by New Yorker
“Yes,” Marjorie says politely.
“It was too big,” Faith says. “It was much, much too tall. It couldn’t even stand up in our living room. And it was too wide. And our dad got really mad at us because we’d killed a beautiful living tree for a bad reason, and because we hadn’t listened to him and thought we knew everything just because we knew what we wanted.”
Faith suddenly doesn’t know why she’s telling this particular story to these innocent sweeties who do not particularly need an object lesson. So she simply stops. In the real story, of course, her father took the tree and threw it out the door into the back yard, where it stayed for weeks and turned brown. There was crying and accusations. Her father went straight to a bar and got drunk. And later their mother went to the Safeway and bought a small tree that fit and which the three of them trimmed without the aid of their father. It was waiting, trimmed, when he came home smashed. The story had usually been one others found humor in. This time all the humor seemed lacking.
“Do you want to know how the story turned out?” Faith says, smiling brightly for the girls’ benefit, but feeling completely defeated.
“I do,” Marjorie says.
“We put it outside in the yard and put lights on it so our neighbors could share our big tree with us. And we bought a smaller tree for the house at the Safeway. It was a sad story that turned out good.”
“I don’t believe it,” Jane says.
“Well, you should believe it,” Faith says, “because it’s true. Christmases are special. They always turn out wonderfully if you give them a chance and use your imagination.”
Jane shakes her head as Marjorie nods hers. Marjorie wants to believe. Jane, Faith thinks, is a classic older child. Like herself.
“Did you know”—this was one of Greta the girlfriend’s cute messages left for her on her voice mail in Los Angeles—“did you know that Jack hates—hates—to have his dick sucked? Hates it with a passion. Of course you didn’t. How could you? He always lies about it. Oh, well. But if you’re wondering why he never comes, that’s why. It’s a big turnoff for him. I personally think it’s his mother’s fault, not that she ever did it to him, of course. I don’t mean that. By the way, that was a nice dress last Friday. You’re very pretty. And really great tits. I can see why Jack likes you. Take care.”
At seven, the girls wake up from their naps and everyone is hungry at once. Faith’s mother offers to take the two hostile Indians for a pizza, then on to the skating rink, while Roger and Faith share the smorgasbord coupons.
At seven-thirty, few diners have chosen the long, harshly lit, sour-smelling Tyrol Room. Most guests are outside awaiting the nightly Pageant of the Lights, in which members of the ski patrol ski down the expert slope holding lighted torches. It is a thing of beauty but takes time getting started. At the very top of the hill, a great Norway spruce has been lighted in the Yuletide tradition just as in the untrue version of Faith’s story. All is viewable from the Tyrol Room through a big picture window.
Faith does not want to eat with Roger, who is slightly hung over from his gluhwein and a nap. Conversation that she would find offensive could easily occur; something on the subject of her sister, the girls’ mother—Roger’s (still) wife. But she is trying to keep up a Christmas spirit. Do for others, etc.
Roger, she knows, dislikes her, possibly envies her, and is also attracted to her. Once, several years ago, he confided to her that he’d very much like to fuck her ears flat. He was drunk, and Daisy had not long before had Jane. Faith found a way not to acknowledge this offer. Later he told her he thought she was a lesbian. Having her know that just must’ve seemed like a good idea. A class act is the Roger.
The long, wide, echoing dining hall has crisscrossed ceiling beams painted pink and light green and purple—something apparently appropriate to Bavaria. There are long green tables with pink plastic folding chairs meant to promote good times and family fun. Somewhere else in the inn, Faith is certain, there is a better place to eat, where you don’t pay with coupons and nothing’s pink or purple.
Faith is wearing a shiny black Lycra bodysuit, over which she has put on her loden knickers and Norway socks. She looks superb, she thinks. With anyone but Roger this would be fun, or at least a hoot.
Roger sits across the long table, too far away to talk easily. In a room that can conveniently hold five hundred souls, there are perhaps ten scattered diners. No one is eating family style. Only solos and twos. Youthful inn employees in paper caps wait dismally behind the long smorgasbord steam table. Metal heat lamps with orange lights are overcooking the prime rib, of which Roger has taken a goodly portion. Faith has chosen only a few green lettuce leaves, a beet round, and two tiny ears of yellow corn. The sour smell makes eating unappealing.
“Do you know what I worry about?” Roger says, sawing around a triangle of glaucal gray roast-beef fat, using a comically small knife. His tone implies he and Faith lunch together daily and are picking up right where they’ve left off; as if they didn’t hold each other in complete contempt.
“No,” Faith says, “what?” Roger, she notices, has managed to hang on to his red smorgasbord coupon. The rule is you leave your coupon in the basket by the breadsticks. Clever Roger. Why, she wonders, is he tanned?
Roger smiles as though there’s a lewd aspect to whatever it is that worries him. “I worry that Daisy’s going to get so fixed up in rehab that she’ll forget everything that’s happened and want to be married again. To me, I mean. You know?” Roger chews as he talks. He wishes to seem earnest, his smile a serious, imploring, vacuous smile. Roger levelling. Roger owning up.
“Probably that won’t happen,” Faith says. “I just have a feeling.” She no longer wishes to look at her salad. She does not have an eating disorder, she thinks, and could never have one.
“Maybe not.” Roger nods. “I’d like to get out of guidance pretty soon, though. Start something new. Turn the page.”
In truth, Roger is not bad-looking, only oppressively regular: small chin, small nose, small hands, small straight teeth—nothing unusual except his brown eyes, which are slightly too narrow, as if he had Finnish blood. Daisy married him, she said, because of his alarmingly big dick. That or, more important, lack of that, in her view, was why other marriages failed. When all else gave way, that would be there. Vince’s, she’d observed, was even bigger. Ergo. It was to this quest Daisy had dedicated her life. This, instead of college.
“What exactly would you like to do next?” Faith says. She is thinking how satisfying it would be if Daisy came out of rehab and had forgotten everything, and that returning to how things were when they still sort of worked can often be the best solution.
“Well, it probably sounds crazy,” Roger says, chewing, “but there’s a company down in Tennessee that takes apart jetliners. For scrap. And there’s big money in it. I imagine it’s how the movie business got started. Just some harebrained scheme.” Roger pokes macaroni salad with his fork. A single Swedish meatball remains on his plate.
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Faith lies, then looks longingly at the smorgasbord table. Maybe she is hungry. Is the table full of food the smorgasbord, she wonders, or is eating it the smorgasbord? Roger has slipped his meal coupon back into a pocket. “Do you think you’re going to do that?” she asks with reference to the genius plan of dismantling jet airplanes.
“With the girls in school, it’d be hard,” Roger says, ignoring what would seem to be the obvious—that it is not a genius plan. Faith gazes around distractedly. She realizes no one else in the big room is dressed the way she is, which reminds her of who she is. She is not Snow Mountain Highlands. She is not even Sandusky. She is Hollywood. A fortress.
“I could take the girls for a while,” she suddenly says. “I really wouldn’t mind.” She thinks of sweet Marjorie and sweet but unhappy Jane sitting on the Danish modern couch in their sweet nighties, watching her trim the rubber-tree plant. Just as instantly she thinks of Roger and Daisy being killed i
n an automobile crash. You can’t help what you think.
She has so revolted against the overornate, complicated and expensive Christmas wrapping jobs, says a pal, that she’s seriously considering doing up her parents in old newspapers and string.
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
A thought that has flashed through many a mind.
1961
“Where would they go to school?” Roger says, alert to something unexpected. Something he likes.
“I’m sorry?” Faith says, and flashes Roger, big-dick Roger, a second movie star’s smile. She has let herself be distracted by the thought of his timely death.
“I mean where would they go to school?” Roger blinks. He is that alert.
“I don’t know. Hollywood High, I guess. They have schools in California. I guess I could find one.”
“I’d have to think about this,” Roger lies decisively.
“O.K.,” Faith says. Now that she has said this without any previous thought of ever saying anything like it, it immediately becomes part of everyday reality. She will soon become the girls’ parent. Easy as that. “When you get settled in Tennessee you could have them back,” she says without conviction.
“They probably wouldn’t want to come back,” Roger says. “Tennessee’d seem pretty dull after Hollywood.”
“Ohio’s dull. They like that.”
“True,” Roger says.
No one, of course, has thought to mention Daisy in preparing this new arrangement. Daisy, the mother. Though Daisy is committed elsewhere for the next little patch. And Roger needs to put “guidance” in the rearview mirror.
The Pageant of the Lights is just now under way—a ribbon of swaying torches swooshing down the expert course like an overflow of lava. All is preternaturally visible through the panoramic window. A large, bundled crowd has assembled at the hill’s bottom, many members holding candles in scraps of paper like at a Grateful Dead concert. All other artificial light is extinguished, except for the big Christmas spruce at the top. The young smorgasbord attendants have gathered at the window to witness the pageant yet again. Some are snickering. Someone remembers to turn the lights off inside the Tyrol Room. Dinner is suspended.
“Do you downhill?” Roger asks, manning his empty plate in the half darkness. Things could really turn out great, Faith understands he’s thinking. Eighty-six the girls. Dismantle plenty jets. Just be friendly.
“No, never,” Faith says, dreamily watching the torchbearers schuss from side to side, a gradual sinuous dramaless tour down. “It scares me.”
“You get used to it.” Roger suddenly reaches across the table where her hands rest on either side of her uneaten salad. He actually touches then pats one of these hands. Roger is her friend now. “And by the way,” he says creepily, “thanks.”
Back in the condo, all is serene. Esther is still at the skating rink. Roger has wandered back to the Warming Shed. He has a girlfriend in Port Clinton. A former high-school counsellee, now divorced. He will be calling her, telling her about the new plans, telling her he wishes she were with him at Snow Mountain Highlands and that his family could be in Rwanda. Bobbie, her name is.
A call to Jack is definitely in order. But first Faith decides to slide the newly trimmed plastic rubber-tree plant nearer the window, where there’s an outlet. When she plugs in, most of the little white lights pop cheerily on. Only a few do not, and in the box are replacements. Later, tomorrow, they can fix the star on top—her father’s favorite ritual. “Now it’s time for the star,” he’d say. “The star of the wise men.” Her father had been a musician, a woodwind specialist. A man of talents, and a drunk. A specialist also in women who were not his wife. He had taught committedly at a junior college to make all their ends meet. He had wanted her to become a lawyer, so naturally she became one. Daisy he had no specific plans for, so she became a drunk, and, sometime later, an energetic nymphomaniac. Eventually he had died, at home. The paterfamilias. After that her mother began to shrink. “I won’t actually die, I intend just to evaporate” was how she put it when the subject arose. It made her laugh. She considered her decrease a natural consequence of loss.
Whether to call Jack in London or New York or Block Island is the question. Where is Jack? In London it was after midnight. In New York and Block Island it was the same as here. Half past eight. Though a message was still the problem. She could just say she was lonely; or had chest pains; or worrisome test results. (The last two of which would later need to clear up mysteriously.)
London, first. The flat in Sloane Terrace, a half block from the tube. They’d eaten breakfast at Oriel, then Jack had gone off to work in the City while she did the Tate, the Bacons her specialty. So far from Snow Mountain Highlands—this is the sensation of dialling—a call going a great distance.
Ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing. Nothing.
There was a second number, for messages only, but she’d forgotten it. Call again to allow for a misdial. Ring-jing, ring-jing, ring-jing.…
New York, then. East Forty-ninth. Far, far east. The nice, small slice of river view. A bolt-hole he’d had since college. His freshman numerals framed on the wall. 1971. She’d gone to the trouble to have the bedroom redone. White everything. A smiling picture of her from the boat, framed in red leather. Another of them together at Cabo, on the beach. All similarly long distances from Snow Mountain Highlands.
Ring, ring, ring, ring. Then click, “Hi, this is Jack”—she almost speaks to his voice—“I’m not” etc., etc., etc., then a beep.
“Hi, Jack, it’s me. Ummm, Faith.…” She’s stuck, but not at all flustered. She could just as well tell everything. This happened today: the atomic-energy smokestacks, the rubber-tree plant, the Pageant of the Lights, the smorgasbord, the girls’ planned move to California. All things Christmassy. “Ummm, I just wanted to say that I’m … fine, and that I trust—make that hope—that I hope you are, too. I’ll be back home—in Malibu, that is—after Christmas. I’d love—make that, enjoy—hearing from you. I’m at Snow Mountain Highlands. In Michigan.” She pauses, discussing with herself if there’d be further news to relate. There isn’t. Then she realizes (too late) she’s treating this message machine like her Dictaphone. And there’s no revising. Too bad. Her mistake. “Well, goodbye,” she says, realizing this sounds a bit stiff, but doesn’t revise. There’s Block Island still. Though it’s all over anyway. Who cares? She called.
Out on the Nordic Trail, lights, soft yellow ones not unlike the Christmas-tree lights, have been strung to selected fir boughs—bright enough so you’d never get lost in the dark, dim enough not to spoil the spooky/romantic effect.
She does not really enjoy this kind of skiing either—height or no height—but wants to be a sport. Though there’s the tiresome waxing, the stiff rented shoes, the long, inconvenient skis, the sweaty underneath, the chance that all this could eventuate in catching cold and missing work. The gym is better. Major heat, but then quick you’re clean and back in the car. Back in the office. Back on the phone. She is a sport but not a sports nut. Still, this is not terrifying.
No one is with her on nighttime Nordic Trail 1, the Pageant of the Lights having lured away other skiers. Two Japanese men were at the trailhead. Small beige men in bright chartreuse Lycras—little serious faces, giant thighs, blunt no-nonsense arms—commencing the rigorous course, “the Beast,” Nordic Trail 3. On their small, stocking-capped heads they’d worn lights like coal miners to shine their way. They have disappeared.
Here the snow virtually hums to the sound of her sliding strokes. A full moon rides behind filigree clouds as she strides forward in the near-darkness of crusted woods. There is wind she can hear high up in the tall pines and spruces, but at ground level there’s no wind—just cold radiating off the metallic snow. Only her ears actually feel cold, they and the sweat line of her hair. Her heartbeat is hardly elevated. She is in shape.
For an instant then she hears distant music, a singing voice with orchestral acc
ompaniment. She pauses in her tracks. The music’s pulses travel through the trees. Strange. Possibly, she thinks between deep breaths, it’s Roger—in the karaoke bar, Roger onstage, singing his greatest hits to other lonelies in the dark. “Blue Bayou,” “Layla,” “Tommy,” “Try to Remember.” Roger at a safe distance. Her pale hair, she realizes, is shining in the pure moonlight. If she were being watched, she would look good.
And wouldn’t it be romantic, she thinks, to peer down through the dark woods and spy some great, ornate, and festive lodge lying below, windows ablaze, some exotic casino from a movie. Graceful skaters on a lighted rink. A garlanded lift still in motion, a few, last alpinists taking their silken, torchless float before lights-out. Only there’s nothing to see—dark trunks and deadfalls, swags of snow hung in the spruce boughs.
And she is stiffening. Just this quickly. New muscles visited. No reason to go much farther.
Daisy, her sister, comes to mind. Daisy, who will very soon exit the hospital with a whole new view of life. Inside, there’s of course a twelve-step ritual to accompany the normal curriculum of deprivation and regret. And someone, somewhere, at some time possibly long ago, someone will definitely turn out to have touched Daisy in some way detrimental to her well-being, and at an all too tender age. Once, but perhaps many times, over a series of terrible, silent years. Possibly an older, suspicious neighborhood youth—a loner—or a far too avuncular school librarian. Even the paterfamilias will come under posthumous scrutiny (the historical perspective as always unprovable, yet undisprovable, and therefore indisputable).
