Petaluma Argus-Courier holiday fiction: Grandma’s Christmas Ham

“Honey, if you think Grandma’s stroganoff is good, just you wait till you taste her Christmas ham. Grandma’s Christmas ham is the best!”

Tom said things like that a lot. Especially when we were at his Grandmother’s house.

It always started with whatever was on the table – Grandma’s stroganoff, Grandma’s hamburger casserole, grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs – and led immediately to the ham. Whatever it was that Evelyn was serving on that particular Sunday afternoon – always delivered to the table on a dish or platter of immaculately cared-for antique china – Tom was sure to tell me it wasn’t half as good as Grandma’s Christmas ham.

For the record, I’d never technically said any of it was “good.”

I said it was “yummy.”

“Yummy” is the word I use when I can’t bring myself to say I like something, but am feeling too polite to tell the truth.

I’d been hearing about that famous ham since months before Tom and I were married. At my very first Sunday dinner at Evelyn’s – a beloved family tradition/requirement, even for relatively new relationships – I’d been told that Grandma had a way with a good fresh ham, and how much the whole family, immediate and extended, always looked forward to it.

“Oh, yes, the ham,” said Mrs. O’Claire, introduced to me earlier as one of Grandma’s “projects,” as she helped herself to another plate of beef stew. Evelyn prided herself in seeking out the loneliest women in town – widows she met at church or awkwardly talkative passengers on the bus – and inviting them over for Sunday dinner. Evelyn strongly believed in offering a warm welcome and a place at the table to those less fortunate. The family was full of stories about Grandma’s many past “projects” – Jessica, Margaret, Miss Simpson, Eliza, Tammy – each of whom had blossomed and flourished under the nurturing care of Evelyn’s kindness and understanding.

Mrs. O’Claire was the latest.

“We had Evelyn’s ham on her birthday last week,” she told me, leaning in just too close enough to feel intrusive. “I’ve never in my life tasted a ham so darn delicious.”

For what it’s worth, Mrs. O’Claire didn’t actually use the word “darn.” Mrs O’Claire used a different word. Mrs. O’Claire, I had just learned, was a recently dismissed Sunday school teacher.

And Christmas ham, I also learned, wasn’t just served at Christmas.

In Tom’s family, ham was a “special occasion” dish. Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Grandma’s birthday on the 22nd of February.

Those were all “Christmas ham” days.

In between, at Sunday dinner, 3 p.m. sharp every week, it was beef stew – or chili mac-and-cheese or build-your-own-tacos or, I swear on a stack of cookbooks, on occasion … Sloppy Joes.

“I know, she’s not a fancy cook,” Tom whispered one Sunday, as the Sloppy Joe fixings were set on the table in an ornate platter lined with tiny hand-painted roses. “But there’s a lot of love and tradition in everything Grandma makes. Just, eat what you can and tell her it’s delicious. And smile a lot.”

By then, Tom had figured out what “Yummy” meant.

It was late June, the first Sunday back from our honeymoon. We’d gone to San Francisco, where, I have to confess, the food was magnificent. We were there for eight days, including one Sunday. We ate at some pricey North Bay restaurant owned by a cookbook writer eager to start branching out.

We had lamb.

“If you think the lamb is yummy,” Tom said with a sly grin, “just wait till you taste Grandma’s Christmas ham.”

“Mmmmmm,” I said, with what I hoped was a semi-seductive purr. “What I really can’t wait for is more of Grandma’s Sloppy Joes.”

To be honest, Grandma’s Sloppy Joes weren’t half bad. They reminded me of my childhood. Every Wednesdays in the school cafeteria. Wednesday was Sloppy Joe day at my elementary school.

“There’s just something warm and comforting about certain foods, isn’t there,” observed Janice, one Sunday afternoon. Janice was Evelyn’s new project. Unemployed, and on the verge of eviction from her apartment, Janice’s most recent job was as a cashier at a hair salon downtown, from which she’d been fired for drinking on the job.

It was our first Sunday back after the honeymoon, and though I don’t remember what Grandma served that day, I do remember Janice. I had just told a version of the Sloppy Joe Honeymoon story, cleverly crafted to make Evelyn’s Sloppy Joe’s the hero of the tale, a dish so “yummy” it even bested the over-priced lamb-shank and lemongrass couscous whipped up by a famous Cooking Channel celebrity in Napa.

“Some good, old-fashioned dishes,” slurred Janice, who’d already had three glasses of the cheap red wine the rest of us were still drinking our first glass of, “are better than anything some ... some fancy-pantsy, TV shot-hot from the big city, um, slaps on a high-priced plate.”

Janice smiled at me, as if she’d just said something brilliant, then scooped a slightly overlarge forkful into her exuberantly lipsticked mouth, and with her cheeks full, added, “’One can ... cannot, um, sleep well, love well, or ... or ... think well … if one has not eaten well.’ Virginia Woolf said that.”

“So … Evelyn,” I said, directing my question to Grandma as a way of changing the topic. “Whatever happened to Mrs. O’Claire?”

For a brief second or two, everyone at the table save myself and Janice seemed to go rigid and silent, their facial expressions all momentarily frozen in place before reactivating with slightly more enthusiasm than such a perfunctory question ought to have merited.

“Mrs. O’Claire?” replied Tom’s brother, Timothy, bending down to pick up a napkin dropped by one of his three kids. “Was she the one with the personal space issues? She moved to Boston, didn’t she?”

“Cambridge, I think, dear,” offered Evelyn. “She went to live with her daughter, who just had a baby and needs some help. It’s so nice to feel needed, isn’t it?”

“Who’s Mrs. O’Claire?” mouthed Janice, still chewing.

“A friend from church,” smiled Evelyn. “You remind me of her, dear.”

“Yeah,” nodded Timothy, clearly attempting to suppress a grin. “You and Mrs. O’Claire have similar tastes … in … um, cuisine.”

Tom’s lighting-quick look across the table at his brother was effective in ending the line of conversation, quickly switched to some other topic by my new husband, and taken up by the rest of the assembled dinner guests.

It was that moment that I began to feel a tiny germ of concern, a small, awful thought, wild enough to dismiss as patently absurd, but persistent enough to remain, implanted in my consciousness, just below the surface.

“From what I’ve been hearing,” I said, not so much to Janice as to the whole table, “nothing compares to Grandma’s Christmas ham.”

As Janice grinned in gastronomic anticipation of soon sampling Evelyn’s famous specialty, the others else merely nodded, offering modest variations on “Mmmm-hmmm,” “Yep,” and “Uh huh.”

“And the next ham occasion, is …. the Fourth of July?”

“That’s right, dear, next week,” said Evelyn, brightly, turning then to Janice. “I do hope you’ll be joining us. We’d certainly love to have you.”

On our way home that night, a handful of vague, exploratory questions and comments directed by me to Tom resulted in answers that were both comforting and wholly inconclusive. If there was any truth at all to my outrageous suspicion – that Evelyn’s Christmas ham were connected to the parade of “projects” who appeared and disappeared around the family table with such consistent regularity – my ham-loving husband clearly did not know, or if so, was hiding it unnervingly well.

When a change of plans at work called me out of town for the first week of July – requiring me to spend the 4th of July in Chicago, thus missing out on dinner with Tom and his family – I have to admit, I was more relieved than disappointed.

But was I being ridiculous?

Had I simply seen too many productions of “Arsenic and Old Lace”? Too many movies about cannibalistic hillbillies? It had to be, and I almost succeeded in forcing the idea from my mind. And though poor, sauced Janice did seem to have vanished by the time I returned, the Sunday after the Fourth, the story Evelyn told of the woman’s landing a promising position – as a live-in cleaning person at a “slightly Bohemian” retreat center for published writers and retired lit professors – sounded just specific enough to believe.

And yet, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, every time someone repeated that increasingly disturbing promise – “If you like Grandma’s fill-in-the-blank, just wait till you taste her Christmas ham” – I briefly saw the faces of Janice, Mrs. O’Claire, Tammy, Eliza, Miss Simpson, Margaret and Jessica, which is odd because I’d only actually met two of them.

Fortunately for me, what followed were nearly five months of ham-less Sunday gatherings.

Un-fortunately, that “darn” ham was brought up every single time.

“I admit I am looking forward to Thanksgiving,” nodded Bernice, the latest newcomer to Evelyn’s Sunday dinners, one Sunday a few weeks after Halloween. Soft-spoken and not especially talkative, Bernice was a large animal veterinarian, with a pleasant old home on a small ranch near the outskirts of the city. Her longtime partner had been killed many years before in what Bernice described without intended irony as a “brief but deadly cattle stampede,” and she’d yet to fully recover from the incident. With a quick smile and a nod toward Evelyn, Bernice admitted she was appreciative of the invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. “There’s the company, of course,” she confessed, looking away briefly. “But then there’s the ham. I am not ashamed to admit I’m a bit fed up with turkey, turkey, turkey. To me, nothing is more delicious at Thanksgiving than a good juicy ham.”

“There’s no one at this table who would argue with you on that,” replied Tom, smiling warmly at Bernice, then at each assembled person, lastly smiling at me. “It’ll be your first time having Grandma’s Christmas ham, won’t it?” he said.

“You’ll be one of us then,” added Timothy, brightly.

I felt a deep, uncomfortable twinge, a sharp spasm of apprehension and dread as I looked around the table, the whole family smiling at me, young and old, with shining, eager eyes. The next two weeks were awful, as the days dropped away bringing me ever closer to Thanksgiving. I tried a dozen times to tell Tom, to ask him straight out if what I was imagining was true, but each time I stopped, frozen, unable to actually put my unthinkable worries into words.

But then, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I finally had to do it.

“Where’s Bernice?” I asked, as the family tucked crunchily into their plates of build-your-own tacos, having, predictably and unfailingly chorused the whole “if you think this is good” mantra as dinner began. Once again, I detected a nearly imperceptible pause throughout the room.

“Who?” asked Timothy, nonchalantly, reaching across his brother for the salsa.

“Bernice,” I repeated. “She was here last Sunday.” Turning to Evelyn, I continued. “She said she was looking forward to Thanksgiving. She was looking forward to your … your Christmas ham.”

I could feel Tom staring at me, but I refused to meet his gaze. I couldn’t. With the crunch of multiple tacos softly underscoring the deepening silence around the table, I finally forced myself to say exactly what I was thinking.

“But Bernice won’t be enjoying your ham, will she Grandma?” I said. “She won’t, because … because Bernice will be the ham, won’t she? Your famous Christmas ham, it’s all of those women, those ‘projects’ of yours, isn’t it? You’ve been killing them and eating them and calling it ham.”

By now, even the crunching had stopped.

I finally looked Tom in the eyes.

“You’ve all been eating them,” I said.

“Are you serious?” he asked, after a pause.

No answer was necessary.

I was obviously serious.

After another long moment of silence, the entire family burst into laughter.

“Oh my god,” said Timothy. “You actually think Grandma’s Christmas ham is … people?”

In response to my blank stare in reply, there was another explosion of laughter.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” Tom said, with a look of affectionate bemusement. “I promise you, on Thanksgiving, we will not be eating Bernice, or anyone else.”

“Of course not,” Evelyn said, shaking her head with an air of kindly understanding and patience. “We’re enjoying her now, dear.”

“…. Now?” I repeated.

As I looked about, all mouths present in the act of chewing, Tom leaned close and whispered, “Every Sunday. Grandma does her best to keep dinner from becoming boring, but people taste like hamburger a little. There’s only so much you can do with it. Why do you think we look forward to holidays? It’s the only time, we … well, you know.”

And he took a bite, still smiling with love and affection.

“The one time …” I said, slowly, one level of shock giving way to another. “…the one time you aren’t eating … people? Grandma’s Christmas ham is … her ham is … real ham.”

“And it’s delicious dear,” said Evelyn, beaming. “Everyone says so. Till then ... have another taco.”