Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

“I thought maybe we’d want a fire,” Paul said. “Hey, kid, you want to help me build it?” But he meant Willy, and Dana, watching Cal, who was helping Liesel thread the Kringel, putting his finger on her knots, felt a vague pang. Susie, noticing, too, said, “He should really wash his hands if he’s got a cold,” and stopped what she was doing to get the bottle of Purell from the kitchen counter and give him a squirt.

  “I don’t like it,” Cal said. “It’s slimy.”

  “Well, it dries up pretty soon,” and she squeezed some of the chemical gel onto her palm and took the boy’s hands in her own. He didn’t resist.

  Later, after everyone had gone, for different reasons and to different places, Susie stood in the living room by herself, surveying the tree—its old-fashioned prettiness. Even without the heat of lit candles, some of the ornaments spun lightly on their strings, balls of glass turning slowly and catching the light like Granny Smiths. She stepped forward to adjust some of the candleholders, most of them clipped on by her son, and wondered if he would notice and if the argument they had been putting off having openly, whatever the root of it was, needed to be had. When Nathan called, the phone lay on the coffee table and Susie was the first to pick up. They had landed safely in Charlotte, but the plane to DFW was delayed by fifty-five minutes. At least, that’s what they were saying now—ten minutes ago it was half an hour. Tell Jean. If it gets too late we’ll just stay at a hotel. She shouldn’t think this is her problem.

  “Okay, I’ll tell her,” Susie said. “Nathan.”

  “Yes?”

  She wanted to tell him about moving to England. Even when they were fighting, or not even fighting, just niggling at each other, she couldn’t escape the fact that she took comfort from him, her big brother, from having her life known by him, and understood by him—to be under his purview. But instead she said, “Everybody’s happy you’re coming. Liesel was very upset, about Bill, too.”

  “Well, let’s hope we get there,” and he hung up.

  Another day was going, the light had already started to change quality at four o’clock. Sunshine turning poignant, the sky still blue but faded. Even through the living-room windows, heavily shaded by branches and the overhanging roof, you could feel the afternoon slipping away. What had they done with the day? Not much, but at least, Susie thought, the tree was up, it was decorated, a job had been accomplished, and she got down on her hands and knees around the coffee table to gather up loose sheets of tissue and put them away into the emptied shoeboxes lying around. She would have to tell Bill, too. He didn’t know about England either—another list of small jobs, things to do, was growing in her head.

  The house was big enough different groups of people could be doing different things, unaware of the presence of anybody else, and she wandered through the hallway to find Jean. It was lined with Susie’s self-portraits, various poses of unhappiness, in dark rich reds and blues. This is how she thought of herself in college. Her skin looked chafed by the paint, the color-tone suggested … a state of high alert. She could hear the TV but there was nobody in the playroom, just some commercial making background noise, loudly. The volume of everything seemed to be going up, year by year, and she hunted for the remote control to turn it off. Maybe the kids were upstairs, maybe they were in the backyard. David was still out with May, who was probably still asleep. Sitting in noisy cafés always knocked her out, and she might be hard to get to bed, but that wasn’t his problem.

  Over the sofa, six foot by six foot, hung her painting of the family—just the kids, Nathan and Jean and Paul, while she hovered behind them, long-faced and sad-eyed. Susie looked at it for a minute, critically. Just schlepping it back from New Haven after graduation was hard enough, along with everything else: rolling up the canvas, taking apart the frame. Not her best work, and yet she also didn’t want to throw it away, out of superstition or something else. The angles between the figures still interested her, the fact that nobody was looking at anybody else, and only she was looking at the camera. Actually, she had worked from a photograph—Liesel snapped them on Christmas day, twenty years ago, everybody sitting on the sofa, watching a basketball game. “Guck mal, ihr glotzt alle.” You’re all just staring at the TV … and now Susie had her own kids, three of them, and was moving again, ending her life in one place and starting another.

  The stirrings of a thought, something that had already occurred to her in one form or another … was beginning to take a more definite shape. You become aware of these gestations after the event. One of the things she had talked about with David, when they talked about moving to England, was finding teaching work. Oxford, he said, usually had plenty of short-term contracts going around. “Just so I don’t feel like a mom,” she told him. “So I have some kind of identity.” But a permanent job was going to be hard to get, she hadn’t published in years. David had a talent for offering good-natured, sweet, effusive but strictly limited support, that always somehow put her in her place.

  In her own way, though, she had stopped listening, or needing it. What had occurred to her, what was taking shape, was the idea for a book, or a series of papers, to be called something like The Invention of Family, and maybe what she really needed wasn’t teaching work but library access, so she could write it. Her field was late seventeenth-century, or used to be, when she was still producing, but she planned to start earlier, with Homer, though she could touch on Paradise Lost as well … because what she wanted to write about was the idea of family as an escape from history, or an insulation from it, from political forces and social pressures and cultural shifts, and the way that writers had been writing about this since they began writing. Odysseus’s dog, what was his name, Argos, even the family dog was part of the picture. Robinson Crusoe had a dog, the idea of an island … and the lines came to her, which had been at the back of her mind all day, With thee to go, is to stay here. Eve promising Adam, after he’s been kicked out of Paradise, to come along. Without thee here to stay, is to go hence unwilling … which always brought tears to her eyes, though the image she had, of someone to address them to, the thee in her thoughts, wasn’t David (it suddenly struck her), but Ben. He was the one who needed to hear her say it.

  Then Dana came in and saw her staring at the blank TV.

  “Do we have any plans for what to feed the kids?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Susie said. “Have you seen Jean?”

  “I think she was taking a nap, I saw her go upstairs. Paul has got everybody playing kick the can.”

  “Even Ben?”

  “Ben, too.”

  “He’s a good uncle,” Susie said, without thinking; and Dana, quietly, felt a faint reproach.

  * * *

  Ben was one of these kids who from an early age had an idea of himself as not a physical person. A boy in his school once called him the walking brain. When he ran, he ran with a show of good-natured effort, like someone late for meeting a friend, trying to prove, as soon as he’s been spotted, that he was hurrying all along by way of apology. But for some reason Paul could always get him to play games. He was a very violent uncle, who liked lifting and throwing babies, slinging kids over his back, carrying several at once, and for years he had no kids of his own to spend this energy on. Sometimes, now, he overdid it. He was strong enough to hold Ben above his head, like a weightlifter, performing the clean and jerk, and threatened Ben with something like this if he didn’t join in. So Ben joined in, semi-reluctantly, because he was still loyal to the idea that Paul was his favorite uncle, even if it wasn’t particularly true anymore.

  Susie had said to him, the night before they flew to Austin, “I don’t want you to get upset by anything that’s going on with Paul and Dana.”

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “Maybe not upset. Just don’t—expect anything from them, or be surprised by it, or ask them too many questions.”

  “What kind of questions? You’re being weird.”

  “Well, they’re going through a kind of phase r
ight now, which isn’t easy to explain. Or understand. Even for grown-ups.”

  “I thought they were separated,” Ben said.

  When May was born, everybody switched bedrooms. It was part of Ben’s compensation package (this is how David referred to it), that he got a larger room, so Susie cleared out of her study and they put a bed in it. But this also meant he was the only one sleeping on that side of the house, the town side, with a distant view of the main street, also known as Route 17, and his mom had to walk along a corridor and past the family bathroom to reach him. He was a little isolated, which he liked; but it also gave him the feeling that every night his mother paid him a visit.

  Susie, sitting next to him, with her hand on his back, rubbing his shoulders under the pajamas, said, “I think that’s what they are. But Dana’s coming, too, for Christmas, she’s bringing Cal, and I don’t want you to worry about what’s going on.”

  “I don’t understand why you think I would worry,” he said.

  But the truth is, he was curious; and one of the ways this curiosity played out is that he realized he felt shy of Dana. For some reason, when he saw her for the first time, he shook her hand, he wasn’t sure what else to do. A few years before she might have hugged him, but she seemed to hesitate, and he put out his hand. She took it and then kind of pulled him toward her, laying an arm on his shoulder, but she released him pretty quickly, too. Which somehow flattered him. She was obviously an unusually pretty woman—a few of the boys in his class had been given iPhones, and found a way of looking at naked women. They huddled over break, under the trees at the far side of the football field. Ben sometimes joined them, pretending to be amused. But he couldn’t conceal from himself that he was always aware of Dana’s presence in any room, and even when he was playing outside, with Cal and Willy and Paul, he looked over at the windows of the house to see if she was watching them. One of the reasons he let Cal tag along is because it attracted her attention.

  He was interested in Paul, too. The idea of a guy not working, living the way he wants to live, and not even bound by family, but just doing what he wants, and not in a seedy way, either. If Paul had a girlfriend nobody had seen her, nobody mentioned it. But he seemed to get along with Dana, too, they were perfectly friendly, and Ben had the sense of an adult world he was still forced to look at from the outside, through the windows, where he couldn’t hear what was really going on. So when Paul said, it’s a sunny day, kids should be running around outside, he let himself be dragged into the game, because Cal wouldn’t have joined in otherwise, and Ben liked the idea of helping out. And he ran the way he always ran, so that the grown-ups could tell he wasn’t really trying, not against kids. Let Willy win; Willy always cared too much about this kind of stuff. Ben found a spot in the bamboo bushes behind the playhouse, where there was a gap in the fence that led to the neighbor’s yard; and he took Cal by the hand and they hid there together, while Paul wandered back and forth, shouting. He could almost feel, like heat coming off a light bulb, the level of tension and excitement in the boy. Then, when the coast was clear, he pushed his cousin in the shoulder, and whispered, Go, go, and watched him run toward Paul’s old CATA baseball cap, which was lying in the grass and serving as the can.

  Willy made his move at the same time.

  He had been hiding in the side passage behind the garage apartment. There was a little patio garden, which belonged to the apartment and was overgrown around the edges with tall spreading agave plants and rambling rose—squeezing between the leaves meant getting scratched. Rusted garden furniture, a couple of chairs, seemed to lean back with age, and were also covered with a rather pretty purplish mold. Nobody ever sat out there. The alley along the side ran between the apartment and the neighbor’s fence, which was six feet tall and cast a deep shade. Willy, crouching down, felt the dust drift over his face, he could hear bugs moving in the leaves, and brushed his hand against his forehead and nose to clear away the suspicion of something tacky like cobwebs clinging to them. He wanted to win, the tension kept building inside him, and he guessed that Paul wouldn’t look for him out there, but it was too far to make a sudden dash for it and trust your luck. There was also the danger of hiding so well that the game moved on without you, people forgot.

  From where he sat, he could see across the backyard through gaps in the vegetation to the playhouse forty feet away and the tennis court beyond it. When Cal started running the movement caught his eye, a series of color flashes between the upright stems of the bamboo, first shady and then emerging into the light. Without thinking, he started to run, too, and knocked against one of the garden chairs on his way past, which made a clang against the pebbled concrete. A branch or tendril of the agave plant snagged briefly against one of his pulled-up socks, but he didn’t care, and as his shoe touched grass the open space ahead of him in the sunshine felt like a long slide that he was rushing down.

  Paul heard the clang and turned around—he had walked as far as the playhouse and would have come up on Ben and Cal from behind them if he’d gone much farther. His son was stumbling in front of him toward the cap, running with a kind of fearful hurry that was always in danger of overbalancing, his body leaning over and his legs somehow catching up, while from the other side of the yard, his nephew Willy, older and not much taller, but more muscular and compact, raced with a straight up-and-down efficiency toward the same spot. Paul, feeling the life in his legs, the kick that he still had in him, started jogging, shouting hey, hey, pretending helplessness, and let his son reach base ahead of him before he put on a late spurt and beat Willy to the cap. For reasons he couldn’t have pinned down. Because he wanted Cal to beat his nephew. Because he suspected on some level that Willy wanted him to be fast, who knows.

  Willy, in fact, as soon as he had caught his breath, said, “I thought I was gonna get there. Man, I thought I was gonna get there. But you were like …” and he made a gesture with his hand. And he turned to Cal, who hardly looked at him, and said again, “I mean, he was like …” and made the same gesture with his hand.

  Paul, touched, feeling sad or a little guilty, recognized the tone—boys somehow were taught to admire other boys, older, bigger kids, and to tell their stories as a way of brushing off the sense of failure. He rested his palm on Willy’s head and then said, “Ben, I see you, under the …” pointing toward the playhouse veranda, where Ben had already begun to walk carelessly out of his hiding place, with his hands up.

  “You got me,” he called out. “Does that mean I’m it?”

  “Can we play tennis?” Willy asked.

  “Do you want to hit a ball around, Cal?” Paul said, but Cal shook his head.

  “I guess you’re it,” Paul told Ben, and the game went on.

  Dana and Susie started getting supper for the kids, working together. Susie took carrots and a cucumber out of the fridge, and Dana washed and cut them into sticks.

  “Is Cal happy with mac and cheese?” Susie said.

  “Does Ben still eat it?”

  “I still eat it. He’s picky about some things, but not food.”

  Dana, apologetically, said, “I’m afraid my son’s a pesto kid.”

  “Well, we can do that, too. I don’t know when David’s coming back. My breasts are killing me.”

  Dana, dutifully, asked her: “How often does May still feed?”

  There was a cupboard next to the oven with a collection of jars in it, most of them several years old, and Susie had crouched down to see if she could find some pesto. This involved taking out cans of soup and chopped tomatoes, a jar of piccalilli, which Bill had brought back from some long-ago trip to London, packets of Miso powder, cans of cherries, etc.

  “Usually just twice a day, mornings and evenings. But I let her feed more on the plane last night to keep her quiet, and now my clock is all out of … hers, too. Red or green?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Red or green?”

  “Either is fine.”

  Dana could do this kind of s
mall talk among mothers, it was a part of the skill set, but she didn’t like it much either, and she couldn’t help feeling that she was being managed in some way. Or appealed to for some reason. Then David came in, you could hear the front door bang, and the screaming of a baby, and the noise of wheels making their progress over wooden floors. When he walked in the kitchen, still pushing the stroller, May was straining against the belts, her face was red, that peculiar rich skin color of the long-crying child, where the blood-color seems to have gone deep into the flesh, and Susie said, “Why don’t you carry her?” while David, good-humoredly, kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, okay,” Susie said, “I hear you,” and began to gather up her child.

  “I gave her some water,” he told her. “She’s hungry not thirsty.”

  “She’s both.” Susie had begun to pull the neckline of her dress across her shoulder; May, with her mouth still open in a scream, but no sound coming, butted her nose against her mother’s breast.

  “Let’s not start this again,” David told her. “It’s five o’clock. She needs dinner not milk.”

  “It’s six o’clock East Coast time. It’s almost her bedtime. You shouldn’t have taken her out so long.”

  “She was asleep, sleeping …” and so on. At one point David looked up at Dana, with a smile, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” Susie told him. “You can finish making dinner. I’m going to get her changed, she’s wet through.”

  “What am I making?”

  “I can do it,” Dana told him, and Susie, departing, said, “Don’t let them all off the hook.”

  *

  The girl was hot and damp in her arms but so insistent that Susie sat down at the top of the stairs and let her nurse. Like lots of hallways in big houses it was a strangely quiet and private space. Light from a side window fell palely across the double-height volume of the stairwell. She could see into the entrance hall, if somebody was coming home; she could see into the dining room window of their neighbor’s house, but nobody was there and she didn’t feel exposed or overlooked. The truth is, David was right, May didn’t need to feed. It was mostly for comfort, and after a minute she stopped crying and got bored and stared up at her mother with the inscrutable calculating look of a baby. Susie was always touched by how unfrightened she appeared to be. The world must seem to her like some bizarre arthouse movie, a succession of images and everybody talking in a language she couldn’t understand. But most of the time she just watched it like you watch TV, because it’s on.