Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  She wouldn’t talk about it. I tried, but no. She just said, “I’m fine. Shut up.” Then she went behind a tree and changed into her bathing suit. She still wouldn’t go in the water, she’d only sit on one of the big rocks and sulk. Finally, she put her pants back on, over her suit. I was looking at her now and then as I swam with one of the Farley girls. It felt good not to smell me. I was also trying to get away from one of the boys from the extra back bedroom at The Mission, a street kid I didn’t know who had started looking at me close. He was creeping on me. So I’d swim away, and I would look over there and see Christmas and her big pout and her tall, skinny-ass body, and I felt bad, and I was also glad never to feel her feels. The feelings I had were all combo.

  I was trying to make some sense of this girl. I knew what I was like at thirteen—because at sixteen, when I burned Mrs. Cassavettes, I was the same person I had been when I was thirteen. That was part of my problem. I was still thirteen in my head, immature and totes self-centered, only I had become sixteen and dangerous because of my body and sex and my wanting everything and being a bitch to get what I wanted. I was not a cool sixteen-year-old. All the time, I was tweeting like I knew. Plus Alexi had hot shoulders, and tats on his neck, and he was a bad boy and older, twenty-four, with his own apartment and good drugs. We did it a lot. He was the boyfriend my parents would never let me have.

  Christmas didn’t want anything. How can a person not want anything? I worked it, to get her to come in—I splashed at her from the water, I made a little rhyming nothing of her name, and got a Farley girl to chant with me: Christmas, shiss-miss, kiss-kiss, kiss-kiss. Christmas wouldn’t get off that rock, and she wouldn’t do anything but stare, and then scribble in her journal like she was keeping notes on all of us.

  I had made sure she left her knife in the tree in front of The Mission. I knew about the knife already. I had seen the knife the second day, she was so bad at hiding it, and I had told her, yo, that’s not cool here. When I was thirteen, I should not have owned a knife.

  “The fuck, Christmas,” I said, but she wouldn’t answer, sitting on that rock. “Why’d you come?”

  When Christmas and I got ready to go to Pittsburgh, she did me a solid. I wanted a Farley vest bad, a souvenir. The Farleys had been good to me, and I had gotten clean again living with them, no more drugs most of the time. Weed doesn’t count. But the Farleys had kept me warm, even if they hadn’t cared—I mean, they had taught me their songs, and fed me, and let me work and stay at The Mission, and sometimes a couple of them would party with me in the woods, which wasn’t allowed, of course. I wanted to remember them, to have something from living there all winter. I like that.

  Christmas got me a Farley vest in exchange for her knife. I don’t know how she did it, because the Farleys cared a lot about their outfits and they didn’t need her knife, so who knows how she talked them out of the vest, but the day we were leaving, as Christmas and I were waiting for the bus, she gave me a vest. I think they didn’t want her to have that knife either.

  She would have made a hell of a Farley, for however long she lived. She was important to them, important enough to get a vest. I was thinking it was good that the Farleys weren’t into secret Farley tats, because Christmas was so skinny, and she might not heal right. A vest works.

  Christmas and I were waiting at the bus station—it’s not a building, just a roof way up high, like most bus stations, so you can get dumped on if it’s raining sideways, and there are some benches I wouldn’t sleep on, they’ve got that tilt to the seats and the heavy slats, which isn’t comfortable, but there was a Coke machine. A group of local losers moped around, waiting for our bus too, and one of them was wearing a big Uncle Sam hat from the Fourth of July. Like that hat was the best hat ever and he was cool.

  The gift was folded up and flat, and at first, I didn’t even know what she was doing, why Christmas would be handing me this thing. No one gives me anything. I couldn’t remember being given a gift. Someone always wanted something from me. Money would always be money.

  I didn’t want those losers to see what I was feeling. I spun around real quick and yanked at the zipper on my bag, which always sticks, and yanked some more, and then got my bag open and stashed the vest.

  In my bag was another vest, one I had stolen from the Farleys a couple of weeks before, but I didn’t tell Christmas.

  Mrs. Margaret Cassavettes had been married to her husband Christos Cassavettes, who died ten years ago of a heart attack, before I burned her. Last week I went to the Saxon Hills Public Library, signed up for Internet, and Googled until I found his obituary from 2007. The article didn’t say much about her, unfortunately, and it didn’t tell why she had lived in the Seventh Street apartment building as the super or whatever, or much about their two kids.

  The obit read: Christos Cassavettes, aged 58, husband of Margaret Cassavettes, father of Sophie (Cassavettes) Tremblay and Hank Tremblay, of Baltimore, Maryland; Tasso (John) Cassavettes and his wife, Katina Fellinger, of New Castle, Pennsylvania, and two grandchildren. The newspaper said that Christos had worked on the line at Alcoa before opening three restaurants in Western Maryland and he had been a deacon or something at his church. I didn’t pay much attention to the rest. Flowers to some charity, thanks to some hospital.

  Had Mrs. Cassavettes done anything at all during her life? Had she run one of the restaurants, or been the cook whose recipes they used, or cleaned houses, or worked in an office so that Christos Cassavettes could put in a hundred hours a week building his business? Had everyone ignored her too? When she had the two little kids in daycare, had she fucked around? That was a weird thought, the old-people-sex thing, although in the shelters, old people fucked and I had seen it, and once one of them wasn’t a granny. Still, I didn’t like the obituary: she wasn’t in it. The life I ruined must have been a life. Something I’ve done has to matter, even if it’s the wrong way. I printed out a copy of the obituary, just in case.

  There was no Mrs. Margaret Cassavettes in my nightmares, and I felt bad about that, too. I wanted her to show up in Farley gear, or wearing the head of an animal, or dressed like my old rabbi, or to step out of a cable TV truck and be all woo-ooo-ooo, or to lie next to me when I closed my eyes. But even though she was my fault, I never dreamed about her. All I could get was the firefighter running up the hill, and I would wake up screaming, bye-bye joybird. There wasn’t a way for me to feel bad enough. Mrs. Margaret Cassavettes wasn’t the victim I saw, and I couldn’t be the sinner who could be saved. No problem there, at least where I live: sin’s not real.

  Carrying around the obit fit my new idea about how when you’re living on the streets, you’re more like the people on daytime TV than the ones at night. People on daytime TV always have stuff they’re hiding in their wallets or purses, and the producer finds out, and the host asks, and then out comes the obit. Everyone gasps.

  Picture yourself with a house and a husband and a couple of little kids. Your name’s Sophie Tremblay, married to Hank the Tank, and you’re the daughter of Mrs. Margaret Cassavettes. Your mom and dad worked hard, gave up everything. Picture your mom all burned, lying in the hospital in the Burn Unit, taking skin grafts, and now you’re going to have to move so that she can recover at your house. You’re pissed. You know who did it, some high school girl who was drunk all the time, who thought blue eye shadow was retro enough to be slutty and cool, who said she wanted to be a nurse but didn’t know anything. This sixteen-year-old girl, she would be the one sitting in the street in a puddle of dirty water from the fire hoses, and she could taste the ash from the burning apartment building. She wouldn’t be smart enough to stand up and go get dry or sober. She didn’t think to go someplace where no one would see her. She would have her boyfriend’s jizz on her from last night. After that, she would keep trying to find the biggest puddle she could and go sit in it—not literally, of course, because that would be like drowning herself, and she’s still alive, no matter that she tried to kill herself with drugs and
all. She’s such a loser, she can’t even kill herself.

  I suck at emotions. Not that I get angry like some of those psychos in the shelter, which would inevitably bring the cops, but emotions make me unable to do anything, to think or to answer questions, or really, just to be a person. Emotions are a prison. I told a social worker that a million lives ago. It might have been why I thought so much about Christmas and tried to talk to her at The Mission and gave her advice and shit.

  She never asked for my advice, I know. Or, I know that now.

  We had agreed to travel together. We paid in cash (my cash, I paid, she nodded yes) at separate times for our bus tickets, so that I wouldn’t be abetting or doing something involving a minor. I knew about those laws. The cops and my parents had wanted me to rat out Alexi, say that he had raped me, because I was fifteen when we had started. But I wouldn’t tell.

  The plan was to get on the bus, get on the next bus, maybe there would have to be another bus, and go to Pittsburgh. The longer trip would be from Frederick through West Virginia, like twelve hours or something, but my geography sucks. Up to Hagerstown, I-70 through the mountains, Pittsburgh, we’re there. Christmas and I had different reasons for going to Pittsburgh, but both of us were going. It was time for me, bye-bye joybird. I had stayed too long. Christmas, she was just beginning something else, I think, because she had decided not to be in treatment, to hell with the doctors and Aunt Nikki. That was the impression I had, but she didn’t say much, Christmas, Miss-Miss.

  She was sleeping like someone who would never wake up, with tiny breaths, her long legs stretched out, her hands across her chest, her knitted hat rolled down over her eyes, sleeping in her own bus darkness. I couldn’t decide if Christmas looked more like a boy or a girl right then. She had that look, she could be anyone.

  A person couldn’t be anyone, I knew that, being anyone isn’t a choice. I also knew that running away didn’t feel the way it was supposed to, or how it was planned. There was no glory in it.

  I had a bag of Doritos and a Coke from the machine. Maybe it was ten o’clock at night, I didn’t have a watch or a phone, so I couldn’t say, but I was hungry enough. I could see out the window, but there weren’t any lights out there, we were in the mountains now, the world was gone. Some people on the bus were mumbling, someone back there was speaking Spanish. I don’t know Spanish, or what would be out there in the darkness that I couldn’t see. It was the same darkness in Spanish, in Mexico, or wherever I was going.

  I used my teeth to open the Doritos. Then I did the little Farley thing before I opened my Doritos:

  Oh, Farley, Farley,

  Thanks be

  For the Earth our bounty

  For the Sun our friend

  Oh, Farley, Farley,

  Thanks be

  For the river and wind

  That bring me thee

  Farley, Farley

  Tap, tap, fist, tap, tap. Thanks be.

  That Farley thing surprised the fuck out of me. Why was I singing like a Farley?

  The Farleys had gotten to me. Was that so bad? I thought about doing laundry at The Mission, what it would be like if the Farleys let me go upstairs, how I could sing instead of pretending. I could trade in my pretending.

  That was a big-ass thought, but not a Nerd-Ass thought. That was something Sarah thought. Next, Sarah decided.

  I woke her up: “Christmas, come on. Wake up. Christmas.” She grumbled, rubbed her eyes, stretched, and elbowed me on accident.

  “Christmas, we’ve gotta get off the bus. We’ve got to go. I’m taking you back. You’ve got to go home. I’m taking you home….”

  We had a ways to the next stop, and I said a lot more, but I don’t remember everything. I talked and talked, the words didn’t even feel mine, but I made Christmas listen. Maybe I told her about Mrs. Cassavettes, what if I did, the story had to tell itself to someone someday.

  My Doritos spilled in a kind of explosion. Damn, there went my Doritos.

  I was going to take her home to Aunt Nikki, who couldn’t be that bad, and she was going to do right by Christmas, and Christmas was going to get treated and get better. She was just a kid.

  Because I was going back, too, to get upstairs. I was going to be a Farley. They were the best people I had ever known, how they cared about each other. No Farley was ever alone.

  I was going to be a Farley, and I hoped Farley would never come.

  MY BEAUTY

  When my mother said Saxon Hills would be a good place to live, she meant Saxon South, because that’s where the black people lived. She was wrong. The idea that Saxon South was ever a leading black neighborhood was of course an invention, true to my mother’s vision of race in America and the illusions of her generation. Instead, Saxon South was for years home to too many different people to call the area anything but poor, most of its residents mid-century immigrants with strikingly discordant origin stories, disenfranchised together.

  In Saxon South, mixed-use zoning never worked, and the affectations of middle-class frippery served merely to distract from the cycle of poverty. As such, Saxon South can be seen as a yet another example of apartheid-by-real-estate in America, where the underemployed were jammed together with the underclass, mostly people of color but not only. There, boxed elbow to elbow, skipped by the census, victimized by the schemes of venal landlords and unforgiving public policies misnamed The Great Society, the people of Saxon South toiled. But toiling wasn’t enough, and eventually the area “transitioned,” as first crack and then meth picked off the most vulnerable.

  Of course, my mother never lived in Saxon South. She would only go there to visit her sister, my Aunt Emily. Notwithstanding, Mother knew, or at least always had an opinion. To Mother, some black people living near one another constituted a good neighborhood, necessary and sufficient. And now, ironically, she thinks she lives in Saxon South—because that’s where Alzheimer’s has delivered her, into the illusory embrace of a loving black community.

  I cannot fault my mother for her beliefs. Born in 1941, she lived her life strictly in the tight fist of a parochial life in Pittsburgh, growing up the middle of five sisters, her parents party and prey to equal opportunity longings. My mother gave birth to me in 1960 when she was barely eighteen, put herself through school as a single mom, had a small career, and witnessed much of what she had hoped for but could hardly believe: the glory of Dr. King, his shocking assassination, and then, more than three decades later, the election of a black president. These were her benchmarks, and proof of what she dreamed, her City on the Hill in sight at last. What she did not see, and will not now, is how the City on the Hill has been besieged by the vengeful mob—for Mother is beyond knowing the horror of today’s news, a small comfort for which I am nonetheless grateful. Mother has become too muddled to understand that the City on the Hill is burning.

  Now we have brought her here, in her dementia, to be a child again in the gracious ranch home I have leased along the northern edge of Saxon Hills. Everything imagined has taken the place of everything real—and I’m with her once again, a child of sorts too, but in my case clinging to a real life elsewhere. For the duration of mother’s decline, for this our shared portion, I’ve arranged to work remotely, keeping atop various cases and only returning to Capitol Hill as crises require. Still I’m nowhere here, acting nurse and son, newly single. Thus far my confinement with Mother has also felt oddly restorative, coming as it does on the heels of my break up with James three months ago, finally exhausted by our mutually persistent failure to be in love.

  So I think I’m still working, and that I’m the same man, albeit in some kind of recovery. My illusions abide as well. If Mother wants to believe she lives in a black neighborhood called Saxon South, and that makes her happy, why not? Almost everyone she sees in her confinement is black. If I want to believe I’m convalescing rather than mourning, who’s to say otherwise?

  There are good reasons for these decisions—that’s what I tell myself. Here, we’re cl
ose to her sister, my cheery Aunt Emily, a person sad around the edges, who already moved out of Saxon South years ago when she lost a child to the horrors of addiction. Mother likes her home, entertained by regular visits from a home healthcare worker and the breezy presence of my cousin Shauna, whom I have hired to help out. And Shauna has been a delightful surprise—a fine young woman, a firecracker, socially competent, and far too nice to me. Shauna’s been a good-humored addition to what might have become a charnel house. With her encouragement, I’ve learned to be an enthusiastic if bumbling caretaker.

  Mother has been taking care of someone too, an oddity of the highest order. She now keeps a little doll tucked to her breast, a child’s toy named Baby whose existence we all pretend not to know about, as per the advice of a good doctor. In the relentless miasma of her Alzheimer’s, with false consciousness all Mother can muster, Baby has become her truest friend.

  The conversations Mother has with Baby are the most difficult for me to accept, but I eavesdrop like any good horror fan. The fact that Mother doesn’t recognize me matters, and hurts, and yet the wounds aren’t mortal, her befuddlement indifferent, not about me. But when Mother questions Baby, and holds Baby up to hear an answer, I feel Death drawing near, a wave of darkness closing over Mother’s being and shivering mine.

  “Baby, do you remember that Irish girl? Momma cleaned for her…they were on Beechwood, near the ice cream man. They were so fine at their church—we went there once, sat in the back. Baby, you weren’t more than four, ’cause I was six. Someone had a new car—it wasn’t Daddy. Who had the new car, Baby?”

  I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room, Mother choosing to sit in her wheelchair nearby, even though she can still walk. Mother thinks I’m reading the paper. I’m on my iPad, which she hasn’t figured out: it’s got to be the Post-Gazette, because she can ask me for weather updates, and the weather’s become one of the few subjects about which we chat well enough. She doesn’t know I’ve got the camera on, the tablet poised on my leg, aimed at the little scene, and I’m making a movie to show the social worker (a camera that lets me feel like a sniper, or Instagram paparazzo, ever ready to upload the next disaster).