running and he hadn’t had the chance to decorate eggs for their daughter. Sally had insisted that the ritual was unnecessary, but the misery in Eric’s eyes and the sadness in his voice when he asked her to “please reconsider,” had clearly indicated how important the ritual was to him, so Sally had relented.
Her eggs would never look as nice as the ones her husband made. He used crayons to create relief in the dyed color and expertly stenciled intricate designs. Eric made genuinely beautiful holiday eggs—a feat well beyond her capabilities. But she had to try. Despite her disgust with the holiday, she still wanted everything to be perfect for her daughter. Sally was just happy she’d remembered to use the wire egg ladle, paper towels and some latex gloves (a benefit of having a doctor in the house) so her fingers didn’t get decorated as well.
The cracked egg nestled in a kitchen towel, unaccompanied. The broken thing rested alone, as if Sally feared its damage was contagious.
Later in the afternoon, Mary would hunt eggs in the backyard of her grandmother’s house, along with her cousins and second cousins. As far as Sally was concerned, one hunt should have been more than enough, but Eric was a creature of habit. Traditionally, he gave their daughter a special gift at Easter, and this year was no different. He’d bought Mary a lovely silver bracelet and a cheap plastic egg in which to hide it. Since he didn’t want to take the chance of another child finding the prized egg and throwing a fit when they couldn’t keep the treasure inside, a pre-extended-family backyard hunt was his answer. The bracelet was yet another extravagance and something else Sally would have to keep track of. Mary was too young to understand the value of jewelry beyond the aesthetic pleasure of sparkling metals and glittering stones. The bracelet, like the earrings Eric had bought his little girl for Christmas, would go in Sally’s jewelry box to be issued to her daughter for special occasions.
A little girl shouldn’t have to worry about losing such things.
THE KITCHEN IS TOO hot. It is always too hot.
Her mother and aunts race from oven to Frigidaire to counter to oven again. The air is honeyed with the scent of ham glaze and rich with the earthy scent of baking sweet potato casserole. Sugar cookies cool on wire racks. But the wonderful smells are tainted by the tangy stink of cigarette smoke. All of the grownups smoke, it seems. Aunt Sheila stirs the ambrosia salad. A cigarette teeters precariously on her lower lip as she scoops great spoonfuls of Cool Whip and canned fruit. Sheila’s husband sits in the corner; Henry adds nothing to the women’s babble. He smokes a cigarette of his own as he’d done in the side yard the night before, staring up through Sally’s window. With a penknife he cleans his fingernails and pauses only to ash his cigarette in the bulky glass tray on the windowsill.
Sally tries to not look at the man. Every time she does, he is looking back at her, and his eyes still look fiery, his front teeth are still too large. Henry has full, rounded cheeks, covered in a rough fur of stubble, and it’s Easter so Sally immediately thinks of bunnies—not rats the way she had the night before. Had she warmer feelings toward him, she might feel grateful to have an uncle Easter Bunny. Only Henry doesn’t look like the dapper, well-groomed Peter Rabbit from her storybook; he looks like a sickly and mean cousin to that magical creature.
“Sally,” her mother barks, “you get on out of here. I don’t want you getting muck on your dress. You go on up to your room until it’s time for church.”
“Don’t badger the girl, Millie,” Uncle Henry says, sounding uncommonly protective.
“Mind your business,” Aunt Sheila snaps at her husband.
Sally doesn’t move. Leaving the kitchen means passing by Uncle Henry, and Sally doesn’t want to get near the man.
Impatient, her mother says, “You go on, now. I won’t tolerate a disobedient child. Go on.”
Sally turns and encounters her Uncle’s sick-bunny eyes. He smiles at her and shrugs as if to say, I tried. She lowers her head, focuses on the light playing off the toes of her black shoes, and hurries out of the too-hot room. Her mother’s voice is trailing after her: “And don’t forget your basket. You won’t get many eggs if you don’t have your basket.”
She trudges through the house, avoiding the screeching, silliness, and roughhousing of her cousins. In her room, she closes the door and sits on the edge of the bed, wishing the holiday were over so the family would go away—so Henry would go away.
ERIC AND MARY WERE at the sunrise service held in St David’s Lutheran Church. Even if she hadn’t been charged with decorating the eggs, Sally wouldn’t have joined them. She hadn’t been to church in thirty years, not even for her wedding. Another point she refused to discuss with Eric, or anyone else.