Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  When I finally woke up on Saturday morning, I had Glitter on my tongue, which felt weird. I had been dreaming after all. Maybe I needed to live my body in Glitter on the inside, too, and that’s what I had tried to do in the dream. A girl could die eating Glitter.

  There wasn’t a lot of time. I rushed home, showered, shaved my pits and legs, sprayed fully, got dressed: panties, little pleated skirt, bra and cami, pink Chuck high-tops. I put on heavy black mascara, did my eyeliner and eye shadow in Glitter Gem’s own Rainbow #4. I did the winged eyeliner, like Lana del Rey. I did my lips in Glitter gloss. Then I sprayed again.

  In the pocket of the skirt, I slid my folded-up speech. My speech was ready, the words waiting, like me, to come out. The gate passes were in my trunk, the cashier’s checks were in my purse. I grabbed a Nalgene from the kitchen of the condo and looked around—what else? Maybe I wouldn’t live here anymore. The difference between being dead and a life in Glitter and being a ghost could be as easy as moving out of your condo.

  My ghost and I should sell real estate, I thought. She would make people want to move, and I’d sell them their next place.

  By the time I returned to Findlay Park, even before I could turn onto the access road, there were cars, oh my God, so many cars had arrived, bumper to bumper. There were three or four cars done fully in Glitter, too. There were so many people, I felt like I would never be able to hug them all, to say thank you. I pulled off the road and onto the grass, parked, and texted the bro beard Parks and Rec guy, and he walked out to my car, to help carry the boxes (it was girly, I know, but I had a latte in my other hand). Here I had been worrying about five hundred people—our break-even—and hundreds were there already, four hours before the show, maybe even a thousand people!

  The dude with the beard found me. “You look amazing,” he said. “It’s so early! Look!”

  I wished, for the first time, that I remembered his name. Ray? Troy? “Thank you. Stuff’s in the trunk, please.”

  “Isn’t this unbelievable? Evie, you’re the best!”

  Joan from Glitter Gems had it going on already. She was setting up four spray booths just inside the entrance. Nose plugs, earplugs, close your mouth, step into the stall, and tsit-tsit-tsit-tsit, with a kind of airbrush, head to toe, the festivalgoers would be sprayed in the brilliant colors of Glitter. Joan was serious and totally in charge of her artists.

  “Evie” was all she said, nodding.

  Joan.

  Being cool with each other, me and Joan.

  Inside the park, on the fields, there was music. A band was playing on Stage 2. It was the Sad Huns. When he saw me, Brat stopped, rose from behind his drum kit, and the tune fell apart. He slid up his motorcycle goggles onto his forehead. “Hey, like, Evie. Wow. We kinda…we wanna jam. I hope it’s okay. There were people here, and people…I mean…people like it.” He was being so polite. “Okay?”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  The Parks and Rec hipster nodded.

  “I want to be Glittered!” said one of the singers.

  “Oh, yeah,” Brat added. “We brought a friend. This is Anders Fly. You know.”

  I looked at a guy I hadn’t noticed, a guitarist standing by an upstage monitor. “Anders Fly? The Anders Fly? From the High Mighties? That Anders?!”

  “What it is,” Anders said. He had on a turban, parachute pants, a tuxedo jacket, and no shirt. He hit his wa-wa, hello.

  “Oh, awesome!” the hipster whispered to me. “Anders Fly.”

  “What it is!” I squeaked back at Anders.

  “We need more security,” the hipster said really quickly. “Evie, this is awesome. That’s Anders Fly. I mean, that’s…God! He’s a god! Dude! Evie! I’m on it!” He handed me my walkie-talkie, pressed TALK on his, and said in a deep voice, “Evie Glitter,” even though we were standing next to each other. Then he kind of skipped away, toward the admin office.

  What was happening? I felt my heart go bumpity.

  I don’t know what I remember. Memory’s just a part of it all, anyway, and it’s not real either, it’s just what happened already and won’t again. When I think back to the day, it’s like trying to remember something from when I was a two-year-old, before my first memory, and I know I can’t know, but I know. I was there, it all happened, but it’s not real anymore, because what’s happened isn’t real. A ghost had to be a memory, because a ghost isn’t alive now, so a ghost was there. So a ghost isn’t real? I was so turned around.

  What will happen, now that’s the show.

  So many people came that the SHPD called the SHFD, and at three o’clock, the hour when GlitterFest was supposed to begin, the police began to turn away disappointed latecomers. We closed the incoming lane of access road 1055 to Findlay at 3:30. We got a couple of ambulances to come park by the tent, just in case someone had a GlitterFit or a GlitterMeltdown. The head count was around 4,500, although we ran out of the printed gate passes early, so I’m only guessing based on estimated gate receipts.

  Charles brought my parents. Luckily, I remembered to comp them.

  I think I ate a garden burger, at one point, and if I did, it was awful.

  So many friends in Glitter, so many colors and sparkles, but also so many people who had no idea—there was dear dumb Binky, and I showed her, and I helped her get sprayed, and I sat her down in the grass later, and we talked and talked, but who knows. I liked her big hat; it was from Remarkable Relix.

  She had found glitter around me, she said, like in her passenger seat after driving me to the quarry last year. She had thought it might be just from my shoes or my bra, although she admitted she hoped I had a thing. A thing is so interesting, she said. I want a thing too, Binky said.

  I told her I loved her. She told me the Cross twins were still at Hilton Head.

  I realized when I walked away that I don’t love Binky. She can be a real bitch. That’s okay. Or I did love her—because if I felt love, that was love, so maybe I did love her after all, BFF 4evs.

  GlitterMart must have had fifty vendors in the parking lot, all of these people who had spent hours coating their things in Glitter, who had bought cases of water bottles and done them in Glitter or had just made T-shirts. I couldn’t get through the aisles, there were too many shoppers. I saw a computer and computer printer in Glitter, book covers, golf club covers, a toaster, and every pet outfit ever. Dogs in Glitter and an iguana in a Glitter cage. I tried not to stare. I didn’t think the iguana was me.

  A couple of the bands sucked, especially You Too, but I expected them to suck. During “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” the guy pretending to be Flea went to do a kind of split and dropped his bass and it broke. That was loud. Some of the crowd—okay, a lot of people—cheered.

  There was a run on the Official GlitterFest T-shirts, and then we had no more. The margin on those was $14 per. That was my bad, not having ordered too many and dumped the extras online later. The kids’ sizes sold first.

  The weather was unbelievably great, that day where one cloud hangs out really far away and watches. All of that Glitter in the sun. I couldn’t wait for the Chicksburgh set, and for the black lights.

  I wasn’t that cloud either. Something was different with me, though, because I was checking myself in everything, Evie Glitter in every mirror.

  The hipster guy from Parks and Rec hugged me like thirty times. I think he used the walkie-talkie to find out where I was so he could show up and look all surprised and then hug me. He was getting cuter.

  I met Glitter Del, who owned the Glitter Dome in Charlottesville, and he introduced himself and invited me to come hang out. He was a Latino guy in his fifties, with a poufy ’do. He was pushing Glitter Alice in her wheelchair, which was totally pimped out in Glitter. Of course, I Instagrammed.

  I made sure to avoid my family. Charles had agreed to keep them occupied. I spied on them for a little while from behind a tower of amps, as they looked around and pretended to be happy. My mom was like a skittish mare. My
dad was all proper, even in a pretty chill purple polo, collar unpopped for once. He pops his collar and it’s the worst. But they looked so normal and out of place, I got scared again. Was that me? I was like that too. I was a ghost, an iguana, my mom. I was none of the above.

  My parents of course had not been sprayed, not Bertrand Ellison Louis and Nancy Robinson Starkweather Louis of Saxon Hills, Maryland.

  Just after eight, the sun going down, I turned off my walkie-talkie and waited in line for the women’s bathroom behind Ball Field #4 to be sick. I had ten minutes before my speech. All of the stalls were occupied, the veggie burgers working.

  When the far stall finally finished, and I rushed in and locked the door, I was hyperventilating.

  When I began to vomit, so did the person in the stall next to me.

  Vomiting always takes so long, and it makes my hair tingle, for some weird reason, or maybe it’s my scalp. I hate, hate, hate throwing up. When I was done, I tried to catch my breath and stop gulping.

  The person in the stall next to me was also done.

  I knew something, I thought. I knew who she was, and I said so. “Hey,” I said through the stall, to the person next to me. “Are you my ghost?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Did you hear me? Are you my ghost?”

  Again, nothing.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I have to know.”

  Her foot moved. She had on big black boots that had been sprayed in Glitter. That was a new look for my ghost, a little mall rat for me, but okay.

  “I…” She coughed.

  “What?” I interrupted her. She had never talked. I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. This was it.

  “I came for the show,” she said in a whisper.

  “I knew it!” I cried out, and banged my palm on the wall of the stall. Suddenly, there was applause outside, a vamp from the band. “Oh, shit, that’s me.” I gathered my stuff, jammed things into my purse again. “Thank you. Oh my God. I’m on. Wish me luck, oh my God. Thank you.”

  I threw open the stall door, ran to the sink, splashed my face, rinsed my mouth, washed my hands, and came back to the mirror. I popped a peppermint from a box of Bix, a square Bix Mint, favorite mints of the Queen of the Netherlands. I pinched the tops of my cheeks.

  “I’m going,” I said to the ghost in the stall behind me. “Feel better.”

  I stopped for another second, to look good in the mirror. Then I was running and it was the best feeling ever.

  CHRISTMAS IN JULY

  I moved back to Saxon Hills, Maryland, to live, never thinking that my thirteen-year-old niece and goddaughter would move in with me to die.

  I had spent childhood summers here at my grandfather’s cabin on Upper Lake Fanning, just ten miles north of town, so I knew Saxon Hills, or thought I did. Saxon Hills—where I had swum and canoed, had my first French kiss, gotten my first period, and touched my first naked boy—looked familiar enough, when I needed a place to run two years ago. I believed my memories could protect me.

  No matter that the cabin had burned to the ground, or that some of my firsts were unforgettable for the wrong reasons, or that in Saxon Hills I had once stood at the side of the road and watched a deer get hit by a truck, a memory that had become a vision that had become a symbol and then a prediction. As I was in the midst of what was clearly a breakdown, moving back to Saxon Hills seemed an opportunity to hide in an idealized past rather than have my face rubbed in an awful present. At the time, I had only those two choices, or so I convinced myself. Renting a house here cost one-fifth of what I was paying for a duplex on Long Island, my credentials suited the job for which I was being recruited, and the people of Saxon Hills looked to be puttering along happily as though it were still 1985, when I was seven years old and not yet hostage to my own life. That Saxon Hills appeared safely unappealing made the decision to move here appealing. Boring looked happy.

  I used to be Nikki Danzig, a Maryland girl by birth and circumstance and a New Yorker in spirit and temperament—go-getter, dynamo, a woman accustomed to being in charge. The more I battled and won, the better I got at my job, the more inclined I became privately toward certain eccentricities and terrors, a divide that ultimately became a chasm. I was thirty-five and childless. I have always been far too relentless and scared to be a parent, and men in general had started to become too male for me, so I was also thirty-five and single. In Saxon Hills, I met with no aggression to match my own or to amplify my phobias; I was allowed to ebb at whatever ease I wanted, to take the edge off of my needs.

  Until, after two years here, at the end of June, I agreed to drive to DC to pick up Beatrice—my late brother Otto’s kid, Otto the Favorite, Otto the Success, dead Otto—and bring her here, and thus I began to participate fully in the lie that became my niece’s palliative care, each day lying more as her condition worsened. Lies of omission, lies in every glance, lies at each meal. Beatrice was told she would be okay, the biggest lie of all, first told by her wide-eyed, dipshit, junkie mother, and never corrected by me.

  Beatrice wasn’t stupid, she was a Danzig after all, so she knew plenty, including the fact that she was sick, and anyone could see that her mother didn’t want her. Whom did Beatrice want? There wasn’t a choice, only a booby prize. Once her good dad was gone and her bad mom had been checked into rehab, Beatrice got me. The thirteen-year-old kid raised in the gentility of Adams Morgan, dying of cancer, was sent to stay with a terrified aunt she didn’t know in a tiny western Maryland town where nothing happens. A thirteen-year-old who would no longer answer to either Beatrice or Bea, who insisted that we call her Christmas—a willful adolescent gesture I pretended to mind because I thought a mother should. Secretly, I admired her bravado. Christmas was the right name for my kind of kid.

  Growing up, I was so bad at being a girl, I had never known what girls were. I told Christmas this much, or tried to tell her. I spoke to her a lot, for me, when she was in my house, even when it felt as though I were speaking at her. When I’m silent, I’m listening—but I couldn’t tell if she was. On the drive here, and over the course of those first lopsided days we lived together, I talked to her as an adult—which in retrospect might have been the wrong approach. Christmas was precocious, sassy, capricious, smart, and mean; in short, she was thirteen years old, a combustible mix of an ever-changing seven- and nineteen-year-old. I think I overlooked the little girl hidden in her and only saw the petulant young woman, whom I treated as an antagonist. Christmas deserved to have a childhood, even and maybe especially at the end.

  Shortly after moving in with me, Christmas began to roam, to disappear all day, and then overnight, and then for a couple of days at a time, and always she came back sicker. She looked to be returning to the wild, but how wild could Saxon Hills get? It seemed pretty safe out there—even if it terrified me. What was the worst that could happen that I hadn’t imagined already? It was as though she had saved her money, and decided to backpack across Europe—that’s what I told myself at first—only she hadn’t any money and Saxon Hills isn’t France.

  Later, I began to understand that a biological imperative had taken over, that her body was making a decision. Like an animal, Christmas was finding a safe place to curl up and die. She was wounded, scratching at the grass to make herself a hidey-hole. I do the same. My body makes decisions too. I rationalized: she was making her own Make-a-Wish ending. So I kept tabs on her, Saxon Hills being a small town, and me the assistant town planner, and I did nothing to deter her expeditions. I wanted her to do whatever she wanted; she’d never had the chance, I reasoned. But in truth, of course, her wandering took the burden of her future death from me.

  The Internet has made stories like Christmas’ ordinary, those human interest profiles once saved for the last three minutes of the Nightly News, stories introduced with “and finally…” the lead-in a sure sign of impending sentimentality. Now the Nightly News has become all headlines; now we coo to Yahoo instead of to each other
in the family room, rage against the pixilated president, close our eyes before we open them and click again. I admit I don’t mind, as I’m better at feelings when I’m alone. But it’s sad that the true story of the thirteen-year-old Christmas has become a roll-over, her death inaudible, the mouse sliding past.

  Much of my time since Christmas’ death has been spent in these kinds of spiraling thoughts, spinning like a wobbly top through the universe—a spinning top without a table on which to spin, just spinning every which way, no surface and no friction. I have more than a passing acquaintance with death, which should have included Christmas, but never quite believing in her as a person, not having chosen, has screwed up my sense of the universe’s order. Or maybe that’s one of the lies she taught me.

  That my grandparents died seemed inevitable, an act of Nature; that my brother died seemed tragic, a decent, well-loved man plucked too young from his affairs; that Christmas died seemed a travesty, a cosmic joke, all the more so as a result of how she died, which became a challenge to our safe lives in Saxon Hills, Maryland.

  I will tell her story. I will get it right. I promised myself that I would get it right—there are still too many unknowns surrounding what exactly happened, and what she did. The police have one version, the Internet another. But I am a person who asks questions. Questions are more than my inclination; they are also my profession. Where shall we build that road? Who benefits from a new public park? How will we evaluate bids for waste removal? How can we keep the water clean? What should the land use policy be on the other side of the river? Although only an assistant, I have my eye on the top job: I am a town planner. I understand laws, rule, bylaws, easements, allowances, dispensations, rights-of-way, codicils, and partnerships; I can negotiate, file, post, project, demure, attach, deliberate, manage. Professionally, I’m sensible. I understand the civilizing powers that keep the chaos at bay.