Authors: Anna Quindlen
The four panes of light on the bedroom ceiling have shifted over the course of the fall, moved closer to the edge of the room. Today their color has changed as well, materialized as a faint silver-blue. For a moment, I look through half-open eyes. No alarm, no announcer telling me that the president is at Camp David, the budget still under discussion, a Nobel laureate dead. I have read the eerie light correctly, and the lawn outside the kitchen window is deep in snow. I start the coffee earlier than usual.
It’s Christmas morning, and we are becalmed. What could be nicer? Snowfall is one of the best things that can happen to a family. The centrifugal force of daily life that flings us in different directions will be stilled. Glen says Ruby’s car is not stable in really bad weather. But in really bad weather the phone always rings just after dawn, the telephone tree sending its tendrils through town to say there will be no school. Then there is no need for Ruby to drive at all.
There have already been two snow days this December, winter
hard upon Thanksgiving. Last week I canceled the appointment with the woman who was expecting me to drape her banisters in blue spruce and holly and turn her mantelpieces into the sort of celebration of the holidays that, in years past, were done by families instead of landscapers. “Don’t you have four-wheel drive?” she asked peevishly when I called. Most of Glen’s patients canceled. Alex did not have basketball practice. The literary magazine sat fallow for a day as the school building, empty and echoing, lay beneath the drifts in a whistling wind. The girls came over to bake Christmas cookies. The boys hovered, picking at dough as Sarah slapped their grubby hands. Even Max joined in that day, putting the eyes and smiles on gingerbread men, relieved not to go to school. His spirits have lifted as the winter break approaches: two whole weeks at home. Or perhaps it is that his sessions with Dr. Vagelos are having an effect.
He and Alex and Ruby are still asleep. Once they would tumble downstairs on Christmas morning even before dawn broke; now they are content to amble into the living room for presents after nine. I let Ginger out of her kennel and she stands at the back door, calculating: How short a distance can she go in order to keep her paws warm and dry? She whines slightly and then goes to a wet space on the driveway asphalt where the snow never sticks. She sniffs at the garage door and whines, then scratches at it.
“Come on, Ging,” I call quietly, the sound lost in the soft hillocks of snow.
Max had an appointment with Dr. Vagelos on the snowy day last week, and he insisted on trudging through the streets to get there. “He’s a good guy,” Max said when he got home, and, more important, he sat at the kitchen table with me for twenty minutes, sipping at hot chocolate, listening to me fill the silence with chatter, occasionally smiling. But I’ve noticed that he runs down after a therapy session, is good for a day or two, and then slowly sinks
beneath the weight of his torpor and sadness. A half-dozen times this term he has missed school, claiming a sore throat or an upset stomach and sleeping the day away. Thanksgiving cheered him, because he never needed to leave the house. In years past, I would have been delighted to see any of the children devote themselves to their grandparents, to hear Max’s laugh as he wrestled with Liam on the floor. “Feel free to invite any of your friends over,” I had said brightly to all three, but Ruby knew what I meant. “Mom, he doesn’t have any friends right now,” she said, and I held up my hand to ward off the blow. “It’ll get better,” she said, and she put her arms around me.
Just before the Christmas break, we had teacher conferences. Because Max had forgotten to sign us up, and Alex had signed us up late, we started with Ruby. Her homeroom teacher had a sheaf of notes from her colleagues, but they all amounted to the same thing: exemplary student, participates in class, has her work done.
“I do find her a little abstracted these days,” she said, “but I find most of the seniors abstracted. I’ve learned to make allowances.”
“So nothing we should worry about?” Glen had said.
“Ruby is the least of my worries,” the teacher said with a smile.
And the least of ours. Alex, too, is abstracted. “If it doesn’t include a ball, he’s not interested,” said the homeroom teacher, who also teaches both boys math. “I’m trying to create word problems for Alex and Ben that incorporate sports.”
“Batting averages?” asks Glen.
“That’s a little elementary for what we’re working on.”
For Max, we met with the school counselor. His teachers, she said, were still worried, although they appreciated that he was seeing a psychologist. “He just doesn’t seem engaged,” she added kindly. Max the Mute has become Nowhere Man. Once he came close to a fistfight with one of Alex’s soccer teammates who called him that.
“You guys need to just tell him to get right,” Alex said one night at dinner when he thought his brother was out of earshot, and Max came barreling back down the stairs, his face fierce, and shouted, “How do you know what right is, you jerk-off?” and then barreled back up before we could even spit out our objections.
I plug in the Christmas tree and watch the white lights send sparks across the surface of the silver balls. I have a half-dozen clients now who hire me to decorate their trees; I have one who has three trees, one in the two-story living room, one in the wood-paneled den, one in the cavernous kitchen. I went into this business because I loved the slow and gradual nature of it, the undeniable logic of the natural world. Now much of what I do is simply show, an attempt to present a gaudy mask to others. There is nothing more joyless than decorating the Christmas tree of someone you barely know.
Two Swedish coffee cakes have risen overnight atop the refrigerator. Along with meat loaf, this is the only recipe my mother has bequeathed to me. Her people were Scandinavian, although she is vague about exactly where they came from. “Ancestor worship,” she called it when Ruby did a genealogy project.
We use the living room for Christmas morning. Once it was littered with boxes—dolls, games, bicycles. There was a feeding frenzy at sunup. Now I sit at the kitchen table, the dog at my feet, trying to figure out when to put the coffee cakes into the oven so they will be warm when the kids finally rise. I hear a noise from outside, a bump, a thump, and Ginger raises her head, sniffs the air, growls unconvincingly, and lies flat again. In the living room there is a very expensive drum set for Max, with a card saying it will be accompanied by the renovation of the room above the garage. Ruby has two round-trip tickets to London in her stocking. Alex has a soccer ball in a Lucite case signed by the Olympic team, and the best lacrosse stick available. I miss the toys.
“You could have slept in,” says Glen when he comes down at seven-thirty in old khakis, a sweatshirt, and bare feet.
“I got up as soon as it was light for old times’ sake.”
He gets himself a cup of coffee and puts his cold feet on my insteps. “That’s mean,” I say drowsily, but I don’t pull away. He kisses me. Because of the weather his father has decided not to come for Christmas dinner. I think we’re both relieved. Glen’s father makes Ruby and Max uneasy. “Nobody ever got rich from writing,” he will say to her, and “You playing any sports?” he will ask Max. Only Alex suits. “Sit down and tell the old man your stats,” he will say, and Alex will obediently recite goals, assists, free throws. Glen played high school sports, but I’ve gotten the impression that he was somehow never good enough. His brother Doug was quarterback but broke his arm halfway through his senior season. “That’s when he put on the pounds,” his father likes to say, although Doug has always looked fine to me.
The baking smell fills the house, and the blue light from outside, the silence of streets becalmed by both the holiday and the weather, makes it feel like a warm, safe cave. Sometimes I feel as Max does: Why would I ever want to leave? As I’m glazing the coffee cakes the children drift down together, Ruby dwarfed by an enormous flannel nightgown, the boys in sweatpants and T-shirts. Ruby screams, then cries at her European trip and says I must join her, which is exactly what I had hoped, although I ask if she doesn’t want Sarah instead. Alex turns the soccer ball around and around and reads off the names and repeats, “Where did you guys get this?”
“Santa Claus found it,” Glen says.
Only Max is silent as he circles the drum set. But as I put breakfast on the kitchen table I suddenly hear a long roll, a clash of cymbals, and then a riff that seems to go on for several minutes. I’m afraid to look, afraid to hope, afraid to see that his hands are going but his face remains lifeless.
“He’s going to wake the whole block,” Glen says.
“I don’t give a damn,” I say. I peek around the corner and he is not smiling, exactly, but his body is alive. The drums were expensive, and I would have paid double just for that.
“Snow!” Alex says when they all sit down, in that delayed reaction that seems to reflect the ability of the young to concentrate on only one thing at a time.
Ruby goes to the door and bends forward to peer out of its panes. She meshes her fingers together behind her back and rocks back and forth. I can tell she wants to put everything right before she flies away, Ruby does. She wants to feel at peace with Kiernan again, to make certain Rachel will not follow her worst impulses, to heal the rift between her brothers. She has given each of the boys a poem for Christmas, and the one for Max begins, “I miss you, mousie. Come back home.” Mousie and Bear—that’s what she called her brothers when she was very young. When I’d asked why, years ago, she made that exasperated click of the tongue, the one most girls don’t learn until adolescence, and said, “Mommy you know.”
I didn’t. I don’t. She does.
“Do you guys want to go sledding?” she asks without turning around.
The house has a special kind of silence in snow, as though all of our modern conveniences have been made obsolete by the primacy of the weather, as though the phones will be useless, the furnace a mere conceit of warmth, the cars an empty gesture. But to my mind the silence is enormous at the moment because I’m waiting to hear the answer from the two boys, whether Max will join Alex and Ruby, and whether Alex will join Max.
“I’m psyched,” Alex says.
“Whatever,” says Max.
There’s the usual scramble for snow pants and gloves. No matter
how many I buy, there are never enough. Mummies in down and wool, the three of them trudge down the street to the hill at its end, two Flexible Flyers, one toboggan. Glen wiggles his eyebrows at me, and we go back upstairs to our room. At midday there are no light squares on the ceiling. I worry about Max while we’re having sex, which seems terrible but inevitable. Then toward the end I forget about Max, which seems terrible in a different way.
“I’m hungry again,” Glen says after. He showers, and so do I. Without talking about it, we decided several years ago that our children could smell sex on us, and that we preferred that they didn’t. They have their illusions about us, just as we have ours about them.
I’m hungry again, too, and I polish off part of the second coffee cake. I call my mother to thank her for the recipe, but I get the machine. Perhaps they’re playing Yuletide golf in the bright white of a Florida afternoon.
Ginger barks sharply once, then again, and there is the sound of a muffled roar from the front lawn. Outside, José is running the snow blower up our front path. He’s wearing a knit cap pulled down low so that it is almost impossible to see his eyes. He goes around to start on the driveway, and I pull on boots and a coat and go outside with cake on a paper plate, and a thermos of coffee. Light and sweet is how the guys like it. At least I know that much.
“I’m surprised to see you,” I say when he turns the machine off.
“John send me. I got no work today, only tomorrow.”
“Merry Christmas.
Feliz Navidad.”
I am embarrassed by the latter, and thrust the plate at him. Laboriously, he takes off his thick gloves and takes it in his hands. He can’t hold the thermos at the same time. “Come inside,” I finally say.
“No, missus, I will be making a mess. John is coming back soon, and I will go with him and have this then. Thank you.
Gracias
.” I have forced the poor man to be bilingual.
“When are you going home?” I say.
“Maybe not this time,” he says mournfully. “Things are not so good. Lots of things.”
“I’m sorry. Is there some way I can help?”
He looks at the cake, and for some reason I’m sure he is hungry. “Eat,” I say, but he shakes his head.
“Maybe I could get some pay now for the summer? The Greyhound is a lot of money, and we have some problems with the little girl, Graciella. She has a problem with her”—he moves his hand in a circle around his throat, seaching for the word—“her glands.”
“Tonsils?’
“Yes,” he says. “Maybe I could get some pay now, then I work?”
I’m embarrassed by my indecision. It would take so little to give this man a few hundred dollars. I’m certain he would work it off when the weather turns warm. But I think of Luis, of how I’d thought he was a good man, too. I think of Rickie’s warning about advances, about how the men are always asking him for a hundred because they’ve gotten in the hole playing cards or borrowing from a co-worker. Last summer he announced to the crew that there would be no pay without work. “No exceptions,” he said.
“I have to think about it, José,” I say, turning the thermos in my hands. “We usually don’t do that.”
“I know,” he says, resigned already. “That’s okay. I ask, but I know.”
“You sure you don’t want to come in?”
“No, missus. I do the back part, the driveway. John will come back.”
“Are you having a special dinner?” I cannot stop myself—my need to know that this isn’t a terrible life, that I’m not responsible for a terrible life.
“The guys bring something from the Chalet,” he says. The
Chalet is the ski resort where they work in wintertime. “Last year very good.”
“Rickie has something for you all,” I say.
“He give it yesterday. Thank you, missus.” Fifty dollars for each man. Rickie is always worried they will spend it in the bar out on the highway, the one with the neon sign that says
STEAK CHOPS BEER.
Nancy says sometimes the kids go there, and no one has ever seen a steak or a chop. “Nachos from the microwave,” she told me. I wonder if Mexicans think we’re crazy to eat nachos.