Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  All right, she could see that. She relented. “Nicholas, I’m not trying to stage-manage this — this date, if that’s what it is. I was surprised that you came by the shop. I wasn’t ready. And I’m not ready to go out this evening, either — I’m cold and I’m tired. I have a pail of steaks and a bottle of Cold Duck in the refrigerator, and enough fixings for a salad. Let me make dinner.”

  “A pair of steaks?”

  “There’s a grocery store off the perimeter highway that stays open night and day. I stopped there last night after work.”

  “But you didn’t think I’d come by today?”

  “No. Not really. And despite buying the steaks, I’m not sure I really wanted you to. I know that sounds backwards somehow, but it’s the truth.”

  Nicholas ignored this. “But you’ll have to cook. I wanted to spare you that. I wanted to do something for you.”

  “Spare me another trip down the highway in my car and the agony of waiting for service in one of this city’s snooty night spots."

  He gave in, and she felt kindlier toward him. They ate at the coffee table in the living room, sitting on the floor in their stocking feel and listening to an FM radio station. They talked cursorily about sports and politics and movies, which neither of them was particularly interested in anymore; and then, because they had both staked their lives to it, Marilyn lifted the taboo that Nicholas had promised to observe and they talked business. They didn’t talk about Liquid Sheers or profit margins or tax shelters, they talked about the involvement of their feelings with what they were doing and the sense of satisfaction that they derived from their work. That was common ground, and the evening passed — as Jane Sidney might have put it —“like sixty.”

  They were finishing the bottle of Cold Duck. Nicholas shifted positions, catching his knees with his right arm and rocking back a little.

  “Marilyn?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You would never have let me drive you over here if I hadn’t reminded you of this fellow you once knew, would you? This fellow named Jordan? Tell me the truth. No bet-hedging.”

  Her uneasiness returned. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Your answer won’t hurt my feelings. I’d like to think that now that you know me a little better my resemblance to this person doesn’t matter anymore—that you like me for myself.” I le waited.

  “Okay, then. You’re right.”

  “I’m right,” he echoed her dubiously.

  “I wouldn’t have let you bring me home if you hadn’t looked like Jordan. But now that I know you a little better it doesn’t make any difference.”

  Not much, Marilyn told herself. At least I’ve stopped putting you in a marine uniform and trimming back the hair over your ears. . . . She felt a quiet tenderness for both men, the dead Jordan and the boyish Nicholas Anson who in many ways seemed younger than Jordan ever had. . . . That’s because Jordan was almost three years older than you, Odau, and Nicholas is almost twenty years younger. Think a little.

  The young man who resembled Jordan Burk drained his glass and hoisted himself nimbly off the floor.

  “I’m staying at the Holiday Inn near the airport,” he said. “Let me call a cab so you won’t have to get out again.”

  “Cabs aren’t very good about answering night calls anymore. The drivers are afraid to come.”

  “I hate for you to have to drive me, Marilyn.” His look was expectant, and she hated to disappoint him.

  “Why don’t you just spend the night here?” she said.

  * * *

  They went upstairs together, and she was careful to close the door to the bedroom containing the wicker bassinet before following him into her own. They undressed in the greenish light sifting through her curtains from the arc lamp in the elm trees. Her heart raced. Then his body covered its beating, and afterwards she lay staring wide-eyed and bemused at her acoustic ceiling panels as he slept beside her with a hand on her hip. Then she fell asleep too, and woke when her sleeping mind noted that his hand was gone, and sat up to discover that Nicholas was no longer there. The wind in the leafless elms was making a noise like angry surf.

  “Nick!” she called.

  He didn’t answer.

  She swung her feet to the carpet, put on her gown, and found him standing in a pair of plaid boxer shorts beside the wicker bassinet. He had put on a desk lamp, and its glow made a pool of light that contained and illuminated everything in that corner of the room. There was no doubt that he had discovered the proof of her monstrousness there, even if he didn’t know what it meant.

  Instead of screaming or flying at him like a drunken doxy, she sank to the floor in the billow of her dressing gown, shamefully conscious of her restraint and too well satisfied by Nicholas’s snooping to be shocked by it. If she hadn’t wanted this to happen, she would never have let him come. Or she would have locked the door to her shrine. Or she would have murdered Nicholas in the numb sleep of his fulfillment. Any number of things. But this was what she had wanted.

  Confession and surcease.

  “I was looking for the bathroom,” Nicholas said. “I didn’t know where the upstairs bathroom was. But when I saw the baby bed . . . well, I didn’t know why you’d have a baby bed and—” He broke off.

  “Don’t explain, Nicholas.” She gave him an up-from-under look and wondered what her own appearance must suggest. Age, promiscuousness, dissolution? You grew old, that you couldn’t stop. But the others . . . those were lies. She wanted confession and surcease, that was all, and he was too intent on the bassinet to escape giving them to her, too intent to see how downright old she could look at two in the morning. Consumed by years. Consumed by that which life itself is nourished by. Just one of a world of consumer goods.

  Nicholas lifted something from the bassinet. He held it in the palm of one hand. “What it this?” he asked. “Marilyn . . . ?”

  “Lithopedion,” she said numbly. “The medical term is lithopedion. And lithopedion is the word I use when I want to put myself at a distance from it. With you here, that’s what I think I want to do—put myself at a distance from it. I don’t know. Do you understand?”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “It means stone child, Nicholas. I was delivered of it during the first week of December, 1968. A petrified fetus.”

  “Delivered of it?”

  “That’s wrong. I don’t know why I said that. It was removed surgically, cut from my abdominal cavity. Lithopedion.” Finally she began to cry. “Bring him to me.”

  The unfamiliar man across from her didn’t move. He held the stone child questioningly on his naked palm.

  “Damn it, Nicholas, I asked you to bring him to me! He’s mine! Bring him here!”

  She put a fist to one of her eyes and drew it away to find black makeup on the back of her hand. Anson brought her the lithopedion, and she cradled it against the flimsy bodice of her dressing gown. A male child, calcified, with a tiny hand to the side of its face and its eyes forever shut; a fossil before it had ever really begun to live.

  “This is Jordan’s son,” Marilyn told Anson, who was still standing over her. “Jordan’s and mine.”

  “But how could that be? He died during the Pacific campaign.” Marilyn took no notice of either the disbelief in Anson’s voice or his unaccountable knowledge of the circumstances of Jordan’s death. “We had a honeymoon in the house on Greenbriar while Maggie was off for Christmas,” she said, cradling her son. “Then Jordan had to return to his Division. In late March of’43 I collapsed while I was clerking at Satterwhite’s. I was stricken with terrible cramps and I collapsed. Maggie drove me home to Greenville, and I was treated for intestinal flu. That was the diagnosis of a local doctor. I was in a coma for a while. I had to be forcibly fed. But after a while I got well again, and the manager of the notions department at Satterwhite’s let me have my job back. I came back to the city.”

  “And twenty-five years later you had your baby?”

  Even the nast
iness that Anson imparted to this question failed to dismay her. “Yes. It was an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus grew not in my womb, you see, but in the right Fallopian tube—where there isn’t much room for it to grow. I didn’t know, I didn’t suspect anything. There were no signs.”

  “Until you collapsed at Satterwhite’s?”

  “Dr. Rule says that was the fetus bursting the Fallopian tube and escaping into the abdominal cavity. I didn’t know. I was twenty years old. It was diagnosed as flu, and they put me to bed. I had a terrible time. I almost died. Later in the year, just before Thanksgiving, Jordan was killed at Tarawa, and I wished that I had died before him.”

  “He never lived to see his son,” Anson said bitterly.

  “No. I was frightened of doctors. I’m still frightened by them. But in 1965 I went to work for the Creightons at Capitol Square, and when I began having severe pains in my side a couple of years later, they made me go to Dr. Rule. They told me I’d have to give up my job if I didn’t go.” Marilyn brought a fold of her nightgown around the calcified infant in her arms. “He discovered what was wrong. He delivered my baby. A lithopedion, he said. . . . Do you know that there’ve been only a few hundred of them in all recorded history? That makes me a freak, all my love at the beck and call of a father and son who’ll never be able to hear me.” Marilyn’s shoulders began to heave, and her mouth fell slack to let the sounds of her grief work clear. “A freak,” she repeated, sobbing.

  “No more a freak than that thing’s father.”

  She caught Anson’s tone and turned her eyes up to see his face through a blur of tears.

  “Its father was Jordan Burk,” Anson told her. “My father was Jordan Burk. He even went so far as to marry my mother, Miss Odau. But when he discovered she was pregnant, he deserted her to enlist in a Division bound for combat. But he came here first and found another pretty piece to slip it to before he left. You.”

  “No,” Marilyn said, her sobs suddenly stilled.

  “Yes. My mother found Burk in this city and asked him to come back to her. He pleaded his overmastering love for another woman and refused. I was no enticement at all—I was an argument for remaining with you. Once during her futile visit here Burk took my mother into Satterwhite’s by a side-street entrance and pointed you nut to her from one of the mezzanines. The ‘other woman’ was prettier than she was, my mother said. She gave up and returned home. She permitted Burk to divorce her without alimony while he was in the Pacific. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Later my mother married a man named Samuel Anson and we moved with him to California. . . . That thing in your arms, Miss Odau, is my half-brother.”

  It was impossible to cry now. Marilyn could hear her voice growing shrill and accusative. “That’s why you asked me to lunch yesterday, isn’t it? And why you asked me to dinner this evening. A chance for revenge. A chance to defile a memory you could have easily left untouched.” She slapped Anson across the thigh, harmlessly. “I didn’t know anything about your mother or you! I never suspected and I wasn’t responsible! I’m not that kind of freak! Why have you set out to destroy both me and one of the few things in my life I’ve truly been able to cherish? Why do you turn on me with a nasty ‘truth’ that doesn’t have any significance for me and never can? What kind of vindictive jackal are you?”

  Anson looked bewildered. He dropped onto his knees in front of her and tried to grip her shoulders. She shook his hands away.

  “Marilyn, I’m sorry. I asked you out because you called me Jordan, just like you let me drive you home because I resembled him.” “‘Marilyn’? What happened to ‘Miss Odau’?”

  “Never mind that.” He tried to grip her shoulders again, and she shook him off. “Is my crime greater than yours? If I’ve spoiled your memory of the man who fathered me, it’s because of the bitterness I’ve carried against him for as long as I can remember. My intention wasn’t to hurt you. The ‘other woman’ that my mother always used to talk about, even after she married Anson, has always been an abstract to me. Revenge wasn’t my motive. Curiosity, maybe. But not revenge. Please believe me.”

  “You have no imagination, Nicholas.”

  He looked at her searchingly. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if you’d only . . . Why should I explain this to you?

  I want you to get dressed and take my car and drive back to your motel. You can drop it off at Summerstone tomorrow when you come to get your rental car. Give the keys to one of the girls. I don’t want to see you.”

  “Out into the cold, huh?”

  “Please go, Nicholas. I might resort to screaming if you don’t,"

  He rose, went into the other bedroom, and a few minutes lain descended the carpeted stairs without saying a word. Marilyn heard the flaring of her Nova’s engine and a faint grinding of gear. After that, she heard nothing but the wind in the skeletal elm trees,

  Without rising from the floor in her second upstairs bedroom, she sang a lullaby to the fossil child in her arms. “Dapples and greys," she crooned. “Pintos and bays, / All the pretty little horses . . .”

  * * *

  It was almost seven o’clock of the following evening before Anson returned her key case to Cissy Campbell at the cash computer up front. Marilyn didn’t hear him or see him, and she was happy that she had been in her office when he at last came by. The episode was over. She hoped that she never saw Anson again, even if he was truly Jordan’s son — and she believed that Anson understood her wishes.

  Four hours later she pulled into the carport at Brookmist and crossed the parking lot to her small patio. The redwood gate was standing open. She pulled it shut behind her and set its latch. Then, inside, she felt briefly on the verge of swooning because there was an odor in the air like that of a man’s cologne, a fragrance Anson had worn. For a moment she considered running back onto the patio and shouting for assistance. If Anson was upstairs waiting for her, she’d be a fool to go up there alone. She’d be a fool to go up there at all. Who could read the mind of an enigma like Anson?

  He’s not up there waiting for you, Marilyn told herself. He’s been here and gone.

  But why?

  Your baby, Marilyn—see to your baby. Who knows what Anson might have done for spite? Who knows what sick destruction he might have—

  “Oh, God!” Marilyn cried aloud. She ran up the stairs unmindful of the intensifying smell of cologne and threw the door to her second bedroom open. The wicker bassinet was not in its corner but in the very center of the room. She ran to it and clutched its side, very nearly tipping it over.

  Unharmed, her and Jordan’s tiny child lay on the satin bolster she had made for him.

  Marilyn stood over the baby trying to catch her breath. Then she moved his bed back into the corner where it belonged. Not until the following morning was the smell of that musky cologne dissipated enough for her to forget that Anson — or someone — had been in her house. Because she had no evidence of theft, she rationalized that the odor had drifted into her apartment through the ventilation system from the townhouse next to hers.

  The fact that the bassinet had been moved she conveniently put out of her mind.

  * * *

  Two weeks passed. Business at Creighton’s Corner Boutique was brisk, and if Marilyn thought of Nicholas Anson at all, it was to console herself with the thought that by now he was back in Los Angeles. A continent away. But on the last weekend before Christmas, Jane Sidney told Marilyn that she thought she had seen Anson going through the center of one of Summerstone’s largest department stores carrying his samples case. He looked tan and happy, Jane said.

  “Good. But if he shows up here, I’m not in. If I’m waiting on a customer and he comes by, you or Terri will have to take over for me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But later that afternoon the telephone in her office rang, and when she answered it, the voice coming through the receiver was Anson’s.

  “Don’t hang up, Miss Odau. I knew you
wouldn’t see me in person, so I’ve been reduced to telephoning.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Take a walk down the mall toward Davner’s. Take a walk down the mall and meet me there.”

  “Why should I do that? I thought that’s why you phoned.”

  Anson hung up.

  You can wait forever, then, she told him. The phone didn’t ring again, and she busied herself with the onion-skin order forms and bills of lading. It was hard to pay attention to them, though.

  At last she got up and told Jane she was going to stroll down the mall to stretch her legs. The crowd was shoulder to shoulder. She saw old people being pushed along in wheelchairs and, as if they were dogs or monkeys, small children in leather harnesses. There were girls whose legs had been painted with Liquid Sheers, and young men in Russian hats and low-heeled shoes who made no secret of their appreciation of these girls’ legs. The benches lining the shaft at the center of the promenade were all occupied, and the people sitting on them looked fatigued and irritable.

  A hundred or so yards ahead of her, in front of the jewelry store called Davner’s, there was a Santa Claus and live reindeer.

  She kept walking.

  An odd display caught Marilyn’s eye. She did a double-take anti halted amid the traffic surging in both directions around her.

  “Hey,” a man said. He shoved past.

  The shop window to her right was lined with eight or ten chalk - white effigies not much longer than her hand. They were eyeless. A small light played on them like the revolving blue strobe on a police vehicle. A sign in the window said Stone Children for Christmas, from Latter-Day Novelties. Marilyn put a hand to her mouth and made a gagging sound that no one else on the mall paid any mind. She spun around. It seemed that Summerstone itself was swaying under her. Across from the gift shop, on one of the display cases of the bookstore located there, were a dozen more of these minute statuettes. Tiny fingers, tiny feet, tiny eyeless faces. She looked down the collapsing mall and saw still another window displaying replicas of her and Jordan’s baby. And in the windows that they weren’t displayed, they were endlessly reflected.