Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  After that she was stuck. Four years old, long-limbed, he was too heavy for her to sleep like that, with his weight on her chest, but every time she tried to lay him down he woke up again, and the whimpering began. When she heard the clank of the Volvo in the drive and the front door open, she couldn’t tell if she’d been lying awake the whole time or whether the noise had woken her. Cal by this point seemed deeply asleep, still hot but quiet, and she listened to the sound in the front hall, which was just below her bedroom, Liesel saying something and Jean saying something and Nathan talking, though she couldn’t make out the words, just tone and rhythm, and something else, a kind of efficient affection or familiarity. Then she heard the noise of footsteps in the hallway running to the back of the house, heavier because of the weight, of kids or suitcases. It was an old house, both creaky and echoey, high-ceilinged and wide-halled, and Clémence’s voice, in its vivid friendliness and lively hushed politeness carried, too, until it disappeared into the kitchen and was replaced by someone climbing the stairs, either Jean or Liesel, going to bed.

  When she woke up again it was already light and late—bright slats of winter sunshine lay like the lines on a piece of paper across the floor. Cal said to her (he was squeezed into her armpit now and looking up), “It hurts.”

  “What hurts, sweetie?”

  “I told you!’ he said, angrily.

  “You didn’t tell me,” but it was pointless arguing so she stopped. “My ear!’ he said eventually. Which ear, and so on.

  She had some Children’s Tylenol in her toiletry bag, but it was another fight to make him sit up and take a spoonful. Meanwhile some dream or half-memory of the night before came back to her, lying in bed and listening for the front door, because it meant that Paul was leaving, driving to Wimberley alone and in the dark, and leaving her in the house with the rest of his family. And she wondered if Cal knew that his father wasn’t there, but the truth is he didn’t ask or seem to care. After the Tylenol kicked in, she managed to get him dressed, she managed to get herself dressed, and came down to breakfast carrying her camera (a Leica M, black with a leather strap), with the slightly shifty and guilty feeling of the late-riser.

  Susie sat over her coffee and an empty bowl of cereal, reading the New York Times. Ben and Willy were watching TV next door, and Cal without asking went to join them, and Dana let him go.

  “Where is everybody?” Dana asked.

  “In bed. Liesel stayed up last night, till they got in.”

  “What time did they get in?”

  “One-thirty. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dana said, “that’s probably my fault. Cal had one of those nights.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Susie told her, which annoyed Dana. “I’m not sleeping very well at the moment anyway. There’s coffee in the pot if you don’t mind heating it up.”

  And so, obediently, Dana went to pour herself a cup of coffee and took it to the laundry room in the hallway, where the microwave lived. While the turntable spun and hummed, Dana looked in on the playroom and felt something of the pleasure Cal must have been feeling, to be included among the boys. Though she also noticed his nose was running again, the skin at the tip seemed blistery, and there was a slick crust over his upper lip. His eyes had a kind of intensity of blankness, a feverish shine, and when she went over to wipe his nose (“just so you look as beautiful as you are”), the microwave beeped. He shrugged her off, but she took a photograph anyway, framing the boys on the couch against the background of Susie’s family portrait, which hung over their heads.

  Nobody blinked; they were watching Scooby Doo. It surprised her a little, that Ben didn’t consider it beneath him. But maybe even at his age … kids are still kids. At least, some of the time. “When this is over,” she said to Cal, “I want you to come have breakfast,” but she left them alone and walked down the hallway to the laundry room. The body of the mug was too hot to touch so she carried it carefully by the handle into the kitchen.

  “Is that a new camera?” Susie said, looking up from her newspaper.

  “Secondhand new. It was a sort of present to …” but Dana let the answer drift away and instead took a picture, which included Susie, who made a deprecatory frown. Like, this is not what my face is useful for anymore. She looked like Anne Frank, pretty and ordinary, at fifteen, but somehow as she grew older Susie’s face hadn’t changed but what it meant or suggested … Her brown eyes were still too big but they looked sensible now, or worried, instead of amused. In the photo afterward (Dana, that night, uploaded the images onto her computer, and while Cal slept in the dark of their bedroom, went over them one by one), Dana felt, as she often did, real affection for the way people are exposed by the camera. It was clear from her expression that Susie did not want to be photographed: that faint awkwardness had been preserved.

  For all their family self-obsession, the Essingers were not picture-takers in any consistent way. But for the rest of the day, Dana kept taking their pictures. She wanted something to do besides hanging around the house, trying to help out and getting in the way, while the Essinger family business carried on, clearing up, shopping, getting ready for Christmas dinner, all the competitive preparations of mealtime. Also, she wanted to make an album for Liesel, to thank her for the visit afterward. There was a company you could send the digital images to, and they turned them into books, hardbound, with glossy pages and captions (if you provided them) under each photo (“Cal tries his first beef rib!”). It had become a mild obsession for her, making these albums, a time-occupier and creative outlet, and she used birthdays and thank-yous as an excuse to indulge it.

  Dana had been tinkering with photography since her (very brief) career as a model, when she was nineteen or twenty years old and using the money to help pay her way through Amherst. And then, when she dropped out and married Michael (her first husband, an old rich not-quite-dead white male, as he called himself), she kept it up a little longer but without any real … ambition or … It was mostly just another thing she didn’t want to quit because of him. But it embarrassed her, too, the fact that when she invited some of the other girls back to her apartment, they saw how she lived. The grandeur and expense … not because they would judge her or think her odd but almost the opposite, because it seemed so in keeping with the world she was moving in, the pretty women and the older men who paid for their lives.

  Most of her modeling gigs were for mail-order catalogs; she once appeared (this was the highlight of her career) in a De Beers ad. Her look was WASPy handsome, but in a kind of anonymous, almost approachable way. People wanted to imagine her as their daughter, the one they had brought up well and sent to boarding school, who could ride a horse. Even at the time she was dimly aware of something bland and maybe even sad about the way she looked in these magazines: a typical example of her class. Almost in protest, she took a camera along on shoots and photographed the locations or the set or the dressing rooms or even the photographers themselves, as a way of turning the tables and insisting on some kind of status. I’m really a college girl, this is just a means to an end. Though she also had to overcome a certain amount of embarrassment. The camera drew attention, and she basically didn’t like attention. But she persisted, as she often did, against the grain of her nature, or even the occasion …

  She poured herself a bowl of Grape Nuts and said to Susie, “Do you know where you’re going to live yet? I mean, in England.”

  “I’ve got some … you can imagine, I spend a certain amount of time on websites. The college is very generous with home loans. But I don’t want to rush into anything. I mean, part of me wants to just make every decision at once. But I’m trying to resist the temptation.” And she laughed, turning back to her newspaper.

  The truth is, she didn’t really want to confide in Dana or even talk seriously about her own life. There was some impediment there, related to Paul, some kind of resentment … Then Clémence came in with the girls, clattering through the backdoor, letting the scre
en door slam behind them, letting in the cold air. They were sleeping in the garage apartment out back: you had to go outside (across the patio) to reach the main house. Nathan had stayed in bed; he was working (Clémence made a face), and Susie went next door to turn off the TV, so that the cousins didn’t spend all morning glotzing—staring at the box.

  “It’s cold,” Clémence said. “I always forget that this place has actual seasons.”

  She wore silk pajamas and bright Moroccan babouche slippers, in red, green, and gold. Everything seemed busy and fun after she arrived—she started making eggs for the girls (“and anyone else”), raiding the fridge and bringing out onions, tomatoes, Gruyère and goat cheese, red peppers and olives (in a tall cloudy plastic container—Susie said, “I don’t know how long that’s been there”), whatever she could find. Including a yellowing bunch of cilantro from the vegetable drawer, a little slimy maybe, but she cut off what she needed, and cracked chopped sprinkled, made a mess. The spice cupboard hung to the side of the oven—you couldn’t take anything out without scattering bright powders and dried brown leaves. When Liesel came down, in her dressing gown, sleepy-faced, she shuffled over to the coffee maker and looked suspiciously at the pot. She said to Clémence, noticing, “You have such elegant pajamas,” and Dana, stupidly, felt a pang of something, jealousy.

  As the morning wore on, she retreated more and more behind her camera. Stephen had given her the Leica on her birthday. He took her out to eat at a restaurant in Chinatown, which is where he handed it over, and she remembered how touched he was that it was her actual birthday, a Wednesday night in October—that she had given him priority. Part of what appealed to him is the sense he must have had, which he couldn’t entirely conceal, that there was something a little lonely or sad about the fact that a beautiful young woman like Dana should have nobody she preferred to spend her birthday with than a guy like him. Given that their relationship was in its early days, and that his attractions, such as they were, were of the solid kind. Tasteful and affectionate companionship, a shared curiosity and detachment about life. She almost felt like she had to apologize to him, or explain herself in some way, so she said that Paul had just flown back on Sunday, after spending a week in town to hang out with Cal, and she was so—she was always so … just discombobulated by these visits, that she could never see past the … or make plans for anything afterward. So when he called and wanted to take her out, she was very … but he said, You don’t have to apologize, I mean you’ve got nothing to …

  This is how they talked to each other, kindly.

  He was very supportive generally of her photography and encouraged her, for example, to take classes at the New School. At their summer exhibition, he said obviously intelligent and perceptive things not just about her own work but some of the other pieces, which he took seriously. His daughter worked for Carl Kwon, who had shot covers for Vogue, but Stephen also belonged to the generation of New Yorkers who grew up listening to talks at the Aperture Gallery and later going to shows at Howard Greenberg in the Eighties. Photography for people like him, especially for people with a background in documentary TV, was really the art form of the twentieth century. This is the kind of thing he said. His apartment on Third Avenue was only a few blocks over from the Whitney, and he had a Nan Goldin in the entrance hall (Misty in Sheridan Square) and a Winogrand over the living-room sofa—a fat boy and his ugly dog, standing in front of rows of chain-link fencing, animal pens, all brightly lit. He’s drinking a Coke. So for someone like that, with his air of authority or experience or culture, to say, you should pursue this, you have a real talent for this, made a big difference to her, had a real effect, given how, in the rest of her life, she had this sense of helplessly drifting.

  Paul used to treat all her photography … stuff … as a kind of useful hobby, something to keep yourself busy with, while you figure out what you really want to do. Which coming from a guy who played tennis for a living … but that was part of the problem. He had gotten to a point where he really didn’t have any respect for any human endeavor. So it was a relief to talk to someone like Stephen, whose enthusiasms were so important to him.

  Maybe this is why she brought the camera to Texas, as a kind of coded reminder that her real life was ongoing and didn’t depend on Essinger approval. At the same time she planned to take a lot of pictures of the family in action. Because she wanted Cal to know his cousins. And something about the busyness of their family life … the constant coming and going and reconfigurations of people, the endless plans and arguments, the quantities of food consumed and information produced (Susie moving to England, Bill’s updates about his sister in Yonkers, Liesel’s stories) seemed so different from her own childhood, her sisterless and brotherless relations with her parents, their occasional friends, the house you had to take your shoes off in. There was something exotic about the Essingers she wanted to capture on film. They seemed interesting to her, artistically. This is the kind of thing she told herself.

  And then, at night, in bed, going over the images in the dark, it was like experimenting on yourself … with needles. What does this make you feel, what do you feel about this. Cal trying to eat baked eggs, which kept slipping off his fork. (He wasn’t hungry anyway, but wanted to fit in.) Jean, kicking out a leg—she came down for breakfast in pajamas, a hooded top, and cowboy boots, because the kitchen floor was splintery and she forgot to bring slippers. Dana photographed her pretending to barn dance. Clémence with her hands full of eggshells; she made an expression (“the harassed chef”), she was used to being on camera. Julie and Ben started arguing from the beginning—whether, for example, Scooby Doo was feminist or sexist, because Velma is supposed to be the brains (“You know why we know that,” Julie said, “because she wears glasses! A woman in glasses! She must be smart, because otherwise …”—“Come on,” Ben said, “the whole point of the show is that Shaggy is an idiot. I mean, if that’s what you’re arguing … I mean, his dog is smarter than him.”). It was hard, on film, to capture the sense of noise: everyone talking at once, and not just talking, but emoting, putting expression into what they said, feelings of anger or sarcasm or conciliation, which didn’t always show up on their faces, because there was no need, that’s what the talk was for.

  Julie didn’t want to be photographed—she put her hand over her face and closed her eyes, and Dana, not really thinking, took her picture like that, feeling her heart go out to her.

  Something had happened to Julie in the last year, a growth spurt, which made her a half-head taller than Ben, but she also looked like a different kind of person—someone a guy could almost be excused for hitting on. Her response to all this was resistance. She kept her hair short and dressed deliberately like someone who didn’t care how she dressed. Her self-consciousness had extended to her physical movements, which were somewhat mechanical. She was as tall as Jean and when her aunt first hugged her, Jean made a face like, what happened to you. Dana had a picture of that, too. Nathan came in, dressed in ragged shorts and old basketball shoes and some kind of parka—his hair stuck out from the hood. He acknowledged everyone, including (briefly) Dana, whom he hadn’t seen, then went out to buy some coffee from one of the food trucks in the Spider House parking lot. Liesel said, “There’s coffee in the pot,” and he told her, “Yeah, I don’t drink that shit”—a ritual of disagreement. He offered to buy Dana some real coffee, and Dana, subtly taking sides, said, “Okay, yes, thank you.”

  “I always get a cappuccino with a double shot of espresso.”

  “Okay, I’ll have that,” and she thought for a moment that he was flirting with her, or she was flirting with him, she couldn’t tell. Then David came down, fresh from the shower, and May looking red in the face.

  “How long did you leave her for?” Susie asked.

  “I don’t know. She was asleep and when I came back from the bathroom, she was awake,” and May reached out for her mother and started crying again. Susie, in her ordinary voice, “I know, I know, tell me abo
ut it,” and took her in her arms.

  “I’m going to get some coffee,” David announced.

  Jean said, “Nathan has already gone, you can catch him up. Has anyone spoken to Bill?”

  “I hear you’re fleeing these benighted shores.” Clémence was talking to Susie—David was at the backdoor and waited a second to hear what his wife would say. “You can take me with you,” she added, but he gave up and walked out.

  “The deal was,” Susie explained, “that if Romney won, I said we could go. I said, in that case … but then somehow I ended up agreeing anyway.”

  “I spoke to him, very briefly, this morning.” Liesel sat in her chair at the head of the table, with her back to the kitchen cabinets, and was laying out, from a small tin of Altoids Curiously Strong Mints, her morning pills. “Everything’s fine. He was just about to go in to see Rose. The streets were … he was going to walk, he couldn’t get the car out. He called me to tell me about the snow.”

  Some of the pills were large and lozenge-like, with painful-looking ridges; some were shaped like M&Ms. The colors were these peculiarly powdery pharmaceutical colors, a kind of off-gray or faint peach. Jean, watching her mother, a little anxiously, said, “Nathan said he wanted to cook. I don’t know what his plans are.” And then: “I’m supposed to be in charge of dessert.”

  This is how the morning wore on—family as information-producing machine … decision-requiring machine … argument-creating machine … catering company and cleaning service … childcare and school. Willy, as soon as he had finished his waffles, said in the voice you use when you want to get what you want, “May I please be excused?” and went outside, leaving the main door ajar and letting the screen slam behind him, clatter and tap. “Close the door,” Susie called out, but he was gone. Cold air flowed in. Then Margot said, “Me, too …” and followed him, Clémence chasing her down to put on her cardigan. When Nathan came back with David and the coffees, he had brought pastries, too, a bag of Mexican conchas (“which are probably disgustingly sweet,” he said, “but there was a guy selling them”), and half the people sat down to start again.