What the Web site implies in its omission is the fact that Galiano is grim almost beyond bearing in the winter. Darkness falls in the evenings at five o’clock, and the sun will not reappear until eight the next morning. Most days, the sun is notional at best, shrouded in layer upon layer of thick, gray cloud. Only one in four days goes without its squall or storm. Dampness is pervasive. Everything is sodden or dripping or clammy. The ground underfoot is saturated. Rain falls from the spreading branches of the trees—Douglas fir, western red cedar, alder, lodgepole pine—and collects in the understory of salal, sword fern, and Oregon grape. The constant damp encourages wild excesses of growth. Bunchgrass, elderberry, saskatoon, rabbitbrush, skunk cabbage, loosestrife, foamflower, and twinflower all compete for soil and sun and space. The twisted branches of arbutus reach to the water’s edge, and reeds, sedges, and glasswort thrive at the margin, where the green ocean waters slop against the sand and rocks. The landscape is uncontained, an unceasing roil of growth and rot, regrowth and decay.
We arrived in several groups a day or two before Christmas—husbands, wives, children, gifts, clothes, and supplies—and found that the several cottages we had booked were the opposite of what the word cottage brings to mind. They were ramshackle, cold, and dirty. The beds were lumpy, the sheets dubious or worse. Years of cooking grease coated the stovetops. The pots were black, the floors sticky, the couches repellent, the windows gray and unwashed. There was no charm or comfort or beauty.
And yet we stayed. In fact, as I recall it, no one seriously pursued trying to find an alternative. We were twelve adults and almost as many children. We were constrained by the ferry schedule, and in any case, there was unlikely to be anyplace else that could have taken us all at such short notice. A part of the reason we didn’t make any effort to leave may have been because the cottages, in fact the entire island, so perfectly reflected the way we felt—dismal, broken, incapable of giving or receiving consolation. We also sensed that we had put our mother through enough to come here; we could not ask her to be dislodged again for our own convenience when she had not known ease or freedom from grief for many months. None of this was spoken, but I know we all felt it, down to the youngest children.
We didn’t even try to set the place in order. Instead, the adults, except for my mother, drank steadily, beginning before noon. We must have produced meals, bathed and fed the children, had discussions, played board games and put together puzzles, prepared stockings, opened gifts on Christmas morning—but I have retained none of this. What I remember is pouring a glass of Scotch every day and ensuring that the bitter liquid was never quite gone until it was replaced with wine before dinner.
I remember seeing my mother sitting on one of those horrible couches and realizing how far advanced was the withdrawal of the heat that all my life she had radiated like a brazier. She had been the center of our gravity, had prevented things from falling apart, had kept conversation spilling, had always brought her wit gently to bear. And now she sat carefully, holding herself still, wearing what we thought of as her cancer face; radiation and steroids and pain had replaced her rapid, true expressions with a guarded absence. She was in retreat from us, and there was almost no will left in her.
I thought then back to when my husband and I lived in the British Columbia interior, when, in mid-October, we took the children to the Adams River salmon run. We watched as thousands of determined salmon, utterly uncaring of us, battled their way upstream toward oblivion. The river was red with them. The waters boiled with their struggles. Salmon that had lost the strength to get to their destination, doomed salmon, littered the riverbanks, and these salmon rapidly lost their rosy color; they were gray and gaping, and their eyes stared up to the merciless sky. These were the ones that my mother made me think of. Not the fighting ones but the ones that had not quite made it.
I do not remember what we talked about during those three days, but I do recollect how words felt in my mouth: cold, marmoreal, weighted like stone. I think most of these heavy words were left unsaid. I would go to sit beside my silent mother and fall into silence too, not companionably, but in despair.
I can remember only one moment of delight from that time. On the afternoon of the day before we left, a cold winter sun briefly appeared. We all left my mother and walked, carrying and shepherding children, along the only road, following it toward the north end of the island. As we passed a frozen pond, a rough, black circle ringed with the dried stalks and husks of summer plants, one of the children, or it might have been me, threw a large pebble to test the ice. The stone landed, then bounced and bounced again, and as it did, a ringing noise resounded, like frozen laughter released from a hidden underwater chamber. A hopeful, joyous, ridiculous sound. We stood there in a group, throwing fist-sized rocks onto the frozen surface of the pond, making it ring and chime, and gulping in the cold ice-music together with the frigid air. I stayed behind for a long time after the others had walked on, wholly contained within the rhythm of throwing and listening, like a fisherman casting his line again and again in hope of a catch. For almost an hour, alone, I held off the relentless advance of time.
THE BITE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Stanley Bing
I’ve never been a huge fan of the holidays. I like Christmas as a cultural event, full of figgy pudding and jolly, scabrous Santas hawking redemption on every street corner and then a week of limbo-weirdness in which nobody works, ending with a drunken, hurling crowd assembling in the public square for the change of year that, in the end, means nothing. The music of the season is nice, too, except when it makes you feel like crying. And I don’t mind the savings you get at the major department stores, either.
But starting at Thanksgiving time, I always begin to feel like my life isn’t as good as all the stuff I’m seeing in the popular media. Maybe my mom made a turkey that came out a little less succulent and more chewy than Martha’s. Or the circle around the family table was a little too small, and growing smaller. Or the presents exchanged all around didn’t fill anybody’s hearts with the kind of joy commensurate with seasonal expectations, and in fact occasionally generated whatever the opposite of goodwill among men was supposed to be. “Oh, that’s nice,” the recipient would say, looking at the proffered object with brooding, abject melancholy. And in that moment, what was revealed was not the glowing finger of the miraculous or the omnipresence of a guiding love, but only the amazing power of everyday life to be, above all, its immutable self.
Noel is the time of giving and forgiveness and community and shared warmth by the fireside and true appreciation of all that speaks of the fullness that underlies the mundane. And to the extent that it actually does refract light against that evanescent ideal, it has always been a time of emotional peril, of stocktaking, of unwanted insight into what is not, as well as what is.
Being a wandering stranger in a merry Christian land hasn’t added to the allure, either. My people came to this brave new American world about a hundred years ago, and found the orgy of red and green everywhere and their children totally left out of the whole baby Jesus thing. We were forced, being ever-competitive with whatever reigning culture into which we were being assimilated, to drum up our own version of the deal. Thus a minor holiday on our calendar, one that featured a few coins and nuts and fun games played with a spinning top, was promoted into a major feast of acquisition and gift-giving. This Not-Christmas has its own power to be both more and less than what we want it to be.
In the end, what I am left with when December rolls around and over us is a profound sense of not truly belonging to the game everybody else is playing, of missing… missing something, somebody… and a sense that somewhere, not very far away, someone is having a much better time.
So I don’t always start from a very good place, is the point I’m making.
Which is not to say that I don’t have great holidays to remember. I’m not Scrooge. The shopping part is nice, particularly when you imagine the rosy flush of tiny faces as they tear
away the wrapping paper. And the nap after the festive meal is as deep as sleep can get without easing over into coma. And at last, there is, in addition to all the crusty stuff, the feeling, when one has a family, of that little group clinging to a raft against the tide of commercialism, fatuity, piety (both real and faux), and communal materialism that has become our annual Noel.
It may not be perfect, we think, but it’s ours. And also, there is this thought, in the midst of it all—what if there was no Us? How terrible would that be? To see it on a midnight clear so starkly that there would be no way to deny it?
Would such a life be worth the living?
At the beginning of the new century, which did not spell the end of time, in spite of all predictions, I left my home of twenty-five years. I’m not the only guy of my age to do so, but there is no community of such people. We are alone, each and all, and never more alone than when the rest of the world is wrapping itself in one giant embrace.
It was some time in coming, this departure, and it represented, in its way, a simultaneous death and birth. The birth, unlike our genuine entry into this vale of laughter and tears, seems to be a somewhat protracted affair. The labor is still under way, at any rate, some years later. The death, on the other hand, like the actual moment that each of us will inevitably share, was short and brutal, even though the process leading to it was as long and as messy as that which attends the real thing. One minute I was in the world as I knew it. The next, I was not.
This took place in early December, when the Thanksgiving pumpkins had already begun to deflate on our porches, their grins rotting away from the bottom, turning to smirks and leers. It was cold. I had already secured for myself a small place in that most stereotypical location for men embarked on such a journey—an apartment on the marina. This was perhaps two miles from my old house, and as distant as the moon.
Christmas Eve arrived, as it inevitably does, whether retailers are ready for the end of shopping days or not. All the people with places to go went there and nestled into the bosoms of those closest to them, however capacious those bosoms might be. Those of us with no bosoms to go to were thrust out into the night.
There aren’t many places open on Christmas Eve. Some restaurants are lit, their tables shoved together to accommodate entire clans tearing up some poor bird or other. The occasional convenience store glimmers like a cheap toy, open for thoughtless, last-minute gift-givers, manned in my area by turbaned employees who presumably do not feel the misery of working on a day of comfort and joy. But the sidewalks are rolled up, all other stores dark. A few bereft individuals lurch here and there beneath the starry firmament. There is no traffic.
I was scheduled to go out of town the next morning, so that would be all right. But that evening, the void that underlies all of existence yawned wide and threatened to suck me in. Gooey treacle and pompous rejoicing oozed from the television. If I stayed indoors, the only solution would be to drink myself into a somnolent torpor, and I try to do that only when I’m happy.
I drove. No, I didn’t want to go to my local bar, full of sad, empty losers whose lives echoed my own at that moment. No, I didn’t want to play glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, which, for some reason, was open at that hour. And I didn’t want to drive anywhere near my old house, full of warmth and light and, quite possibly, turkey that did not come packaged in its own microwavable gravy.
I went to the Thruway Diner. As it has been every day, 24-7, for the past fifty years, it was open. I went in, and was amazed. Quite a few people were there. The stools at the counter were relatively full. The tables, both in the fast-turnover front room and the more high-tone, less casual dining room out back, were not full to bursting, but there was life in them under the tinsel and felt caps festooned with fake fur that hung from the doorways. A little seasonal music driveled from the speakers, but a game of some kind was on the TV sets around the room.
I chose the counter, because I saw that it was fully loaded with lumpy dumpsters like myself, men in their prime, as I am, whose hair might not have been sufficiently combed for the evening, dressed in ski jackets, heavy shirts, and boots, each bent over a plate of something to their liking, food not determined by the propriety of the hour, the day, the time of year. The guy to my right was reading a three-dayold paper. He had waffles and sausages. A more studious individual to my left was reading a book in a language I couldn’t guess at. It had no pictures. He was eating bacon and eggs.
I looked down the counter and saw the lineup of dishes selected by my brethren this Christmas Eve. There were perhaps ten of us. All but one was having breakfast at an hour when the rest of the world was staggering away from a table full of dinner, groaning with the strain that all that festivity was placing on their overloaded systems.
I don’t know about you, pilgrim, but for me breakfast at dinnertime has always been the most comforting of meals. Some claim meatloaf with potatoes for that privilege. Others swear by turkey with all the fixin’s. But for me there’s nothing like a stack of buttermilk flapjacks with three kinds of carcinogenic meat to make me feel like there’s a home someplace to which I just might be headed.
I had the flapjacks with bacon, ham, and sausage. Coffee, too. Not a word passed between any of us at that place where we shared our simple meal. In that silence was all the community that we required. Anything more would have been too much and far, far too little.
The next morning I took off for the coast. In a week, it would be the New Year, an enforced day of merriment I usually detest more than any other. On that Christmas morning, however, I found myself looking forward with a tiny flicker of cheer to the end of one twelve-month cycle and the beginning of the next. Some things are hard to leave behind, even when you have to. Maybe once that ritual is done, it doesn’t hurt to rejoin the rest of the world to celebrate all the Noels that just might lie ahead.
SURVIVOR
Louis Bayard
At some point in our conversation, it occurred to me this was where they brought the shoplifters. Toxed-up junkies, nose-picking teenagers, thrill-seeking grannies… one after another, dragged with their contraband into this same windowless chamber with hard orange plastic-shell chairs and naked overhead lights. Forced to confess their crimes… cuffed… read their rights… probably by the very guy who was interrogating me now.
A lanky guy, bald as an elbow, with eyes like frozen mouse droppings. A straight mouth, a straight back. He was the kind of guy who’d been in the army with my dad. Give him a couple of martinis, he’d unbend—bring out the war stories—tell you about peeing next to General Westmoreland. Sober, he gave you nothing. You had to give.
He sat ten feet away from me in his orange shell chair, and he fixed his mouth in that straight line, and he said, with disarming softness, “What makes you think you should be Rudy the Reindeer?”
It was a question I was fully prepared to answer—I’d just written a mini-essay on the subject as part of my application—but in that moment, I foundered. If I were to be truly honest (and, from the looks of him, he could sniff out deceit), I would have to confess that I was here to save my life.
Which, apart from setting the wrong tone, would then require me to take him through all the links in my dark mental chain. The first being:
1. Actuarial Data
Somewhere toward the beginning of my sixteenth year, I read that more people committed suicide during the holidays than at any other time of year. From this, I concluded that Christmas would kill me.
Why shouldn’t it? It had killed all the others, that was a matter of Statistics, and what right had I to be spared? Particularly considering how I’d begun to feel about it. Year after year, the same ebbing of spirit, the tug of gravity every time I heard a Salvation Army bell, the malaise of dragging up old construction-paper ornaments from the bottom of the ornament box.
The Christmas blahs, that’s what my mother would have called them, but that phrase didn’t get to the mortality that lay behind them. Christmas walked hand in han
d with Death. Death was there in the boas of tree tinsel and the bestselling thriller that Great-Aunt Alice sent us every year (with the price clipped off the front flap) and in every cup of hot cider and every Perry Como special and in the jangle of every strip-mall carol. Death lay behind all of it.
And so, as I contemplated the onrushing Christmas of 1978, I felt myself to be standing at the heart of a very busy interchange, with direly accelerating Statistics converging on me, and no other result but this: my own crumpled body laid out on the pavement.
2. Bette Davis
I should say right now I had no very keen desire to kill myself, and didn’t know anyone who had. For reasons that remain veiled to me, my notions of suicide were derived from Dark Victory, in which Bette Davis does not kill herself, is merely afflicted with a silent and fatal illness that will hold off (she is told) until the very final minutes of her life, at which point it will register as a gentle dimming of the lights.
Well, if death could come like that, couldn’t suicide? Sweep over you like the distant peal of a Salvation Army bell? One minute you’re yacking with Geraldine Fitzgerald in the garden; next minute, you’re stiff-upper-lipping George Brent out the door and lying down with the shadows.
This left me in a state of halfhearted vigilance, for it seemed to me that at any moment—shopping for tchotchkes at Spencer Gifts, shaking the dead needles from a Jaycees spruce—Death might come whispering in my ear. I had no choice but to arm myself in the manner of medieval saints resisting Satan’s thrall: with meditation and self-mastery and, above all, with hard seeds of infrangible wisdom.
The Worst Noel Page 6
