Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  Gina never wanted to talk about him. I suppose she thought of it as a kind of betrayal; she never again had a friend that she was as close to as she’d been with me.

  I remember her mother calling me once, worried because Gina seemed to be sinking into a reclusive depression. I did my best to be there for her. I called her almost every night for a month and went out to visit her on the weekends, but somehow I just couldn’t relate to her pain. Gina had always seemed so self-contained, so perfect, that it was hard to imagine her being as withdrawn and unhappy as her mother seemed to think she was. She put on such a good face to me that eventually the worries I’d had faded and the demands of my own life pulled me away again.

  6

  Gina never liked Christmas.

  The year she introduced me to Newford’s gargoyles we saw each other twice over the holidays: once so that she could do her Christmas shopping and then again between Christmas and New Year’s when I came over to her place and stayed the night. She introduced me to her dog Fritzie, a gangly, wire-haired, long-legged mutt that she’d found abandoned on one of the country roads near her parents’ place and played some of her new songs for me, accompanying herself on guitar.

  The music had a dronal quality that seemed at odds with her clear high voice and the strange Middle Eastern decorations she used. The lyrics were strange and dark, leaving me with a sensation that was not so much unpleasant as uncomfortable, and I could understand why she’d been having so much trouble getting gigs. It wasn’t just that she was so young and since most clubs served alcohol, their owners couldn’t hire an underage performer; Gina’s music simply wasn’t what most people would think of as entertainment. Her songs went beyond introspection. They took the listener to that dark place that sits inside each and every one of us, that place we don’t want to visit, that we don’t even want to admit is there.

  But the songs aside, there didn’t seem to be any trace of the depression that had worried her mother so much the previous autumn. She appeared to be her old self, the Gina I remembered: opinionated and witty, full of life and laughter even while explaining to me what bothered her so much about the holiday season.

  “I love the idea of Christmas,” she said. “It’s the hypocrisy of the season that I dislike. One time out of the year, people do what they can for the homeless, help stock the food banks, contribute to snowsuit funds and give toys to poor children. But where are they the rest of the year when their help is just as necessary? It makes me a little sick to think of all the money that gets spent on Christmas lights and parties and presents that people don’t even really want in the first place. If we took all that money and gave it to the people who need it simply to survive, instead of throwing it away on ourselves, we could probably solve most of the problems of poverty and homelessness over one Christmas season.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But at least Christmas brings people closer together. I guess what we have to do is build on that.”

  Gina gave me a sad smile. “Who does it bring closer together?”

  “Well . . . families, friends . . . ”

  “But what about those who don’t have either? They look at all this closeness you’re talking about and it just makes their own situation seem all the more desperate. It’s hardly surprising that the holiday season has the highest suicide rate of any time of the year.”

  “But what can we do?” I said. “We can’t just turn our backs and pretend there’s no such thing as Christmas.”

  Gina shrugged, then gave me a sudden grin. “We could become Christmas commandos. You know,” she added at my blank look. “We’d strike from within. First we’d convince our own families to give it up and then . . . ”

  With that she launched into a plan of action that would be as improbable in its execution as it was entertaining in its explanation. She never did get her family to give up Christmas, and I have to admit I didn’t try very hard with mine, but the next year I did go visit the residents of places like St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged and I worked in the Grasso Street soup kitchen with Gina on Christmas Day. I came away with a better experience of what Christmas was all about than I’d ever had at home.

  But I just couldn’t maintain that commitment all year round. I kept going to St. Vincent’s when I could, but the sheer despair of the soup kitchens and food banks was more than I could bear.

  7

  Gina dropped out of college during her second year to concentrate on her music. She sent me a copy of the demo tape she was shopping around to the record companies in hopes of getting a contract. I didn’t like it at first. Neither her guitar-playing nor her vocal style had changed much, and the inner landscape the songs revealed was too bleak, the shadows they painted upon the listener seemed too unrelentingly dark, but out of loyalty I played it a few times more and subsequent listenings changed that first impression.

  Her songs were still bleak, but I realized that they helped create a healing process in the listener. If I let them take me into the heart of their darkness, they took me out again as well. It was the kind of music that while it appeared to wallow in despair, in actuality it left its audience stronger, more able to face the pain and heartache that awaited them beyond the music.

  She was playing at a club near the campus one weekend and I went to see her. Sitting in front were a handful of hardcore fans, all pale-faced and dressed in black, but most of the audience didn’t understand what she was offering them any more than I had the first time I sat through the demo tape. Obviously her music was an acquired taste—which didn’t bode well for her career in a world where, more and more, most information was conveyed in thirty-second soundbites and audiences in the entertainment industry demanded instant gratification, rather than taking the time to explore the deeper resonances of a work.

  She had Fritzie waiting for her in the claustrophobic dressing room behind the stage, so the three of us went walking in between her sets. That was the night she first told me about her bouts with depression.

  “I don’t know what it is that brings them on,” she said. “I know I find it frustrating that I keep running into a wall with my music, but I also know that’s not the cause of them either. As long as I can remember I’ve carried this feeling of alienation around with me; I wake up in the morning, in the middle of the night, and I’m paralyzed with all this emotional pain. The only people who have ever really helped to keep it at bay were first you, and now Fritzie.”

  It was such a shock to hear that her only lifelines were a friend who was hardly ever there for her and a dog. The guilt that lodged inside me then has never really gone away. I wanted to ask what had happened to that brashly confident girl who had turned my whole life around as much by the example of her own strength and resourcefulness as by her friendship, but then I realized that the answer lay in her music, in her songs that spoke of masks and what lay behind them, of puddles on muddy roads that sometimes hid deep, bottomless wells.

  8

  I was in the middle of studying for exams the following week, but I made a point of it to call Gina at least every day. I tried getting her to let me take her out for dinner on the weekend, but she and Fritzie were pretty much inseparable and she didn’t want to leave him tied up outside the restaurant while we sat inside to eat. So I ended up having them over to the little apartment I was renting in Crowsea instead. She told me that night that she was going out west to try to shop her tape around to the big companies in L.A., and I didn’t see her again for three months.

  I’d been worried about her going off on her own, feeling as she was. I even offered to go with her, if she’d just wait until the semester was finished, but she assured me she’d be fine, and a series of cheerful cards and short letters—signed either by her or by just a big paw print—arrived in my letterbox to prove the point. When she finally did get back, she called me up and we got together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park.

  Going out to the West Coast seemed to have done her good. She came back looking radiant and tanne
d, full of amusing stories concerning the ups and downs of her and Fritzie’s adventures out there. She’d even got some fairly serious interest from an independent record label, but they were still making up their minds when her money ran out. Instead of trying to make do in a place where she felt even more like a stranger than she did in Newford, she decided to come home to wait for their response, driving back across the country in her old station wagon, Fritzie sitting up on the passenger seat beside her, her guitar in its battered case lying across the backseat.

  “By the time we rolled into Newford,” she said, “the car was just running on fumes. But we made it.”

  “If you need some money, or a place to stay . . . ” I offered.

  “I can just see the three of us squeezed into that tiny place of yours.”

  “We’d make do.”

  Gina smiled. “It’s okay. My dad fronted me some money until the advance from the record company comes through. But thanks all the same. Fritzie and I appreciate the offer.”

  I was really happy for her. Her spirits were so high now that things had finally turned around and she could see that she was going somewhere with her music. She knew there was a lot of hard work still to come, but it was the sort of work she thrived on.

  “I feel like I’ve lived my whole life on the edge of an abyss,” she told me, “just waiting for the moment when it’d finally drag me down for good, but now everything’s changed. It’s like I finally figured out a way to live some place else away from the edge. Far away.”

  I was going on to my third year at Butler U. in the fall, but we made plans to drive back to L.A. together in July, once she got the okay from the record company. We’d spend the summer together in La La Land, taking in the sights while Gina worked on her album. It’s something I knew we were both looking forward to.

  9

  Gina was looking after the cottage of a friend of her parents when she fell back into the abyss. She never told me how she was feeling, probably because she knew I’d have gone to any length to stop her from hurting herself. All she’d told me before she went was that she needed the solitude to work on some new songs and I’d believed her. I had no reason to worry about her. In the two weeks she was living out there I must have gotten a half-dozen cheerful cards, telling me what to add to my packing list for our trip out west and what to leave off.

  Her mother told me that she’d gotten a letter from the record company, turning down her demo. She said Gina had seemed to take the rejection well when she called to give her daughter the bad news. They’d ended their conversation with Gina already making plans to start the rounds of the records companies again with the new material she’d been working on. Then she’d burned her guitar and all of her music and poetry in a firepit down by the shore, and simply walked out into the lake. Her body was found after a neighbor was drawn to the lot by Fritzie’s howling. The poor dog was shivering and wet, matted with mud from having tried to rescue her. They know it wasn’t an accident because of the note she left behind in the cottage.

  I never read the note. I couldn’t.

  I miss her terribly, but most of all I’m angry. Not at Gina, but at this society of ours that tries to make everybody fit into the same mold. Gina was unique, but she didn’t want to be. All she wanted to do was fit in, but her spirit and her muse wouldn’t let her. That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

  All that survives of her music is that demo tape. When I listen to it, I can’t understand how she could create a healing process for others through that dark music, but she couldn’t use it to heal herself.

  10

  Tomorrow is Christmas day and I’m going down to the soup kitchen to help serve the Christmas dinners. It’ll be my first Christmas without Gina. My parents wanted me to come home, but I put them off until tomorrow night. I just want to sit here tonight with Fritzie and remember. He lives with me because Gina asked me to take care of him, but he’s not the same dog he was when Gina was alive. He misses her too much.

  I’m sitting by the window, watching the snow fall. On the table in front of me I’ve spread out the contents of a box of memories: The casing for Gina’s demo tape. My twig people and the other things we made. All those letters and cards that Gina sent me over the years. I haven’t been able to reread them yet, but I’ve looked at the drawings and I’ve held them in my hands, turning them over and over, one by one. The demo tape is playing softly on my stereo. It’s the first time I’ve been able to listen to it since Gina died.

  Through the snow I can see the gargoyle on the building across the street. I know now what Gina meant about wanting to live in their world and be invisible. When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different.

  Thinking about Gina hurts so much, but there’s good things to remember, too. I don’t know what would have become of me if she hadn’t rescued me in that playground all those years ago and welcomed me into her life. It’s so sad that the uniqueness about her that made me love her so much was what caused her so much pain.

  The bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral strike midnight. They remind me of the child I was, trying to stay up late enough to hear my cat talk. I guess that’s what Gina meant to me. While everybody else grew up, Gina retained all the best things about childhood: goodness and innocence and an endless wonder. But she carried the downside of being a child inside her as well. She always lived in the present moment, the way we do when we’re young, and that must be why her despair was so overwhelming for her.

  “I tried to save her,” a voice says in the room behind me as the last echo of St. Paul’s bells fades away. “But she wouldn’t let me. She was too strong for me.”

  I don’t move. I don’t dare move at all. On the demo tape, Gina’s guitar starts to strum the intro to another song. Against the drone of the guitar’s strings, the voice goes on.

  “I know she’ll always live on so long as we keep her memory alive,” it says, “but sometimes that’s just not enough. Sometimes I miss her so much I don’t think I can go on.”

  I turn slowly then, but there’s only me in the room. Me and Fritzie, and one small Christmas miracle to remind me that everything magic didn’t die when Gina walked into the lake.

  “Me, too,” I tell Fritzie.

  I get up from my chair and cross the room to where he’s sitting up, looking at me with those sad eyes of his. I put my arms around his neck. I bury my face in his rough fur and we stay there like that for a long time, listening to Gina sing.

  In 1891, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose a ballet based on an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” After completing the score, Tchaikovsky selected eight of the numbers from the ballet for a concert performance version: The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a. Premiering in March 1892, the suite was an immediate hit. The Nutcracker ballet, however, was not as well-received when it debuted in December of the same year. In the 1960s—after George Balanchine’s 1954 staging for the New York City Ballet—it spread to dance companies across America and became a popular annual Christmas event. If the future predicted in this Hugo-winning novella is correct, Tchaikovsky’s music will remain popular for a very long time.

  The Nutcracker Coup

  Janet Kagan

  Marianne Tedesco had The Nutcracker Suite turned up full blast for inspiration, and as she whittled she now and then raised her knife to conduct Tchaikovsky. That was what she was doing when one of the locals poked his delicate snout around the corner of the door to her office. She nudged the sound down to a whisper in the background and beckoned him in.

  It was Tatep, of course. After almost a year on Rejoicing (that was the literal translation of the world’s name), she still had a bit of trouble recognizing the Rejoicers by snout alone, but the three white quills in Tatep’s ruff had made him the first real “individual” to her. Helluva thing for a junior diplomat not to be able to tell one local from another—but there it was. Maria
nne was desperately trying to learn the snout shapes that distinguished the Rejoicers to each other.

  “Good morning, Tatep. What can I do for you?”

  “Share?” said Tatep.

  “Of course. Shall I turn the music off?” Marianne knew that The Nutcracker Suite was as alien to him as the rattling and scraping of his music was to her. She was beginning to like pieces here and there of the Rejoicer style, but she didn’t know if Tatep felt the same way about Tchaikovsky.

  “Please, leave it on,” he said. “You’ve played it every day this week—am I right? And now I find you waving your knife to the beat. Will you share the reason?”

  She had played it every day this week, she realized. “I’ll try to explain. It’s a little silly, really, and it shouldn’t be taken as characteristic of human. Just as characteristic of Marianne.”

  “Understood.” He climbed the stepstool she’d cobbled together her first month on Rejoicing and settled himself on his haunches comfortably to listen. At rest, the wicked quills adorning his ruff and tail seemed just that: adornments. By local standards, Tatep was a handsome male.

  He was also a quadruped, and human chairs weren’t the least bit of use to him. The stepstool let him lounge on its broad upper platform or sit upright on the step below that—in either case, it put a Rejoicer eye to eye with Marianne. This had been so successful an innovation in the embassy that they had hired a local artisan to make several for each office. Chornian’s stepstools were a more elaborate affair, but Chornian himself had refused to make one to replace “the very first.” A fine sense of tradition, these Rejoicers.

  That was, of course, the best way to explain the Tchaikovsky. “Have you noticed, Tatep, that the farther away from home you go, the more important it becomes to keep traditions?”