Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  “What am I going to do with you?” Susie said, feeling guilty already. She shouldn’t have said that to Dana, she didn’t mean anything by it, she was mostly mad at David, and not for taking May out too long and bringing her back in a state, but for the other thing. Bill and Liesel’s bedroom door was behind her, and for a moment she wondered where Liesel was, what she’d been doing. Sometimes her mother tried to escape the crush of people by reading in her room—what used to be their dressing room, which overlooked the backyard and had been turned into a study with a camelback sofa and a pretty desk. Her parents as they grew older had become more and more sensitive to noise. Not just noise but the … pressure of too many people, all their different demands and points of view, which is funny, given the fact that for much of their married life, they had kids in the house, sometimes four of them at a time, and at least a decade of dealing with babies. But you forget, or you grow out of it, and you figure, I’ve done my time, and Susie remembered that she hadn’t told Jean about Nathan’s flight.

  Her sister was staying in what was sometimes called the Blue Room, because of the wall color, and sometimes Granma’s room, because for the last five years of Bill’s mother’s life, that’s where she slept, driving everybody crazy. So Susie hitched May onto her hip and walked creaking down the length of the hall, toward the front of the house, where the bathroom was, and pushed the door next to it gently open. Like most of the upstairs bedrooms, it had too much stuff in it—the built-in closets overflowed with the kids’ old dresses and couldn’t be closed, bookshelves were stacked two deep, there were paintings and framed posters not only hanging on the walls but leaning against them, and all the surplus antique chairs had been arranged in a circle, as if anybody would ever sit in them and socialize. Jean lay on her belly, in her Levi’s, with one leg draped over the edge of the sofa bed, and her shoes kicked off beneath her. She was out cold, and her plain pretty face, like a boy’s under the short hair, showed a red crease on her cheek where she must have pressed against it awkwardly before turning over.

  Susie, with one baby in her arms, couldn’t help feeling the connection, my baby sister … it was easy to forget all the adult additions to Jean’s personality, when she lay like that, opinions and habits, case histories, and it was also easy to think, none of these matter very much. Maybe she should let her sleep. With Nathan’s flight delayed, she still had a little time before she needed to set out for Dallas. But then a thin persistent beeping sound began, sudden and irritating, and Susie noticed the watch on her sister’s wrist. Its digital face flashed on and off and Jean suddenly startled into consciousness, an unfiltered animal response. Her eyes opened, she seemed to draw back and freeze at the same time, as if she had been interrupted in the middle of a guilty act. Then, after a moment, she pressed a button on her watch and sat up.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “You’re fine. Their flight’s delayed, I was coming to tell you but wasn’t sure if you wanted to be woken up. By at least an hour. You’re fine.”

  And Jean, rubbing her eyes and then putting her head in her hands, took a couple of breaths, and said, “All right, all right. I’m fine,” and then looked up and said, in a different voice, “Hey baby,” and reached out to touch May’s fingers. Susie didn’t know which way it would go, but the baby, bored of being held, made the little movement of her back and legs that meant she was ready to be released, so for a moment Jean gathered her in her arms and felt her intimate heat but had to let go again, because she wanted to play on the bed.

  “I guess I had my moment,” Jean said and flipped open her laptop, which lay on the coffee table—an old leather chest.

  “Just watch it she doesn’t fall off,” Susie told her, and Jean shifted her butt around and half-reclined, resting on her elbow to form a wall. “It’s two hours now,” Jean said, tapping at the keyboard anyway. “Fuck. It’s my fault.”

  “Nathan told me to tell you if it gets too late they’ll get a hotel.”

  “Well, that’s what he expressly didn’t want to do. Fuck.”

  “Hey, Jeannie,” Susie said, changing tone. “It’s fine. He’s a big boy,” and Jean rubbed her cheeks again and pushed back her hair and lifted her shoulders and stretched out her hands. “Well, whatever it is, it’s too late now.”

  *

  Dinner was in progress when they came back downstairs. Dana and Paul were fighting about something, David had disappeared. Susie said, “Where is he?” and Paul told her, “I think we scared him away.”

  “He’s not so easily frightened.” But the kids were eating—Ben had mostly finished his plateful and was reading a book, and Willy was looking for something else in the fridge. Yogurt and jam. Dana, sitting down, fed Cal his pesto macaroni spoon by spoon. Paul, hovering, tried to get him to eat a piece of cucumber. From time to time, he said, “Come on, Buddy. Be a big kid now. You can do this yourself,” but when Susie started fixing a high chair to the end of the table he backed away. Jean left them to it and carried her computer into Liesel’s study, to check for flight updates—the WiFi in the kitchen was temperamental anyway. She also looked up tickets for a UT basketball game. Maybe Henrik would be interested. After a few minutes, she heard Dana calling her, and with a very slight delay responded, “I’m here.”

  “Want to get a drink?” Dana said. “Paul wants to put Cal to bed by himself. He thinks if I’m around he won’t let me. So I’m being sent away.”

  She stood between the sliding glass doors in a jumpsuit made out of some patterned material, vaguely African-looking, but light and comfortable. It also showed off her long legs; she wore leather sandals underneath, her toenails were freshly painted. Jean thought, I’d feel embarrassed in something like that, I couldn’t pull it off, and said, “I’m supposed to go get Nathan from the airport.”

  “When do you need to leave?”

  “I don’t know. His flight’s delayed.”

  “So you can check your phone from the Spider House.” And then: “Please come. I’m going a little crazy around here.”

  “Okay. Give me a minute to get ready.” But in the end, she went out like she was, in jeans and a T-shirt, she couldn’t be bothered, and slipped on a pair of sneakers at the kitchen backdoor. Dana was giving Cal another kiss; he didn’t want to let go. Paul kept saying, “All right, all right, all right,” and eventually she pulled herself away and they walked out together, into the early dark.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Dana felt the shift in mood. They were out of the house, a couple of women heading to a bar, on a Sunday night two days before Christmas. She looked good, it was nice to feel the softer Southern air again on your skin, after two months of New York weather, snowfall and the aftermath of snow, the grit and dirty puddles and constant cold—to wear the kind of clothes you can wear on a mild evening, to feel the grass on your toes through the sandal straps. A few blocks away, someone was having a party: music, open-air drinking sounds, a bit of low cloud cover held the noises down, she could feel the baseline in her rib cage, like a heartbeat, and her blood kicked a little, she was out on the town. When you’re single, with a kid at home, you don’t get many chances, and she said, “Maybe we should just follow the … I mean, go where that is,” and Jean said, “I don’t know. I just woke up.” And then, after a minute, being honest: “I’m not very good at crashing parties.”

  They had to watch their step on the unlit lawn—the branches of a crepe-myrtle appeared, you felt the leaves on your face, blinking, and afterward, pushing through, had to step around the spines of an agave plant, like a mop of prickly hair spread out to dry on the grass. Jean fiddled with the back gate (someone had stuck a twig in the latch to lock it), then they stepped out onto the dead-end street. The party music suddenly got louder, while Trudy’s, the frat-boy Mexican restaurant at the end of the block, was lit up by strings of colored Christmas lights in the shape of a reindeer and Santa, dangling and twinkling from the branches of a live oak. Dana could see, about thirty feet away along the e
mpty road, a guy walking toward them with low-hanging arms. He carried in each hand a paper shopping bag and had the slightly lugubrious and deliberate gait of a young man on his own (maybe he was twenty-two years old), showing up at a party like you’re supposed to do, with beer, before he turned up the front path of the house where the noise was coming from and slipped around the side past the air-conditioning units toward the backyard. The sound system was playing “Locked Out of Heaven” and Dana heard the “yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah” of the lyrics and felt a sudden nervousness at the thought of actually following him in. But Jean kept going anyway and they crossed over West 30th toward the Spider House, whose courtyard glittered with Chinese lanterns and smelled of wood smoke from a couple of outdoor braziers and was starting to fill up with people.

  Dana ordered a frozen margarita; Jean had a hot chocolate. “I’ve got to drive all night, and I’m kind of out of it already,” she said apologetically. A band was setting up at the other end of the courtyard, but they hadn’t started to play. There was a woman in blue jeans and a red dress and cowboy boots messing with one of the speakers, and a guy in Stan Smiths came over and gave her a soft kick in the butt, and Jean could hear her say, “Hey.” The stage area, really just a raised level of the courtyard, covered like the rest of it in patterned paving stones, was draped in colored lights, whose profusion of reds, blues and greens cast little halos that shattered against each other and seemed to spill and run. Jean felt the weirdness of the afternoon napper. She felt hollowed out and totally un-hungry at the same time, and all of these effects taken together—the lights, the jet lag, and the slightly awkward but familiar position of hanging out with her brother’s ex-girlfriend—made everything seem a little more meaningful or dramatic than it otherwise might have.

  “You must be excited,” Dana said.

  They were sitting on old garden furniture, which wobbled metallically on the stones. The smoke smell from the firepit was strong, and from time to time the wind shifted, so that you had to close your eyes and turn away.

  “You mean because Henrik is coming? I guess. I don’t mean that … in a downplaying kind of way. I’m probably more terrified than … that’s too strong. I’m a little nervous.”

  But that’s not what Dana had meant. She meant because Susie was moving to England, but changed tack now because this line of conversation was more intimate than the other, and she wanted to have, just for its own sake, the more intimate version of any conversation she could have at the moment with Jean. And Jean guessed as much, and decided to push through anyway, because what she actually realized, not for the first time but maybe for the first time clearly, is that she had been holding back on Dana, a little bit. Out of loyalty to Paul maybe. Pretending to be friendly but not really opening up, and she could use her nervousness about Henrik’s arrival as a tool to that effect, or a unit of exchange.

  “If you like him, then I’m sure he’s nice,” Dana said simply.

  “I don’t know if nice is the …” but Jean was touched. She hadn’t always felt, for the past two years, as confident as she used to feel of being liked or trusted in a certain way, even though a lot of what she had been doing involved unusual levels of selflessness. Making nice to his kids, arranging her life around them, and also, after Henrik’s diagnosis, sitting with him in hospital waiting rooms, questioning doctors, mastering complex information, making sure he showed up at his appointments and took his medicine, and communicating what needed to be communicated to the woman he was getting a divorce from, without responding to her consistent low-level sniping or angry or provocative remarks. “I like him,” she said. “He’s very … I don’t know if good is the word either. I mean, he’s superficially perfectly friendly and polite, he’s not like an … but he’s very straight with people. I want to say honest but I know how that comes across, given how we got together. But he basically is. He’s also very open or nonjudgmental. I don’t know if I mean any of this. People are hard to describe. Even when you love them. I mean, it’s total bullshit—he makes lots of judgments …” And she closed her eyes, a gust of smoke blew into her face, and she added, “I’m not making much sense. My brain isn’t really … I’m losing my words, as Granma used to say.”

  “People are hard to describe,” Dana said.

  The waitress brought their drinks, a red-haired woman in a surprisingly formal dress, something velvety (it was hard to tell in the light) and sneakers, Jean noticed, as she walked away—Nike running shoes. The band had started warming up. There were three of them, the girl seemed to be the singer. She held the mic and was humming along and tapping it, though she had a guitar around her neck as well. The first guy was still fiddling with his drums, and an older dude had joined them, pony-tailed, grizzle-faced, standing and plucking at a cello—they started a song and stopped, they were messing around. The girl said something and the other two laughed and Jean checked her phone to see if Nathan’s flight had taken off.

  Somebody said, “How’re you ladies doing?” and Jean glanced up—she thought for a second it was another waiter. He wore dirty black jeans and an Antone’s T-shirt and looked like he was maybe thirty years old, though it was hard to tell. He had the strong tattooed forearms and chapped broken-nailed hands of somebody who does a lot of manual labor, but his teeth weren’t great and there was something sheepish or damaged about his face—a kind of habitual appeal in it, to be treated leniently. His hair was black, greasy, and uncombed but he was otherwise handsome, tall, muscular, and skinny; his belt sat on his bony hips, there wasn’t any fat, and his T-shirt didn’t quite cover the dark hairs of his belly.

  “Can I get you ladies a drink?”

  He sounded like an actual Texan, and Jean noticed he had a bottle of Shiner in one hand, which he had been holding with a touching formality behind his back, until he brought it out to take a swig. It was clear by this point to both of them that he was drunk.

  “We’re fine,” Jean said. “We just got our drinks.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, backing up good-humoredly, and he stumbled a little and sat down at an empty table. “I’m just gonna sit here,” he said.

  “What’s it say?” Dana asked.

  “It says fifteen minutes. But that’s what it said the last time I checked as well.”

  “You’re a good sister, to pick him up.”

  “Well, I don’t think he really wanted to come. I kind of bullied him into it.”

  “Liesel will be happy.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jean said, but she was withdrawing again, she didn’t like Dana bringing their mother into it, but corrected herself and said: “I wanted him to meet Henrik. That’s kind of the whole point of this trip for me.”

  “I’m not really sure what I’m doing here,” Dana said, after a moment, into the silence. She made a face, flattening her lips and raising her eyebrows slightly.

  “You’re … I mean, Cal, it’s perfectly …”

  “I wouldn’t guess y’all’s from around here, am I right?” the man said, hamming it up—leaning forward now in a friendly way, with his elbows on his knees. He was five or six feet away.

  “I’m sorry,” Dana said. “We’re trying to have a conversation.”

  “Now you sound to me like one of those … stuck-up kind of … I don’t mean to be rude, but I mean, just like, in terms of where you come from. Like Anne Hathaway, in Rachel Getting Married, that’s all I mean, I mean, she’s a … she’s a movie star. You kind of look like her a little bit, too.”

  “She asked you to leave us alone,” Jean said.

  “That’s not really what she said. She said you were having a conversation. Now I’m having a conversation, too. We’re all having a conversation.”

  “Okay, now I’m asking you to leave us alone.”

  “It’s not really you I’m trying to … I mean,” and he started laughing, “what I’m saying is, I don’t mind if you want to …”

  “Do you want to go?” Dana asked Jean. “We can move tables or so
mething.”

  “Fuck him, why should we move. He should move.”

  “All right, ladies,” he went on, “all right, all right. All right. I won’t say anything. I’ll just sit here. In my hole, in my man-hole,” and he started laughing again. When he laughed you could see his teeth; there was a gap on one side, and several others looked heavily discolored—his face seemed to give way into his mouth. But there was also something phony about his laughter, something forced, which in its own way seemed sad, and almost sympathetic.

  “I guess you get this a lot,” Jean said. They were speaking in undertones now and had subtly shifted their positions, turning their backs on the fire and looking toward the street, where an SUV was trying to park, and somebody, a woman, stood in the road directing. Beyond them was a triangle of grass, empty one-way streets cutting through a park, and beyond that a dark slope that led through a gap in the trees to college housing and the beginnings of the university.

  “Me?” Dana said. “Yeah, all the time. Pushing Cal around. I have to fight them off.”

  “Come on, you know what I mean.”

  The band by this point had started playing and they could use the noise to talk almost normally—in fact, they had to raise their voices slightly, and turned around now to listen. The girl in the red dress leaned forward and back with the microphone in hand (Jean thought, the way they all do, it’s funny how conventional these gestures become), and sang, “Don’t take the dogs away. Don’t take the dogs away from me …”