Authors: Orson Scott Card
“I didn’t,” Helaman told her. “I bought all new ones.”
“Oh, you’re such a tease,” she said. “I mean, here’s the old garlic press. I’ve never even used it.”
“Now you have two of them.”
And when she realized that he meant it, that he had really duplicated all her utensils and put them away exactly as she had always had them, she started to cry, which was a sign of happiness even more certain than the squealing.
So yes, they loved the house, all of them. Wasn’t that what he built it for? For them to feel exactly this way about it? But what he hadn’t expected was his own feeling of disappointment. He couldn’t match their enthusiasm; on the contrary, he felt sad and uncertain as he walked through the house. As if after all his struggling to cause this house to exist, to be perfect, now that it was done he had no reason to be here. No, that wasn’t quite the feeling. It was as if he had no
right
to be here. He strode through the house with all the rights of ownership, and yet he felt like an interloper, as if he had evicted the rightful occupants and stolen the place.
Am I so used to struggling for money all my life that when I finally have visible proof that the struggle is over, I can’t believe it? No, he thought. What I can’t believe is
me
. I don’t belong in a place like this. In my heart, I think of myself in that miserable three-bedroom tract house in
Orem with the four makeshift bedrooms Dad built in the basement so all his six kids could have rooms of our own. Well, I’m not a wage man like Dad, and my kids will not be ashamed of where they live, and my wife will be able to invite any woman in the ward into her home without that look of apology that Mother always had when she had to bring chairs from the dining room just so there’d be enough places for her visitors to sit.
Yet even when he had told himself all these things, reminded himself of the fire that had burned inside him all during the building of the house, he still felt empty and disappointed and vaguely ashamed, and he just didn’t understand it. It wasn’t fair that he should feel like this. He had
earned
this house.
Well, what did he expect, anyway? It was like Christmas itself: The gifts were never as good as the preparations—the shopping and hiding and wrapping. He felt as he did because he was tired, that’s all. Tired and ready for it to be the day after Christmas when he could get back to running his little empire of five Willkie’s stores, which sprawled on their parking lots in choice locations up and down the Wasatch Front, beaming their cheery fluorescent lights to welcome people in to the wonderful world of discount housewares. This had been a record Christmas, and maybe getting the accountants’ year-end reports would make him feel better.
Then again maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe this is what it is, he thought, that makes all those lonely women come to see the bishop and complain about how they’re so depressed. Maybe I’m just having the equivalent of postpartum blues. I have given birth to a house with the finest view in the Darlington Heights Ward, I’m sitting here looking out of a window larger than any of the bathrooms, the twinkling lights of Salt Lake Valley on Christmas Eve spread out before me, with Christmas carols from the CD player being pumped through twenty-two speakers in nine rooms, and I can’t enjoy it because I keep getting the postpartum blues.
“They’re
hee-
eere!” sang out Trudy. So the new love of her life (the second in December alone) must be at the door. At eighteen she was their eldest child and therefore the one nearest to achieving full human status. Unlike Joni, Trudy still spelled her name with a
y
, and it had been more than a year since she stopped drawing the little eyes over the
u
to make it look like a smile in the middle of her signature. At church yesterday she had fallen in love with the newly returned missionary who bore his testimony
in a distinctly Spanish accent. “Can I invite him to come over for the hanging of the stockings?” she pleaded. In vain did Helaman tell her that it would be no use—his
own
family would want to have him all night, it was his first Christmas with them since the 1980s, for heaven’s sake! But she said, “I can at least ask, can’t I?,” and Lucille nodded and so Helaman agreed, and to his surprise the young elder had said yes. Helaman took a mental note: Never underestimate the ability of your own daughters to attract boys, no matter how weird you think your girls have grown up to be.
And now the young elder was here, no doubt with so many hormones flowing through him that he could cause items of furniture to mate with each other just by touching them. Helaman had to get up out of the couch and would play father and host for a couple of hours, all the time watching to make sure the young man kept his hands to himself.
It wasn’t till he got to the door and saw
two
young men standing there that he realized that Trudy had said
they’re
here. He recognized the elder, of course, looking missionary-like and vaguely lost, but the other was apparently from another planet. He was dressed normally, but one side of his head was mostly shaved, and the other side was partly permed and partly straight. Joni immediately attached herself to him, which at least told Helaman what had brought him to their door on Christmas Eve—another case of raging hormones. As to
who
he was, Helaman deduced that he was either a high school hoodlum she had invited over to horrify them or one of the bodacious new boys from the Darlington Heights Ward that she had been babbling about all day. In fact, if Helaman tried very hard he could almost remember the boy as he looked yesterday at church, in a lounge-lizard jacket and loosened tie, kneeling at the sacrament table, gripping the microphone as if he were about to do a rap version of the sacrament prayer. Helaman had shuddered at the time, but apparently Joni was capable of looking at such a sight and thinking, “Wow, I’d like to bring that home.”
By default Helaman turned to Trudy’s newly-returned missionary and stuck out his hand. “Feliz Navidad,” said Helaman.
“Feliz Navidad,” said the missionary. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
“I didn’t,” said Helaman.
“
I
did, silly,” said Trudy. “And you’re supposed to notice that Father said Merry Christmas in Spanish.”
“Oh, sorry,” said the missionary. “I’ve only been home a week and everybody was saying Feliz Navidad all the time. Your accent must be good enough that I didn’t think twice.”
“What mission were you in?”
“Colombia Medellín.”
“Do I just call you Elder or what?” asked Helaman.
“I’ve been released,” said the missionary. “So I guess my name is Tom Boke again.”
Joni, of course, could hardly bear the fact that Trudy’s beau had received more than a full minute of everyone’s attention. “And this is
my
first visitor to the new house,” said Joni.
Helaman offered his hand to Joni’s boy and said, “I know a good lawyer if you want to sue your barber.”
Joni glared at him but since the boy showed no sign of understanding Helaman’s little jest, she quickly stopped glaring.
“I’m Spencer Raymond Varley,” said the boy, “but you can call me Var.”
“And you can call me Brother Willkie,” said Helaman. “Come on in to family room A and we’ll tell you which cookies Joni baked so you can avoid them and live.”
“Daddy,
stop
it,” said Joni in her cute-whiny voice. She used this voice whenever she wanted to pretend to be pretending to be mad. In this case it meant that she really
was
mad and wanted Helaman to stop goading young Var.
Helaman was too tired to banter with her now, so he pried her off his arm, where she had been clinging, and promised that he’d be good from now on. “I was only teasing the spunky young lad out of habit.”
“His father is
the
Spence Varley,” Joni whispered. “He drives a Jag.”
Well,
your
father is
the
Helaman Willkie, he answered silently. And I’ll be able to get you great prices on crock pots for the rest of your natural life.
The family gathered. They munched for a while on the vegetables and the vegetable dip, the fruits and the fruit dip, and the chips and the chip dip. Helaman felt like a cow chewing its cud as he listened to the conversation drone on around him. Lucille was carrying the conversation, but Helaman knew she loved being hostess and besides, she was even
worse than the girls, waiting to pounce on Helaman and hush him up if he started to say anything that might embarrass a daughter in front of her male companion for the evening. Usually Helaman enjoyed the sport of baiting them, but tonight he didn’t even care.
I don’t like having these strangers in our home on Christmas Eve, he thought. But then, I’m as much a stranger in
this
house as they are.
By the time Helaman connected back to the conversation, Joni was regaling her fashion-victim boyfriend with the story of the marble floor in the entryway. “Father
told
the contractor to lower the floor in the entryway or the marble would stand an inch above the living room carpet and people would be falling down or stubbing their toes forever. And the contractor said he wouldn’t do it unless Father accepted the fact that this would make them three days late and add a thousand dollars to the cost of the house. And so Father gets up in the middle of the night—”
“You’ve got to know that I warned them while they were putting
in
the entryway floor that they needed to drop it an inch lower to hold the marble, and they completely ignored me,” said Helaman. “And now it had the staircase sitting on it and it really would have been a lot easier to just install a parquet floor instead, but I had promised Lucille a marble entryway and the contractor had promised
me
a marble entryway and—”
“Father,” said Joni, “I was going to tell the
short
version.”
“And now he said he wouldn’t do it,” said Helaman, and then fell silent.
“
So
,” said Joni, “as
somebody
was saying, Father got up in the middle of the night—”
“Six in the morning,” said Helaman.
“
Let
her tell the story, Helaman,” said Lucille.
“And he got the chainsaw out of the garage,” said Joni, “and he cut this big gaping hole in the middle of the entry floor and you know what? They realized that Daddy
really meant it
.”
They laughed, and then laughed all the harder when Helaman said, “Remember the chainsaw if you’re ever thinking of keeping my daughter out after her curfew.”
Even as he laughed, though, Helaman felt a sour taste in his mouth from the chainsaw story. It really
had
cost the contractor money and slowed down the house, and when Helaman had stood there, chainsaw in
hand, looking in the first light of morning down into the hole he had just made, he had felt stupid and ashamed, when he had
meant
to feel vindicated and clever and powerful. It took a few minutes for him to realize that his bad feelings were really just because he was worried about somebody walking in without looking where they were going and falling down into the basement, so he wrestled a big sheet of plywood over and laid it
mostly
over the hole, leaving just enough of a corner that the contractor couldn’t help but know that the hole was there. And then it turned out that
that
wasn’t the reason he felt stupid and ashamed after all, because when he’d finished he
still
had to come home and take a shower just to feel clean.
Of course, while he was thinking of this, they had gone on with the second marble story, only now it was Trudy telling it. “So this lady from across the street comes over and Mom thinks she’s going to welcome us into the neighborhood, and so she holds the door open and invites the woman inside, and the first thing she says is ‘I hear you’re going to have marble in the foyer of your new house,’ and Mom says yes, and then the woman—”
“Sister Braincase, I’ll bet,” said Var.
“Who?” asked Lucille.
“Sister Barnacuse,” said Var. “We call her Braincase because she’s going bonkers.”
“How compassionate of you,” murmured Lucille.
“
Any
way,” said Trudy, “whoever she was—Mrs. Barnacuse—said, ‘Well, I hope it isn’t that miserable
fox
marble.’ And Mother just stands there and she’s trying to think of what fox marble might mean. Was it a sort of russet shade of brown or something? She’d never heard of a color called
fox
. And then all of a sudden it dawns on her that the woman means
faux
marble, and even though the marble in the entry
is
real, Mother says to her, ‘No, the marble
we
have is
faux
.’ As if it was something to be proud of. And the woman says, ‘Oh, well that’s different,’ and she goes away.”
Var laughed uproariously, but Tom Boke only sat there with a polite missionary grin, which Helaman supposed he probably perfected back before he really knew the language, when he had to sit and listen to whole conversations he didn’t understand. Finally the young man shared with them the reason for his failure to laugh. “What’s foe marble?” he asked.
“Faux,” said Lucille. “French for false.”
“It means fake,” Ryan said, in one of the brief moments when his mouth wasn’t full of chips. “But ours is real. And our toilets flush silently.”
“Ryan,” said Lucille in her I’m-still-acting-sweet-but-you’d-better-do-this voice, “why don’t you go down and pry your brother away from the computer and ask him to come up and meet our guests?”