The Wainscott’s Christmas Dinner
The Wainscotts only hosted Christmas dinner once.
When Steven Wainscott informed Laura Wainscott that his boss had manoeuvred her way into being invited as a dinner guest at theirs, Laura spared no expense. By evening, fresh pine suffused the living room, while clouds of steam rose from boiling apples and cinnamon sticks. A jingle of sleigh bells and jaunty melodies outpoured from the speakers, and shiny red baubles swayed delicately from needle-like branches. Warm light emanated from strung-up fairy-lights, and that sweet, fresh Christmas smell, infusing thyme, rosemary, garlic, and pine, perfumed the room.
Steven quietly watched in fascination as Laura dusted the windows of thin spiderwebs, swept shiny floorboards and positioned golden decorations about the house. She brushed paint over pine cones and chestnuts to lay under the tree, made gingerbread and iced Christmas cakes, poked and pricked her fingertip on sewing needles, peeled sweet potatoes and seasoned winter vegetables. He caught glimpses, only momentarily, of her pale wrist when her sleeve climbed up her arm, that striking colour of uncooked dough. She was naturally beautiful, more than simply pretty, with divinity shimmering just around her lovely features – in the curve of her wide smile, the smoothness of her slender fingers, the skin between her star-like freckles. She could make her bright eyes twinkle in that childlike way, and as he caught images of her – scrubbing, rubbing and wiping – his tender heartstrings grew taut.
A timer shrilled.
“Honey,” Laura said, at this moment smoothing out uneven lumps of leather on the couch. “Can you turn the oven off?”
“S-sure,” he returned. He was by the fire, crouched low and prodding it. He walked to the kitchen, turned the dial of the oven, and it sighed the smell of burnt butter. His face was tinted and wrinkled by sun, and his thinly boned frame rendered him brittle. He had a stammer that, despite years of training, stubbornly persisted, and a nasally voice sounding as if somebody were pinching his nose. Most tellingly however, he wore glasses, large and thick, that he pushed up the bridge of his nose whenever he felt nervous. It was this that, after a few debilitating games, made him quit poker. Laura never liked him playing anyway.
His chest stirred thinking about the dinner, his stomach fluttering and turning until he started sweating. He had never known his boss, Penny Turnbull, to visit her employee’s houses. She was a spectre looming over Steven’s accounting office, somehow simultaneously always and never there - though, when she was resolutely there, the resounding clack of her heeled boots down a hallway was enough to straighten the spines and stiffen the necks of workers she stepped past. After eight years of midnight sweats and dreading weekday mornings, dry eyes and nausea-induced empty breakfasts, Steven had, though it was strictly forbidden, applied to a higher-paid position at their main competing firm, Trojan Accounts. It took him four months to send the application.
Laura lifted a pale-blue spray bottle and strolled over to him. “Are you worried about tonight?” She softly asked.
He paused. The silence in the kitchen grew louder in his ears. “Yes,” he said. “I s-suppose I am.” He turned his wrist to look at his watch and, ticking loudly, as if to specifically remind him, it fastened its pace - or seemed to, at least. He added, “She’ll be here soon.”
Laura noticed the fine hairs on the vertebrae just below his neck and softly stroked them. His muscles relaxed and his head began slowly to droop as she lulled him. Goosebumps appeared on the back of his arms and on the creases of his neck.
She looked up at him innocently. She asked, “Don’t you think it would help if you told her?”
A pressure of panic panged throughout his body. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “N-no. I think, p-probably, we should just keep our heads down.”
Her stroking slowed.
Finally, after a few moments, she whispered, “We’ll just see how it goes then.”
Laura slid soap over her hands and rinsed them before bringing a platter of mince pies to the living room table. Then, she adjusted draping tinsel, stepped back, winced, and readjusted.
From the kitchen, Steven gazed at her as she repeated this. There was a curious intimacy in the way she could make his heart swell just from seeing her tilt her head, or bite her fingernails as she always did when she was thinking deeply. During these moments, when he understood her idiosyncrasies, his image of Laura scintillated around the edges. Smiling mildly, he briefly delighted in envisioning her trace her hands down his spine and rake her fingers through his hair. When he suddenly, and somewhat shamefully, realised what he was thinking about without her knowing, he decided to atone by adopting her fastidiousness and rearranging the baubles how he knew she would like them. He walked to the tree and pushed the fish wire hooks up the branches, uprooting a few pine needles and watching them fall. A knot of fear tightened at the top of his stomach and a sickly feeling clasped him, the kind he experienced when he was alone in the house at night and heard, or thought he heard, a patter of footsteps in the next room.
Laura walked to the living room couch. Her body dropped, sunk into leather, and softened.
Steven joined her on the couch, pinching the inside of his cheek with his teeth.
She contorted herself to put her heavy head on his chest, then closed her eyes.
He was catatonic now, and, strangely, his nerves had settled from rabbit-like jumping in his stomach, to a vague nausea.
She breathed slowly.
Then came three distinct knocks.
Penny Turnbull, Board Director of CashFlow Accountants, was unusually tall and stocky. In hushed whispers and over-the-shoulder glances, her employees nicknamed her ‘the Minotaur’, to which Steven, when Laura rose and opened the door, felt he could now attest to. Cold wind blowed through, and he had the disorientating sensation, like termites nibbling on wood, that his stomach was being hollowed out.
“Hi,” Laura spoke, with flushed, glistening cheeks. “It’s lovely to meet you.”
Turnbull pursed her lips in response. She looked down at both of them, nodded her head and spoke in acknowledgement, “Steven.”
“H-hello,” Steven returned. He gulped quietly, then readjusted his glasses.
For a few moments, the silence between them all was palpable. Laura’s cheeks burned as if she had already had two glasses of merlot.
Steven felt, as if it had been snatched from him, suddenly devoid of the language – letters and syllables, vowels and consonants – needed to speak. His throat clogged the longer the silence ensued, and his mouth, slightly parted, became drier.
“Well, come in,” Laura offered.
Turnbull stomped in and looked about the room.
“I’ll grab some wine,” Laura announced.
Turnbull sat herself on a leather armchair by the popping fire. Her riding boots had tracked in snow from outside. The outsole of her shoe plopped onto a murky pool on the wooden floorboards.
Steven watched her overcoat, glistening in frozen shards, tentatively trickle onto the leather couch. Teetering between trepidation and irritation at the sight of it, considering commenting then deciding to abstain, his stomach rose and fell like dough in an oven.
He could hear Laura open cupboard doors in the kitchen. “Help yourself to anything,” he said, finally.
Turnbull nodded.
A cork popped. Laura grabbed an ice bucket for the sparkling wine, and carried it over with three flute glasses. “The journey here was not too bad, I hope,” she said.
Turnbull looked at Laura. She said, “I caught a taxi.”
Laura walked over, then poured the wine. White foam rose and fell. “Right. Well, cheers!”
Each took a sip of their drink and watched the fire. Behind clenched teeth, Laura smiled brightly and stroked Steven’s forearm. After her forlorn attempt to make conversation, he still remained silent. Her stomach acid started boiling, and her blood coagulated, as she waited patiently and prettily for him to say something. A cold stare formed her face, which went unnoticed by him, of course, and she gave him a final arm squeeze. Hopelessly unable to prompt him, she quietly sighed. Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree bled into the room, and its lyrics to Laura sounded distorted and vacuous.
She proposed, “Should we have dinner?”
“Y-yes, of course,” Steven agreed. They rose and approached the dining room table. Already adorned with tall candles and spruces of holly, Laura placed from the kitchen fresh bread rolls, seasoned chicken, buttered brussels sprouts, caramelised onions and crisply cooked carrots on the table. She turned the light low.
They all sat. “Help yourselves,” Laura said.
The candle’s flame slid down the wick into a pool of wax, and Laura poured thick gravy on top of her chicken. The cutlery tinkled against crockery.
After they silently ate for a few minutes, Turnbull said, “You must both be wondering why I’m here.”
Both Laura and Steven turned to her.
“I don’t see a reason to postpone it any further,” she added.
Steven’s throat closed. He was certain, in an absoluteness that he would testify to, to this day, that his voice box would not allow him to speak.
Turnbull sipped her drink, relishing the taste. “You’re fired, Steven.”
The colour drained from his face. He thought it entirely possible that he would be sick right then and there.
She cut a fat slice of chicken breast, smeared it in gravy and devoured it. She cut another and said while chewing, “I was informed of your application.”
“Informed?” He repeated dryly.
“I wouldn’t have wasted everyone’s time by coming here,” she said with the monotony as if they were discussing the weather. “But my superiors insisted the termination of an employee like you must be conducted in person.”
His head was a spinning top. “L-like m-me?” He said, breathing out, repeating to believe it rather than confirm.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “There’s all sorts of informal rules about these things. And since you’ve worked with us for more than fifteen years, I believe, a meeting was apparently essential.”
The sides of his temples stung as he started sweated.
Turnbull stripped the chicken down to the bones, and put the flesh between her sharp teeth. As Steven watched, she playfully paused, and a spark ignited behind her eyes. A sly smile strung up her lips and her nostrils slightly flared.
She added, teasingly, “It would, however, also have been remiss of me if I didn’t come to thank the informant myself.”
Laura matched Turnbull’s stare. She closed her eyes for a few seconds.
Turnbull chewed the chicken’s skin, then licked the front of her teeth with her tongue. “It was sweet when you called, Laura,” Turnbull spat. She ripped her buttered roll, popped it in her mouth and said, “Thinking it might save him if you told me.” She chewed while saying, “Obviously though, I can’t let this go.” She dabbed her napkin around her mouth, swallowed and, instead of leaving, paused.
She smiled at the two of them, who glared back at her. Something snapped deep within her which compelled her to say, “I wouldn’t have even known about it without you, Laura.” Nourished from a Christmas dinner, she smiled softly at both of them. She added, “Don’t feel bad. I would have done the same thing if my husband was being as narrow-minded as yours was.”
Then, Turnbull got up and left. She bellowed some vague comment about lawyers contacting lawyers.
The thought of looking at Steven gave Laura a burning sensation around the corners of her eyes.
The door slammed shut, and silence, like the white noise of a water stream, rushed into the room. The string of lights above them flashed red and green, over and over.
Steven Wainscott looked, as if for the very first time, at his wife.
Written by Emma Gore.
Emma is an emerging writer currently studying Politics and English at The University of Sydney. While she adores all sorts of writing and dedicates most of her spare time to reading various types of texts, she veers toward writing creative non-fiction pieces and fictional short stories. She hopes to eventually become a novelist in her career, but ultimately, whether it be in the morals of the storytelling world or the policies of our material one, she wants to make distinctly positive changes in the world.