By now it was late. I probably would have given up if all I'd wanted was to impress Camille, but writing a story was the only way I could imagine communicating with her. Despite what Sister Lucy had said about simply writing about the meaning of Christmas, I didn't seem able to concentrate on a story dedicated to Ralphie if he wasn't in it, so I tried writing about the funeral.
I hadn't ridden in the line of cars that left for the cemetery after Ralphie's requiem mass, but I'd stood on the church steps and watched the confusion of spinning tires and men in dark topcoats rocking a hearse piled with snow and flowers out of a rut along the curb. Then, the taillights of the cortege slowly disappeared down Washtenaw into a whiteout. I envisioned their headlights burrowing through the blizzard as they followed the hearse up Milwaukee Avenue, way out to the Northwest Side, where I imagined the snow was even deeper. I'd heard how, when they finally reached St. Adalbert Cemetery, they had trouble finding the grave site. In my story, the drifts were so deep that all but the crosses of the tallest monuments were buried. In that expanse of white, it was impossible to find Ralphie's plot, but as the procession of cars wound along a plowed road, they came to a place I described as “an oasis of green in a Sahara of snow.” There, gaping from exposed grass, was a freshly dug grave. At my grandfather Mike's funeral I'd noticed a robin with a worm in its beak fly from his open grave, so in my story birdsârobins, doves, seagullsâflew out of the hole as if a cage door had opened, and circled cawing overhead. When I reread that sentence, I scratched out “robins” and wrote in “blue jays.” Only after the graveside service did snow drift over Ralphie's plot, which was markedâas I'd heard it actually wasâwith a simple gray stone that made no mention of his being a blue boy. But in my story, when the snow
melted in spring, his gravestone had turned blue. I tried different shades: turquoise, cornflower, Prussian, all the blues in a giant 104 box of Crayolas. None seemed right.
It was long past my bedtime. Mick had gone to sleep in the room we shared, where I'd been writing cross-legged on my bed, so I'd relocated to the kitchen table. My father looked in on me before he turned in, obviously amazed to see me slaving over homework.
“Don't burn that midnight oil too late, sonnyboy,” he cautioned.
Quiet in our flat was when the motor of the refrigerator grew audible. I could hear its hum, and the toilet trickling, the crinkle of cooling radiators and, from down the hall, a harmonica, maybe Shakey Horton or Junior Wells still faintly playing on the bedroom radio tuned to the black rhythm and blues station that Mick and I listened to on the sly before we went to sleep.
“I'm going down to the basement and put my blue light on,” Sam Evans, the DJ, would announce at midnight.
What blue was that gravestone emerging from the dirty snow in spring? As blue as the blue light in Sam Evans's basement? The ghostly blue of Blue Island rising from the lake? Or the cold blue of the lake itself? Norky once described it as “turn-your-balls-blue” in an oral presentation. For a time after that we referred to Lake Michigan as Lake Blueballs.
It had actually offended Camille. “Sometimes people look but don't see what's beautiful all around us, like the lake,” she wrote in
To Change the World
. “It's a melted glacier, an Ice Age turned to sweet water. I love its taste.”
I slipped my jacket on and went out the back way and walked down the alley that led to an Ice Age so fierce the air felt crystallized, as if the snow tailing off the roofs might be flecks of frozen oxygen. It took a conscious effort to inhale its sharpness, yet instead of cursing the cold, I had a thought that maybe the purpose
of winter was to make you realize with every breath that you were alive and wanted to stay that way. I thought about Ralphie and the other kids I knew who already were dead, some from accidents, some, like Peanuts Bizzaro, murdered. Peanuts had seemed indestructible. In winter, we'd all go to watch him fight at the steamy Boys' Club gym. He was a boxer who'd prided himself on not getting hit. He made boxing something daringly beautiful, like diving off a high board. One night I stood in an audience of guys outside the Cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse lot on Rockwellâa lot with floodlights mounted too high to bust with rocksâwhere Peanuts was dancing, jabbing, throwing combinations, and repeating, “I'm fast, I'm flashy,” though under those lights and the bluish shadows they threw he appeared to move in slow motion as he methodically beat the piss out of a much beefier kid from the Ambros. The kid, called Dropout by the gang buddies cheering him on, had wanted to box at the Boys' Club, but he was obviously heavier than Peanuts's welterweight class, and when the boxing coach refused to let them put the gloves on, Peanuts offered to take it outside. Dropout wasn't even trying to box anymore. He was grabbing and kicking, and Peanuts was nicking him with his fists, calm and cool as a matador, asking, “Am I fast or what?” Then, from outside the fence, came a single pop that echoed off the stacks of oil drums. Guard still up, Peanuts went down to one knee. Dropout kicked him over, then scaled the fence and took off with his buddies.
Peanuts tried to climb the fence but slid back. Out of nowhere, his older brother, Tony, came running and nearly cleared the eight-foot fence in a jump. He wrapped his Levi's jacket around Peanuts, who was shivering, turning blue under the lighting, and repeating, “No fair, no fucken fair.”
Ralphie never had a fighting chance. I thought of him, and of Peanuts, of Gino Folloni and the others all buried under earth
frozen too hard to break with a spade. They couldn't feel the cold because they were the cold. Maybe they could hear the wind, but they couldn't see how even colder than earth the boulder of moon looked through the flocked branches of back yard trees. I stopped, made a snowball, hurled it, and the snow knocked from the tree maintained the shape of branches in midair for a moment before disintegrating. I wasn't wearing gloves, and my hands burned numb. Suddenly, I felt choked up, and I started to run as if I could outrun the feelingâwhich, in fact, was what I did, sprinting down three blocks of alleys without stopping to check the cross streets for traffic, but there weren't any cars and finally, when my nostrils and lungs felt at once frostbitten and on fire and I could no longer remember why I was running or if there even was a reason, I stopped and turned around, jogging home under streetlights that looked as if they, too, should have been exhaling steam.
The kitchen was filled with a dizzying warmth. It would have felt warm if the only sources of heat were the overhead light and the humming refrigerator motor. There, on the gray Formica table, lay my smeary blue ballpoint pen and three-holed loose-leaf papers, my story, and the scratch paper on which I'd listed various kinds of blue. I tried to reread my story and couldn't. The only thing left to make it feel right was to compress it in both hands like a snowball before throwing it into the trash bag under the sink.
Everyone handed in compositions but Chester and me. Sister Lucy didn't say anything to Chester, but she told me to sign my name on a blank sheet of paper, title it “Christmas Composition,” and below that to write “Dedicated to Ralphie.”
On the last day of class before Christmas vacation, when she returned the compositions, she handed the blank paper to me marked with a red F. Written in red ink was the comment “I see that your gift this Christmas was an ENORMOUS nothing.”
After returning the papers, Sister Lucy placed a scratchy record of carols on the portable turntable, and while it played she announced what we all already knew, that Camille's essay would represent our class at the Christmas Pageant that year. As was customary, Sister Lucy asked Camille to read her story aloud for our class. Camille rose to read at her desk, but Sister motioned her to the front. Camille was to be our valedictorian, too, the first one ever at St. Roman, and Sister Lucy had begun coaching Camille on her oral delivery in preparation for her speech at graduation.
“A Christmas Carol for Ralphie: A True Story,” Camille read, her quiet voice in competition with the “Ave Maria.” She enunciated carefully, eyes glued to the page, rouge burning on her cheeks. She appeared to be overheating, and she partially unbuttoned the navy blue cardigan she'd taken to wearing over her school uniform.
“Try looking up at your audience from time to time,” Sister Lucy suggested. “Eye contact, that's the secret.”
Camille's composition opened with the sound of prancing hooves: not reindeer on a rooftop, she told us, but Tito Guizar on the white stallion following the Virgin down Washtenaw. Listening to her re-create the scene, I wondered if she'd been there. I didn't remember seeing her, but there had been a crowd of people on the sidewalk watching Tito Guizar. When she came to the part about Sharky leading his parade out of the alley, she looked up at us, her audience, and asked, “What if Charles Dickens, the author of
A Christmas Carol
âone of the greatest writers in the history of the worldâwas there in the crowd?”
She dropped her gaze back to her paper. “I think I saw him there that afternoon,” she said, then deliberately making eye contact, asked, “If Dickens can transport us in time back to London, why can't we transport him to Chicago?”
Maybe eye contact
was
the secret, because it seemed as if she was asking me the question.
“You don't have to be transported to London on Christmas Eve a century ago to know that, as Dickens wrote, âthe business of Mankind is Man.' You don't have to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. But if you were, who would your ghost of Christmas Past be?” she asked. “Each of you has one. What would your spirit of Christmas Present look like?”
She paused as if waiting for an answer, and though I now realized her technique was to make eye contact whenever she asked a question, the question nonetheless seemed directed at me, as if there were a secret connection between us.
Before I could think who my ghost might be, Norky turned in his seat a row over and whispered, “Brigitte Bardot,” then shook his fist as if jerking off and made a demented face, which confirmed the ill effects of masturbation. Otherwise, the class was quiet, everyone intent but Chester, who'd buried his head in his arms as if asleep at his desk.
“Maybe the ghost might be disguised as a blind man who sells newspapers or, instead of dragging chains, comes rattling on a little cart with hooves strapped to his hands,” Camille suggested.
However different our ghosts might be, she said, she guessed that everyone in our class had the same Tiny TimâRalphieâand that we needed to be inspired by his example to change the world. To change the world, we first had to change ourselves. We had to make Christmas in our hearts and love one another.
Norky turned, caught my attention, and raised a sheet of paper on which in big letters he'd scrawled: “Estrada has BB's.”
I hated to admit he was rightâmaybe it was an optical illusion, but whenever Camille paused for breath, her white blouse beneath her blue sweater seemed to strain against the swell of her breasts as if she were developing before our eyes.
She took a deep, breast-heaving breath and said that a blue boy was not so different from Tiny Tim with his crutch. And that Tiny Tim with his crutch was not so different from Jesus with a cross.
She said that on that day last December when he ran to join the band of disabled marchers, Ralphie “mounted the wheelchair like a prince assuming his throne.” She said he raised his blue fist not in triumph or, as some claimed after he died, to wave goodbye, but as if to cheer as Tiny Tim would, “God bless us every one!”
“That's not what happened,” Chester said quietly.
He lifted his head from his arms and, without asking permission, half rose at his front-row desk.
“Chester, do you want to add something?” Sister Lucy asked, giving him the floor, though it wasn't necessary, because Camille had immediately stopped reading and now stood as if trapped before the class, more uneasy than I'd ever seen her.
Chester sat back down. “Lots of little kids chase parades,” he said. His voice trembled. “How come for once in his life Ralphie couldn't just do what other kids do without somebody making it a big deal?”
“Of course he could,” Sister Lucy said. “What Camille meant wasâ”
“She shouldn't make stuff up about him,” Chester interrupted, rising to his feet with a force that jarred his desk and sent the needle on Sister's portable player skipping across vinyl. “He wasn't joining anything!” he shouted at Camille. “He wasn't like them. His fist wasn't blue. That's bullshit. What do you know?” he demanded. “You don't know shit! And he hated being called Blue Boy. That wasn't his goddamn name. He wasn't some fucking freak. He wasn't some crip in a story. He didn't want your fucking feeling sorry for him. We don't need it. What do you know? You don't know fucking dogshit! Go fuck your four-eyed self!” he yelled after her as Camille ran from the room.
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“How much you soak for it?” my father asked, studying the tree with a characteristic combination of suspicion and contempt.
His appraisal was accurate, it wasn't much of a tree. The lots were already picked over. Each year we'd shop later in December in order to get a better deal. I'd begun to suspect that, if he could, he would buy a tree on sale after Christmas the way he bought Christmas cards.