by New Yorker
As he paced the floor, Clarence caught his reflection in the mirror. He stopped and ran a comb through his hair—the magnificently full head of hair that fell just below his shoulders, rippling and shining like a waterfall of pure, luminous gold. Glorying in the reflection, Clarence grimaced only slightly as he recalled the scene that had taken place last week between himself and the university’s beetle-browed dean. Clarence had refused to be shorn, and the dean had retaliated by “expunging” him—that was the way he’d put it—from the senior class, “until such time as you choose to return to classes looking like a recognizably normal, well-trimmed American male.”
THE MAHARAJAH OF PUTTYPUT RECEIVES A CHRISTMAS NECKTIE FROM THE QUEEN
Now Clarence bravely turned to other matters, but not before a few tears had fallen to his sandalled feet.
Clarence’s hair, however, was but one of the two possessions in which he and his wife took fierce pride. The other was Clarissa’s twelve-string supersonic double-cutaway guitar—perfect except for its embarrassingly bourgeois, unelectrified state. But it would remain an embarrassment only until that time when Clarence could earn the amount needed for the crowd-exciting two-channel amp, with 90-watt peak, patented baffle, crossover network, and master control, they had seen in the window of a music supply store on St. Marks Place. The price was two thousand dollars, federal and city taxes included. And here it was, the day before Christmas, and Clarence had but one thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars toward Clarissa’s guitar-electrification project. A hundred and thirty clams short!
Earlier that day, Clarence had gone to the store and promised to pay twice the amount he was short before the fifteenth of January if only the proprietor would let him take the amplifier now. But the man knew Clarence and refused. It was payment in full or no dice.
And then it dawned on Clarence. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Hadn’t he seen an advertisement in the East Village Other for the Greater Precision Instruments Corp.? Yes, he remembered now. “Wanted—fine hair for use in delicate industrial instruments,” it read.
On went his Hindu bead collar. On went his sleeveless denim vest. On went his boots. A bit of hair jelly on his hair, then a quick spray of Command, and Clarence was on his way. Whistling his favorite fifteenth-century madrigal, he hurried down the street. A light, delicate snow was transforming the parking meters into a veritable wonderland. He quickened his step. The solution was so perfect for Clarissa that the sacrifice could be borne. With short hair, he might have to return to class, but at least Clarissa would be able to play along with her records of the Screaming Ends, and that rich, happily hippy sound would not only liberate his sensibilities but might also help him with his evening studies.
Clarence stopped whistling when he came to the door of the Greater Precision Instruments factory. He paused for a moment in the wet street, feeling the familiar, luxuriant weight on his neck and ears. Then he took a deep breath, entered the building, and carefully shook the snow from his hair. “Hair purchases?” he said to the receptionist in a steady voice. “I want to sell my hair.”
The receptionist looked up, then caught her breath sharply. “Oh, no,” she gasped. “Not your hair.”
“It’s my wife,” said Clarence resolutely. “Something for my wife.”
Tears came to the girl’s eyes. “Your need must be very great,” she whispered. “You are a brave man.”
“It is Christmas,” said Clarence simply.
The snow felt cold on Clarence’s crew-cut head, but he hardly noticed it. The highly prized amplifier was now his, and would shortly be Clarissa’s. Outside their pad, he silently hid the bulky parcel in the hall, then opened the door and stepped inside. “Hi, baby!” he called. “It’s me.”
Clarissa quickly ran some white lipstick across her lips and, still carrying the leek she was peeling, danced toward him from the sink. But on seeing Clarence she let out a gasp and stared as if he were something she had discarded in Scarsdale.
The smile on Clarence’s face disappeared. “Clarissa!” he said. “Don’t look at me that way.”
Clarissa shook her head from side to side, as if telling herself that what she saw wasn’t true. “They!” she cried bitterly. “They’ve got this big authority game going, and like you sold out to them.”
“I sold my hair,” he said, “but I didn’t sell out, baby.” He hesitated momentarily, groping for the rest of his answer. “Like I sold it because they were buying. And I needed the bills to get you—”
Clarissa threw the leek to the floor. “If it was better phrased,” she shouted, “I’d call it liberal rhetoric!” Apparently startled at the sound of her own voice, she lowered it slightly. “But pretty soon you’ll start wearing socks. And like the next thing, I’ll be washing them, and before long…before long you’ll end up going back to school, back where the girls are the ones with long hair.” She began sputtering, searching for words. “And then, then…then what’ll happen to our heightened catharsis of experience?”
Clarence envied her way with words, her uncompromising ideals. He could see that this was not the time to reason with Clarissa. Maybe tomorrow. He’d think of it tomorrow—on Christmas Day. “Let’s wish each other a merry Christmas,” he said softly. “A very merry Christmas.” It was a little like Tiny Tim’s speech, and Clarence hoped it would work in an apartment full of posters of the Grateful Dead. Remembering the beautiful amplifier, he went to the hall and retrieved the parcel. In a moment he had it open. The chrome, glistening like Christmas-tree lights, reflected her tear-filled eyes.
Clarissa smiled briefly, but then the smile vanished. “I sold it,” she said. “Like just this afternoon I sold it. Sold it so you could get a tutor and graduate with your hair on. But now you don’t need a tutor, and you don’t need me.”
Clarence put his arms around his sobbing wife. “I don’t want no tutor,” he said. “But I do want you. And we can take that money and buy back your guitar.”
“Take the money and buy back your hair!” shouted Clarissa as she pushed Clarence away and ran to the window. Sullenly, she stared out at the snow, which was now falling more heavily.
Clarence joined her at the window, but the arm he tried to put around her shoulder was quickly brushed away. He glanced across the street at the snow-laden Psychedelicatessen sign, then down at the wet pavement below. “It’s turning to slush,” he said. “Everything’s turning to slush.”
1967
PARENTAL ADVISORY
DANIEL MENAKER
For the few people not familiar with the idea behind the Domestic Rider to Parkinson’s Law—children expand to fill the space allotted to them and also a great deal of the space not allotted to them—a brief, selective inventory of the contents of the “public” areas of our apartment (entrance hall, dining room, living room) will demonstrate it nicely: Plastic bag filled with cheap Walkmans, dead batteries, and Gordian earphone cords. Pieces of paper on the floor, including an old birthday-party list on a page torn off an Amoxil Chewable notepad and a drawing done by Elizabeth, my eight-year-old daughter, of an Asian-looking smile face with a third, Caucasian eye in the middle of its forehead and mucus dripping from its nose. A pair of navy-blue Stride Rite party shoes. Small clay figure resembling Mr. Bill, the victim of “Saturday Night Live”’s sadistic Sluggo. Similar figure of a woman in a chair, whom I think of as Dame Edith Sitwell. A drawing done by my eleven-year-old son of a nightmare version of a subway station. A wedge of wood that my daughter painted green and red, with black pips, to resemble a slice of watermelon. Lionel XR Speed Machine bicycle with two flat tires. A two-foot-long Medusa’s coiffure of plastic lanyard under a chair. A pair of Reebok Blacktop sneakers. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players’ Handbook. And so forth.
The Domestic Rider will surely prove to govern not only real space but electronic space. In fact, around our cyber-household it already does. I bought a PowerBook a few weeks ago and, the other day, when I turned it on I noticed that a new icon had floated do
wn onto its desktop. Its title was “Willy’s Folder,” and in it I found one document called “The Moron Gang” and another called “Wish.” Yeah, I opened them. (Hey, it’s my PowerBook!) “The Moron Gang” turned out to be a short story, abandoned, at least for the time being, after a few pages; and this is “Wish,” a docket-in-progress of Christmas desiderata (reprinted with the permission of the author):
WISH LIST
Music
Beastie Boys: Ill Communication
Offspring: Smash
Nirvana: Bleach
Nirvana: Nevermind
Janes Addiction: Ritual de lo Habitual
Clothing
Princess Mary flannel
muted Dress Stewart flannel
pair of faded denim jeans
pair of saddle jeans
pair of stonewashed denim jeans
pair of double black jeans
Green Day Dookie Bombs T-shirt
Nirvana in Utero T-shirt
Pearl Jam Flame Picture T-shirt
Soundgarden Black Hole Sun T-shirt
Barney eating kids T-shirt
Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics T-shirt
Necklaces, Rings
Nirvana necklace
Soundgarden necklace
skull rings
claw holding crystel necklace
wizard necklace
anarcy necklace
Exspense Things
black leather 8 eyelet pair of doc martians
Sony disc man
For all their found-poetry quality, and despite my having watched the Grammys with Willy last fall, some of the bytes that “Wish” took out of my PowerBook are Klingon to me, but even so they clearly illustrate another article of the universal Code of Parenthood: children grow up five years for every five minutes their parents aren’t looking. Skull ring? Not for that molarless tyke my wife just now put down for a nap. Jane’s Addiction? Not for that towhead who yesterday was afraid of the Cookie Monster. And so on. I could have sworn I saw him teetering into his room Pampers-clad and with oatmeal adorning his head this morning, and yet here he is at 7 P.M. going out to a dance wearing (single?) black jeans held up around the tops of his thighs by what means I have no idea, and a dab of mousse in his hair.
So it wasn’t truly surprising to learn that a kid’s eminent domain extends beyond real estate and into RAM. What did arrest me was the extreme force with which Willy’s wish list applied the law of They Grow Up Too Fast, and it made me understand that my children’s childhood, like a lot of other things around here, will remain, for me, unfinished. That’s the law, too, of course: you have to let your children go before you’re ready to. And that is why childhood is poignant even when it’s not. I will someday, too soon, fatten my laptop’s trash can with Willy’s file folder and put Elizabeth’s Stride Rites away for good, but Christmas is around the first corner, so wish away, the two of you—all of a sudden you’re old enough to know a soft touch when you see one.
1994
CHRISTMAS CARDS
JOHN UPDIKE
How strange it is—gut-wrenchingly strange—to realize that your parents, in a snapshot taken by memory, are younger not only than you now but than your own children. If I was seven or eight on a certain Christmas that I remember, my father would have been thirty-nine or forty, and my mother thirty-five or six. A couple of kids, really, living in her parents’ house with their only child, in a Depression that war’s excitement and mounting public debt hadn’t yet lifted. The taste of Christmas in the little Pennsylvania town of Shillington—one of the more penetrating in my life’s bolted meals—was compounded of chocolate-flavored piety, as sweetly standardized as Hershey’s Kisses, and a tart, refreshed awareness of where one stood on the socioeconomic scale.
Since at that latitude white Christmases were a rarity, the proper atmosphere had to be created within the front parlor: an evergreen tree more or less richly laden with decorations brought down from the attic; beneath the tree a “Christmas yard,” a miniature landscape of cotton snow and mirror ponds and encircling railroad tracks; a heap of wrapped presents, which at my age of seven or eight had not yet quite shed the possibility, like a glaze, that an omniscient, fast-moving Santa Claus had personally deposited them. Though we had the tree, our neighbors’ trees were in my impression bushier, pressing against the ceiling and crowding the front windows, and more sumptuously hung with reflective balls, colored lights, and glittering tinsel. We didn’t bother with tinsel; my mother, I believe, found it vulgar and messy. Though we had the yard, with a lovable blue Lionel train—engine, coal car, and two or three passenger cars, going around and around in tooting obedience to a cubic black transformer—friends of mine, or friends of theirs, had entire basements dedicated to mountainous, suburbanized mazes of tracks, switchoffs, tunnels, and toy stations. Our yard had a single tunnel, through a papier-mâché mountain whose snowy crest was approached up green-sprayed sides diagonally dented by what I understood to be sheep paths. Our pond was square, and any illusion of landscape fomented by the toy cows and cottages on its cotton banks clashed with the reality of my own huge, freckled face looking up from it when I peeked in. Though we had the presents, they seemed less numerous and luxurious than presents bestowed up and down Philadelphia Avenue, in houses externally more modest than ours.
Is there a professional friend or associate for whom it is always difficult to select a suitable nonpersonal Christmas gift? Here’s one suggestion that will answer the problem for you—give him a copy of the 20 Year Index to Sewage Works Journal.
—Adv. in the Sewage Works Journal
It’s as good as done
1951
On the Christmas that I painfully remember, one of the presents was a double deck of playing cards in a pretty box, whose gray surface had a fuzzy texture, and whose paper drawer was pulled out by a silken tab. I had unwrapped the box and had assumed that it was for me until my father’s voice, which was almost never raised to me in disapproval or correction, gently floated down from above with the suggestion that the cards were a present from him to my mother. This made sense: one of her habits—the most alarming habit she had, indeed—was to play solitaire at night at the dining table, under the stained-glass chandelier. “The weary gambler,” she would intone theatrically, “stakes her all,” as she doggedly laid out the cards in their rows. Now her voice descended to me, saying that the cards were for all of us to share; and it was true, we did play cards, three-handed pinochle, and the box said “PINOCHLE” on it. Nevertheless, I was humiliated, as deeply as only a child can be, to be caught trying to appropriate her present. At the same time, I thought that if there had been more presents I would not have made such a mistake. And I was afflicted by the paltriness of this present from my father to his wife. At least, I am afflicted now, or have been the hundreds or thousands of times I have remembered this incident. The something pathetic about our Christmases, the something that strived and failed to live up to Shillington’s Noël ideal, was bared; a pang went through me that dyed the moment indelibly.
Some elemental, mournful triangle seems sketched: my grandparents, those distant, grave, friendly adjuncts, are absent from the room as I remember it. My parents are above me, the presents shorn of wrapping are around me, the three-rail Lionel tracks are by my knees, the tree with its resiny scent presses close. I have no memory of what I did receive that Christmas—the wooden skis, perhaps, with leather-strap bindings that never held, or a shiny children’s classic that would stay unread. I feel, for a moment, the triangle flip: through the little velvety box of cards I see my parents in their poverty, their useless gentility, their unspoken plight of homelessness, their clinging to each other through such tokens, and through me. I become in my memory their parent, looking down and precociously grieving for them.
Captured in this recollection, I want to look out the window for relief, at the vacant lot next to our house, at the row houses opposite. If there was no white Christmas, there was at least a public
Christmas, a free ten-o’clock cartoon show at the Shillington movie theatre, followed by a throng of us children lining up at the town hall to receive a box of chocolates from the hands of Sam Reich, the fat one of the three town policemen. I remember eating these chocolates, trying to avoid the ones with cherries at their centers, while walking up Philadelphia Avenue with the other children as they noisily boasted of their presents—I seeming to be, as one sometimes is in a dream, tongue-tied.
1997
A FINE TURKEY DINNER
BRENDAN GILL
Father Hagerty sat at his desk in the bay window of the rectory parlor stacking, in precarious piles, the nickels and dimes of the annual Christmas collection. This little hoard had been gathered at Mass the previous Sunday in order to buy, according to parish custom, a fine turkey dinner for the rectory household—Father Hagerty; his curate, Father Cain; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Katharine O’Degnan Malone. Father Hagerty added coin to coin in mixed discouragement and hope. After setting aside four dollars for the dinner, he planned to turn over the rest of the collection to a fund he had fostered in secret for several years. Sooner or later he would have the means to buy a new Saint Anthony to stand by the sacristy door. The plaster fingers of the present Saint Anthony, who was twelve years old, were beginning to chip.
