Content Warnings: infertility, miscarriages 

Bash and I divorced four years ago, but Gram keeps inviting him to Christmas, so I have to wear the red dress with the buttons that go all the way down and burn my neck with the curling iron, leaving two marks like eyes, chapped and purple, so that when I brush my hair away he sees and wonders whose mouth put them there. 

I always arrive early to help decorate, which for me means staging the animals on the stairs: grandfather bears wearing Santa hats, monkeys dressed as Scrooge with monocles and nightcaps, fuzzy snowmen bundled in scarves. I have done this since I was three, just old enough to climb the stairs by myself. These days, it is this tradition that keeps me dragging myself to Christmas dinner each year. 

I park on the street, glancing into the dining room window to make sure Gram doesn’t see me shortcutting the path across her perfect, rigid cross-hatch lawn. The two-story house is Cape Cod-style in the New Haven suburbs, with a front door painted so blindingly red it pisses off the HOA. 

When I push open the front door, I’m hit with something that smells sickly sweet, like the oozing sap of rotting fruit. Gram has lost her taste, so she drowns everything she makes in sugar and then it burns in the oven. 

Eyes squinting, I nearly trip over the oversized trash bag lying by the door. I stare down into its gaping mouth at all the smiling animal faces. Soon enough, I’m in a standoff with a toddler. I watch her tiny fingers attempt to button up a penguin’s overcoat. My mouth goes bone-dry. I imagine myself snatching the animal from her hands and dragging the bag back up to the attic. 

I ignore my sister’s child and go into the kitchen. “Gram,” I say to her back. “Did you get the bag of Christmas animals down for Lottie?”

She doesn’t turn to face me. “Yes, she kept asking where they were,” she says. “I’m surprised she remembers them. I thought you might like to pass the torch.” 

I lock myself in the washroom for 30 minutes to cry, angry at myself for being a baby.

When I return, Bash is here, staring at Lottie as she tries to feed her applesauce to one of the grandfather bears. She has only arranged four animals out of the thirteen. Thirteen animals for thirteen steps. Bash seems to see the irony in it, too, hands in his pockets, lips pressed into a thin line. 

When he looks up, he takes me in. He seems lonely. He only brought a date once, a year after the divorce. But my uncle Dennis quipped that she looked like his daughter. My uncle was on my side, because Bash is Indian-American, and she was a blonde with a fake tan. 

It is true that Bash likes his women young. I still look at his Facebook page sometimes, where he is tagged in photos with the same type of girl—blonde, fertile, does pilates on Saturday mornings. Sometimes, he takes them to artist retreats in Vermont or cooks them biryani in his studio apartment. 

We are cordial. We smile and say hello and lie to each other about how we are and what we are doing. Or we give half-truths, exaggerating our circumstances.  

“You look well, Izzy.” He always speaks first. “Haircut?”

I shake my head. “It has been this length for three years, Bash.”

His hands are still shoved in his pockets, and he rocks on his heels. “You still in New London?”

“No, I’ve been staying at the beach house.” I don’t tell him it’s about to be foreclosed because I can’t afford the mortgage without his income.

“You’re not teaching anymore?”

I was laid off. “No. Just wanted to try something different. A change of scenery.” 

I leave out the part about sometimes downing a bottle of chardonnay in the middle of the night, then sitting in a beach lounge chair, wearing only a robe, just to feel something.

He nods like he doesn’t believe me. 

“And I heard you bought a boat,” I say. It is a tiny cruiser that leaks and has a faulty motor that once left him stranded overnight in the Sound. Facebook is a beautiful place.

“Yeah, yeah. She’s a real beauty. Even has a slide. I think you’d like the slide.” Even in his deception, Bash is smug. He is good at pretending to be nice. I have always found him judgemental, but it used to be fun when we would sit in the car in a parking lot and talk about people who walked by. It is different now that his judgement has shifted on me.

We sit down to dinner and lie some more to my relatives.

I do the hair-moving maneuver before dessert, glancing at Bash just in time to catch him looking away. 

After dinner, Gram and Pop waltz in the living room and everyone claps along. I stand in the back, leaning against the doorframe, watching as Gram pulls Bash up from the sofa and makes him dance with her. He and Suzanne pass out gifts, and she laughs at everything he says even though Bash has never made a joke in his life. She smacks his arm playfully, rubbing her pregnant belly. Her husband Craig lifts Lottie like she is an airplane and flies her around the room while everyone cheers. 

In the final months leading up to the divorce, I often accused Bash of sucking up to Suzanne to spite me. Suzanne was pregnant twice in the eight years we were married, and I noticed the way he acted around her when she was pregnant versus when she wasn’t. I told him he only respects women when they’re pregnant, and he told me I was insane and bitter.

Bash is quiet and awkward. I used to find it endearing. I tell myself that Gram feels sorry for him, which is why she invites him. Gram is our only remaining link, the only common variable keeping us in each other’s lives. 

Suzanne has two more children with her ex-husband, who spend every Christmas with him. She gets them during Thanksgiving, and she often remarks that I am lucky that I don’t have children with Bash. It means you’re free, she says. 

Later, when the kids are asleep on the couch and the adults are drunkenly playing Twister on the carpet, I stand in the foyer at the foot of the stairs and stare at the animals. Bash joins me silently, his shoulder brushing against mine, and together we remember our four.