by New Yorker
The door opened, and there was Alice, Jim’s size-8 mom, in a beady blue silk gown from Italy or somewhere. “Jim! What?” she said. “You’re outdoors! Sharon said you were in the solarium, using the tanning machine.”
(Sharon! Why would she believe his sister Sharon, who was on drugs?)
“I ran away from home eleven hours ago, Mom!”
“Oh. Who’s this?”
“It’s my old dog, Tony. I’ve had him since he was a pup.”
“Oh—I thought you had a pony.”
The lobby twinkled with Christmas lights, pink and white and silver, and the rich, gloomy library was gaily festooned with pine boughs from the Hartz Mountains and red silk streamers and angels with spun-platinum hair. A sequoia wreath hung over the vast fireplace, where fragrant mesquite blazed away. In the glittering dining room, the table was decked with green linen, golden candlesticks, the rare Roi d’Alton china, with its handpainted gold filigree, and the good silver from his mom’s side of the family, the wealthy Chesterfields. And through the great onyx arch he could see, standing thirty feet high in the Chinese rotunda, the Christmas tree, the most beautiful one anywhere in the world! It cost four thousand dollars to airlift it down from the High Sierras and truck it east to Texas.
“It looks nice. Marlon did a good job. I like it traditional,” said Jim, though he was so nearsighted the tree looked like an upturned skiff. His mom always had the house professionally decorated at Christmas. Last year, Marlon had gone in for a Georgia O’Keeffe look, with sand, cactuses, stones, bleached bones, and Christmas bulbs inside cow skulls, and the year before it was lasers. Then Jim noticed the table was set for fifteen persons. But there are only four of us, he thought to himself.
As I mentioned, DioNate is picking up most of the tab for publication of “A Christmas Story,” but, of course, corporate underwriting can’t hope to cover all of the writer’s costs. None of the $21,600,000 went to me, and I’ve had to spend a lot of time writing and rewriting and rewriting to make sure the story is phenomenally good, and that’s why I’m coming directly to you, my readers, and asking for your support. Only your generous gifts will insure that many more stories of this quality will keep coming your way. It only takes a minute to do this.
“Why fifteen? Who’s coming for dinner besides us?” asked Jim.
His mom shrugged. “Some people we met. I don’t know. They seemed nice. A couple of fund-raisers from different colleges, our broker and his lover, some people from DioNate, and George Will, the ostrologist. He was on our cruise.”
“Tony’s cough is pretty bad,” Jim said. “You don’t suppose Dr. Will could give him a shot or something, do you? And I’m all pooped out. I gotta grab some shut-eye.” He hauled the poor old pooch up the grand staircase and into Sharon’s bedroom and boosted him up into her canopied bed. Tony groaned. How ironic to think that the dog might die on Christmas, here in this ornate bedroom the size of a gymnasium!
A moment later the door opened, and there was Sharon, his tall, willowy, successful (but dazed) older sister, in the arms of Vince, her vicious boyfriend, who was tugging on the shoulder strap of her blue jumper. “Beat it, scum,” he snarled, and raised his fist to pound on Jim.
“Grrrrrrr,” growled Tony, trying to leap up from under the covers, though he was much too weak.
Just as Jim was about to be pummelled by the loathsome Vince, Jim’s dad, Jack, waltzed in. “Hi, kids,” he said. “Hi, Tony. How’s tricks?” He smelled of a cilantro after-shave, and he looked youthful and tanned and taut and extremely fit. In fact, he appeared to be several years younger than either of his children. He smiled effortlessly. “Look what just came from my kiln!” he cried.
“What is that?” asked Sharon.
Jack grinned at her. “It’s a trivet,” he said.
With literary costs rising each year, it becomes more and more difficult for writers to offer their stories to readers at a reasonable price. The 1989 Christmas Catalogue is one way you can help me keep on writing and not have to raise my rates. When you purchase one of these gifts, a portion of the price is earmarked for my writing program:
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“Tony’s dying, I think, of pneumonia,” said Jim.
“That’s too bad. We’ll get the best medical care available, regardless of cost,” said Jack. “I think Dr. Will is coming for dinner. Maybe he can save him. We met him at the Woffats’. He seemed nice.”
Downstairs, the bell rang—bonggggg, bonggggg. The door opened, and there were murmurs, and Alice yelled up the stairs, “Never mind. It’s only the wine man.”
Tony’s eyes were small and red, his nose was dry and scaly. His tongue was white. Jim stayed near the bed, wondering if even the vast, ill-gotten fortune of his parents could make the dog well. Tears ran down his cheeks.
Dr. Will arrived at eight—a dapper little fellow in a yellow bow tie, who seemed to diminish as he approached. “Jim, what a pleasure,” he said, easing onto the bed with a bland smile and surveying the old dog. “Alice asked me to check on Tony. How is he doing?”
“Near death.”
“Here. We’ll just have a look. Hmmmm. Let me just check his eyeballs. Nnnhnnn. Sort of red. Corneal infection, I’m afraid. But no prob, Bob. We’ll just do a corneal thing. Don’t worry.” He took out a pair of scissors and a hankie. “All we do is remove these old corneas and slip in a coupla new ones.”
“No, please. No,” Jim said, and looked away in pain.
“It’ll bleed a lot for a while, but don’t worry. As long as he doesn’t blink, he won’t feel a darned thing.”
You’re lying, just trying to reassure me, thought Jim, and then he heard two little snips as his dog’s eyeballs were sliced. Tony moaned.
“That’s him, Jim,” said Dr. Will. “Now, where did I put the donor tissue? Did I leave it out in the car? Or—”
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“We’ll have Tony put in a special place for blind dogs,” Mom said. “He’ll be happier there than with you, hard as that is to accept. You’ll go away to Yale soon, honey, and life will be good for both of you.”
“You’re lying. You’re going to have him killed in a gas chamber!”
“I promise you that Tony will be sent to a training center where he will learn to work with a seeing-eye bird and lead a life that is almost normal. They use canaries that sit on the dog’s shoulder and hold in their beak long reins attached to the dewlaps.”
Jim looked down at his poor old pal; a bandage covered Tony’s head except for his dry, brown nose and big, floppy ears and friendly mouth. A bandage very poorly wrapped, he couldn’t help but notice. Tape slapped on, the way a post-office clerk would do it. Downstairs, Dr. Will was hobnobbing with the other celebrities over drinks. “Dinner is Afghani this year. Why don’t you join us?” his mom said. But Jim couldn’t leave Tony.
Or could he? Dinner sure sounded good to him, and maybe Mom was right; you can’t live a dog’s life for him, can you? A blindy like this one, he’d have to learn how t
o depend on himself and not expect favors. Lots of blind dogs nowadays just lie around getting fat and lazy probably. That’s a rather poor attitude. Maybe he ought to leave Tony and go downstairs and talk to Dr. Will and the other influential guests, in hopes of garnering recommendations for future employment, graduate school, etc. Maybe he ought to kick Tony so as to make him less emotionally dependent.
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I’d just like to close with a big thank you to DioNate and wish a Merry Christmas to their forty thousand employees and express my sincere thanks to those who gave so generously to support my writing program and wish bon voyage to the folks on the Nordstrom and thank the customers of the Christmas Catalogue. Allow eight weeks for delivery. Tony, by the way, got a new pair of eyes, and Jim’s family was pulled together by the crisis and learned the true meaning of Christmas, which is not how much but how well. It’s a time for quality of life. Jim is headed for college, and Sharon split up with Vince, who was an illiterate brute, and—how can I say this?—she is marrying me on Wednesday morning. It was a whirlwind romance, and after a honeymoon on St. Bart’s we’ll be home in the sixteen-room Romanesque stone mansion Alice and Jack presented us with, which stands on the banks of a ten-thousand-acre marsh and wildlife preserve. A person could disappear in there and never be found again. But that’s another story.
1989
“I know just what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, ‘Look at this handsome attaché case my wife gave me for Christmas.’”
CRÈCHE
RICHARD FORD
Faith is not driving them, her mother, Esther, is. In the car it’s the five of them. The family. On their way to Snow Mountain Highlands—Sandusky, Ohio, to northern Michigan—to ski. It’s Christmas, or nearly. No one wants to spend Christmas alone.
The five include Faith, who’s the motion picture lawyer, arrived from California; her mother, who’s sixty-four and who’s thoughtfully volunteered to drive. Roger, Faith’s sister’s husband, a guidance counsellor at Sandusky J.F.K. And Roger’s two girls: Jane and Marjorie, ages eight and six. Daisy, the girls’ mom, Faith’s younger sister, Roger’s estranged wife, is a presence but not along. She is in rehab in a large Midwestern city that is not Chicago or Detroit.
Outside, beyond a long, treeless expanse of frozen white winterscape, Lake Michigan suddenly becomes visible. It is pale blue with a thin fog hovering just above its metallic surface. The girls are chatting chirpily in the back seat. Roger is beside them reading Skier magazine. No one is arguing.
Florida would’ve been a much nicer holiday alternative, Faith thinks. Epcot for the girls. The Space Center. Satellite Beach. Fresh fish. The ocean. She is paying for everything and does not even like to ski. But it has been a hard year for everyone, and someone has had to take charge. If they’d all gone to Florida, she’d have ended up broke.
Her basic character strength, Faith believes, watching what seems to be a nuclear power plant coming up on the left, is the feature that makes her a first-rate lawyer: an undeterrable willingness to see things as capable of being made better. If someone at the studio, a V.P. in marketing, for example, wishes a quick exit from a totally binding yet surprisingly uncomfortable obligation—say, a legal contract—then Faith’s your girl. Faith the doer. Your very own optimist. Faith the blond beauty with smarts. A client’s dream with great tits. Her own tits. Just give her a day on your problem.
Her sister is a perfect case in point. Daisy has been able to admit her serious methamphetamine problems, but only after her biker boyfriend, Vince, has been made a guest of the State of Ohio. And here Faith has had a role to play, beginning with phone calls, then attorneys, a restraining order, then later the state police and handcuffs. Going through Daisy’s apartment with their mother, in search of clothes Daisy could wear with dignity into rehab, Faith found dildos; six, in all—one, for some reason, under the kitchen sink. These she put into a black plastic grocery bag and left in the neighbor’s street garbage just so her mother wouldn’t know. Her mother is up-to-date, she feels, but not necessarily interested in dildos. For Daisy’s going-in outfit they decided on a dark jersey shift and some new white Adidas.
The downside on the character issue, Faith understands, is the fact that, at almost thirty-seven, nothing’s particularly solid in her life. She is very patient (with assholes), very ready to forgive (assholes), very good to help behind the scenes (with assholes). Her glass is always half full. Stand and ameliorate, her motto. Anticipate change. The skills of the law once again only partly in synch with the requirements of life.
A tall silver smokestack with blinking silver lights on top and several gray megaphone-shaped cooling pots around it all come into view on the frozen lakefront. Dense chalky smoke drifts out the top of each.
“What’s that big thing?” Jane or possibly Marjorie says, peering out the back-seat window. It is too warm in the cranberry-colored Suburban Faith rented at the Cleveland airport, plus the girls are chewing watermelon-smelling gum. Everyone could get carsick.
“This one’s from you know who, so make a fuss and thank him.”
“That’s a rocket ship ready to blast off to outer space. Would you girls like to hitch a ride on it?” Roger says. Roger, the brother-in-law, is the friendly-funny neighbor in a family sitcom, although he isn’t funny. He is small and blandly not-quite-handsome and wears a brush cut and black horn-rimmed glasses. And he is loathsome—though only in subtle ways, like TV actors Faith has known. He is also thirty-seven and likes pastel cardigans and suède shoes. Faith has noticed he is, oddly enough, quite tanned.
“It is not a rocket ship,” Jane, the older child, says and puts her forehead to the foggy window then pulls back and considers the smudge mark she’s left.
“It’s a pickle,” Marjorie says.
“And shut up,” Jane says. “That’s a nasty expression.”
“It isn’t,” Marjorie says.
“Is that a new word your mother taught you?” Roger asks and smirks. “I bet it is. That’ll be her legacy.” On the cover of Skier is a photograph of Alberto Tomba wearing an electric-red outfit, running the giant slalom at Kitzbühel. The headline says, “GOING TO EXTREMES.”
“It better not be,” Faith’s mother says from behind the wheel. Faith’s mother is unusually thin. Over the years she has actually shrunk from a regular, plump size 12 to the point that she now swims inside her clothes, and, on occasion, can resemble a species of testy bird. There are problems with her veins and her digestion. But nothing is medically wrong. She eats.
“And don’t forget—make it look like an accident.”
“It’s an atom plant where they make electricity,” Faith says, and smiles back approvingly at the nieces, who are staring out the car window, losing interest. “We use it to heat our houses.”
“We don’t like that kind of heat, though,” Faith’s mother says. Her seat is pushed up, seemingly to accommodate her diminished size. Even her seat belt hangs on her. Esther was once a science teacher and has been Green since before it was chic.
“Why not?” Jane says.
“Don’t you girls learn anything in school?” Roger says, flipping pages in his Skier.
“Their father could always instruct them,” Esther says. “He’s in education.”
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“Guidance,” Roger says. “But touché.”
“What’s ‘touché’?” Jane says and wrinkles her nose.
“It’s a term used in fencing,” Faith says. She likes both little girls immensely, would like to punish Roger for ever speaking sarcastically to them.
“What’s fencing?” Marjorie asks.
“It’s a town in Michigan where they make fences,” Roger says. “Fencing, Michigan. It’s near Lansing.”
“No, it’s not,” Faith says.
“Then, you tell them,” Roger says. “You know everything. You’re the lawyer.”
“It’s a game you play with swords,” Faith says. “Only no one gets killed or hurt.” In every way, she despises Roger and wishes he’d stayed in Sandusky. Though she couldn’t bring the girls without him. Letting her pay for everything is Roger’s way of saying thanks.
“Now, all your lives you’ll remember where you heard fencing explained first and by whom,” Roger says in a nice-nasty voice. “When you’re at Harvard—”
“You didn’t know,” Jane says.
“That’s wrong. I did know. I absolutely knew,” Roger says. “I was just having some fun. Christmas is a fun time.”
Faith’s love life has not been going well. She has always wanted children-with-marriage, but neither of these things has quite happened. Either the men she’s liked haven’t liked children, or else the men who’ve loved her and wanted to give her all she longed for haven’t seemed worth it. Practicing law for a movie studio has accordingly become extremely engrossing. Time has gone by. A series of mostly courteous men has entered but then departed, all for one reason or another unworkable: married, frightened, divorced, all three together. Lucky is how she has chiefly seen herself. She goes to the gym every day, leases an expensive car, lives alone at the beach in a rental owned by an ex-teen-age movie star who is a friend’s brother and has H.I.V. A deal.
