Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  “I hope not,” she said and bent her head down again, walking on, as if one of her many small jobs for the day had been done.

  *

  Over lunch, while waiting for the food to come, Susie started complaining about Nathan. “He always does this,” she said. “It’s typical. He leaves everything to the last minute.”

  “You’re being completely irrational,” Jean told her. “You guys came in late last night. He was scheduled to fly in tomorrow. A snowstorm hit—it could have happened to you.”

  “He always has to make this grand entrance …”

  “Whatever,” Jean said, and when Susie looked at her, she went on: “This is some first- and second-born thing, I don’t know what. I mean, I should just leave you to it.”

  “Be nice to me. I’m just disappointed for the boys. They don’t get to see their cousins as much as I’d like.”

  “I’m disappointed for me,” Jean said. “I don’t get to see my brother.”

  For some reason, this set Susie off—her face crumpled, she turned away. “Just ignore …” she began, in a different voice. “I haven’t slept. We got in at one in the morning and then May wouldn’t go down. She slept too long on the plane, she’s a good little girl. But then I had to keep feeding her all night, so she wouldn’t wake up everybody else.”

  “I don’t mind,” Dana broke in, not sure if she should, if it was her business. “I mean, if that’s what you’re worried about. Cal never wakes up.”

  They were sitting inside, on a couple of rough wooden tables pushed together. A waitress started bringing over trays of food, chopped beef and onions, pickle chips, on wax paper; ribs and brisket, soft tacos, sliced sausage, half a chicken. Little plastic bowls of beans and potatoes. Jean stood up to get drinks and silverware from the counter, she asked for extra bread. Most of the other adults were occupied with their kids, trying to find something they would eat. Liesel, having sat down and swung her knee under the table, couldn’t get up again easily. Jean passed around mottled plastic cups of iced tea and water. Everybody was eating, everybody was silent, when she joined them again and reached over shoulders to put together her own tray of food.

  But slowly it emerged what was going on. David had been on the phone to England, that’s why he was late coming down. With his fat stubbly face, his bald head, his glasses, he turned to Jean and said, “It’s all my fault. I’ve been causing trouble.”

  When he ate you could see the strong workings of his jaw. He took a lot of pleasure in food, he took nothing very seriously. Sometimes, it’s true, he shouted at the kids, he lost his temper, but in a kind of careless way, it didn’t matter much. When Ben was born, twelve years ago now, Jean had lived with them for two weeks, helping out Susie with the baby, taking the late shift. She got along well with David, but he also had a way of treating her like staff.

  A few weeks ago his old Oxford college had approached him about a job—they wanted someone to run the American Institute. They would give him a room in Mansfield and an office at the Institute, which was across the road. He would have almost no teaching duties, just the odd graduate seminar. It meant moving to Oxford. He had said yes that morning. At the moment their plan was to rent out their place in Connecticut, at least for a year or two, to see if they wanted to make it a permanent move. It was a chance for the kids to get to know their English grandparents—David’s father had recently become too frail to travel. To get to know their Englishness, generally.

  Jean said, “Well, it will be nice for me,” looking at her sister tenderly and apologetically. There was a cheap coach service running all night long between London and Oxford—it stopped near Notting Hill Gate. She was renting a flat with Henrik in Kensal Green. The 52 bus took you straight to Notting Hill. You could do the whole journey, door to door, depending on traffic and connections, in under two hours. I can come at the drop of a hat, I can go for the day. “I’m sorry it’s upsetting to you.”

  “You’re the main reason I agreed.”

  It was left to Dana to offer congratulations—nobody else had said anything nice. Liesel kept asking everyone to repeat themselves, she couldn’t hear. The restaurant was filling up. She kept saying, “But what’s going to happen to the house?”

  Susie’s house was acknowledged in the family as the nicest piece of Essinger real estate. It was also the thing on which she had spent the energy she might have spent on a career—an old saltbox, almost three hundred years old, painted gray and deep red. Some of the windows contained the original glass, they shimmered in sunlight. It sat around the corner from a gas station, which doubled as a liquor store, and just off the highway that slowed down in Durham village to become the high street. A lake at the bottom of the property didn’t belong to them but they swam in it anyway, every summer.

  When they bought the house, the kitchen hadn’t been touched in forty years. There was a breakfast nook, with built-in benches and table, under the window that overlooked the front yard. For that and other reasons, the whole place reminded Susie of the trim postwar cottage that Liesel had grown up in, in northern Germany, which lay off a dirt road and whose garden also ran down to a body of water: the Flensburg fjord. These connections or continuities meant something to her. To give up the house, to leave it behind, meant stopping or editing out one of the stories you tell about yourself.

  Cal wouldn’t eat anything but the sausage; it was the only kind of food on the table he was used to. Even the potatoes had vinegar or mustard in them. At least he liked the white bread—Dana made him sausage sandwiches. Susie had to wrestle her phone away from William, who afterward climbed under the table and sat there. Liesel pretended not to notice. She always had to bite her tongue where the kids are concerned. Maybe you just forget. I don’t think my kids behaved in this way. But it’s also true that everything tires you out after a while, especially noise.

  Susie said, “You don’t even have time to react to anything that matters, because you’re so busy reacting to all these things that don’t.”

  “There’s time,” David told her. “We don’t have to move till the summer.”

  The weather started clearing over lunch; they could see the sun shining on the cars in the parking lot outside. Jean held everyone up for a minute by buying merchandise, a Ruby’s baseball cap. She needed one, if it was going to be sunny; she wanted to bring one back to London anyway, as a badge of home. Her short hair stuck out of the sides. She wore one of her T-shirts, black jeans, and an old suede jacket from the Gap, which she had inherited from Susie years ago—the kind of thing Susie stopped wearing when she had kids.

  Liesel said, “You look cool.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Jean and Susie went ahead on the way home. Dana could see them—Jean had taken her sister’s arm, and for a moment Dana felt a pang, of jealousy, to be excluded from all the petty fighting and the casual loving making-up. Also, this meant that she had to look after the boys. David was occupied with the baby, letting her walk, holding her lightly by the hand. When she lost her balance, she swung around like a flag on a pole. You forget all the stages, they don’t last long. Ben was old enough to take care of himself, but since Cal wanted to go with him, Dana had to chase after them both.

  William and Liesel were walking together.

  “Are you sad about leaving Durham?” she asked, but he kept his head down.

  His father used to have the same blonde hair, cut like an upside-down bowl—you could see it in his prep-school pictures, which his parents had hung in the bathroom under the stairs in their house in Hampshire. David, with May’s little fingers sweating in his palm, heard Liesel’s question and looked up at his son, who was three or four steps ahead. In a few years, his hair will probably darken, like mine; his accent will change; he’ll be an English little boy.

  Liesel slowed down to cross the road. She reached for his hand, and William let her take it. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe a little older, I lived in an apartment in Berlin. We had no garden but
the windows went from the bottom of the floor to the top of the ceiling. They were really doors, you could open them, and step out onto a balcony. Not very big, but big enough for flower pots. I used to sit out there and watch the people in the street go by. There weren’t many cars then.”

  They crossed and entered the wide quiet road that dead-ended on their backyard. In the sunshine, you could see the printed shadows of twigs and leaves shifting over the rough asphalt surface. Jean and Susie were already at the gate, followed by Cal and Ben. Dana, lagging a little behind now that the road was safe, had taken off her jacket. The afternoon was transformed by radiant heat—the winter sun felt very close in the sky. “Then the war ended,” Liesel went on, “and my mother took us all on a train, it seemed like a long journey, to the house where I eventually grew up. With a big garden, by the sea.”

  “Did you miss the old house?” William asked. His voice had a slight thickness to it, as if he had a mouthful of yogurt; his hearing went through phases of better and worse, they were still doing tests. He didn’t seem to mind much.

  “I was happy in the new house. But all my life I’ve wanted to live in an apartment with windows like that, and a balcony like that.”

  The back gate was open, and William let go of Liesel’s hand and ran into the yard. By the time Liesel followed, she couldn’t see him anymore—he was hiding again in the bamboo. David, who had picked up May by this point, her face was in his neck, she was very fair and he didn’t want her to burn, said to his mother-in-law: “I’m sorry to take them all away from you.”

  “You’re not taking them away. It won’t make a difference to us, Connecticut or England. But Susie will be sad about the house.”

  “Yes,” David said.

  *

  Paul was waiting for them when they came back. There was a patio with a picnic table on it, outside the kitchen backdoor. A crepe myrtle tree gave it shade; leaf-matter tended to gather between the pebbles of the poured concrete.

  “Hey, Buddy,” he said to Cal. “Want to hit a ball?”

  He wore his biking gear, a Lycra top and shorts, and shoes that clicked against the pebbles. There was dried salt around his eyes, his hair had taken on the shape of his biking helmet, he needed a trim. In his playing days, Dana used to run the electric razor over his scalp. He sat on a kitchen chair on the bathroom tiles and the short segments of keratin scattered around his feet, like iron filings. She felt the grain of his hair in her hand. Whenever she saw him, she had a physical reaction. Somehow his body had become more distinct to her since their separation, she noticed him the way she might notice a stranger at a party: a muscular, intense, not-very-happy-looking guy.

  A new kids’ tennis racket lay on the picnic table, with a canister of balls.

  “I brought you something,” he said to Cal. The boy looked down.

  Dana felt suddenly angry. “You can’t just show up whenever you want,” she said. “He’s got to know when you’re coming and going.”

  Sometimes his temper was just as quick as hers—it came out of nowhere.

  “What are you talking about. This is my house.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know. I’m a guest here.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything.”

  “Oh, Paul,” she said, shaking her head. “If you can’t see … I mean, the whole time he’s looking over his shoulder, where’s Daddy gone.”

  “That’s just not true. He doesn’t even care. I mean, look at him.” Cal had followed Ben into the TV room.

  “No TV!” Dana called out, her anger spreading, like something spilled, and Paul went in to get him. After a minute, he came out again, carrying his son, so he had to push open the screen door with his butt and turn around on the steps, while at the same time closing the door delicately behind him.

  “You can’t make him,” Dana began to say, and then let it go.

  “Come on,” Paul said, in a different voice, to the top of his son’s head, to his fragrant hair. “It’s Daddy time.”

  Cal was letting himself be carried, unprotesting, but not helping out much either. So Paul picked up the racket and balls with the kid still in his arms, and clicked his way across the patio and into the thick St. Augustine grass. Strong memories returned to him. The direct early afternoon light made the skin contact with his son, Cal’s cheek against his neck, feel hot, and he had to duck against the out-croppings of the crepe myrtle. After his bike ride, his knees hurt, his back hurt; the kid was heavier than he used to be. How many times did he walk this walk as a boy? Under the pecan tree, past the playhouse. Paul was maybe six when Bill put in the court at the back, with the high net on one side and the concrete wall of the parking lot on the other. For hitting balls against. He could still remember the guys pulling the cement mixer, which had wheels, through the back gate and across the lawn, and watching them from the window of the playhouse. Mexicans, wearing baseball caps, which they took off and put on again; they laughed, he couldn’t understand them. In summer the sunlight was so intense that it obscured rather than illuminated—colors faded, a bright glare spread over everything, the green of the grass, the pale gray of the poured concrete.

  “Is it dry?” he kept asking his dad. “Can I go on it?” And finally Bill said, “Okay, okay.”

  One thing his father was good at was repetition. He could be very patient, and held out the tennis ball in his hand, to show his son. “Now I’m going to throw it in the air. Now I’m going to let it bounce. You have to wait for it …” And then, “That’s it, that’s it,” as Paul knocked it into the fence, into the grass, into the pebbles laid down by the side of the court. The son had inherited his father’s appetite for repetition. “One more time,” he would say, even in the heat of the day, the two of them standing there, six or seven feet apart, the dad throwing, the son swinging, something in the DNA both being passed along and mirroring itself, a capacity for concentration, for taking pleasure in simple contact, between the two of them, between racket and ball, while Bill’s neck grew red under the sunshine. “One more time”—again and again.

  When they reached the court Paul let his son slide out of his arms. He wasn’t sure if Cal would make the effort to land on his feet, or if he would stay in limp protest mode, but the kid stood there, not very steadily, blinking.

  Paul said, “I always loved the smell of tennis balls when you open the can.”

  In the past few years Bill had let the court run to seed. The sycamore by the drinking faucet had stretched its branches farther and farther across the playing surface, interfering with the telephone wires and dropping leaves and twigs. These snapped underfoot and contributed to the erosion of the rough green paint, which had started to crack in slow wrinkles. But the tree cast shade, too, and even on a winter afternoon, a few days before Christmas, you could feel grateful for it. Paul set the racket on the ground and gave the can of balls to Cal, who took it.

  “You pull at the tab,” Paul said. “You have to pull it … here, like this.”

  And he tried to show the boy, who told him, “I want to play with Ben.”

  “You can play with Ben later—”

  “I want to watch TV.”

  “Nobody’s watching TV, it’s a sunny—”

  “Ben is.”

  “No he’s not.”

  “He is. Let me see.”

  “Look, you can watch TV later …” And so on, until Paul pulled the tab off himself and let the balls roll out onto the concrete. “Can you smell them?” he said, holding the opened canister like a flower against his son’s face. “They never smell that way again.” Cal just looked at him.

  Paul stood up (he had been crouching down) and felt the ache in his back shift. His muscles were cold from recent exercise; he needed a shower. You can’t force this kind of thing but you don’t want to give in all the time either just to win their temporary approval. Which isn’t worth much anyway. “I bought you this, as a present,” he said at last, sounding lame even to himself, and unzipping the rack
et bag. William, he noticed, was watching them from the other side of the net, pressing his face against the mesh, so you could see the lines of it on his skin. “Hey, Willy,” Paul called out. “You want to play, too?” Thinking, maybe the presence of another kid, especially an older boy, another cousin … and Willy stepped around the net and picked up one of the balls that had rolled away.

  “Here, throw it here,” Paul said, and the kid threw it.

  Paul put the racket into Cal’s hand, feeling the small fingers and wrapping them around the grip. “Hold it like this,” he said. “That’s right, and stand like this.” All of which involved a certain amount of intimate rearrangement, of fingers and feet, which Cal passively accepted.

  “Watch the ball, I’m going to throw it to you in the air,” Paul told him, hearing his father’s voice and seeing himself at the same time, standing in front of himself, though Cal had his mother’s face, pretty and small-featured, and his mother’s long neck. Paul tossed the ball toward the racket head, which bounced against it and rolled away and Willy ran to get the ball. “Look at that,” Paul said, in a dad voice of wonder. “But this time I want you to try swinging.” When it happened again, Willy said, “Can I try?” so Paul said, “Can Willy have a turn?” and Cal eventually gave him the racket. Paul threw the ball, and Willy, two years older, hit it hard in the air and away into the grass. “You want to get that for me, kid?” Paul asked his son.

  Cal watched it rolling away. “Can I go now?” he asked.

  “You can pick up the ball, the way Willy got the balls for you,” Paul told him, losing his temper.

  “After that can I go?” Cal asked, not chastened at all or angry in return.

  “After that you can go.”

  “Can I watch TV?”