Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  Bill kept worrying about Paul, about what he was going to do. It’s a long time to be retired, he kept telling people on the phone. Mostly the other kids. It became a kind of refrain. But Bill was a worrier, Paul seemed fine.

  When Liesel asked him what his plans were, he said, “Right now, I’m taking a break. It’s just nice waking up in the mornings without anything hurting. But I’m talking to people, I’m looking at some options.”

  This seemed to her perfectly sensible. His face was still his face, handsome and finely drawn, sun-damaged, an athlete’s face, but she could see the boy in it, too, who doesn’t want to have to talk. They Skyped sometimes, for Cal’s sake—Liesel liked to keep tabs on her grandchildren this way. Mostly Paul set the computer on their living-room coffee table. She could see the sofa and the plants behind it, on the windowsill; the skies of New York in the window, maybe a few tall apartment buildings, depending on the angle of the screen. Dana came in and out of the picture, she said hello. Inez was sometimes there, too. It all seemed a little crowded to Liesel. She could imagine people getting on each other’s nerves. When you’re young, when you’re that age, it’s important to have a few money worries, something to strive for, to get you out the door in the morning. A mortgage. But Paul always looked very relaxed.

  When he flew back to Austin a few months later to take possession of the house, he came on his own.

  * * *

  The Volvo pulled into the driveway, clanking against the dip in the other direction. Bill stepped out, in his teaching jacket and a faintly striped shirt—one of her presents to him. The collar was new enough it still stood out around his neck. She used birthdays and Christmas to replace certain items of his wardrobe because he never bought anything for himself.

  She waited for him to climb the steps, she waited for him to open the door, and then he was in the house and calling to her, “Are you ready? Liesel? Liesel? I don’t want to be late.”

  But she had to find her purse first, it wasn’t in the hallway. And she had bought a little something for Cal, which she wanted to give him. She couldn’t find that either.

  “You can give it to him when we get home.”

  “It’s just a little thing. But it will keep him busy in the car.”

  “Come on,” Bill said eventually. “Let’s go. You don’t need your purse.”

  “It has chocolate in it. I’m hungry. Dana might want some, too, after her flight.”

  “And what you really want, when you’re traveling with a baby, is for people not to be late.”

  “He’s not a baby—he’s four years old.”

  “Even so,” Bill said.

  Maybe he was right; but still the idea upset her, having gone to the trouble of buying it, of not arriving with the present in her hand.

  “Come on, come on,” Bill said again; but, in fact, he wasn’t in a bad mood. Just the thought of a full house cheered him up. More than the reality, sometimes. “Move ’em on, head ’em up,” he started singing. And he found Liesel’s purse, with the present inside it, sitting on the bench in the kitchen under a dish towel.

  “What are you so anxious about?” he asked her, when they got in the car.

  He backed into the wide empty road. All of the lawns were yellow, all of the trees were bare. The sunshine on this bareness had a curious effect. The temperature was mid-sixties, very mild; it was as if everything had died for no reason. The sun kept shining and cast little sketches of shade across the asphalt, from the twig-thin branches. Funny how a neighborhood grows old. People with kids move in at the same time, the kids grow up and move out. Now couples with babies couldn’t afford to buy here anymore. Dodie, the old lady across the street, had turned ninety-three; she was still hanging on and remembered the woman they bought their own house from, she knew Mr. Mosby. But these links keep breaking.

  They passed the law school building and Bill avoided the turnoff for I-35. Instead, he drove under the highway, two raised improbable tracks curving above them, swoops of concrete. He liked to take the old road, Airport Boulevard, even if it meant stopping at a few lights. Liesel looked at the parking lots, the single-story businesses, car washes and Family Markets and taco shacks. When she first came to Austin, thirty years ago, she couldn’t understand how Americans could live this way, from parking lot to parking lot. Her parents visited and she watched their reaction. Quiet neighborhoods split by five-lane roads. On the near side, out of her window, Liesel could see backyards, small houses, picket fences, chain-link fences. The corner plots of residential streets. Everything had a temporary feel, which she now found attractive. The landscape sloped here and there, trees sprouted, grass grew, you put down houses and streets where you found a space. And there was plenty of space.

  “We have to get a tree today,” Liesel said. “Susie told me not to wait. Last year we waited and there was nothing good left.”

  “With Dana?”

  “If she wants. Cal might like it.”

  “They just got off a plane.”

  “Then she doesn’t have to come. Jean can come. I’ll need a little help.”

  But it’s also true the city was changing. Local government did its best to deal with all the newcomers, but sometimes she got the feeling there was a two-tier city—for the young, good-looking, successful types, who wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn or San Francisco. And for everybody else.

  Take any route out of town and you came across signs for new housing developments, people kept moving in. Cheap-looking houses where you had to drive forty-five minutes to get to work. It was hard to meet anyone who grew up in Austin anymore. Not the guy at the checkout at the co-op grocery store or the waitress at the new Italian restaurant or the lawyer you went to after your old lawyer retired. When Jean was a baby, Bill bought her one of those Native Texan T-shirts, in red, white, and blue. She was the only one of the kids born in Austin, at Seton Medical Center in Bryker Woods. One of the older neighborhoods, which meant that some of it was developed in the 1930s. The other kids were all East-Coasters. Sometimes Liesel thought, this made a difference. But what the difference was, who could say.

  Henrik was coming after Christmas. Another thing for her to think about. She had never met him before, Jean’s married lover. Apparently he was in the process of a divorce. But Liesel’s information was usually out of date, she didn’t like to keep asking. It could have happened already.

  “What exactly do you expect to accomplish?” Bill said. They were stuck in the lane merging with 71. For a second, she couldn’t figure out what he meant. But then he added: “By inviting her like this.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody tells me. And if I ask Paul, he gets defensive.”

  “That’s why I don’t ask.”

  “He says to me, there’s a reason we didn’t get married. This is the kind of thing he says. We wanted to keep our … separate lives. I don’t know what Cal’s supposed to make of it.”

  “My understanding is that when Paul visits them in New York he stays over.”

  “Who told you that? What does that mean?”

  “Nathan said something last night. We were discussing sleeping arrangements.”

  “What else did Nathan say? Does Paul expect to stay at Wheeler Street?”

  “I don’t know. He thinks Paul has taken his retirement pretty hard.”

  “Jean says he talks sometimes like one of these self-help evangelists. I haven’t heard it. He sounds like Paul to me.”

  “Well, the least we can say is that Dana is extremely tolerant.”

  “Maybe she should be less tolerant,” Liesel said.

  Her older brother, who was retired and living in Hamburg, had recently sent her a document he had put together, photocopies of their parents’ letters to each other, when they lived apart during the war. Their father was stationed in Gotenhafen, now part of Poland. The Russians were advancing and Liesel’s mother caught the last train out with the kids—they lived in Berlin for a year with one of her u
ncles, a minor government official. Later, when the war ended, they shifted to Flensburg, which is where Liesel eventually grew up.

  The letters were upsetting for several reasons. Her father wrote things he shouldn’t have written, about their prisoners of war, about shooting the deserters and the outcomes of certain battles … things she didn’t want to read. But you have to make allowances. People living in the middle of history are in a tunnel they can’t see out of. It’s the difference between saying what you think in your own home, among friends, and expressing yourself in a public place. The past is a very public place. When you write a book about your family, when you publish your memoirs, people keep telling you stories—they send you things. Even your own brother. In spite of everything, they want to have the facts recorded. But Liesel also thought, reading over her parents’ letters, she couldn’t help thinking, my father would never have left us the way Paul has left his child. It took a war to keep them apart. But Paul has these expectations, he has these ideas, about how you can live your life, how you have to be honest and do what you want, which are more shameful than anything my father wrote.

  They had been living in Flensburg for several months, with her mother’s parents, when a man showed up at the door in uniform. Liesel, seven years old, had answered the bell and called back over her shoulder, to her mother, who was in the kitchen: “There’s a soldier at the door who looks like father.” It was her father. She knew as much when she heard her mother’s footsteps; she was running. Liesel thought, what does Cal think when he sees Paul.

  Around the airport, the landscape is very flat. The skies are wide but somehow flat, too. You feel like you’re a long way from anywhere. Then a huge hotel appears off the highway, the airport Hilton, and the traffic thickens on the access road. You can see the control tower, its little bleeps of light, and the parking lot stretching out away from the terminal—all those brightly colored cars in the sunshine, lined up as if by some obsessive child, in little rows.

  She said to Bill, “I was going to put her in the au pair’s room, but if Paul is staying, too, we’ll have to think of something else.”

  “Put her there for now.”

  The curbside pickup lane was semi-underground—the road sloped into a cool shady concrete-colored world. Everything seemed to slow down; the speed limit was 10 mph. Cars pulled in and pulled out again, with their lights on. Through glass doors, Liesel could see the baggage carousels rolling along. People waited outside, smoking; there were wide stone benches, but mostly they paced around or sat on their luggage. Enjoying the mild Texas air. But she couldn’t see Dana or Cal. For security reasons, you weren’t allowed to park outside the terminal anymore. So Bill had to circle, into the sunshine again, along brand-new mostly empty roads, in the middle of nowhere.

  “I don’t know what I want to happen,” Liesel said.

  “So long as we get through with nobody getting sick, it’ll be a triumph.” Bill was still in a good mood, looking forward to it.

  They had to circle three times before Dana was waiting for them. Liesel saw her first, standing by a brand-new suitcase, the kind you can pull along the ground. Like a stewardess, Liesel thought. She had forgotten how handsome Dana was, it was disconcerting. She wore a short tweed skirt over cream tights and a bright red turtleneck—the sort of woman who can go to her hairdresser and flip through the magazines and realistically ask them to make her look like one of the photographs. Without any delusion or vanity. Cal had been dressed up for the occasion, too, in skinny corduroy pants and a fancy plaid shirt. But he seemed tired and bored; he kept playing with the suitcase, trying to release the handle, to make it work. His nose was running. Bill pulled in behind one of those new pickup trucks, almost an SUV, big and aggressive, totally clean and white. The guy in the passenger’s seat had rolled down his window—he said something to Dana, who said something back as they drove away. Then she saw Bill and smiled and made eye contact with Liesel, too. She didn’t look very unhappy.

  *

  Cal had made a mess of his lunch on the slippery seat-back tray and so Dana took him to the bathroom when they landed and tried to clean him up. There was rice-in-tomato-sauce all over him. She even changed his shirt after the suitcase came through, which is partly why they were a bit late and why he was grumpy. Even though she knew Liesel didn’t care about these things and was just as likely to be put off by … presentableness as endeared by it. But Dana couldn’t help herself. What you do when you’re stressed is what you do.

  The last thing she wanted was some guy trying to pick her up while she waited for her in-laws to arrive. Or ex in-laws. Or not even that. But he was perfectly sweet. The kind of earnest sensitive bearded type who spends a lot of his free time in the gym. His wallet was full of business cards and pictures of his little girl. Her mother was just a one-night stand but he was doing his bit. They sat next to each other on the flight—he gave Cal his pack of sour cream pretzels. One of the reasons she changed Cal’s shirt in the bathroom was to get away from him, but then he was waiting outside anyway when she walked out.

  His brother came to pick him up. The guy gave her his business card as he left. “If you ever need anything while you’re in town,” he said.

  “What am I going to need?”

  “A greener greener lawn.” He sold eco-friendly irrigation systems; it was a company slogan.

  Then Liesel called out, “Dana!” with an exclamation mark in her voice. It was like switching between costumes in a play, except worse, because you have to do it on stage. Liesel tried to get out of the car, but Dana wouldn’t let her.

  “He’ll be happier with me in the back,” she said, before realizing, maybe she isn’t offering. Maybe she just wanted to give you a hug. Anyway, that’s not how you should have turned her down.

  Bill pushed himself out of the driver’s seat to walk around the car and open the trunk. There was an air of slow-motion hurry about the whole thing—cars pulled in and out, cops waved them on, people were waiting on the curb, coming home for Christmas, looking for their ride, everybody inching forward, hanging back, getting in line. Surging off. Bill bent down for the suitcase and Dana tried to embrace him or stop him, even she didn’t know. But Bill won. He grunted and lifted her suitcase and threw it in the trunk. Afterward, he put his hand on Cal’s head. “Hey, son,” he said. “You all right, kid?” Cal didn’t respond—he was annoyed that Bill had taken the suitcase away. “That’s okay,” Bill said. “Not talking while the flavor lasts.”

  There was a car seat in the back, but it wasn’t set up, and Dana spent a minute trying to figure out the mechanism. Feeling strangely hassled and anxious, as if this were a test of motherhood. At the same time worrying that it might seem like a reproach to Bill and Liesel for not setting it up themselves. When they were both buckled in and ready to go, she reached forward and squeezed Liesel’s shoulder from behind.

  “It’s nice to see you,” she said. But the gesture seemed wrong, somehow both too intimate and too formal. The kind of thing a daughter would do to her elderly mother, which wasn’t their relationship.

  “I’ve brought something for Cal,” Liesel said. “Something small and stupid. And I’ve got a piece of chocolate for you, if you want. I’m going to have one.”

  She turned around to reach them over, and smiled at Dana—her broad round face, under her short gray hair, seemed almost brimming with good intentions. Dana felt something hot on her cheeks, like a blush.

  The toy was a small plastic airplane, with a propeller in front that you could wind up. A typical Liesel gift, which probably cost two dollars. She bought these sorts of things for herself as well—her desk was full of them. This one made an airplane noise as it unwound again, a rushing takeoff sound, a sort of whee! Maybe after all it was a little babyish for Cal, which Liesel seemed to sense.

  “He can play with it in the bath,” she said.

  “What do you say?” Dana said. “Cal. What do you say.”

  “I thought, since he just got of
f a plane …”

  “He thanks you,” Dana told her.

  And in fact he played with it happily enough—stopping the blade with his finger, and annoying everyone with the noise. One of the funny things about learning to talk is that it makes kids more private than they were before. They don’t want to look at you because they know you might expect them to say something. At least that’s how it felt sometimes to Dana. That Cal was retreating more, was more boyish, concentrating on stupid little things, and not listening to her. But he probably had other reasons for that, too.

  “Jean said she would meet us back at Wheeler Street for lunch,” Bill said. “I don’t know about Paul.”

  “Are you excited to see Daddy?” Dana said to Cal. She didn’t want them to think that she was poisoning him against their son. But even so, it seemed like the wrong thing to say—the wrong tone. She felt like she was on one of those landings with too many doors. All her feelings seemed to get in the way of each other.

  The car drove out from under the shadow of the access road above them, and the landscape opened up. There was yellow grass between the highways, that wide flat sky. Dana rolled down her window and closed her eyes against the mild inrush of air. She said, “When we got outside this morning it was about six in the morning and twenty degrees. The car service had cardboard laid out on the floor, which was just … mush. Everything was just dirty and cold.”

  “Welcome to paradise,” Bill said.

  “That’s what Paul always says.”

  On the drive through Queens, she had stared out the window at the traffic, hurrying in both directions, people trying to get out of the city before Christmas, commuters commuting in. She saw snow piled up by the railings, the elevated exit lanes, held up by heavy purplish walls, the yards of row houses backing onto them, bordered by chain-link fences. The world looks harsh and depressing at seven in the morning, during a Northeastern winter. Who would live in this place, maybe Paul was right. Cal kept repeating something, he was trying to remember something: one rhinoceros, two elephants, three pigeons, some story he read, maybe, but Dana didn’t recognize it. All gray, he said. All gray. Maybe a game he played with Inez. Another thing to worry about. But somehow when you’re in a taxi, heading to the airport, nothing matters much. This isn’t your life, you can get out.