“Some things you just know.”
“It’s the double letters,” she said six months later. We were making a topographical map of North Carolina for school.
I looked up from the cardboard I was cutting. “What?”
Daintry squeezed two droplets of green food coloring into the doughy mixture of flour and water. “Black Magic. Good Housekeeping has it, Life doesn’t. Seventeen has it, but Time doesn’t. And headlines count, too.” She screwed the cap carefully on the green bottle. “Would you have ever guessed?”
“Give me that mixing bowl. The Piedmont isn’t all green. Add some brown.”
She laughed.
I walked to Ellen and wrapped my arms around her shoulders as though my embrace could protect her from this intrusion. The night had been marred.
“Perhaps we’ll see you at the five o’clock service Christmas Eve,” Mother said.
But it was Daintry who would have the last word. “No, I don’t expect you will. I’ve always thought that family service is like a circus.”
I watched my mother’s mouth tighten. Can I go to the midnight service with the O’Connors? Please, please, please? They invited me. Why can’t we go to the late service?
“Oh, and Hannah,” Daintry said, hand on the door, “I was wondering if you’d be in charge of organizing appointments for the pictorial directory.”
“What?”
“It was my idea, to have parishioners’ photographs taken for a pictorial directory. So we can all have names to go with faces.”
“I . . .” I hated the idea.
“Since the columbarium is finished.”
“It. . . ”
“You have plenty of time now, don’t you?”
Mother spoke up definitively, answering for me. “I’m sure Hannah will do a wonderful job. Whatever she does, she does well.”
Daintry tapped her chin with one finger. “I’m sure of it, too.” She looked at me. “I’ll call with the details after Christmas.” The door closed behind her.
“Can I put the presents under now?” Ellen asked.
“Let’s eat,” Hal said. “I’ll have soup and a ham sandwich.”
But Mother hadn’t moved. “Why didn’t you tell me the O’Connor girl was living here?”
“Her name is Daintry, Mother. And she’s doing a little more than just ‘living here.‘”
“She didn’t take her husband’s name? Or one of those slash names?”
Ceel laughed. “No.”
“What does she do?”
“Manages an Asheville stockbroking office.”
Mother wasn’t impressed. “A pictorial directory,” she mused, Daintry dismissed. “Dreadful.”
After dinner was eaten and cleared; after Ceel and Ben departed; after Hal and Ellen and Mother had gone to bed, I sat on the sofa before the tree. Sat in the silent room darkened but for the eerie glow of red against the black branches and held the baby book Ellen had forgotten in her trimming glee. The baby book Mother no longer, seemingly, had any need to keep.
I might have flipped through its pages. Might have looked at the pictures cataloging all those events of childhood. But pictures hold only moments, fractions of seconds preserved in toothy smiles and flashbulbed eyes made feral with pinpoints of red. Within the stained satin cover were snapshots of birthday cakes and Christmas mornings and beach vacations. There were before and after grins of braces and haircuts, glasses and contacts. Yet as a photograph of an impulsive hug isn’t evidence of intimacy, a relationship can’t be documented in a split-second, freeze-framed rectangle. The album I held couldn’t capture the unguarded, guileless, myriad moments of a childhood friendship. There were no pictures of chalked hopscotch grids or giggled telephone pranks or backyard forts.
Nor were there sounds within its pages. Of banged “Heart and Soul” on the organ, or arguments over whose turn it was to play the right-hand melody. No one potato two potato three potato, four. No tuneless plinking accompaniment to the jerkily twirling ballerina that sprung up when I opened the lid of her jewelry box, or tinny “Edelweiss” when she opened the lid to my music box from Switzerland. No churning of the rock tumbler we left grinding night and day for a month, waiting to unplug and silence it and discover ordinary rocks transformed to smoothly patinaed jewels. There was no coin, the first sandwich quarter made of copper and silver that we saved as if it might be the only one minted, taped to the pages. No pictures of our private industries, damming the creek behind our houses as if we might actually control its ceaseless flow. Playing— and cheating—on a Ouija board in a dark closet. Scissoring a stack of homemade thousand-dollar bills for a week-long Monopoly marathon. There was no room on its pages for jars filled with grass and earth, our earnest efforts to make lightning bugs and caterpillars and June bugs and earthworms feel cozy in captivity.
There were no pictures of Daintry and me beneath a red-lit Christmas tree, our arms and legs radiating like spokes as we lay among the presents, looking upward into the furry branches. “A book, easy,” we’d say, pressing and guessing at the contents; or peeking outright as I gargled an entirely fake cough to cover Daintry tearing an entirely unaccidental rip in the wrapping paper. And no picture of my disappointment the Christmas we pledged to ask for wispy-haired trolls so that we could play with them together. “Let’s see yours,” I said Christmas afternoon, proudly displaying my brown-skinned, bug-eyed midgets.
“Oh,” Daintry said, barely glancing at my toys, “I changed my mind and asked for art supplies instead. Look at this book on van Gogh.”
Traitor, I’d thought, hating my ugly trolls.
There was no photographic record of us memorizing those poems for fifth-grade assignments, no sounds of childish chanting or of our chest-beating moans when we discovered “The Highwayman” a year later. There was no box of Luden’s cough drops, candied medicine that was good as currency those elementary days. No copy of the songbook we purchased together at the school store to share during assemblies. Gone, gone, in a blink of unrecoverable time. Nothing at all to prove the sweetly squandered thousand thousand moments of pure happiness. Unadulterated. Un-adult. Oh, Daintry. I drew a deep breath, gasping in a smothering sadness for all the lost spontaneous joys, the trivial thrills of a girlhood shared. I leaned forward and placed the album on the table beside Ceel’s narcissus. In the glass bowl the delicate white roots twined inseparably throughout the pebbles.
“Mom?” A draft of cold air gushed in as Mark closed the front door. He shrugged off his coat and sat down beside me. “What are you doing, staying up to check on me?”
Mark had been on a short rope ever since he’d come home reeking of smoke several weeks earlier. “It’s not me,” he’d said. “Wendy and her friends smoke, and I was just in the car.”
But a week later I’d discovered something more worrisome than lingerie magazines under his bed: a heavy STOP sign. Hal was livid. “Stealing government property is a felony.” Again Mark objected, claiming that the sign had been lying on the side of the road.
“Mark,” I’d told him later, “whenever you’re with friends who are doing something you don’t want to do, blame it on me. Say, ‘My mother will kill me.’ ‘My mother won’t let me.’ ‘My mother will punish me.’ ‘She’s a. . . witch.’ You can blame it on me.”
“All I smell is syrup glaze,” I said to him now.
“Wendy calls me her ‘honey funk hunk.‘”
Dear God, I thought, and said, “Settin’ there jes’ lak a spider.”
“Huh?”
As if Mark would know Gone With the Wind. As if it would deter his attraction. As if he could ignore his sexuality even as I, decades older and supposedly wiser, was experiencing the same powerful pull myself. “Never mind. I was just enjoying the peace.”
“You ought to see how the windows look from outside. Like a nuclear meltdown.”
“Oh, admit it. You love the red bulbs.”
“You decorated without me.”
“You know what, Mark
? My first year at Wyndham Hall, the only thing that got me through December exams was thinking about decorating our tree, having everything be normal and usual and exactly the same. And when I came through the door, there it was, done. I didn’t know whether to sob with hurt feelings or stomp around being furious.” Mark picked at the beginnings of a hole in his jeans, listening. “And guess what. Go ahead, it won’t kill you. Say, ‘What?‘”
He gave me a grudging smile. “What?”
“The tree was beautiful, and Christmas came and went, and I lived. I got some things I wanted and some that I didn’t, just the same as every other year.” I stuck out my tongue at him. “Nyah.”
He shook his head as if he were the mature one. “Mom, you are so strange.”
“Maybe.” I stood and walked over to the tree. “What do you think?”
“It isn’t finished.”
“Sure it’s finished. Right down to the—up to the— angel on top. Or do you think it should be a star? We could have a good family feud over that issue.”
“The icicles.”
“But you can’t even see the branches when they’re covered with those stringy things.”
“Thanks a lot.” His lips were set in a thin line of stubbornness. Or hurt. I peered closely at him, and something inside me tumbled and gave way.
“Actually,” I said, “I was just saving them till you got home.” I took a paper bag from beside the ornament box. No one had thought to look into it between decorating and dinner and . . . Daintry. I handed him two slender cellophane-wrapped boxes. “After all, they have to go on last, right?”
He grinned, hugely pleased, and slit the plastic. “You didn’t forget.”
“I didn’t forget.” It wasn’t only Ellen who needed ritual. I leaned to switch on an end table lamp.
“No!” he nearly shouted, then lowered his voice for the sleeping house. “No lights.”
Like a waiter’s napkin, the icicles draped Mark’s forearm in a silvery cascade. As they swayed soundlessly he held up his free hand to stop me from saying more. “I know, I know. Put them on one by one, branch by branch. Only at the ends. No clumping, no tossing. Take your time. Careful, careful.” He separated one limp strand of tinsel from the mass and hung it delicately on the closest bough. It twinkled a solitary metallic red. “Your turn,” he said solemnly, and held out his arm to me.
“Mark,” I said, equally serious. “You’re doing this all wrong. Totally, heinously wrong,” I repeated, using one of his own overused adjectives to show him I meant business. “Now watch,” I said, and scooped up a dozen foil ribbons, “ ’cause I’m only going to show you this once.” I took two steps back and pitched the strands toward the tree. “Icicles have to be flung for the proper effect.” I pointed at the helter-skelter landing of the silver strips. “Now you try and let’s see if we can get this right.”
Mark laughed. He began to carefully put down his burden of perfectly aligned icicles, but I touched his arm. “Nope, uh-uh, like this,” and shook his arm so they fell to the sofa in a tangled lump. We stood over them, eyeing them and each other.
“You know,” I said, “we could make a swell tinfoil ball.”
“Nah,” Mark said. “I. Wanted. Icicles.”
We fell on them like famine victims. Twirled them in our fingers and grabbed them in our fists and flung them inanely toward the tree, mindless of where or how or if they landed. Clumps of red-burnished silver dotted branches like mangled birds’ nests. Backs to the tree, we tossed the icicle threads over our shoulders in unison, spilled salt and superstition. We clapped hands to our mouths in silent hilarity as we tied a bow round a Santa’s beard, handcuffed an angel with an icicle bracelet, tinsel-lynched a reindeer ornament to a branch, used slivers as makeshift dental floss in delirious spontaneity. It rained thin metallic silver with our wasteful, careless, free-falling pitches. Mark threw over-hand, I threw my best like-a-girl underhand, he went in for a layup with a crimped handful. The tree was a crazy web of shimmering foil, dripping and strewn with our unorchestrated handiwork.
We must have looked mad, leaping and bobbing in that strange fiery light before an indoor tree. We were twin banshees, a dervished duo enacting a pagan ceremony before finally collapsing to the floor, panting with laughter and exertion. And for everything else I’d remembered that night, I couldn’t recall when I’d felt so free and foolish.
I reached out to pick a silly silver string from Mark’s hair. “Forgot one,” I said, and handed it to him.
Our fingers touched as he took it from me and hung it carefully from a branch empty of sparkle. The single icicle swayed gracefully, as if some slight breeze, a breath, had set it in soundless motion.
“There,” Mark said. “Now it’s Christmas.” He crossed his arms behind his head and lay down, snug within the presents beneath the lowest boughs. Just as Daintry and I used to do.
From Hannah’s quote book:
Like a relapsing fever. . . the familiar ache of age and sadness and wisdom.
—Norman Mailer
Chapter 11
You should wait to take down the tree,” Mother said over my shoulder.
I pulled the ornament box closer. It was late morning of New Year’s Eve, and Hal had gone to the Academy with Ellen as eager company. The vacated school was a paradise for her, a life-size setting to play Teacher, where she scribbled assignments on blackboards and instructed imaginary students. “Wait for what?”
“Epiphany.”
“When’s that—January fifth or something?”
“You know very well when it is. We’ve hardly had time to enjoy the tree.”
“You’re getting ready to leave,” I reminded her.
“It’s a sin, what’s become of Christmas. Stores decorated before Halloween. Whatever happened to Advent?”
“The tree’s a fire hazard. Needles have been dropping to the floor for days.” I unhooked a Snoopy on skis and freed a wicker pram twined in tinsel. “Besides, it’s bad luck to leave it up over New Year’s.”
Mother stooped and lifted out the tiny plastic crèche from the cardboard dividers where I’d already packed it safely away. She turned it over in her hand. “Hannah. . . ”
I unhooked a stuffed mouse. “Yes?”
She replaced the ornament efficiently, clasped her elbows, and looked around distractedly. “You’ve done a nice job with the house. I wasn’t sure whether this move was the right thing for you and Hal.”
“Daddy always said it was never the right time to change jobs or buy a house or”—I paused—“have a baby.” “Don’t tell Mother about the latest rejection from the agency. I don’t want to say anything until I have a baby in my arms,” Ceel had said, adding, “If that ever happens.”
“You do have those beautiful boxwood out front,” Mother mused as if still deciding whether the house was worthy. “You and Hal don’t have plans for New Year’s Eve?”
I shook my head. “Is that okay?”
“No, I mean yes, I mean . . . I just assumed you’d want to celebrate in some way. Your Christmas presents to each other seemed. . . odd.” She gestured to the window where my gift from Hal was already in use: a sleekly modern squirrel-proof bird feeder. “Not very romantic. Have I ever told you about your father’s Christmas present to me the first year we were married?” She had, but I let her tell me again. “We were so poor. Christmas morning I unwrapped the gift and it was this big, green, ugly sewing box. I burst into tears holding it.
After that we always made sure to give each other something even a tiny bit personal.”
I thought of my back-rub coupon book for Hal on our own long-ago, poverty-stricken Christmas. This year my gift to him was a handheld computer dictionary, though it had been weeks since we’d challenged one another with definitions. Weeks since we’d even read together in bed. It was just a hectic time, we’d told ourselves, but our lovemaking seemed stratified now, easily, painfully assigned to category: Saturday night sex; bottle-of-wine sex; sex as sleeping pill. �
��But you still use that sewing kit, don’t you,” I said gently.
Mother straightened. “You know,” she said, pointing on her way back to the bedroom, “that picture is hung too high on the wall.”
I sighed.
Five minutes later she called to me again. “Hannah?”
I stopped in the doorway of Ellen’s room, messy with Christmas loot and Mother’s packing. She stood at the window, gazing outside. It was unusual to see her paused, stilled with inactivity. I disliked those rare afternoons as a child when I arrived after school to a quiet house and found my mother napping, stretched out on her bed like a corpse. An arm was thrown across her eyes, and its underside was a startling fish-belly white. Small snores leaked from her slightly gaping mouth, and I would watch, simultaneously fascinated, frightened, and repulsed. She seemed distant, her parental authority diminished by unconsciousness. Yet she was somehow naked as well, helpless and vulnerable in slumber.
“Mother?”
Roused from whatever reverie she’d been lost in, she started, and her head jerked in my direction. “Oh, I . . .” She walked to the bureau and began busily gathering toiletries. “Where did Mark go?”
“He’s at work, why?”
“I wanted him to pick up a crate of fatwood kindling for me from that roadside store.”
“You have gas logs.” “I knew you’d be purists,” Daintry had said.
“I was thinking of using them for Christmas presents next year, tied in bundles with plaid ribbon.”
“Next year? Who’s rushing Christmas now? ‘Whatever happened to Advent?‘”
Mother crossed her arms defensively. “Fatwood is better when it’s aged. Besides, that’s not rushing, that’s preparation.”
“Like Advent?” I laughingly suggested. “Daintry will be pleased you thought her idea was a good one. Imitation being the highest form of flattery.”
“A better idea than that parish photograph directory,” she said brusquely. “Are you going to help?”
“I don’t know.”
“You still let that girl boss you around.”
Even Now Page 14
