Interview with the Virgin

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1998
The Weekly Screed (Xmas #1)

Interview with the Virgin

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — This time of year, Nativity scenes — many very elaborate — start popping up in front of every church. They feature real straw, hand-hewn mangers, lifesize papier-maché cows, sheep, shepherds, donkeys, Magi, Josephs, Christchildren, not to mention the Virgin Mary — who, to my surprise, stepped out of the creche the other day, nudged me sideways on the pew and sat down.

“I gotta get off my feet,” she said.

I was speechless. She wasn’t. She waved a weary hand at the Nativity (now lacking one key statue) and said, “What’s wrong with this picture, huh?”

Before I could guess, she said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Steve. What am I doing standing up? Or even sitting up? Since when does a woman who’s just given birth — to an enormous kid, by the way (without benefit of Demerol!) …And another thing! This virgin birth dodge? A failed concept. You ever try pushing the Son of God through an intact hymen?”

I told her I wouldn’t if I could.

“Damn straight!” she ejaculated. “This cockamamie idea that I was standing at attention, welcoming well-wishers ten minutes after birthing Jesus, is a male chauvinist myth. Truth is, Steve, I was flat on my back, puffing like a beached tuna. Listen, you’ve read Luke, right?”

“The Christmas story,” I said. “Sure. It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, nice story. Except for the parts Luke left out!” she said. “Like, for instance, where is it written that the labor took 20 hours?”

“Twenty hours?”

“That’s right, Steve. Twenty miserable hours on a pile of donkey shit. Look over there!” She pointed again. “That’s supposed to be a stable, right? So what’s missing? The manure maybe? And the cats. Have you ever seen a stable anyplace that wasn’t crawling with diseased cats? And look at the help I had! You see an obstetrician here? A midwife? Anybody at all?! Heck, I would’ve settled for a barber! What’d they give me? A carpenter! What was Joseph gonna do — cut the kid’s cord with a jigsaw?”

I shuddered. “I never thought of Christmas so …clinically.”

“Of course you didn’t, you deluded sexist romantic! You’re a man. Look over there. You see those shepherds?”

“Yes.”

“Disgusting! Lying outdoors, sleeping with dogs, getting up with fleas, hip-deep in sheepflops. Have you ever smelled a shepherd? And every last one wants to handle my newborn babe! No wonder I wrapped the tyke in swaddling clothes, laid him in a manger and said, ‘Everyone! Keep your filthy hands to yourself!’”

Mary went on, “Honest to God, if there was one of those slobs traipsing through the stable, there had to be fifty of ‘em. I couldn’t sleep a wink. Even when I wasn’t nursing Jesus, fighting off shepherds and darn near suffocating every time the ox farted, there was the blinding light from that star. It was like a night game at Shea Stadium. And look! See that Christchild statue over there?”

I looked again, at the glowing image of the newborn Savior, spreading his pudgy arms to embrace the sufferings of humankind.

“Well, that ain’t my Jesus. My baby was no blue-eyed, towheaded WASP, and he wasn’t born a year old. He was shriveled and blotchy. His head was cone-shaped, bald as a duck egg — and if he’d had any hair, it would’ve been black as the ace of spades. Look at me! I’m an olive-skinned Jew, not Tuesday Weld. If I’d given birth to a blond, the idiot shepherds would have stoned me for witchcraft.

“And if the shepherds and that star and all those noisy angels singing elevator music, every minute day and night, and that chiseling innkeeper — if all that wasn’t enough aggravation, these foreign Kings show up and start passing out gold, frankincense and myrrh. Raising the kid’s expectations. Give the infant Savior gold one year and he’s gonna want gold every Christmas ‘til the Crucifixion. And where we gonna get frankincense even if Joe can afford it on a carpenter’s wages? Trust me, Steve, there wasn’t a Nieman-Marcus in Nazareth.”

I sympathized with the Virgin. Certainly, the Nativity was less bucolic than we depict it in our modern iconography. “And then!” she cried. “The last straw!”

Her face turned crimson.

“I finally get Jesus nursed and quiet. I’m dozing off, and suddenly this lice-infested peasant kid barges in. He’s telling Jesus he’s a poor boy, too, and he has no gift to give — as if somebody had asked him for one. So then he says, instead, he’ll play his drum. His DRUM? So I try to tell this kid: No, not that! Get outa here, for Christ’s sake! I just got the baby to sleep. But before I could move, the little psychopath is whacking the damn drum, ba-rum-pum-pum-pum — over and over and over — and pretty soon Jesus is wide awake, bawling his brains out! …Silent Night, my ass!

“But then — God bless the old coot — clueless Joe finally comes through.”

“Wha’d he do?”

“Well, Joseph was tired, too. He woke up, yelled ‘What the hell is that racket?”, put his foot through the drum, and beat the brat senseless with his own drumsticks. And then…”

Her face took on a beatific radiance.

“I started giggling,” said the Virgin Mary. “I swear to God, that was the first time I’d smiled since that weird day nine months before when the Holy Ghost floated into my room and started feeling me up.”