“Daddy is coming back,” she says to Amy. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t want him to come back.”
The spell of the prayer is broken. “Get some rest,” Ellen says. “You don’t want to fall asleep during Mass.”
“I don’t want him to come back either,” Herbert says, but he is sleeping, his mouth closing around Amy’s words, repeating them like a lullaby. Ellen kisses them good night, then goes to find Mary-Margaret in the bathroom. She is dressed for bed in her pink gown with the billowy sleeves. Her breath smells of goose.
“Aren’t you going to Midnight Mass?” Ellen says.
“Three…four…” She is measuring out her pills. She swallows them with water, coughs briefly. Then she bends her head forward and Ellen squeezes Ben-Gay into her hands, rubs her neck, her smooth shoulders beneath the gown. Mary-Margaret’s skin is the softness of peach skin, the softness of babies and satin and water, the softness of rot.
“What about Mass?”
“I don’t want to go without Jimmy,” Mary-Margaret says. She gets up, pulling Ellen’s hands with her under the gown, shrugs them away, and goes down the hall into her room. Ellen washes her hands, scrubs them with a washcloth to take off the greasy residue. When she comes out of the bathroom, she turns on all the living room lights: the lamp, the overhead light, the light above the TV. She goes into the kitchen and turns on the oven light, the big light over the counter, and she switches on the glass chandelier in the dining room. She bumps the heat up from sixty to eighty-five.
Wasting electric. Wasting oil.
She eats fingerfuls of cold stuffing from the dish in the refrigerator; soon it is all gone, and so is the leftover pumpkin pie. Still, she is hungry, she is raging with hunger. She takes the plate of Pfeffernüsse into the living room and turns on the TV, a Christmas special about an elf who cannot make toys. The first TV she ever saw belonged to her mother’s sister and her family. They watched “The Howdy Doody Show,” and while the picture filled the tiny screen, she and her cousins and sisters were silent, frozen, not wanting to blink or swallow or cough and accidentally miss a moment of that magic. Afterward, Aunt Amelia was impressed, not so much with the TV as with the quietness of the children. TV was a wonderful thing, she said, because TV made children behave. Even now, staring at the screen, Ellen feels her hunger melt into a dull ache she can easily ignore. What will happen to the elf? Why can’t he learn to make toys?
At ten, the show is over, and she wraps the gifts. A portable radio for James, chocolate lemon cremes for Fritz and Mary-Margaret. She bought the kids mostly clothes this year: boots for Amy, a down vest for Herbert, socks and underwear and lined mittens. Then, on a whim, she bought each of them a large stuffed mouse, one orange, one blue. Now she realizes they will both want either the orange one or the blue one. They will fight, they will cry. Someone will be unhappy. She wraps the mice, leaving only their long tails sticking out. Since there is no Christmas tree, she arranges the gifts around the TV, spreading them out so they’ll look like more. Then she sits on the couch and stares at the reflection of herself in the window. Her skin is the color of pale bread; her eyes and nostrils are hollows. Her short, permed hair is uneven, curly in patches, straight above her forehead. She looks like any woman she might see in the grocery store.
When she was about Amy’s age, she invented her future self from pictures she’d cut from the Sears catalogue. Her future self wore aqua shoes and hose and an aqua dress. Her hair was blond, swept up in the back, full in front. Perfect hair. Perfect body. Perfect clothes. She had eight children, and each of them had beautiful names. Veronica. Evelyn. Ruth. Her husband was sophisticated, dignified, certainly not someone who sold farm equipment. He worked in an office. Her aqua body greeted him at the door after work each day. Her aqua arms hung up his coat, led him to a table filled with delicious things to eat. The children sat, each in their place, and she turned to smile at them, one by one.
This is what my future self looks like, Ellen tells her reflection. This is what a real wife and mother looks like.
But she sees her aqua self shimmering behind her own reflection in the glass. It is almost eleven o’clock, and James has not come home. Her aqua self smiles her satisfied, perfect smile, the smile Ellen had chosen after scanning page after page, clipping many figures of women who weren’t quite right. But now the smile gives Ellen a chill: there is something behind it, something desperate, something terrifying.
She jumps up and goes into the children’s room, turns off their alarm clock. Then she puts on her boots and her own thin winter coat. If she walks fast, she can make it downtown in fifteen minutes, grab James from the Gander, swing back for the kids, and get to church early enough to listen to the choir. For a moment, standing in the entryway, she smells the aqua lady’s sweet sweet perfume. Stay home with the children. Wait for James. When he comes home, be gracious, tell him it’s all right.
She leaves at a run with James’s key in her pocket. Behind her, all the lights blaze in the house like fire.
She finds the car parked outside the Gander with its headlights on. The doors are locked. She doesn’t have a key. The light from the headlights is a watery yellow against the snow. Cars and trucks are parked randomly along the street, facing each other, facing away from each other. Hummer’s rusted Mustang has one wheel lodged on the sidewalk as if it is pulling itself toward the warmth and lights and smells of the bar, which have filtered out into the cold air of the street.
Her lungs ache from running. She pushes her way into the bar through the men standing by the door. One of them grabs her sleeve. When she shoves him away, there is laughter. Ellen has always hated bars—the smoke, the noise, the groups of half-drunk men who always laugh in the same sly way. Before she married James, she sometimes went to bars with her girlfriends, but she always sat with her back to the wall, unable to feel safe. Marriage, she thought, would be shelter from all that, from men who look at you and laugh that way because you belong to no one. Yet marriage brought its own brand of laughter; on her wedding day Hummer kissed her full on the lips. Warming her up for you, Jimmy, he’d said, and the other men whistled when she slapped his face.
She spots James in his usual booth with Bill and Hummer and a woman she doesn’t know. The woman is Ellen’s age, but only another woman would guess it; to men, she would look younger with her stylish hair and painted nails, her sneakers with jingle bells tied up in the laces. She wears a cute red Santa’s cap, and Ellen hates her for it. As she watches, the woman leans over, puts her tongue in Hummer’s ear. James is sitting beside Bill, his head propped up on one hand, his skinny legs crossed at the ankles. He turns, looks at Ellen, but does not notice she is there, and she thinks wildly that perhaps it isn’t him, that she’s made a mistake and he’s home right now, wondering where she is. Somebody touches her arm and she jerks it away, spins around.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says quickly; it’s one of the fourth-grade teachers from school. Ellen promptly forgets her name. It’s Beatrice, maybe. Or Carol.
“I always pegged you as the quiet type, but here you are on Christmas Eve. Looks can be deceiving.” The woman grins; then she looks at Ellen closely. “Hey, it’s me, Barb. You okay?”
“No,” Ellen says.
Then Hummer sees her, waves his arm. “Ellie!” he shrieks. He has a high, wandering voice. Mocking. “Me-e-erry Christmas!” he says. “Come and have a drink.”
“That your husband?” Barb says.
“The one to the left,” Ellen says grimly. “The one with his head on the table.”
“Wow,” Barb says, staring at James. “He’s going to have one hell of a stiff neck.”
“He’s going to have more than that,” Ellen says, and Barb laughs, but kindly, and squeezes her arm before disappearing into the crowd. Ellen sidesteps a group of slow-dancing couples, sits down next to James. Five people in a booth is tight, but she doesn’t want anyone to be comfortable. James lifts his head and drapes a heavy
arm around her shoulders. A half-empty pitcher is on the table, certainly not the first.
“Whoops,” James says. “I was going to get back for Midnight Mass.”
The beer has wiped his expression clean. There is no trace of Fritz, the children, Christmas. No trace of her. Only his nose looks different: puffy, with traces of blood at the corner of one nostril. A few stained tissues are crumpled on the table in front of him.
Hummer checks his watch. It is gold, large, too big for his wrist. “Aw, shit, me too,” he says sarcastically. “You Catholic?” he asks the woman.
“Used to be,” she says. She takes a large swallow of beer. “Fuck that shit.”
“That’s sacrilege,” James whispers to Ellen, truly amazed. “Did you hear what she just said?”
“I ain’t been to Mass in years,” Bill says. “I always mean to go, but then…” He smiles, shrugs, drinks his beer. “Hey, Ellen, you going?”
“If the car starts,” she says.
James looks at her strangely.
“You left the lights on,” she says. “Give me the key, I’m going to try and start it.”
“Okay, okay.” James says. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.” His hands work through his pockets like hands moving underwater. When she grabs the keys, the woman snickers.
“Looks like Jimmy’s in trou-ble,” she says, and she shakes her jingle-bell feet.
“Have a merry Christmas,” Ellen says, and she leaves them to their beer. As she’s struggling past the men around the door, her heel finds a toe, grinds hard, and then she’s back on the street. She unlocks the car, gets in, turns it over.
Nothing.
She doesn’t bother to try again. She puts her head on the steering wheel, thinking about the long walk home, the kids waking up in the morning to the presents strewn around the TV. The thud of the music from inside the Gander is as muffled as a heartbeat; snow falls, peaceful as the snow in a movie or a song. Silent night, holy night. It’s a beautiful Christmas Eve. In the morning, the fields around her mother’s house will be like a single cloth spread across a wide table, the pine trees shuddering with chickadees and juncos, the smell of wood smoke in the air. She thinks about how she will have to pretend to her mother, to her sisters, Yes, what a wonderful Christmas we had, how was yours? and her voice will be the voice of the aqua lady, charming and sweet and unreal. A lady’s voice. The voice she chose for herself when she was just a little girl.
Lullaby
7
Their hands remind him of skeleton hands; their eyes the round, blank eyes of ghosts. As a boy, he’d been afraid of Halloween: the neighborhood children carved tiny jack-o’-lanterns and carried them, leering and lit, from farm to farm. From the window of the bedroom he shared with his brother, he could see strings of jack-o’-lantern smiles gliding through the dark fields. Sometimes, one of the smiles broke from the others, arced wildly, twisting as it fell, burst into blackness. Later, much later, his brother would come home, smelling of crushed pumpkin rot. He’d climb into James’s bed and sit on James’s stomach and pinch his nipples hard, saying, chicken, chicken, chicken.
James swallows, licks his lips. What kind of man looks at his own children and thinks of Halloween?
They are waiting for him in their beds, pale fingers thin and reaching. Their pointed chins remind him of witches. They are waiting to press their cool witch lips to his neck. They are waiting to breathe candy kisses into his ears. They are waiting for him to tuck them in, because he said he would do it. James stands in the doorway, not wanting to come in, not wanting those skeleton fingers even accidentally touching his own. He has never tucked them in before. He wants to be closer to his children.
“Have you said your prayers?” he asks. If he stands just so, his feet wide apart, his back straight, both his shoulders brush the door frame. He feels he is standing the way a father should: upright, firm, filling in the extra space. A lamp glows on the nightstand between the beds, and the shade of the lamp is painted with angels, white-winged angels in long, pale gowns.
“Yes,” Bert says.
“No,” Amy says. She has a bruise on her cheek: the shape reminds James of a lemon and makes his mouth taste sour. Amy says importantly, “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”
He wonders how she got the bruise. Little girls, he knows, get bruises now just the way little boys used to.
“You pull up the covers and ask us do the pillows feel okay, and if we say no, you say, oops, must be a stone in here somewhere, and you take the pillow and scrunch it and shake it and give it back. Then you say prayers and you kiss us good night.”
She is such a plain little girl. His mother, he knows, doesn’t like her. It isn’t fair to dislike a little girl just because she is plain.
“That’s what Mom does,” she says.
Sunken cheeks. She does not have her brother’s looks. Bert is small and sweet as an elf, except for the pointed incisors, too big for his mouth, which peep from the edges of his lips like fangs. He looks shockingly like James did at that age: delicate, pretty, mistaken sometimes for a girl. His eyes glitter; he is staring at James, he is always staring at James. He wants James to—what?
James looks again at Amy’s bruise. Swallows the sour taste.
Bert’s arms are wrapped tight around a large blue mouse; an orange one like it squats at the foot of Amy’s bed. To James, both mice are gray: he is color-blind. But Ellen told him the colors, which he memorized. Because he is making an effort. Because he wants to be close to the children.
“What a nice blue mouse,” he says.
He remembers something his grandmother used to sing to make children fall asleep. Her name was Ann, and she had long hair which she wore in braids and a bump on her chin where sharp black whiskers grew. When she died, they laid her on the kitchen table to prepare her body to be put into the ground where God would take it away. Once, when no one else was in the house, he lay flat on the table to see what it felt like to be dead. It was summer; flies buzzed against the windows, and a faint breeze smoothed his hair. He waited until he heard the flutter of angels’ wings and smelled the sweet vanilla odor of their breath.
“Braun’ Kuh, schwarze Kuh, mach’ die Augen zu,” James sings to the children in a quavery woman’s voice.
His mother caught him there, stretched across the cold, hard wood, and he was punished, he knows he was punished, but can’t remember how. It was one of the few times his mother ever punished him. He was the delicate one, sickly just like she was. Hasenfuss, Mitch called him. Mama’s boy. The children look at him with their blank ghost eyes.
“Braun’ Kuh, schwarze Kuh—” How does it go? Those black whiskers poking his cheek. The smell of grease in her hair.
“Daddy, what does that mean?” Bert says.
Round eyes. Glitter.
“It means,” James says, “brown cow, black cow.” He waits for the words to come. “Make your eyes shut.”
They think about that. Their cool witch lips form silent shapes. Singing. Her braids twisted together, pinned high on her head, a nest of hair, smelling of grease. She stabs metal forks into the apples, one by one, then swirls them in caramel, lines them up on a platter. When they come to the door, you give them these, she says, and he waits, shivering in the drafty entryway, the jack-o’-lanterns drifting toward him, as though he is the center, the core, the magnet, his brother’s brightest smile in the lead.
During the night he gets up, restless, untangling his breathing from Ellen’s moist, deep breaths, leaving the stale cloud of warmth beneath the blankets. It is after midnight; he has been dreaming about the children. They clung to him as the air swarmed with bees. It was the sound of the bees that woke him, the shrill scream of a thousand wings, blending into song.
Braun’ Kuh, schwarze Kuh—
He cannot remember the rest. His brother would have known; Mitch was older, he remembered everything, anything, when he wanted to. A mind like a steel trap, his mother said. Mitch was the smart one, good in
school, while James was held back because he couldn’t learn his colors, because he stuttered when he spoke, head down, voice almost too soft to hear. Skinny James, always frail like his mother, always with a black eye or a bruised rib or an arm in a sling. Accident-prone. Careless.
But James is alive and Mitch is dead. Mitch died when the truck he was driving overturned, rolled deep into a culvert, burst into flames. Now he is buried at Saint Michael’s Cemetery, asleep in the ground like the twin brothers James can barely remember. They lived less than an hour, not long enough to seem real, and his mother and grandmother denied that they had ever been born. But Mitch showed James what their mother said were two dogs’ graves on the gentle swell of land overlooking the house. James liked to stand on their flat granite stones, each the size of a man’s footprint, his legs spread wide as they could go, swinging his arms for balance. Once, Mitch gave him a shove, and James pitched forward onto his knees, embarrassed in front of his little brothers, who he knew must be laughing, like Mitch, at his clumsiness, their baby mouths black with dirt. The thought of them churned in his stomach, and he wouldn’t visit their graves after that.
Together down there. Whispering secrets.
Even now, small children make James nervous. Smooth faces; blank ghost eyes. Tiny fingers and toes. He never knows what they are thinking. Their faces are masks, their expressions wiped clean of words. The slightest thing can kill them: a cold, a bump, a bruise. Then they close their eyes and disappear into the ground.
He gropes his way down the dark hall, past the children’s bedroom, past his parents’ bedroom. In the living room, he turns on the TV and sits down on the couch. The light from the TV fills the air like mist. His head is still thick with the dream: Amy’s chin hooked over his shoulder, Bert’s legs wrapped like a belt around his waist, the strange costume of their bodies against his own. The show is an old sixties movie, and he folds himself eagerly into the plot.
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