by Haven Kimmel
And Trisha. She kept her hair cut as short as a marine’s, smoked in the parking lot, and walked like a wrestler. She wore black concert T-shirts stretched over her massive frame, and she was always looking for someone to fight. No one understood what she wanted, whether it was to vent her rage, to prove something, or to actually get hurt. There they all were, the faculty and administration, the students of the Midwest. They had no psychological vocabulary, and no experience outside the razor-straight lines of their county, and in every class there was someone like Trisha (someone like Claudia, she now realized), a vexing atypicality: a girl too thin; a boy who, every day, threatened to kill his stepfather. There had been curly-haired Kevin, who wanted to stage Broadway musicals, the girl whose arms were covered with self-inflicted cuts, and to a person the teachers had just tried to get them through the system and out the double doors before they blew up or expressed themselves irrevocably.
Trisha had cornered Claudia in the girls’ restroom. Had she pushed her? Claudia remembered how the other girls at the sinks had vanished without a sound, and how she had hit her elbow on the towel dispenser. Trisha was the height of Claudia’s stomach, her glasses were smudged—as soon as Claudia started to remember it, she remembered every detail. The T-shirt that day, faded, frayed around the neck, was KISS Love Gun. Claudia had never hit anyone; she had, in fact, worked very hard to keep her body separate from all other bodies. She remembered the breathless near-panic as Trisha got closer and closer to her, the sharp heat rising through Trisha’s shirt. Trisha was going to hit her, or worse.
“I want to ask you a question,” Trisha said. She had a grinding voice, already affected by cigarettes. “I said I want to ask you a question.”
“Well, then”—Claudia cleared her throat—“ask it.”
Trisha lowered her head, looked up at Claudia like a bull about to charge. “Will you go to the prom with me?”
What had Claudia answered? She had no idea; she could no longer imagine the horror she must have felt, the black implications of the question. She said…whatever it was she said, and Trisha’s eyes filled with tears, and then she punched not Claudia but the towel dispenser, breaking two of the knuckles of her right fist. Everyone had fled the restroom, but by the end of the school day the news had spread far and wide, and that night at dinner Millie had tortured her by talking obsessively about the prom, who was going with whom and wearing what, the theme song, the colors, finally saying, “Have you ever thought about going to the prom, Claudia?” In a moment all the more shocking for its rarity, Ludie had picked up a dinner roll and thrown it directly at Millie’s face; it had hit her in the forehead with a satisfying, doughy thunk.
Claudia had remembered it all over the past few hours, a thousand separate moments that told her who she was, or who she might have been if she’d paid attention, if she’d been braver. I could have moved away, she thought, imagining a place where it was okay to be both so tall and in love with Sarah Jackson, but of course she couldn’t have moved away and there was no such place. She sat up, watched Oliver shake his bunny rattle, pull it furiously into his mouth, chew on it a moment, then shake it again. Her hips and hamstrings had begun to ache; she’d lifted a dresser wrong, or set it down wrong, something.
She stood up slowly and walked toward the crib. Oliver watched her with a look of such concentrated happiness she nearly laughed out loud. He seemed to have forgotten all about her in the ten minutes she’d been out of sight, and now he was re-creating her, building himself a great big trustworthy toy, like a lion hidden in the back of the closet. If she’d moved away she would never have found him. He frowned, kicked his legs and swung his fists while also making a spit bubble—everything required such heroic effort. Claudia slid her hands under his head, his bottom, and lifted him up to her chest. He turned and began sucking on her cheek. Rebekah called this kissing but really it was something else, a desperate little remnant that made Claudia’s throat tighten with sadness.
She held him, amused him with the black and red jingle-bell worm, and tried to imagine what she might say to Rebekah, or even to Millie. She was what she was and she loved whomever she loved, and none of that was making her so angry. What infuriated her was simply that she had, out of the blue and surely against the wishes of all the Millies everywhere, been given what everyone else expected as a birthright. The world belonged to other people; it belonged to the Death’s-heads in their SUVs, to frat boys, to the fat women in the gas stations who stared at Claudia as if she carried a plague. It belonged to evangelicals and morbidly narcissistic politicians. No one had ever said to her—and it pained her to realize that she included Ludie and Bertram in this failure—no one had told her that the brand-new, perfect, everyday world was hers, was Claudia’s as much as it was anyone’s. No one had ever even hinted that there might come a day when she would open her front door to Sinatra and Rebekah Shook, a blond-haired baby on her hip, bread in the oven, and it would be hers to have and to hold, at least for a little while longer, at least for tonight.
She changed her mind about the train suit, and dressed Oliver in his clown pajamas, adding the little nightcap with the fuzzy ball on the end, and decided that if and when the moment arrived, the moment Millie criticized her or made fun of her, or raised an eyebrow at Rebekah’s unmarried, fatherless condition, Claudia would simply lift her up by her cheap clothes and carry her out the door. Claudia wouldn’t need to say a word to her sister, she’d just pick her up and deposit her outside, locking the door behind her, and then she’d sit Rebekah down and explain to her that her whole life had been a lie, but it wasn’t going to be anymore. That’s what she would do.
The doorbell rang and Claudia jumped, scaring Oliver, who puffed out his bottom lip as if he would cry. Claudia bounced him a moment, listening. She heard Rebekah turn down her music, walk from the kitchen down the hallway, through the living room. The front door opened with a vacuum sound from the weather stripping, and there was Millie’s pointed voice, right on time. Claudia couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she stepped out of her room and stood at the top of the steps. Rebekah laughed; Millie said something. Claudia took a few steps down, then a few more, until finally she was in plain sight.
“People are talking, you know how people talk, I was in the Pizza King with Tracy yesterday and I heard someone say…” Millie dropped two shopping bags filled with wrapped gifts, took off her coat and tossed it on the couch. Claudia took the last few steps down, still watching Rebekah.
“And then someone from the PTA Daisy Chain—well, it isn’t really a gossip Daisy Chain, it’s for snow days—called and said she’d heard Claudie was living with a woman and a baby boy.” Millie glanced at her sister and Oliver, turned back to Rebekah. “I said, ‘Please. Claudia Modjeski will have a baby when I grow wings and take to the—’” Millie looked back at Oliver, taking him in, and shouted, “I have a nephew!” startling everyone. She raised her arms in the air as if declaring a touchdown. “When Sheila Hopkins asked me at the Aldis today was I aware of what was going on in my parents’ house, I said, ‘I most assuredly am, Sheila Hopkins, are you aware of what goes on in the backseat of your Grand Am?’ in a way that put the squash on that conversation. I have a nephew, give me that baby,” she said, crying and reaching out for Oliver. “Oh, I’m just a mess, I know it, but you can’t imagine what this means to me, you can’t imagine how awful it’s been for me to think that all I had left was my own stupid husband and those children, Rebekah, you can’t imagine what teenagers are like, what it feels like to have to go on every day taking care of and being all nice to people who despise you, who wouldn’t give you the time of day if they had enough money and someplace else to live. And then when I found out about you, and about little Oliver here, I waited and waited for Claudia to call and tell me herself, but finally I couldn’t wait. What was I saying? Oh, when I heard about you and Oliver I just cried and cried, well I’m crying now, aren’t I, I am such a mess, because I suddenly realized there was hope for me,
because even though Mom and Daddy are dead and I can’t stand one single person who lives in my house, I still have a family, there’s a new family in town, and if anyone will do it right it’s Claudia, I’m sure you already know that, Rebekah, but she will do this one hundred percent right because that’s how she’s always been.” Millie wiped her eyes on her sleeve, kissed Oliver’s head again and again. “Claudia, it’s a good thing you’ve got your shoes on because I about cleaned out the baby section of Wal-Mart today, you better get out there and start hauling it in. If I guessed wrong on any of the sizes, just keep those things for the next one, Rebekah, come over and sit down and tell me how you feel and when you’re due. I had such a terrible labor with Tracy I thought I was going to die, I finally said to the doctor, ‘I am dying and you won’t admit it, you bitch!’ And poor Gil, he just told me to breathe.”
Claudia would have gone on standing there, dumbstruck and staring, if Rebekah hadn’t given her a nudge toward the front door. As she stepped outside she heard Millie say, “Show me—does it hurt right here? Because that’s probably—”
She let down Millie’s tailgate and there it all was: a new battery-operated swing. A new bright blue playpen in a box. Bag after bag filled with diapers and formula and bottles and little socks. Claudia took a deep breath, began to shoulder the plunder. She didn’t know anything about anything, that’s what she was figuring out. Poor, poor Millie. All the poor sisters of the world.
“Mom liked the green glass closer to the top,” Millie said, directing Claudia in the hanging of the ornaments. “No—Claude, land’s sakes you can reach all the way to the top, could you hang it a little higher, where Mom would have wanted it? Like I was saying”—she turned back to Rebekah, who was rocking Oliver—“I only married Larry because we’d had sex in high school and he convinced me I was ruined. Ruined was the word he used. I believed him. I mean, we were this couple, and at Jonah High people get started early on this mating business, as you know it comes from being around farm animals all the time.”
Claudia glanced at Rebekah, who raised an eyebrow in reply. Claudia shrugged.
“And Mom and Daddy did not say one single word, not one, to stop me. You’d have thought they’d at least suggest waiting, but no—they pushed me right out the door, glad to have me gone so they could devote all their time to Claudia, who was so much their favorite it wasn’t funny. Was not funny. Of course I’m over all that now.”
“I wasn’t their favorite, Millie. I was just here.”
“Oh, remember this one? Rebekah, did you look through this pinhole here, holding it up to the light? There’s a miniature nativity scene in there, this was the one I liked absolutely the best. I should have thought to ask for it years ago, I just love it.”
“Take it now,” Claudia said, standing next to the tree, waiting for the next order.
“No, no. I won’t take it now. If Mom had wanted me to have it she’d have given it to me, wouldn’t she. And the other thing is that after I was married, especially in that first year, remember that apartment, Claudie, where Larry and I were living, I think it had been a gas station before? It was terrible, I was always afraid to light a candle for fear the place would explode. Evenings we would sit on that ratty couch and watch an old television that didn’t hardly get any channels and we didn’t have anything to say to each other, not one single thing. Sometimes I’d get so lonely I’d just show up here during dinner and of course a place would be set for me but no one ever asked, ‘Millie, why do you look like this, why are you so miserable?’ Because that’s not our way, to ask and maybe save someone from a life of utter and complete joylessness, no, we just politely look away and keep our counsel. I would sit at the table and watch Mom and Daddy and Claudia interacting so nicely and I would think if only I could have what Claudia has, if only I’d found a way to get that. Here, Claudia, put this special one close to the front. Remember how Mom would want to take it down when company came to let people look through the little hole.”
“Mil, don’t you want to go outside and start smoking again?” Claudia asked, placing the ornament where she was told.
“What do you mean?” Rebekah said from the rocking chair. “What do you mean about if you could only have gotten what Claudia had?”
Millie rubbed her hand over the frosted spikes of her hair, shocking Claudia with familiarity. When had that happened? When did they both begin making that gesture?
“Whew, well, it’s hard to describe.”
“I feel like you’re going to try.” Claudia reached in the box, pulled out a red and silver ball, faded now and flaking its metallic shell.
“She just”—Millie looked at Rebekah as if the two of them were alone, which was fine by Claudia—“she was so self-contained and nothing got into her, nothing. It was as if…as if she lived on her own planet and nobody bothered her there, and everything there was orderly and clean and without…you know, disruption. Her car was always clean and her clothes were always pressed and she moved…as if she was just gliding over ice.”
Claudia was leaning down for another ornament, and stopped midway. “What did you say?”
“I said you just glided past the rest of us. You never reacted to me or my life. I’m not complaining or anything, I’m saying I envied you, especially after the kids were born because God knows my own life became such a tangle and I could never get anything done and everything right seemed, you know, just out of reach. But not with you, Claudia.”
The three women were silent, but Claudia could hear Millie’s voice still ringing around the room, nearly four decades of an ignored monologue.
“Everything with you was always right. Now, this one goes near the bottom of the tree so his little legs hang down,” Millie said, holding up a dessicated fabric Santa with a porcelain face. “Yes, like that. Oh he’s a sad one, isn’t he but Mom couldn’t throw such a thing away now, could she.”
1969
But where is the angel for the top of the tree?
Hazel and Caroline had looked through every box, uncoiled every string of dead lights. They had found a strand of tinsel so scraggly neither could recall its purchase; they’d found the missing baby Jesus from the plaster nativity set, gone three years now; they’d found the evidence of mice below the tree skirt. But no treetop angel.
On the east side of the wide hallway were three mahogany doors side by side. Standing before them, Hazel could see how they might appear in a dream: identical but for what was behind them, and what that was the dreamer couldn’t know until she’d opened one and it was too late. Awake, and in the bright daylight of Christmas Eve, they were just doors: one to the bathroom, one to the linen closet, one to the attic.
She opened the attic door, turned on the light to the hallway, which stayed dark even on the brightest days. The stairwell walls had gone unpainted perhaps the entire twentieth century; their color, streaked and flaking, was not one Hazel could name. It was a muddy yellow and it lacked uniformity, as if the original owners had mixed the remnants of two or three other colors together, without regard to the results, in order to cover raw plaster. The stairs, the same fine wood as the front staircase, were covered with dust. Nancy, their current housekeeper, obviously never ventured through door number three.
Six steps up, a landing, a turn, seven more steps. At the top Hazel turned and there it was. The ceiling was twelve feet at the peak, six feet on the dormer ends, above the windows with the large fans. The attic stretched the width of the house, as big as a ballroom. To her right was the place Albert had intended to build an entire village for model trains, if only Edie had been a boy. To the left was the nook, hidden behind an old batik blanket, where Edie used to bring her boyfriends to smoke pot and talk about overthrowing the government with mass levitation. Behind Hazel, stacks of waxed cardboard boxes, two hundred or more, containing medical records, invoices, journals Albert intended to read but never quite got around to. And everywhere, in front of the boxes and in place of the model train village, was th
e story of her family’s life, told in objects.
A birdcage, a child’s wheelchair, a set of crutches: these were left from the previous owners. A dressmaker’s dummy, a broken sewing machine, a wobbly hat rack. Here was a metal pole run between two beams, on which hung her uncle’s clothes, zipped up in a cloth bag and saturated with mothballs. Boxes marked Edna’s Things, packed up by Nancy when it seemed they would never see Edie again. A high chair that doubled as a potty chair, its decals of dancing teddy bears faded. Hazel rubbed her arms in the cold. She picked up the high chair and moved it across the room, closer to the wheelchair. She leaned the crutches against the bags of Uncle’s clothes. She straightened the dressmaker’s dummy, scooted it back until it caught a shaft of sunlight, and moved the sewing machine close enough that someone could really sit there, sewing, then stand and make adjustments. She found a stool, its cane seat shredded, and slid it in front of the sewing machine.
A breath crossed her shoulder. Hazel stood up straight, looked around. The room was bright, dusty, but nothing moved. She took a step toward the corner where the Christmas boxes were stored, and she felt it again: a sigh, a stirring. Her palms began to sweat and she rubbed them against her blue jeans.
Nancy hadn’t left any stray boxes when she carried the decorations downstairs. The angel must have been separated from the others last year, after the ritual dismantling of the tree.
