The Holiday Season

by Michael Knight

  “Point taken,” Hugh said. “I shouldn’t have snapped. But you know I hate being lost. You know how I get. No need to go all dramatic on me.”

  What Katie felt, more than anything, was relief. Her pronouncement had been erased, her unhappiness reduced to the product of a squabble, not uncommon even in a healthy marriage, easily repaired. She thought of the children (Evan, twelve; Nicole, eight) at home with Miss Anita. Tonight they would eat too much pizza and drink too much Coke and stay up past their bedtime, rare pleasures. How naturally happiness came to children.

  “Katie?”

  His voice surprised her.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “To top it off we’re late. Forty minutes. I hate being late almost as much as I hate being lost.”

  “They’ll understand.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Hugh said.

  Evan

  Evan Butter found hotbush.com on the Internet the day after Christmas. He’d talked his parents into getting him a computer and an online hookup for his room. Schoolwork, he said. It’s the only thing I want this year, he said, hinting that if there wasn’t a computer under the tree they’d have a deeply unhappy twelve-year-old on their hands. He knew they remembered how he’d sulked two years ago when they got him a three-speed instead of the mountain bike he asked for. He’d memorized his father’s American Express number and had been downloading naked pictures of a woman named Veronica ever since (Veronica on a pool table, Veronica emerging from a hot tub, Veronica doubled over and mugging for the camera through her legs).

  There were other women on the site (petite Autumn, busty Desiree, long-legged Lorelei) and there were other sites (bigsluts.com; beavershot.com), but he was faithful to Veronica. She reminded him of a girl named Lulu Fountain who went to his school and had acquired both breasts and braces the previous summer. She sat in the next desk over from his in Ms. Hempel’s English class, smelled faintly of maple syrup. Just before the holidays, he’d been flipping through his year-book and come across her picture and circled it in red ink. The picture had been taken before the braces so he sketched them in across her smile. She hardly ever smiled like that anymore, her whole face in it. The emphasis in her features had shifted since the summer. Now she kept her mouth pinched shut, her eyes open wide like she was constantly in the process of being startled. He looked at her picture for a long time. Then he added a mustache and horns. If asked, he would have been hard pressed to explain what exactly Veronica and Lulu Fountain had in common beyond the most rudimentary physical similarities: brown hair, brown eyes. There was, however, a barely perceptible look of amazement in Veronica’s features, as if she was surprised to find herself naked except for hip-high leather boots, the whole world looking on.

  Tonight, his mom and dad were off somewhere at a party. He and his little sister, Nicole, were under Miss Anita’s care. Miss Anita was the housekeeper. She was old and black and could be counted on to have no plans for New Year’s Eve. She had children of her own (now and then, Evan heard his mother asking her about them) but they were grown, didn’t need looking after anymore. Right now, Miss Anita was watching TV in the living room with Nicole, one of the New Year’s countdown shows. Evan could hear music drifting up the stairs and under his locked door. He’d been masturbating pretty much nonstop since dinner. He was a little sore and more than a little bored but refused to admit it to himself. It didn’t seem possible that such a wonder as Veronica could ever lose her charm.

  Lulu

  Lulu Fountain believed absolutely in the thunderbolt of love, as observed on the Turner Classic Movie Channel and in the novels of Jane Austen, believed that any action taken in its service could not possibly be wrong. Which was why she was trying not to feel guilty for running away from home this very night to live her life with a boy named Ike Tiptoe. Which was also why she was disappointed Ike had brought her, as usual, out to Illumination Meadows. There was nothing so wrong with the place itself. Illumination Meadows was an abandoned development out by the airport, lots staked off, foundations poured, the houses framed but unfinished, plastic sheeting tacked up to protect exposed drywall from the weather. It would have been plenty romantic if it was just the two of them, Ike and Lulu, tucked away in a half-built house, huddled together on New Year’s Eve, but Illumination Meadows was where Ike and his friends liked to hide out from the world. Even now, even with Ike’s hot mouth on her right ear, she could hear them downstairs, Ollie and Myrtle and Mary Lee and the two Neals, popping beer can tabs, laughing stoned laughs, scanning stations on the portable radio, and Lulu wanted more than anything for her and Ike to be alone.

  Ike Tiptoe was seventeen, four years her senior. She’d met him at a football game. Lulu went to Immaculate Conception Middle. Ike went to Bishop O’Dell High, where all the kids from the parish schools around Mobile wound up eventually. Lulu’s pep squad had been honored with an invitation to participate in the halftime show at Bishop O’Dell’s homecoming and Ike approached her in the third quarter and she loved him right away, which was how she knew her love was true, his mismatched eyes (one hazel, the other blue) and how thin he was under his coat. In her daydreams, Lulu saw herself lithe and graceful (precisely the reason she’d been taking ballet for the past six years) with a kind of hard-to-put-your-finger-on appeal, but in the mirror she was plain as pocket lint, with her braces and her freckles and her brown, nothing special hair. Even her dance instructor, Mrs. Settle-Kidd, had told her that, while she was happy to have Lulu in the class, she was too “flat-footed,” too “cumbersome of bone,” to have a future in ballet. But Ike: From that first moment, it was as if he perceived Lulu as she imagined herself, not as she was.

  “You look like that girl,” he’d said. “That actress. She was in that movie in New York where she worked for a magazine and her mother had cancer. She used to be in that show about hairdressers.”

  Lulu knew exactly who he meant.

  Stella

  Here’s how New Year’s Eve kicked off for Stella Fountain:

  First, she arrived home from work to find an eviction notice tacked to the door of her apartment. This was a nice building, an old hotel reclaimed, high ceilings, exposed brick, part of the city’s effort to gentrify downtown, not the sort of place where evictions were run-of-the-mill. But she’d buzzed a burglar in last week. It was a Tuesday evening and Lulu was due home from ballet any minute (somebody else’s mother brought her home on Tuesdays) and Stella always let her up without checking the intercom. The burglar made off with just over $6,000 worth of property, none of it Stella’s, which made for plenty of hard feelings, she was sure. Because she refused to make restitution (it could’ve happened to anybody was how she saw it), the tenant council decided it was best for everyone if she found other accommodations.

  Then she read the letter her daughter, Lulu, thirteen, had left on the dining room table. Dear Bitch, it began, and went on to list the various cruelties and indignities Stella had perpetrated on her poor child over the years, chief among which was the fact that Stella had forbidden Lulu to go on a car date that very evening with a high school boy named Ike Tiptoe. Consequently, Lulu had decided to live her own life, the letter said. She was practically a woman. Exclamation point. She could make her own decisions. Exclamation point. She didn’t need a mother. Exclamation point. She could look after herself. Double exclamation point. Sincerely, Lulu.

  Stella fixed a gin and tonic and sat on the couch waiting to cry but nothing happened so she called her ex-husband on his cell phone.

  “What’s up?” he said. “I’m in the car.”

  Stella had been divorced for almost four years. It had been an amicable proceeding. Irreconcilable differences were cited. Her husband, Boyd, had ceded custody to Stella without a fight, agreed to pay a generous percentage of his earnings in child support and handed it over each month without incident or complaint. For Lulu’s sake, Stella had kept her married name. She and Boyd had managed to stay friends. Lunch now and then. Parent-tea
cher conferences. Lulu’s ballet recitals. They still did holidays as a family. Together, they even took Lulu on a trip to see Swan Lake at the Kennedy Center last year. When she let herself think about it, Stella couldn’t help concluding that their relationship was better now than ever. There were nights when she couldn’t quite recall the reasons her marriage had dissolved.

  “Lulu hates me,” Stella said. The sound of his voice had triggered her tears and she fought to blink them back. “She’s run away from home. She left a note.”

  “She doesn’t hate you, honey. I’m sure this is nothing, OK. Lulu’s just acting out.” There was a burst of static. “—what teenage girls do. They rebel against their mothers. Tell me what the letter said.”

  “It said she hates me.”

  Boyd asked her, “What else? There must be something.”

  “This boy, Ike Tiptoe. He’s sixteen,” Stella said. “I wouldn’t let him take Lulu out in his car.”

  “That’s good. You did the right thing, honey. Here’s an idea: Why don’t you try calling his parents. Maybe they know what’s what.”

  “Would you come over?” Stella said.

  “Stella, honey, I’m on the interstate right now. I’m on my way someplace.”

  “Please,” she said.

  There was a crackly pause. She knew it was just the connection but it was hard not to hear impatience in the sound.

  “All right,” Boyd said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Stella sipped her drink, let the ice click against her teeth, imagined Boyd hunched up in his Mercedes. He drove with his seat too close to the wheel for a man his size. She considered mentioning the eviction notice but decided it would sound too much like a plea for sympathy. She hadn’t told him about the burglar. She worried it would make her seem helpless. She didn’t want the man she’d once married to think of her that way.

  Katie

  The Marchands were friends from early in the Butters’ marriage. They had lived in a neighborhood thick with smaller, older homes: wood floors, chipped paint, tidy lawns. Everyone was young, just getting started. Mark and Lauren Killibrew, Brett and Astrid Watts, Lee and Donna Mason. Katie was pregnant with Evan when they bought the house, with Nicole when they put it up for sale. They’d all moved on since then, some to bigger and better lives, some, like Boyd and Stella Fountain, sundered from them by divorce. They saw each other socially maybe once a year, usually at the Marchands’ New Year’s Eve soiree, made promises to spend more time together in the future, never did. The Marchands were the last to leave the neighborhood. Paul was a professor of mathematics, his rise in the world a little slower than the other husbands. The party was at their new house.

  Somehow, almost as soon as they arrived, Katie got herself cornered by a stranger, a colleague of Paul Marchand’s. His name, she thought, was Urqhardt. He was midforties, small (the top of his head barely reached the tip of Katie’s nose) and he wore his hair too long for a man his age, past his collar. He was telling her that his apartment had been robbed last week.

  “It was the strangest thing,” he said. “We came home from the movies and we knew right away that something was weird. We didn’t realize that we’d been robbed, of course. I mean, he didn’t tear the place up or anything. There was nothing obviously different, understand. It was like this presence in the room.”

  “We?”

  “My partner and me.”

  He pointed at a man standing by the fireplace with his elbow on the mantel. He was younger than Urqhardt by at least fifteen years, probably more. He dressed like a gay man. His clothes were stylish but too tight. Katie wouldn’t have been surprised if he was Urqhardt’s student. Other guests floated by, their heads like balloons passing through Katie’s line of sight. Music. Voices. Closer, perched on the arm of the couch, was Hugh. He was talking to Haley Marchand.

  “That’s Kevin,” Urqhardt said. He waved but Kevin didn’t see him. “Anyhow, he only took little things. My pocket watch and Kevin’s diamond studs, stuff like that, but we knew intuitively that our home had been invaded. I don’t need to tell you I’ve been having nightmares ever since.”

  “How was the movie?” Katie asked.

  Urqhardt blinked at her, smiled a close-lipped smile, as if she’d told a joke he didn’t get. She realized, too late, that she’d been rude. She hadn’t meant to be rude. The question had simply popped out of her mouth. She was intrigued, to tell the truth. That kind of dreadful intuition sounded awfully familiar.

  “Not good,” he said after a moment.

  He drained his chardonnay, wagged the empty glass, a parting gesture, an irked farewell. She watched him drift over to the bar, then drift away, his glass refilled, watched him circle through the party, headed for the sunporch, describing a perfect arc as far as possible from Katie.

  When she looked away, Katie was washed with a nervous, untethered feeling. Here she was alone in a roomful of people. Normally, she would have attached herself to Hugh, but after what she’d said, after what she told him in the car … It didn’t matter that he misunderstood. Earlier that evening, she’d asked Hugh if he thought she’d gotten old and he told her she looked great in such an absent way that the hair on the back of her neck stood up like he’d said something spooky. Hugh had been picking lint off of his jacket at the time. At the moment, he was engrossed with Haley Marchand. He’d always had a crush on Haley, she thought. Nothing serious. Haley was pretty enough, different enough from Katie, that Hugh wanted her to be impressed with him. Right this minute, he was probably letting her know, without actually saying the words aloud, how much more money there was to be made in headhunting (Hugh owned his own headhunting outfit) than in the education game. Once, in the old neighborhood, Hugh had gotten drunk at a cookout in somebody’s backyard and serenaded Haley with a medley of Beach Boys songs.

  Miss Anita

  Miss Anita knew exactly what was going on up in that boy’s room. She had three sons of her own. She was remembering an April Thursday, barely a month after her husband died, when she’d gone back to her oldest’s room to flip the mattress and found a sheaf of dirty magazines. Her first thought was what kind of stupid son had she raised to hide his dirty magazines in the bed. She wanted to roll them up and beat him like a dog. Her second thought, upon closer inspection, was that all the women in the dirty magazines were white. Weren’t there any dirty magazines for black people? Her third thought, the one that made her bones feel soft and dropped her to her knees, was that her husband was gone and he wasn’t coming back and she would have to sort this out alone. She shut her eyes and clasped her hands and asked Jesus what she should do.

  “Don’t do anything,” He replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “Leave the magazines where you found them and never speak of this to your son.”

  He sounded similar to but not exactly like the young lawyer on her favorite TV show.

  “Is this a test?” she asked.

  “Now is a time to count your blessings.”

  Miss Anita kept on praying and praying but Jesus did not speak again. After a while, after she’d gotten past her anger and confusion, she began to see the wisdom in His guidance. Her sons were healthy. The house was paid for. She had plenty of work. And she’d known love. That was something.

  Now, sixteen years had passed and her boys were married off and raising children of their own. She had two miniatures of Peppermint Schnapps in her belly right this minute and she was feeling warm and slow and there were ten more in her purse. There was still plenty to be grateful for. The little girl, Nicole, was sitting beside her on the couch with her toes tucked under Miss Anita’s thigh, and the boy, Evan, was doing what he was doing up in his room. She felt a pang of affection for them both, for being young and knowing nothing of the world. She hated to bother the boy but he’d been up there for hours and she was thinking she should at least let him know he was welcome to join them anytime. So she stepped into her slippers and creaked up to his room. The door was locked, wh
ich came as no surprise. She couldn’t help teasing him a little. She rattled the knob.

  “Whachu doing in there you need to lock a body out?”

  No answer, but she could hear a frantic ticking sound.

  “Boy?” she said.

  “What?” His voice was high-pitched and constricted. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You just sitting in there, hunh? All quiet? You just looking at the wall?”

  “I’m playing a computer game,” he said. “It’s Lucifer’s Gate.”

  “Lucifer,” she said and she covered her mouth to keep from laughing. “Well, why not give old Lucifer a rest and come watch TV with your sister. We gone pop some popcorn in a minute.”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  Miss Anita said, “Un-hunh.”

  Lulu

  She was wearing these low-slung jeans that exposed the waistband of her thong and this black sweater that showed off her belly-button ring and she was seriously cold. Even with Ike all over her. Even with her blood running crazy in her veins. They were making out on the bench seat of a pickup truck, all musty-rusty smelling and ripped in places and damp from a thousand rains. Ike and his friends cruised neighborhoods after school looking for cast-off furniture: an old futon, cracked-up box springs, this bench seat, a broken La-Z-Boy, permanently reclined, which they set up in the house as if they owned the place. Which they sort of did. Ike’s friend, Ollie, it was his father who had bankrolled the development until the IRS came calling for reasons not even Ollie could explain and his father had to put everything on hold.

  Three times before, Lulu had sneaked out of the apartment after her mother had gone to sleep and Ike had picked her up at the corner and brought her out here with his friends and each time, they’d socialized a minute, had a beer, smoked a little, then headed upstairs. Lulu had it in mind that this night would be different. It was New Year’s Eve after all, the perfect time for new beginnings, and she was in love. Which was why she’d made the mistake of telling her mother about Ike. Even her mother, who was divorced, who had only failed at love, even her mother, thought Lulu, had to respect the mysteries of the heart. She’d asked her mother for permission to go out with Ike this time, instead of slinking into the night. Her mother had, of course, refused. Lulu was too young and Ike was too old and there would be time enough for dating when she was in high school. Lulu cried and cried. Then she realized that, if you looked at it in the right light, her mother’s pigheadedness was kind of perfect. Forbidden love was surely more meaningful than any love that received her mother’s blessing. And this gave her an opportunity to prove to Ike just how enormous was her commitment. She hadn’t told him yet that she’d run away or about the brutal but honest letter she had left for her mother to find. She clutched the secret close to her heart as if it helped to keep her warm.