You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (4 page)

I did it again. Sliding my mouth all over Santa’s, I licked his upper lip, his lower lip, the corners of his mouth. I licked and licked and licked because not only did Santa smell like a delicious candle, he
tasted
like one, too.

My heart was pounding and I was overwhelmed with new and astonishing sensations and desires. At any moment, my grandmother or my father could poke their head out from the kitchen doorway and see me and I’d be in trouble.

Just one more kiss, I thought, and I leaned forward once again.

With Santa’s lips in my mouth, I bit down. I bit down
hard.
His lips came off right in my mouth.

Shocked and unsure of what to
do
now that I had Santa’s lips entirely in my mouth, instinct took over and I started to chew.

I chewed the lips and they dissolved almost to nothing. They were, I realized happily, exactly like one of my favorite candies—wax soda bottles, filled with liquid.

I moved to the right where his plump, red check presented an impossibly tempting round knob. I bit it clean off his face, leaving a gaping hole with what appeared to be Styrofoam beneath.

I chewed and swallowed.

I bit off his chin and then I went for his ear, but it was hard plastic and resisted my teeth, so I settled for a little bit of neck.

His beautiful, true eyes: I opened wide, curled back my lips and bit into the ridge of his brow.

I bit off his nose.

“Why, Margaret, you can’t
possibly
mean that!” my grandmother shrieked from the other room, before bursting into peals of laughter. “Oh, but that’s just the most precious thing I have ever heard in all my life.”

And it was this, the sound of my grandmother’s laughter, that lifted me out of my love mist, my strange new hunger, that made me pull away from Santa and look at him again with fresh, clean eyes. And I saw that what I had done had gone alarmingly beyond kissing.

Carefully, silently, I stepped down from the chair and I carried it back to the dining room table.

Even from across the room I could see the carnage that was Santa’s face. I’d disfigured him, hideously. I felt sure that even Jesus, with his love for the maimed, would turn away. Santa now looked like his sleigh had crashed on a roof, his face slamming hard into the brick edge of a fireplace chimney.

I’d devastated the life-size Santa.

I began to tremble, this time not with anticipation, unnamed and unknowable excitement, but from dread. I was going to get in a lot of trouble for
this.

But then, could I maybe hide what I had done?

And I had an idea.

Quietly, I padded back to Santa and I placed my arms on his legs. I turned him counterclockwise so that now, instead of standing beside the tree and looking out into the room, waving at everyone who passed, he was facing the tree and his raised arm made him appear as though he was going to smack the tree, knock it over. Or, I realized dreadfully, he looked like he was about to mess with my mother’s special decorations—her nut mouse, her corncob friends.

Still, it was
better.
And when one of them came into the room and made a move to turn him around, I could act like a baby and fuss,
“But I like him better this way. He looks more real. Don’t turn him around. Leave him alone! Don’t look!”

Unfortunately, things never progressed that far.

Just a moment later, my mother and Carolyn strolled out of the kitchen and into the living room. I held my breath and prepared for them, the same way you would prepare for a cold wave that’s about to hit you at the beach.

“
What on earth?”
my grandmother gasped.

My mother was staring at my chest. “Augusten,
what
is that mess all over your shirt?”

I looked down and saw bits of fleshy wax, chewed white hairs, tiny shreds of lip all down the front of my shirt.

My mother lowered herself onto her knees and began to inspect my shirt, brushing the curious crumbs into her open hand and examining them.

My grandmother, I knew without being able to see, was standing before Santa. Her complete silence told me she had seen Santa’s face.

My face was hot and I knew it was bright red. Why wouldn’t Carolyn say anything? The mangled face had shocked her mute. It had been more awful than I imagined. I might have to go right to hell tonight.

And then finally, she did speak. “Margaret, put Augusten into the Cadillac. We’re going to have to drive to the hospital and get his stomach pumped.”

I absolutely detested having my arms and legs strapped to the table, but the nurse told me, “It’s the only way.”

The medical staff gathered around the gurney inserted a terrible, seemingly endless tube down my throat. My mother stood at the back of the room chewing on her fingernails. “But why?
Why,
Augusten?”

It wasn’t like I could answer her. At least not until they removed the thick plastic tube they had snaked into my mouth, down my throat, and into my stomach.

Horribly, I could see the waxy chewed contents of my stomach rising up through the tube and into some sort of pail. Bits of pink lip and fragments of Santa’s blue eyes, along with clumps of white beard were sucked out of me, as though modern medicine itself was trying desperately to reverse what I had done and save Christmas.

I was terrified, humiliated, in extreme physical discomfort, and confused. On top of this, the only way I could make the room vanish was to close my eyes. But every time I did, I saw the ghoulish, ruined face of Santa, staring back at me with his questioning, kind eyes. “
Why did you do this to me? I got you the ID bracelet last year, the two-tone just like you wanted,
” he seemed to be saying to me, though of course he no longer had a mouth.

I knew for a fact that I would never receive another Christmas present. And there wasn’t a child in the world that would want to sit on Santa’s lap now and stare up at his horribly maimed face. He would have to wear a leather face mask now and he would need a seeing-eye dog.

In the recovery room, I thought about all the items on my wish list: the Texas Instruments calculator, the saltwater aquarium with real sharks, the platform shoes. None of it would be mine.

For the rest of my life, I would be on Santa’s naughty list, right there at the very top. Mine was the one house he could mark off his list with black, permanent marker.

And Jesus, God’s only child, certainly he, too, was watching me from the sky, his eyes narrow with bewilderment, disgust.

I had displeased them both and would be punished.

I’d ruined not only Christmas, but any chance I ever had of getting into heaven. And this realization caused my nose to itch madly but I could not scratch it. Because my hands were still bound to the rails along either side of the hospital bed. I may have been lying flat on clean white sheets, but I was most certainly crucified.

F
OR AS LONG
as I could remember my mother would buy an intricate, often handcrafted advent calendar and hang it on the refrigerator. It was she who introduced me to the concept of a calendar for the month of December, a countdown to Christmas. Where each date from
1
to
25
was printed on a little door you could open. And behind the door, a visual surprise—a little scene or charming sketch. I wanted nothing more than to sit on the floor with the thing and tear off all the doors at once so I could get immediately to Christmas.

I had, over the years, developed something more than a fondness for the paper calendar. Each Christmas when the calendar went up, I stopped
living
and started
waiting.
My mother surely must have regretted ever introducing me to the advent calendar, because now she could never take it away. It would be like getting your child hooked on heroin and then withholding their needle.

Only one row of doors remained closed on the advent calendar. For the last eighteen days, it had been the single focus of my life. My mother would not allow me to open a new door before eight o’clock in the evening. By seven each night, I was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator like a dog, staring up at the calendar and asking her every few minutes, “Is it almost eight o’clock?”

Always, there was a fleeting disappointment upon opening the door because the image revealed was never one I recognized. “What is that? What does some old man on a camel have to do with Christmas?”

My mother leaned over to inspect the image in question and then she explained. “Oh, look at that! What a beautiful image. See, now I believe these are actually woodblock prints behind the doors. But done with such fine, fine detail. I would love to be able to achieve a line like that,” she said, pointing to the hump on the camel’s back.

“But what
is
it?”

“Well, this is one of the Three Wise Men, I imagine. On his way to see Jesus. Or maybe he’s just riding around in the desert for some fresh air. Look at the way they captured the wind on the sand, it’s gorgeous. You know, I bought this calendar from Faces in Amherst. It’s German. I wish I’d picked up those napkin rings while I was there.”

By this point, I was no longer listening to her and was instead focused on the next night’s door. Surely, there was something better under
that
door.

The last week was always the worst. It was like an unbearable itch I could not reach. “You have waited patiently for three hundred and forty-five days and you only have one more week,” my mother would tell me.

But somehow, this one week seemed longer than all the others combined. So I was constantly seeking a distraction, but one that was related to Christmas. My mother helped by offering to sit with me and string cranberries and popcorn together into long garlands for the tree. We each had a needle and thread as we sat before the television set with a large bowl of popcorn and a bag of fresh cranberries on the table between us.

But even this couldn’t go on for a week. “Oh my God, you need to put that mess down now and go wash your hands and put some Band-Aids on your fingers.”

“But I don’t want to stop. I can keep going. We need more.”

“Augusten, you are going to get blood all over the house. You have just pricked your fingers to death with that sewing needle. And see? Look at that; your entire rope of popcorn is bloody. You don’t want to hang bloody popcorn on the tree, do you?”

“Mine can go in the back!” I said, protectively clutching the needle and thread and bloody popcorn rope to my chest.

She shook her head, no. “Go wash your hands. And use some Bactine before you put on the Band-Aids.”

The stores had begun filling their shelves with Christmas decorations way back in October, so along with jack-o’-lanterns and paper turkeys, you could buy a can of spray snow.

By this point, I had burned through numerous cans, even though my father paid good money to have the real stuff removed from our driveway and front steps.

I had sprayed it on my bedroom windows, adding a string of wildly blinking lights. Tinsel, my favorite product, was draped from anything in my room that protruded even slightly: the needle arm of my record player, curtain rods, the switch to my desk lamp. My room was a festering, glittering shrine in honor of my favorite day of the year. But there were only so many times I could move my own small artificial Christmas tree from one side of the room to the other. At a certain point during that last painful week, I simply ran out of preholiday amusements.

So I would wander into the living room to at least be in the same room with the real tree. As it had for weeks, my scratchy copy of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
continued to moan away on the record player.

Because all the magazines that had arrived featured Christmas trees and stockings and other holiday paraphernalia on their covers, I would thumb through these, searching only for the colorful ads.

This was what I was doing the Saturday morning before Christmas, while my parents were downstairs sleeping. On Saturdays, it was rare for them to come upstairs before ten or even noon. That gave me a good five to seven hours alone.