There were no pictures of Daintry and me beneath a red-lit Christmas tree, our arms and legs radiating like spokes as we lay
among the presents, looking upward into the furry branches. “A book, easy,” we’d say, pressing and guessing at the contents;
or peeking outright as I gargled an entirely fake cough to cover Daintry tearing an entirely unaccidental rip in the wrapping
paper. And no picture of my disappointment the Christmas we pledged to ask for wispy-haired trolls so that we could play with
them together. “Let’s see yours,” I said Christmas afternoon, proudly displaying my brown-skinned, bug-eyed midgets.
“Oh,” Daintry said, barely glancing at my toys, “I changed my mind and asked for art supplies instead. Look at this book on
van Gogh.”
Traitor,
I’d thought, hating my ugly trolls.
There was no photographic record of us memorizing those poems for fifth-grade assignments, no sounds of childish chanting
or of our chest-beating moans when we discovered “The Highwayman” a year later. There was no box of Luden’s cough drops, candied
medicine that was good as currency those elementary days. No copy of the songbook we purchased together at the school store
to share during assemblies. Gone, gone, in a blink of unrecoverable time. Nothing at all to prove the sweetly squandered thousand
thousand moments of pure happiness. Unadulterated. Un-adult. Oh, Daintry. I drew a deep breath, gasping in a smothering sadness
for all the lost spontaneous joys, the trivial thrills of a girlhood shared. I leaned forward and placed the album on the
table beside Ceel’s narcissus. In the glass bowl the delicate white roots twined inseparably throughout the pebbles.
“Mom?” A draft of cold air gushed in as Mark closed the front door. He shrugged off his coat and sat down beside me. “What
are you doing, staying up to check on me?”
Mark had been on a short rope ever since he’d come home reeking of smoke several weeks earlier. “It’s not me,” he’d said.
“Wendy and her friends smoke, and I was just in the car.”
But a week later I’d discovered something more worrisome than lingerie magazines under his bed: a heavy STOP sign. Hal was
livid. “Stealing government property is a felony.” Again Mark objected, claiming that the sign had been lying on the side
of the road.
“Mark,” I’d told him later, “whenever you’re with friends who are doing something you don’t want to do, blame it on me. Say,
‘My mother will kill me.’ ‘My mother won’t let me.’ ‘My mother will punish me.’ ‘She’s a. . . witch.’ You can blame it on
me.”
“All I smell is syrup glaze,” I said to him now.
“Wendy calls me her ‘honey funk hunk.‘”
Dear God,
I thought, and said, “Settin’ there jes’ lak a spider.”
“Huh?”
As if Mark would know
Gone With the Wind.
As if it would deter his attraction. As if he could ignore his sexuality even as I, decades older and supposedly wiser, was
experiencing the same powerful pull myself. “Never mind. I was just enjoying the peace.”
“You ought to see how the windows look from outside. Like a nuclear meltdown.”
“Oh, admit it. You love the red bulbs.”
“You decorated without me.”
“You know what, Mark? My first year at Wyndham Hall, the only thing that got me through December exams was thinking about
decorating our tree, having everything be normal and usual and exactly the same. And when I came through the door, there it
was, done. I didn’t know whether to sob with hurt feelings or stomp around being furious.” Mark picked at the beginnings of
a hole in his jeans, listening. “And guess what. Go ahead, it won’t kill you. Say, ‘What?‘”
He gave me a grudging smile. “What?”
“The tree was beautiful, and Christmas came and went, and I lived. I got some things I wanted and some that I didn’t, just
the same as every other year.” I stuck out my tongue at him. “Nyah.”
He shook his head as if he were the mature one. “Mom, you are so strange.”
“Maybe.” I stood and walked over to the tree. “What do you think?”
“It isn’t finished.”
“Sure it’s finished. Right down to the—up to the— angel on top. Or do you think it should be a star? We could have a good
family feud over that issue.”
“The
icicles.”
“But you can’t even see the branches when they’re covered with those stringy things.”
“Thanks a lot.” His lips were set in a thin line of stubbornness. Or hurt. I peered closely at him, and something inside me
tumbled and gave way.
“Actually,” I said, “I was just saving them till you got home.” I took a paper bag from beside the ornament box. No one had
thought to look into it between decorating and dinner and . . . Daintry. I handed him two slender cellophane-wrapped boxes.
“After all, they have to go on last, right?”
He grinned, hugely pleased, and slit the plastic. “You didn’t forget.”
“I didn’t forget.” It wasn’t only Ellen who needed ritual. I leaned to switch on an end table lamp.
“No!” he nearly shouted, then lowered his voice for the sleeping house. “No lights.”
Like a waiter’s napkin, the icicles draped Mark’s forearm in a silvery cascade. As they swayed soundlessly he held up his
free hand to stop me from saying more. “I know, I know. Put them on one by one, branch by branch. Only at the ends. No clumping,
no tossing. Take your time. Careful, careful.” He separated one limp strand of tinsel from the mass and hung it delicately
on the closest bough. It twinkled a solitary metallic red. “Your turn,” he said solemnly, and held out his arm to me.
“Mark,” I said, equally serious. “You’re doing this all wrong. Totally,
heinously
wrong,” I repeated, using one of his own overused adjectives to show him I meant business. “Now watch,” I said, and scooped
up a dozen foil ribbons, “ ’cause I’m only going to show you this once.” I took two steps back and pitched the strands toward
the tree. “Icicles have to be
flung
for the proper effect.” I pointed at the helter-skelter landing of the silver strips. “Now you try and let’s see if we can
get this right.”
Mark laughed. He began to carefully put down his burden of perfectly aligned icicles, but I touched his arm. “Nope, uh-uh,
like this,” and shook his arm so they fell to the sofa in a tangled lump. We stood over them, eyeing them and each other.
“You know,” I said, “we could make a swell tinfoil ball.”
“Nah,” Mark said. “I. Wanted. Icicles.”
We fell on them like famine victims. Twirled them in our fingers and grabbed them in our fists and flung them inanely toward
the tree, mindless of where or how or if they landed. Clumps of red-burnished silver dotted branches like mangled birds’ nests.
Backs to the tree, we tossed the icicle threads over our shoulders in unison, spilled salt and superstition. We clapped hands
to our mouths in silent hilarity as we tied a bow round a Santa’s beard, handcuffed an angel with an icicle bracelet, tinsel-lynched
a reindeer ornament to a branch, used slivers as makeshift dental floss in delirious spontaneity. It rained thin metallic
silver with our wasteful, careless, free-falling pitches. Mark threw over-hand, I threw my best like-a-girl underhand, he
went in for a layup with a crimped handful. The tree was a crazy web of shimmering foil, dripping and strewn with our unorchestrated
handiwork.
We must have looked mad, leaping and bobbing in that strange fiery light before an indoor tree. We were twin banshees, a dervished
duo enacting a pagan ceremony before finally collapsing to the floor, panting with laughter and exertion. And for everything
else I’d remembered that night, I couldn’t recall when I’d felt so free and foolish.
I reached out to pick a silly silver string from Mark’s hair. “Forgot one,” I said, and handed it to him.
Our fingers touched as he took it from me and hung it carefully from a branch empty of sparkle. The single icicle swayed gracefully,
as if some slight breeze, a breath, had set it in soundless motion.
“There,” Mark said. “
Now
it’s Christmas.” He crossed his arms behind his head and lay down, snug within the presents beneath the lowest boughs. Just
as Daintry and I used to do.
From Hannah’s quote book:
Like a relapsing fever. . . the familiar ache of age and sadness and wisdom.
—Norman Mailer
Y
ou should wait to take down the tree,” Mother said over my shoulder.
I pulled the ornament box closer. It was late morning of New Year’s Eve, and Hal had gone to the Academy with Ellen as eager
company. The vacated school was a paradise for her, a life-size setting to play Teacher, where she scribbled assignments on
blackboards and instructed imaginary students. “Wait for what?”
“Epiphany.”
“When’s that—January fifth or something?”
“You know very well when it is. We’ve hardly had time to enjoy the tree.”
“You’re getting ready to leave,” I reminded her.
“It’s a sin, what’s become of Christmas. Stores decorated before Halloween. Whatever happened to Advent?”
“The tree’s a fire hazard. Needles have been dropping to the floor for days.” I unhooked a Snoopy on skis and freed a wicker
pram twined in tinsel. “Besides, it’s bad luck to leave it up over New Year’s.”
Mother stooped and lifted out the tiny plastic crèche from the cardboard dividers where I’d already packed it safely away.
She turned it over in her hand. “Hannah. . . ”
I unhooked a stuffed mouse. “Yes?”
She replaced the ornament efficiently, clasped her elbows, and looked around distractedly. “You’ve done a nice job with the
house. I wasn’t sure whether this move was the right thing for you and Hal.”
“Daddy always said it was never the right time to change jobs or buy a house or”—I paused—“have a baby.”
“Don’t tell Mother about the latest rejection from the agency. I don’t want to say anything until I have a baby in my arms,”
Ceel had said, adding,
“If that ever happens.”
“You do have those beautiful boxwood out front,” Mother mused as if still deciding whether the house was worthy. “You and
Hal don’t have plans for New Year’s Eve?”
I shook my head. “Is that okay?”
“No, I mean yes, I mean . . . I just assumed you’d want to celebrate in some way. Your Christmas presents to each other seemed.
. . odd.” She gestured to the window where my gift from Hal was already in use: a sleekly modern squirrel-proof bird feeder.
“Not very romantic. Have I ever told you about your father’s Christmas present to me the first year we were married?” She
had, but I let her tell me again. “We were so poor. Christmas morning I unwrapped the gift and it was this big, green, ugly
sewing box. I burst into tears holding it.
After that we always made sure to give each other something even a tiny bit personal.”
I thought of my back-rub coupon book for Hal on our own long-ago, poverty-stricken Christmas. This year my gift to him was
a handheld computer dictionary, though it had been weeks since we’d challenged one another with definitions. Weeks since we’d
even read together in bed. It was just a hectic time, we’d told ourselves, but our lovemaking seemed stratified now, easily,
painfully assigned to category: Saturday night sex; bottle-of-wine sex; sex as sleeping pill. “But you still use that sewing
kit, don’t you,” I said gently.
Mother straightened. “You know,” she said, pointing on her way back to the bedroom, “that picture is hung too high on the
wall.”
I sighed.
Five minutes later she called to me again. “Hannah?”
I stopped in the doorway of Ellen’s room, messy with Christmas loot and Mother’s packing. She stood at the window, gazing
outside. It was unusual to see her paused, stilled with inactivity. I disliked those rare afternoons as a child when I arrived
after school to a quiet house and found my mother napping, stretched out on her bed like a corpse. An arm was thrown across
her eyes, and its underside was a startling fish-belly white. Small snores leaked from her slightly gaping mouth, and I would
watch, simultaneously fascinated, frightened, and repulsed. She seemed distant, her parental authority diminished by unconsciousness.
Yet she was somehow naked as well, helpless and vulnerable in slumber.
“Mother?”
Roused from whatever reverie she’d been lost in, she started, and her head jerked in my direction. “Oh, I . . .” She walked
to the bureau and began busily gathering toiletries. “Where did Mark go?”
“He’s at work, why?”
“I wanted him to pick up a crate of fatwood kindling for me from that roadside store.”
“You have gas logs.”
“I knew you’d be purists,”
Daintry had said.
“I was thinking of using them for Christmas presents next year, tied in bundles with plaid ribbon.”
“
Next
year? Who’s rushing Christmas now? ‘Whatever happened to Advent?‘”
Mother crossed her arms defensively. “Fatwood is better when it’s aged. Besides, that’s not rushing, that’s preparation.”
“Like Advent?” I laughingly suggested. “Daintry will be pleased you thought her idea was a good one. Imitation being the highest
form of flattery.”
“A better idea than that parish photograph directory,” she said brusquely. “Are you going to help?”
“I don’t know.”
“You still let that girl boss you around.”
I was stung. “What is it you have against her?”
“Geoff O’Connor broke Ceel’s heart.”
“I was asking about
Daintry
O’Connor.”
Mother zipped the side compartment of her bag. “Did I tell you about Paul Sullivan?”
“Yes.” No doubt the earlier reference to my father had reminded her. Paul Sullivan, a jut-jawed pillar of St. Francis—usher,
lay reader, senior warden, Every Member Canvas head—had dropped dead a month earlier while swinging a nine iron, killed without
symptom by his own heart at fifty-four. A death too similar to the “no warning” circumstances of Daddy’s.
Sometimes Ceel and I talked of dying, macabre conversations in which we speculated whose genes we’d inherited. Whose thin
hair or blue eyes, bowlegs or small shoulders—and whose death sentence. Would we be genetically blessed with our mother’s
good health and longevity? Or doomed to our father’s fate, felled by a stroke at fifty-five? “Don’t you dare die first and
leave me to gum chicken salad alone,” she’d warned me with utter seriousness. And with each conversation, the limit of age
with which we agreed to be content—satisfied with having lived long enough—expanded.