The ink was slightly blue and blurry. But even if that hadn’t tipped her off, the faint smell still embedded in the paper would have. That sharp powerful odor, only approximated these days in Magic Marker pens, always brought her back to her father’s office where she ran the mimeograph machine for him.
He would set up the machine, carefully aligning the typed original with its gluey purple back on the drum. Then she would operate the crank handle, watching as each page appeared, glistening and wet from its contact with the mimeo ink.
She was there every week, copying his pop quizzes and helping with the year-end exams. But she loved mimeographing the Christmas letter because she got to read it first.
Joanne could still remember some of his openings, having studied them as they came through the mimeograph machine, one blurry page after the other:
Yes, it is the bleak midwinter and you will probably get this letter after the festivities have ended. Still, the information contained herein doesn’t lose its freshness with the passing of the holiday.
Or . . .
Every year, I look at the snow glistening on our yard, the pine trees providing a nest for the winter birds that gather despite the weather, and I feel the urge to share the triumphs and tribulations of my family with the people whom we love but see only too rarely.
When she went away to college, she missed that voice, and greedily snapped up a copy of the Christmas letter as soon as she got home for the holidays.
Annie had inherited her job. Annie had lasted only one year (“Jeez,” she said to Joanne, “you didn’t tell me that turning that dang crank hurts your arm.”) before giving the job to Ginny. Ginny secretly told Joanne that she hated the smell: “It makes me dizzy.”
Joanne loved it. She missed it when her father became practical and retired the mimeo machine for a half hour at a copy shop. Some pimply kid ran the copier behind the desk while Daddy read his newspaper, and Joanne always felt the process had gone slightly wrong. No pimply outsider should take over the family copying task, no matter how slight it was.
Joanne once told her father she had learned to write by reading his letters, and he was surprised by it. But she felt it was true. Even though he had written essays—what now would be called “creative nonfiction”—those influenced her less than his newsletters.
Although she never did tell interviewers that. When they asked where she got her inspiration for her novels, she cited her favorite authors—Fitzgerald, King, Le Guin—and never once mentioned her father.
Lately, she had been regretting that oversight. She might not have a chance to rectify it. The doctors said he would probably never regain consciousness.
At the thought, Joanne’s hand started shaking. The newsletter crinkled in her fingers. So she carried it to the kitchen and set it flat on the table she had covered with a vinyl cloth in anticipation of the grandchildren.
December 15
Right there, the date was unbelievable. Daddy had slipped into the coma on December 2. The nursing home had moved him to hospice on the 10th. Hospice was offering only palliative care.
The fact that he was still alive only a few days from Christmas showed the inherent strength of that ninety-five-year-old body. It was efficient from the marathons he had run until his knees gave out at seventy-two, and the lap swimming he had substituted until he got pneumonia in October.
He had been so angry then, knowing he was going to miss the Regional Masters Competition that was going to be held in Minneapolis at the end of November.
I would’ve won my category, Button, he said to Joanne—actually more like wheezed at her, his breath whistling as if he had swallowed a bit of tubing.
You’re the only one in it, she said.
No, Button, that’s where you’re wrong. There were fifteen people at State, and I beat all of them, including some whippersnapper who hadn’t even turned seventy-five yet.
She remembered when he turned seventy-five and was trying to find something to substitute for the running. That was the year he had discovered the Masters age group swim program and he was determined to race.
This’ll keep me going, Button. You’ll see.
She blinked hard and made herself focus on the warm house, the table before her, the vinyl cloth ready for the grandchildren’s mess. She held the newsletter flat and tried to read it again. This time, she got past that date and into the body itself.
December 15
The magic of the season arrived with suddenness and gusto the day after Thanksgiving. For the first time since retailers moved the Christmas season from Advent to November, the Christmas music on the radio seemed appropriate and I began thinking about my holiday newsletter.
Of course, I think about my newsletter all year. How does a man describe his adventures in a world he doesn’t really understand in a short pithy way that makes him seem less like a fool and more like the hero?
I hark back to my own great-grandfather on that summer day in 1934 when he first took me across that mysterious divide between our world and Luminaria. My mother had called me home from college, convinced he was about to die. And apparently he thought so, too, or he wouldn’t have taken me with him . . .
Joanne stopped reading. She knew the story, since her father had repeated it most of her life. Only there was no mention of Luminaria. Instead, her father told the tale to illustrate how hardy his side of the family was.
His great-grandfather had fallen off a ladder at the age of ninety-five. Daddy had been called home from college and spent the day at his great-grandfather’s bedside. In the morning, Daddy had awakened to the whir of blades against grass. He peeked out the window to see his great-grandfather mowing the lawn—not with any power mower (they didn’t exist in 1934), but with one of those push mowers that Joanne had tried once and given up on at half the length of the lawn.
He couldn’t stand how overgrown the lawn looked through the window, Daddy would say, so he hopped from his bed and had the entire thing mowed by ten A.M.
And lived for another five years, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and bowling until a few days before the end.
Luminaria. She shook her head just as the buzzer went off. She got up and walked into the kitchen. Whoever had written this newsletter had known her father. That much was clear from the lawn-mowing story—and from the mention of Luminaria.
Luminaria had been Daddy’s world. It lived in the bedroom she shared with Annie before Ginny arrived and they moved to a bigger house. In that house, Luminaria moved to Ginny’s room, because she was the baby and she had a special bed she needed tucking into.
Daddy always told stories of Luminaria. It was his fantasy world, filled with knights and pretty princesses named Joanne and Annie and Ginny, and a benevolent queen who sounded a lot like Mom, and dragons and sea monsters and talking cats with names that matched those of the family cats.
The stories never ended, just like they never began, but they continued from night tonight, unless Daddy had to work late. Then Mom read a story from a book—Where the Wild Things Are or Horton Hears a Who—which was nice, but just wasn’t the same.
At some point, Joanne stopped showing up for the stories. She listened to music, read her own books, or talked to boys on the telephone.
She couldn’t even remember where the Luminaria stories left off for her, only that look in Daddy’s eyes when she told him she didn’t want to hear any more. Stories, she said, are for babies and little girls.
These past two decades, he had never said what he thought of her making her living from stories, stories of the fantastic kind. Stories she had once dismissed.
She wiped at her eyes and opened the oven. Warm steamed air swept over her. The last batch of sugar cookies were a perfect golden brown.
At moments like this, she got flashes of her mother—who taught her how to bake, how to make a home pretty, how to make people feel comfortable even when they didn’t belong. Most of the traditions she brought to her grandchildren came from her mother and h
er mother’s family—the recipes, the cookie frosting party, the way the meals were served.
She put the cookies on the cooling rack. Soon she would have to start mixing the frosting for the kids. They would arrive in about two hours, energetic, giggling, and ready to make a mess.
By then she would have the frosting done, the sprinkles and red hots set out, the Christmas carols on her stereo, and the tree lights flickering merrily.
She had to put this thing with her father aside.
But she couldn’t yet. She went back into the dining room and grabbed the letter. It seemed longer than it had before. She had thought he (or whomever) had sent a single page. Now she held two.
She sat down slowly. She wasn’t thinking clearly, that was all. She was doing too many things—cooking, cleaning, decorating, and now the letter. She was also running to hospice, making sure she spent an hour at least with her father every day.
And her sisters were too far away. “We have a choice,” Ginny had said on her last phone call. “We can come see him when he’s in a coma or we can come for the funeral. I’d like to be there for both, but I can’t, and I know Annie can’t either.”
Annie, who had screamed at Joanne on the phone not so long ago about this letter.
Joanne found the paragraph where she had left off.
The light is different in Luminaria. That’s the first thing you notice. I was nearly blinded by it seventy years ago, and my great-grandfather laughed. You never get used to it, lad, he said, but you do come to crave it.
And he was right. At times like this, when winter falls without warning—the sky dark, the world gray except for the white snow—you crave the light. I’ve only seen light like it one other place, and that was the Mediterranean on that cruise the girls put me on nearly a decade ago, trapped with a bunch of old people, going from port to port, pretending to see the sights.
My great-grandfather took me through my mother’s garden, past a pile of rocks he called Stonehenge. To call those rocks Stonehenge was to call a Matchbox truck a Big Rig. Still, the magic shimmered in the air, and I knew as I stepped through that shimmer my life would never ever be the same.
That was his gift to me, this place, and when he was dying five years later—really dying, a fragile wisp of a man buried under my mother’s homemade quilts—he sent everyone from the room but me.
Then he grabbed my hand. His grip was so tight, I think I still have bruises from it. I didn’t know a dying man could cling to something that tightly.
“Have you gone back?” he whispered.
It took me a moment to understand him. “No,” I said.
“You have to now,” he said, “if only to visit me.”
Then he chuckled, but he didn’t let me go.
“Remember,” he said. “You have two lives. Never confuse them. The real world is here. That world—ah, it’s marvelous, but you can’t live there.”
“You just told me to visit you there,” I said.
He smiled. “I said you can’t live there, my boy. But there’s nothing wrong with dying there.”
Then he patted my cheek with his other hand, and closed his eyes. Even though he lived for three more days, he never opened his eyes again . . .
Joanne set the letter down again. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger over her nose. Whoever had written this had managed her father’s voice beautifully.
But she understood Annie’s anger. Who would play this trick, especially now?
She was standing before she realized it, heading to the phone. Halfway there, she realized she had been about to cancel the frosting party.
But she couldn’t do that to the kids. She had too many generations to consider, too many things to worry about.
She went back to the table and picked up the letter. This afternoon was about the children. She would worry about her father later.
She folded the letter back up, wondering how he (or whomever) had gotten it into the card. Three pages seemed like a lot to cram into a regular-sized envelope, with only one stamp in the corner.
She buried the envelope under the pile of cards, hoping to forget it, and knowing she wouldn’t be able to. Then she went into the kitchen and prepared the frosting.
Halfway through, she turned on the Christmas music loud enough to drown out her thoughts.
But no matter how many times she sang along with winter wonderlands and jingling sleigh bells, it wasn’t visions of sugar plums that danced in her head.
It was mimeographed sheets of paper, telling, in her father’s inimitable prose, the story of her life.
By the time the children arrived, her mood was lighter. It was hard to be sad when little hands, newly freed from snow-covered mittens, grabbed hers, when cold cheeks pressed against hers, and when slightly sticky lips brushed against her skin.
Six grandchildren, ages four to ten, and three of their parents—all her children because they loved the tradition.
Her dining-room table was covered with plates of unfrosted sugar cookies, bowls of frosting—red, green, yellow, blue, pink, and white—and more edible decorations than they could use in an entire year.
Sing-alongs with Frosty and Rudolph and lots of chatter. Little fingers in bowls (parents grabbed filthy hands—you can’t do that, hon) and voices clamoring—What do you think of that nose, Grammy? Gots more frosting? I like frosting. Izzat how you spell Mommy?
Too many cookies got eaten, too much frosting ended up on faces, and (predictably) one of the four-year-olds giggled herself sick in her sugar high and then passed out as it wore off.
No one would eat a good dinner that night, but they would all remember the occasion—and not just because of the red hots stuck in their hair.
Joanne was packing up cookies in the special tins she bought just for the occasion so that everyone could take some home, when Ryan joined her in the kitchen.
“You’ve got shadows under your eyes, Mom,” he said.
“It’s a busy time of year,” she said.
“Bull.” He took one of the tins from her and wrapped up the cellophane like she had taught him years ago. “You usually get jacked by this time of year. It’s Granddad, isn’t it?”
To her surprise, her eyes filled with tears. “This is the first time ever he missed cookies.”
She hadn’t realized it until she said it aloud. He only decorated a few every year. He sat at the head of the table, did his “example cookies”—usually piled with frosting and sprinkles—and then got out of the way. He had always been the only person who wasn’t wearing frosting or flour by the end of the day.
But he had also been the one to carry in the extra cookies, and help Joanne pack up the tins. And he had watched avidly as generation after generation of children learned how much fun it was to make the ugliest cookies on the planet.
She smiled up at her own son. Ryan had come in here, not just to talk with her, but because he remembered that his grandfather had done the same job.
“Have you visited him?” she asked, not sure she wanted to hear the answer. Her own sisters had disappointed her, and one of her daughters hadn’t visited her grandfather since he left the hospital for the nursing home.
“Leonardo has been insisting,” Ryan said.
Leonardo was Joanne’s oldest grandson. The rest of the family called him Leo, but Ryan loved the boy’s full name. Joanne’s father had shaken his head when he heard it.
Leo the Lionheart, his father had taken to calling the boy, and the nickname was proving true.
Who would think that a ten-year-old would be the one to insist on seeing his unconscious great-grandfather?
“You’ve been taking him to hospice?” Joanne asked.
“Every day we can manage it.” Ryan sounded as baffled as she felt. “He’s the one who keeps reminding me when it’s time to go.”
She heard the reluctance in his voice. It was the same reluctance she felt whenever she thought of going to the hospice care facility.
“Leonardo wanted to
take some cookies over today,” Ryan said. “I’m supposed to pack up the best for him.”
Joanne hadn’t thought of that, probably because she knew her father would never eat them. Ah, well. They’d last. Eventually the nursing staff would enjoy them.
Still, she picked out the best “example cookies,” the ugliest ones, dripping with the most frosting and decorations. She had an old tin, an extra one she’d kept for years for reasons she no longer remembered, and she carefully packed the cookies in that.
Her grandson came into the room just as she was finishing. Leo looked like a little lion. He had a round face and a flat catlike nose. His eyes were a light brown that matched his brownish-blond curls.
A streak of green frosting ran from his right ear to his nose, and his eyebrows were dusted with red sprinkles. She had a hunch he did that last on purpose.
“You wanna come and see Grandpop?” he asked Joanne. Grandpop was what all the kids called her father. Her own husband had been their grandfather, but his death was long enough ago that Leo was the only one who remembered him, and then only dimly.
“I’ll see him a little later,” Joanne said. “You tell him all about the cookies.”
Leo took the tin. “He’s sorry he missed out, but he said you’d understand.”
Her breath caught, but Leo didn’t seem to notice. He took the tin out of the kitchen as if he were holding gold.
Ryan watched him go. Joanne’s hands were shaking as she packed the last tin.
“He’s been doing that,” Ryan said. “It’s like he realizes Grandpa can’t talk, so he’s talking for him. I’m not sure if it’s sweet or creepy.”
“Or both,” Joanne said.
Ryan nodded. “We’ll stop at hospice. You sure you don’t want me to stay and help you clean up?”
She shook her head. “I’ve done it for years. It’s my chance to eat the leftover frosting.”
He chuckled. She grinned, then picked up the remaining tins and carried them into the dining room. The littlest two grandchildren—four-year-old cousins born days apart—had fallen asleep with their faces mashed against the table. The five- and six-year-olds—both boys—were stirring all the different frostings together to see what color they would get.
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 37
