“Good morning, good morning, good morning!” he called to me jovially, scampering down the hall in his Christmas carpet slippers with holly embroidered on them. I sighed and rolled my eyes. The day’s festivities had undoubtedly begun. It was going to be a long one.
“You heard the bells, splendid, splendid! Have you tried the Christmas buffet yet? No? Well, it’s set up in the dining hall, of course.” Apparently, in the short time it had taken the bells of Notre Dame to wake up the whole household our dining room had become a dining hall.
“Bacon, eggs, ham, roast beef, no goose, of course, can’t have goose, that’s for dinner.”
“I don’t know, I was kind of looking forward to some breakfast goose,” I said.
“Ho, ho, ho, nothing like a little Christmas humor,” said Uncle Marten forgivingly. “Now, I must go finish stuffing stockings. Want everyone to have stockings round the fire. Round the fire. Awake the dogs and cats, there’s plenty for them, too.”
I had visions of rounding everyone up, puppy and cat, who lived their independent lives and were rarely seen, and nailing them to the floor around the fireplace. The morning events were going to be full of interest. I was just thankful I was well enough to withstand all this; it would be awful to have to appear in a weakened state.
I crept downstairs. Then, as I was sitting alone in the semidark “dining hall” with my plate of bacon and eggs, calmly watching dust motes dancing in the one stream of light coming from a window while the rain poured heavily as usual on the roof, down came Uncle Marten dressed to the nines and I realized that I was not going to be able to slop around in my pajamas in his Christmas scenario. He said nothing but had already provided a green velvet dress which yesterday Humdinger had placed on my bed. I trudged back upstairs. It fit more or less because it seemed to be some sort of medieval design, coming nearly floor-length and having a yard-wide waist.
When I came back down and Uncle Marten saw me, he asked, “Where is everyone else? Where is everyone else? This is Christmas after all!” Humdinger was standing with Uncle Marten before the fire, both of them sipping something hot from silver cups. His Christmas outfit from Uncle Marten was a tuxedo but still with the strange butler collar he had arrived with. Humdinger was as composed as always, and Uncle Marten quivering with excitement.
“Right,” said Humdinger, and he and I went to rouse Jocelyn and Mrs. Mendelbaum, who was very confused.
“This is not my holiday, bal toyreh! Loz mich tzu ru. I am a Jew!” she kept protesting to no avail. I don’t know what Humdinger did to convince her to come down, but she appeared looking shrunken in what I guess was the fanciest dress she had, a kind of awful-looking thing with large orange flowers. Uncle Marten eyed it with consternation. I could see he was thinking that not getting her a Christmas dress as well had been a great oversight. She clashed with all the cranberry and green. But there was always next year! Jocelyn still had a fever of 102, and so Humdinger carried her downstairs still in her pajamas and wrapped in a blanket.
“No dress? No Christmas finery?” asked Uncle Marten.
“No,” said Humdinger firmly.
“Are you sure?” asked Uncle Marten, looking at Jocelyn’s feverish cheeks and then sighing resignedly. “All right, then. It’s a pity. It was a very nice red velvet. But never mind. Maybe that would be more suited to Meline, after all. I think really, yes I do, that the red was the nicer of the two. Meline, maybe you’d like the red dress.”
“I don’t think a dress meant for me would fit her,” said Jocelyn, proving she could still be judgmental even at death’s door.
“If it’s like my dress it would fit anyone, it’s like a tablecloth with sleeves,” I said, sitting down with a plop on one of what were now the five chairs before the fire. Uncle Marten apparently couldn’t stop buying wing chairs and Humdinger must have brought them in quite recently; they were still damp from being dropped outside.
“And the pets!” said Uncle Marten, clapping his hands together and then rubbing them. “Where are those two, what’re their names?”
“Aileron and Kitty,” said Humdinger, who was the only one of us who knew. Even I didn’t know what the cat was called.
“Kitty? Hmm, not what I would have named a cat,” said Uncle Marten. “I suppose you wouldn’t think of renaming her? Something from Shakespeare maybe? Let’s all take turns thinking of a good Shakespearean name. All cats should have names from Shakespeare if they must have names at all, and if you think of it, why name a cat? They don’t come when you call them. Still, if you must, why not Portia? Your turn,” he said, turning to me.
“Juliet,” I said.
Then he turned to Jocelyn and she followed my lead. “Romeo.”
“But the cat’s a girl cat, dear,” said Uncle Marten, who usually didn’t bother us with terms of endearment, but this was Christmas, after all.
“The Nurse, then,” she said feverishly and then shivered as if for effect.
“The Nurse?” several of us asked.
“Wasn’t there a nurse in that play? I’m sorry, but it’s the only play I know and will everyone please leave me alone?” She turned it into one long sentence without pause and we all averted our eyes accordingly. Talk about strange.
“Well then, you, Mrs. Mendelbaum.”
“Who would know by Shakespeare? Me ken brechen, I’m not naming your farkuckt cat,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum and ate a shortbread. We none of us tried talking to her again. Still, it was obvious that Uncle Marten didn’t want to leave her out of Christmas or any naming ceremonies that might come along.
“Well then. Humdinger?” said Uncle Marten.
“Kitty,” said Humdinger and thus ended the game.
Good for you, I thought.
“Well, perhaps we had best get on to stockings. Yes, stockings. Humdinger, give me a hand, will you, old boy?” Humdinger followed Uncle Marten into the third-floor bathroom, where, Uncle Marten later told us with glee, he had hidden the filled stockings in the laundry hamper. They carried them in one by one and presented them ceremoniously to us. I could see that Uncle Marten was quite proud of himself. He even had one for himself that he had made Humdinger stuff for him. He had taught him the use of the computer and Internet, which, it surprised me to learn, Humdinger had never used before, and Humdinger had ordered various items he thought Uncle Marten might like. Uncle Marten had paid for them, of course.
“A garlic peeler, very thoughtful, sir,” said Humdinger, taking things out of his stocking. None of us knew the protocol here. Were we all supposed to unstuff our stockings one by one, exclaiming over each other’s items, or was it to be some kind of free-for-all? As we sat self-consciously fiddling with the items on top and looking at each other out of the corners of our eyes, so as not to appear either too eager or too reluctant, Uncle Marten solved our social dilemma by ripping through his at a tremendous rate, not commenting on anything but sort of tossing items out into a big pile while he exclaimed “ummmm” and “ah” noncommittally and then cried, “All right, then! Let’s get on to the games!” Then he noticed that we had not opened our stockings yet and impatiently signaled by a rolling motion of his right hand that we had best get at it, time was wasting.
I went through my stocking and it was full of an amazing assortment of inappropriate things as if Uncle Marten had ordered things willy-nilly out of a variety of catalogs with no attention whatsoever to whom he was giving them to. Mrs. Mendelbaum got a hair curler, a cocktail shaker, and seven murder mysteries, for some reason, and, I could not help but feel, a rather useless supply of bubble gum.
Jocelyn, who less opened hers than let it tip so that things simply fell out to a pile by her feet where she could ignore them in peace, got, from what I could see, a toy truck, several packages of candy cigarettes, and an embosser the actual seal of which I couldn’t read but seemed to be for the Zingle Company. Should she ever be in need of papers marked with the Zingle logo, she was all set. Humdinger’s seemed to be entirely full of neckties and that ha
ndy garlic press, of course. Mine had a flute, an assortment of small rubber balls, the purpose for which was unclear, some packing labels, and some boxes of tea. I offered Mrs. Mendelbaum the tea and Uncle shrieked at me, “No TRADING!” Mrs. Mendelbaum said she didn’t want the tea anyway and gathered her things, which I was pretty sure she had no use for, into a tight little pile in her lap and held on to them possessively while glaring at all of us as if daring us to take them away.
“What kind of games?” I asked suspiciously.
“Christmas games,” said Uncle Marten, clapping his hands again. The hand clapping at first seemed to be a particularly obnoxious Christmas tic, but then I noticed that it was turning on and off the tree lights. He had some kind of clapper device installed for this purpose and he couldn’t seem to stop playing with it all day.
So Humdinger dutifully passed out paper and pens and we were forced to do word scrambles and mazes and word searches and any number of puzzles for prizes that were made up of each other’s stocking stuffers. When someone won, Uncle Marten simply swooped in and took something off someone’s pile of loot and awarded it to the winner. The first time he tried to take something away from Mrs. Mendelbaum, she grabbed it back and gave him such a look he did not try that again. When we exhausted all his paper games, he started moving our chairs around and announced we were going to play musical chairs, which was when Humdinger declared luncheon served.
“Oh no, not right now, surely it can wait,” said Uncle Marten, but “The flan is temperamental” was all the satisfaction he got from Humdinger, who, I noted, was clearing breakfast things and setting a lunch table as fast as his little tuxedoed legs could carry him. It was only ten o’clock, but nobody mentioned this. We all sat at the table, even Humdinger and Mrs. Mendelbaum. Jocelyn, with her steely discipline, managed to stay upright all through the Christmas lunch, which consisted, as per Uncle Marten’s menu, of a celery root salad and some flan and a green Jell-O mold in the shape of a wreath with cinnamon Red Hots and Cool Whip decorating the top.
“Women’s magazines online are such a source of incredible foodstuffs,” said Uncle Marten cheerily. “Have some celery root?” He passed it to Jocelyn, who shivered uncontrollably.
There was a silence as we looked at the ten o’clock victuals on our plates; all of us, I thought, except Mrs. Mendelbaum, must be thinking of Christmases past.
“Light lunch,” said Uncle Marten, reading his book on the life of Einstein—one of the stocking stuffers Humdinger had thoughtfully chosen for him—throughout lunch and barely looking up. After lunch Jocelyn begged to go up for a nap and Humdinger reminded Uncle Marten that she was ill, as was Mrs. Mendelbaum, and perhaps we should take a break in the festivities so everyone could admire the contents of their stockings anew in the comfort of their own rooms.
“Excellent. Excellent suggestion and unquestionably in the spirit of the day,” said Uncle Marten and, sweeping his goodies together, was the first to retire upstairs. We all gave a collective audible sigh of relief and I thought Jocelyn was going to faint, but when Humdinger came to help her, she just crabbily waved him away, which turned into more of a push from where I was standing, and headed off upstairs, her pile of stocking stuffers still untouched and unexamined on the floor by the fire. Humdinger collected them and later put them in her room and I heard her say something crankily to him before he crept back out again. It wasn’t like her to be rude to grownups, but these days she always had the querulous air of someone who had been prematurely roused from a deep sleep.
Uncle Marten rang a little bell at three in the afternoon. We all tried our best to ignore it, but he followed it up by shouting, “It’s time for PRESENTS!” Oh, God, give me strength, I thought, imagining what we had suffered with the stockings multiplied. Then I remembered that we had actually given him a Christmas list, so if he had followed it, and I saw no reason why he wouldn’t, the tools and things I would need to make the airplane were there and perhaps I could even get started working on it tonight. This excited me so that I flew downstairs.
“Ah, a little enthusiasm at the thought of presents, excellent, excellent!” said Uncle Marten, rubbing his hands together. Humdinger was already there. We waited a bit. Uncle Marten rang his bell a few times again and then, finally, we had to repeat the actions of the morning, with Humdinger going up after Mrs. Mendelbaum. I went to get Jocelyn, who, although she’d had a nap, was still cranky.
“I don’t want to go down. I don’t want to have Christmas with a bunch of strangers,” she said.
She was only saying what we were all feeling, but it annoyed me to hear it aloud. What good did it do to say it? “Get downstairs. The sooner you open your packages, the sooner I can start building the plane,” I reminded her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, but allowed herself to be led sulkily back down to the wing chair reserved for her. She sat there with her arms crossed over her chest, glaring at the fire. Mrs. Mendelbaum, I think, had had a little private drink of some sort and was looking a bit loopy and stoned. She kept swaying as if she heard music. Uncle Marten sat in a chair and Humdinger fetched us each one present. The opening of them took the rest of the afternoon. Mrs. Mendelbaum, for some reason, was given a large mounted singing fish, which she said confirmed her worst suspicions about goyishe holidays. Uncle said he got it from an overstocks catalog. “Tahkeh a metsieh,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum, but as usual none of us knew what she was talking about. I got all my tools, and we were down to the last present when Humdinger put a long rectangular box on my lap. I couldn’t imagine what I had asked for that was shaped this way, and I wondered if Uncle Marten had gone out on a limb and gotten me something he’d chosen himself because he thought I’d like it, but this seemed unlikely. He had no idea who I was or what I’d like. Yet he seemed particularly excited by this last present.
“Open it, open it, best for last,” he said excitedly, getting off his chair and dancing around me. I struggled with the ribbon. He had wrapped the presents himself and had obviously had Boy Scout training. The knots had taken us forever to undo. “And I must say, Meline, I was ever so happy someone thought to ask for one because next to a large toy truck I can’t think what Christmas would be without one.”
“One what?” I asked ripping off the paper. I sat there flabbergasted. Inside was a large doll that looked a bit like me with its round apple cheeks and blunt hair with bangs. I couldn’t think what to say. I hadn’t played with dolls in years. Mind you, it was no stranger than getting the embosser that said Zingle Company.
Uncle Marten awaited my response breathlessly, then when I could think of nothing appropriate to say, blurted out, “It’s your dolly! The dolly you requested.”
I tried to smile, but it was more just a matter of stretching my closed lips across my face. I looked up at Uncle Marten and saw Humdinger eyeing me, a tiny glint of amusement that he was unable to conceal peeking uncharacteristically out.
“Thank you,” I said finally.
“Now for dinner!” said Uncle Marten, clapping his hands in excitement and inadvertently turning on and off the tree several times. It was disco Christmas. We sat in the chairs while Uncle Marten handed round eggnog, rumless for me and Jocelyn and with rum for Mrs. Mendelbaum, who if you asked me didn’t need anything else to make the day merry and bright, she was merry and bright enough when she came down, but I was too depressed to discreetly point it out to Uncle, who hadn’t noticed anyone’s state anyway. The light was fading, which should have made the house feel cozy and even more Christmaslike with the millions of candles Humdinger had lit about the halls, but instead it felt like a large, empty death. Sorrow lay around our feet, like warm water, coming six inches up our legs. We waded through it. Everything was damp and wet, not shiveringly cold, but you couldn’t wade from room to room without being aware of it. Always there. Not life-threatening, just lapping against your legs so you could never move freely in the way you had before. I told this to Jocelyn, who, as usual, was very literal and sai
d, “Six inches of water can be life-threatening. There was a woman in my mother’s guild who drowned in a creek during a drought. There wasn’t more than six inches of water there. Probably less.”
“How is that possible, Jocelyn?” I argued. “It wouldn’t cover her head, so unless she was facedown, it wouldn’t go in her nose, and even if it did, all she would have to do is turn her head.”
“She couldn’t turn her head, my mother said. She took a terrible fall and she didn’t have the energy for it.”
Well, it sounded very bogus to me, but I didn’t feel like arguing at that point. It seemed to me that if you drowned in six inches of water you just weren’t showing much spunk. I went to sit next to Mrs. Mendelbaum by the fire. She kept taking sips from a small flask in her pocket. Whatever she was drinking didn’t look like liquor. It left a thick black rim around her lips.
“Can’t wait for goose, eh?” said Uncle Marten delightedly on his way through the dining room. Fortunately, he didn’t wait for an answer. He turned the stereo on—one of his presents from himself to himself was a whole stereo system, which he had spent an hour hooking up while the rest of us sat glumly. Finally he herded us all to the dining room to the haunting sound of some boys’ choir singing carols in a big echoey cavernous church. The music ringing in all that empty space only accentuated our own dilemma. I think all of us would have given anything to just go to bed at that point. Even Uncle Marten, though clearly loopy on eggnog, seemed to be fading.
“Well then, well then,” he said when we were all seated. “I suppose now is the time to carve the goose. Wait, the crackers! The Christmas crackers!” Then we all had to pull on the end of these strange party favors that made explosive sounds that clearly freaked out Mrs. Mendelbaum. Inside each was a toy, a hat, and a joke or witty saying. We had to read these and put on our hats. Fortunately, no one was called upon to exclaim about yet another useless toy. Then Uncle Marten grabbed his large dangerous-looking carving paraphernalia again, and holding a carving knife and fork in his hands with his paper crown on his head, bid Humdinger to bring in the goose. The goose was duly gotten and Uncle Marten hacked at it, looking all the while at an illustration from a book he had bought on goose carving. I kept thinking of the geese which we saw flying over the island in October in beautiful long-necked V’s and which still hung around, swimming in the ocean and pecking worms out of the meadow, and I wanted to throw up. I knew for certain that although I’d come a long way from my vegetarian ways I could not eat goose. The only one who ate it with any gusto was Humdinger, who had also cooked it. Mrs. Mendelbaum picked at hers, but she was clearly by now stoned out of her mind and kept asking people to pass her the side dishes, which she would then look at as if she’d already forgotten what she’d wanted them for, before passing them on untouched. This kept everyone busy and her too busy to do much eating. Jocelyn put food dutifully on her plate but just took sips from her ice water and finally fell asleep in her chair, something I was reasonably sure she had never done before in her life. It was quite some time before anyone else noticed it. Uncle Marten took one bite and stopped eating. “So this is goose?” he said as if he didn’t quite want to believe it. “Well, it’s simply horrible. No wonder most people eat turkey. No wonder there’s not a run on geese at Christmas. Because who in their right mind would want to eat them. I, myself, can’t go through with it. It’s very fat, isn’t it? It’s … fat.” I think it was the breaking point for him. Up until then he’d been able to ignore the fact that no one else was full of Yuletide spirits, that living in the house together did not make us one big happy Christmas family, that the cat wasn’t going to wear her Christmas collar or the dog his Christmas sweater. The stockings sucked, the presents sucked, and the goose tasted disgusting. I think it was finally occurring to him that you could buy all the props you needed for Christmas but people were not props. Humdinger looked at Uncle’s face and then noticed Jocelyn and carried her off to bed. Mrs. Mendelbaum asked where dessert was, and while Uncle looked vaguely around for the Christmas pudding, Mrs. Mendelbaum started passing side dishes again. That’s when I left the table.
The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane Page 15
