Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  She opened her eyes and the filtered afternoon sunshine fell in two streaks against the wall. There was a watery effect from the waving of a tree branch outside—the wind seemed to disturb the surface of the light. Standing up was mildly painful. She had to roll over first on her side, and then use her hands to push herself up from her knees. Jean, pulling at one of the sliding glass doors, put her face in the gap. She said, “I’m sorry, that was my fault. Did I wake you up?” But she didn’t wait for an answer and went on: “That was Nathan on the phone. I found a flight that gets them into Dallas around ten o’clock tonight. I said I’d pick him up.”

  “Oh good,” Liesel said, flooded suddenly with strong emotion. “Oh good.” And then, in German: “You’re my good girl. Mein tüchtiges Mädchen.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, they followed Nathan’s progress by various means. He called from the airport in Rhode Island—they took the Concord Turnpike out of Cambridge and missed most of the Boston traffic. It was fairly plain sailing after they crossed the mess of exits around I-90. Anyway, they made good time; security took an hour to clear, but they were now giving the kids late lunch/early supper at Famous Famiglia’s Airport-Style Pizza—for them, it was basically an adventure. Susie wanted to decorate the tree, Paul (showered, dressed, in jeans and T-shirt) had helped her carry it in from the backyard and move some of the furniture around in the living room. They pushed the side table into a corner, they lifted pictures from the wall. While Nathan was talking, people kept walking in and out, the phone got passed around. Susie said to him, “I’m glad you’re coming. I didn’t even have the heart to tell the kids that you might not. Safe flight. One of you should stay up to talk to Jean, I don’t want her falling asleep.” And then, in answer to something Nathan had told her: “No, that’s probably true.”

  When it was her turn, Liesel found she couldn’t hear with all the noise and carried the handset out on to the porch for peace and quiet. Then she closed the French doors behind her and sat down on the rocking bench with a sigh. From there, she could see—through one of the living-room windows—Susie holding up the tree, Paul, crouched underneath, adjusting the stand. Nathan said, “Has anyone spoken to Bill? We tried to call the hospital number but nobody picked up.”

  “I haven’t heard from him.” It was cool on the porch, under the roof, in the shade of the pyracantha bush. Paul had said they should put in those restaurant heaters, but Bill was opposed. We’re talking about two months a year, he said, where they might get some use. And Liesel, hearing this argument in her head again, said, “Jean’s been looking up hospital reports. Apparently where Rose has been brought has a very poor record on MRSA. There are a number of specialist centers in Yonkers …”

  And Nathan said, “Listen, I should go—people are starting to board. We don’t even know what state she’s in. This seems to me premature.”

  “Nathan?” She could hear the PA system announcing a gate change for the flight to St. Petersburg, the distinctive echo of a public announcement, as evocative in its way as the smell of a swimming pool, which shifted the space in her head, so that for a moment she felt like her bags lay around her, she was catching a flight. “Jean says this is an area where the doctors have very different rates of success, and it’s worth …”

  “She may be right. There’s nothing I can do right now. I’ll call when we get to Charlotte.”

  “Nathan?” She couldn’t tell if he was still on the line. “Ich freue mich sehr. Dass du kommst. I’m happy you’re coming.”

  “Me, too,” he said and she was sitting again on a shady porch in Texas, with the sunshine falling brightly on the empty street outside her house. After a few minutes, she pushed herself off the bench and went inside.

  Susie had gone upstairs to find Ben—it was something they always did together, decorate the tree, a mother and her firstborn son. He used to have tremendous patience for this kind of job, cooking, wrapping presents, baking cakes. But lately Susie felt … she was losing him somehow to his father’s way of … a certain cheerful carelessness, which Ben had adopted as a useful strategy for getting out of chores. At the top of the stairs, she heard him saying to Cal, “You can’t get on my bed until you blow your nose. I mean, look at you. It’s disgusting.” And when she walked down the corridor to his room and saw the two of them, Ben said to her, “Somebody needs to clean his nose. He’s disgusting.”

  “We’re decorating the tree. Come here, Cal.” And she picked him up, shifting him onto her hip. There was a box of Kleenex on Jean’s old desk and she pulled out a tissue and spread it against his face. “Blow,” she said. “That’s it. As hard as you can.” Really, he was too big to carry like this, too heavy, and she put him down and threw the tissue in the wastebasket by the door.

  “Okay …” Ben said, in his mildly ironic puzzled voice.

  “I want you to help.”

  “I’m reading.”

  “You’re playing Minecraft. Come on, Cal. You, too.”

  “I want to play Minecraft,” the kid said, and Susie gave her son a look. Like, busted. Ben shrugged his shoulders.

  “This is something I love to do with you,” she told him and reached over to take the iPad away. He fought with her a little, he was strong enough to fight harder, and tested the waters longer than he might have, then gave in and lay back on the bed, while Susie, feeling strangely upset, tried to shut off the device.

  “Don’t be a pane of glass,” he said.

  The button she pushed kept reverting the screen to its home page, but then she found the off switch and heard the satisfying artificial click. “I hate this … thing. Come on, Cal,” and she took his hand, which in its smallness seemed somehow trusting.

  “What about Willy?” Ben asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Why can’t he help?”

  “He’s playing in the yard. I don’t know, he never likes this kind of thing. You do. You … it’s not a chore …”

  “Well then.”

  “Do what you want.” And then, to Cal: “You can help me hang up the Kringel. Kringel are like chocolate.”

  “I don’t like chocolate,” he said, but allowed her to lead him away.

  “Give me the iPad,” Ben called after her, but Susie only waved it in the air, in a kind of triumph, like the spoils of war. Ben, watching her go, felt less pleased than he might have expected to. The news about moving to England was not upsetting to him, really—it satisfied a sense he had of himself, of being slightly apart or distinguished in some way, though he realized already that he was thinking about it in terms of the people he knew at school now, in Connecticut, who wouldn’t matter very much when he was gone. Still, he felt his parents owed him something, for what they were putting him through. And it made him feel better to hang out with Cal and order him around. Part of what he liked about the iPad is that it required a kind of concentration that seemed to conceal him from other people. Though he also had a vague sense that this was unhappy behavior and he should snap out of it. He lay back on the bed and listened to everyone talking downstairs.

  Dana had joined the others at the tree-side. When Susie came down, Paul left to check on William, who was still apparently hitting balls against the wall out back. “You never do what I say anyway,” he said, meaning the decorations. Susie had strong specific tastes and opinions, but the truth is, Paul didn’t really care. David had taken May for her afternoon walk. (She liked to sleep in her stroller, and he was planning to go to a coffee shop and work.) Jean had carried her mom’s laptop into the living room to find out what she could about her aunt’s condition. She rocked in the old rocking chair, newly up-holstered in a kind of Klimt fabric, soft bright yellow, while Liesel sat on the sofa with a pile of Kringel on her lap—German Christmas decorations, chocolates and sugared jelly-candies shaped like little donuts. She was threading them with silver and gold loops of string, for hanging on the tree.

  “Hey Cal,” she said. “Come here. Want to try one?”

  A
nd the boy was walking toward her, squeezing between the chairs, when the phone rang. Dana, doing nothing much but standing around, picked it up in Liesel’s study. Bill said, “Well, I’m here.”

  “Hi, Bill. It’s Dana.”

  There was a silence while he adjusted his thoughts. From where he stood, in the hospital corridor, he could see through a gap in the plastic curtains into Rose’s room. His sister lay on one of those mechanized beds, a quarter upright, the angle at which you display fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. Maybe because of this she was hunched in slightly, lying partly on her side, a protective position; wires and tubes proceeded from her, hidden under the folds of her sheets, and connected to monitors and plastic sacs of liquids—some going into her, some coming out. On the screen Bill could read various accounts of what was happening to her or inside her, pulse and blood pressure, and it was hard not to overreact to changes in the data. When people don’t talk, when they just lie there, when their only form of expression is the medical readout, every blip or adjustment feels like a communication from the deep. Whatever it is that’s going on in there, dreams or sensations. The battle you spend your life fighting played out at the micro level, gang warfare of cells and bacteria. From time to time a broken connection in one of the wires set off a persistent beeping, which the nurses, passing by, largely ignored.

  “Hey, Dana,” Bill said, “who’s around?” and immediately felt bad. But he wasn’t prepared for any kind of small talk or jumping over conversational fences. Nobody used the hospital phones anymore, people relied on their cells. He had had to buy a calling card from the gift shop—the guy at the counter was surprised they still sold them. All of this involved a grappling with practicalities that wasn’t Bill’s specialty. Who would have thought, with your sister lying there like that, that reading numbers off a thin plastic card, following the instructions, waiting for the automated voice, could be the thing that stresses you out. Standing in the hallway, he held the stretched cord in his hand. For some reason, he didn’t want to talk in Rose’s presence. He didn’t want to wake her up or act like she wouldn’t wake up anyway. For the past two hours she had been like a body lying in the water. Sometimes with her head in the air she could respond, but then she would dip down again, below the surface, and you had to try to make contact through a very thick medium.

  “Everybody,” Dana said. “Anybody you want. We’re decorating the tree.” And he heard her announce, into the living room, “It’s Bill.” And then his wife’s voice, “Bill?” rising in a kind of pleased panic, as she made her way between the chairs. And then, as if she had really moved closer to him, across the distances, her words in his ear: “Bill? Where are you? How is she?”

  So he told her, keeping his voice down. One of the nurses sat on a swivel chair, maybe five feet away, typing into a computer and eating a sandwich—a late lunch. Asian, straight black hair, pretty; she sat there like she was sitting in a coffee shop. Everything echoed off the marble tiles, but sounds also lost themselves in the echoes. The privacy of public spaces. While he was speaking, two men wheeled a cart full of medical equipment, containers of some kind, on balky wheels. They pulled and pushed and had to start again. One of them had left a clipboard on the top—Bill worried it might fall off.

  Judith has come and gone already, he said. She showed up straight from the airport and was almost angry with her mother for not being in a critical condition. Anyway, she went home to drop off her suitcase and shower. Yes, she’s staying at Rose’s. I don’t know, I guess I’ll sleep there, too. We may as well take it in turns, she said. The truth is, she’s angry with her mother anyway. When I arrived she had been sitting in the room for maybe half an hour. The first thing she said to me was, she must weigh two hundred pounds.

  Yes, I brought some work along. It’s okay, I sit and scribble. There’s a TV in the room, but I don’t like to turn up the sound. MSNBC.

  She woke up. She wakes up. She’s in and out. Yes, she knows who I am.

  In fact, Rose hadn’t said his name, but there was no surprise on her face to see that he was there. As if, of course, when you come round, not knowing where you are or what has happened to you, Billy will be there. Your brother. (For the first ten years of his life they shared a bedroom. Every time they woke up, when they opened their eyes … until they moved to the house on Roosevelt Avenue.) When the nurse arrived he thought he traced a different reaction, a faint … manner. If you told her to sit up, she could sit up. If you asked her, would you like to watch TV, she could shake her head. Her robe, as she shifted, sometimes parted in the middle. Bill saw her stomach, discolored and pleated from any little application of pressure; it was also covered in the soft hairs of obesity. Her breasts hung down like balloons filling at the faucet. There are things you can’t turn your eyes from. Just to look is doing a kind of human duty, because it means, okay, I see you, you’re there. The skin of her shoulders had a peculiar milky pallor and softness, like a baby’s skin or worn stone.

  The nurse herself seemed grateful to have somebody else to communicate with—other than Judith. Judith liked to think of herself as a person who got what she wanted from these relations. There was also the fact that she had spent two years in medical school, training to become a doctor. At a certain point in life you become one of these people who, regardless of the situation, has some vanity at stake. Her voice carried and she spoke at full volume, even in the little curtained room, in the presence of medical personnel. Every time I come to the house I have to throw out all the sugary foods; she says she buys them for Mikey but it isn’t true. She eats them herself. But I guess you have to let your parents make their own mistakes. And the way she laughed conveyed to Bill in some unmistakable way the impression she had of herself, as charming and tolerant, among friends. These people, people like Judith, need constant support; unless you agree with them they think you’re stabbing them in the back. But he laughed, too, or made a grunt of amusement; he felt sorry for her. She was his sister’s child. The truth is, the two of them, Judith and Rose, were still locked very much in the same battle. Which he had somehow, in his own life, in relation to his own parents, escaped.

  Liesel, responding to Bill’s silence, tried to keep him on the line. “How was your flight? Did the driver find you all right?”

  “I told Nathan not to bother. I rented a car.”

  “Bill. You’re too tired. You didn’t sleep.”

  “I’m fine. I slept on the plane. I can sleep now. There’s one of these mechanical reclining chairs in Rose’s room, which is perfectly comfortable. What else am I doing.”

  “Nathan said he was going to call his driver.”

  “Well, I figured I’d need a car anyway. When I got here.”

  This is also the argument he had with Nathan. He told his son, it’s a half-hour drive from the airport. I’ll be fine. In fact, it took him most of two hours. Traffic was backed up a mile before the Bronx–Whitestone Bridge, the usual holiday exodus, but also people getting out of the city before the cold front hit. Then he took the wrong exit off the Saw Mill Parkway and only realized when he passed the cemetery. All of these streets used to be familiar to him—he had a terrific memory for directions, it was one of the binary qualities amplified or exaggerated by their marriage, Liesel got lost and Bill could always remember the way. But he disliked the rental, which was the kind of new car that didn’t need a key, where you pressed a button. He came off at Palmer Road and tried to find his way back through neighborhood streets. Every time he stopped at a light, the engine turned off. At a certain point everything adds to your anxiety, traffic, getting lost, the new technology. But he found Lake Avenue and then North Broadway, and feeling a little more in control, made it to the hospital by familiar landmarks—Washington Park and City Hall. The first thing he did when he got to the hospital was take a leak.

  “Have you eaten anything?” Liesel said.

  “I’ll eat with Judith. I’m just going to sit here for another half hour while it’s quiet. I’m
pretty wiped, it’s no hardship sitting in that chair. I can watch TV with the sound off. At six o’clock there’s a shift change, and I want to talk to whoever comes in. Then I’ll go home.”

  When she hung up, the tree was almost finished; it glittered in the half-light. Old shoeboxes, half empty, lay on the floor, and there were piles of paper towels, which had been used to wrap the ornaments. When the kids were little, Liesel sat with them at the kitchen table, making chains of silver paper, reindeer cutouts, cardboard witches’ hats sprinkled with stars, animals stuck together out of wine corks. At antique markets, she kept her eye out for baubles and trinkets—glass balls or slippers, tarnished silver birds with pincer-feet for sticking to a branch. Liesel, being German, preferred beeswax candles to Christmas lights, and Susie and Dana and Jean were placing the candleholders carefully over the barer branches of the tree, when Ben came down. He looked at his mother and said, “I want to help,” and she said, “You can help us put these on,” so he took a handful from the box and found a place around the tree, toward the back, by the window.

  Jean told him, after he had fixed his first candle to one of the piney boughs, “You have to give it some room to burn. Here, like this,” and moved it a few inches along, so the branch dipped a little, and the candle bobbed in open space. Susie, overhearing her, wished she hadn’t and was almost pleased when her son, ignoring his aunt’s advice, clipped another holder in place, in a thicket of needles. Jean let it go, and Susie wondered if she knew it was intentional, one of Ben’s deliberate sly expressions of quiet indifference to other people’s points of view. Before she could say something, Paul walked through the hallway double doors carrying a stack of dried logs in his arm, and Willy followed, holding a few gray twigs.