by Sandi Tan
“Your mother told us she’s going traditional this year on account of you. None of her usual cooter and gator stew.” B. M. turned to Mary-Sue. “We had quite the Everglades Christmas last year, didn’t we, darling? Too bad about Larry’s stomach trouble, though. I blame the turtle.” He handed a bouquet of purple orchids to Kate, “FYI, these are vandas, the Jackie Collins of the orchid world. Tourists love ’em.” He lowered his voice, “Your mother shouldn’t, yet she does.”
The dining table was set in greens and reds. Facing the breast-heavy bird with its immaculately crisp skin, Kate realized that this was her first holiday dinner with her mother that felt the way she imagined a holiday dinner should feel—social, hearty, conventional and more than a little claustrophobic. Her mother had a world—close friends, friends who’d fly across the country to eat with her. Kate had nothing like this. Mary-Sue said for everyone to wait another ten minutes for their final guest. Then those ten minutes passed.
She asked Larry to say grace, and everybody joined hands. She clasped her mother’s bony, birdlike talon with one hand and B. M.’s leathery paw with the other. Larry and B. S. reached across the sixth empty seat.
“Let’s just pretend he’s here, in spirit,” said Mary-Sue.
The men hadn’t bought any gifts for Mary-Sue because she’d outlawed it. As Kate knew, this was how she kept her own presents in the spotlight. Like Wendy surrounded by her kowtowing Lost Boys. B. S. caressed the slow cooker Mary-Sue gave him, B. M. called Mary-Sue a mind reader because the hurricane lantern he got was just what he needed “for the airboat out in Shark Valley.” Larry planted a kiss on Mary-Sue’s lips when he peeled open the wrapper and found the back support pillow he’d been wanting for watching TV in bed. Kate accepted her portable breast-milk pump wordlessly, then she switched on the one news channel Mary-Sue didn’t object to. “No terrorism,” she’d barked. Luckily, because of the holiday, what came on were “human interest” stories—identity theft, mountain lions, and missing children.
“ . . . Brittany Ann Yamasato turned sixteen during the eight months she spent hiding in the Palo Alto fraternity house where her boyfriend, a junior at Stanford, lived. She had not been kidnapped, she told her parents. She lived there willingly. And to protect the young man from prosecution, she has refused to reveal his identity. As to why she finally decided to come home, she says it’s all due to, quote, ‘the Christmas propaganda’ she saw around her. All in all, it’s a bittersweet reunion for the Yamasato family tonight . . .”
As old photographs of Brittany Ann Yamasato flashed on the screen, Mary-Sue felt all choked up: Brittany in a pink sweatshirt, posing by a New York subway sign; Brittany eating lobster with her parents in Maine; Brittany on a class trip to Paris. She was an obliging subject, but she always smiled a frozen sort of smile. Was she happy? Possibly. Was she unhappy? Possibly. Her expression was uncannily, unfathomably Kate-like. She wondered if Kate saw the resemblance also—but people never do.
On TV, the girl’s parents looked more shell-shocked than joyous as they faced the news cameras, as if the truth presented to them had to be a hoax because their daughter had always seemed so unfettered, sprawled on the couch doing her nails and watching MTV. They were glad she was home, Mary-Sue could tell, but she also saw that their innocence was no longer intact; their daughter’s happiness had been a lie. She felt an affinity with the mother whose pallid lips were quivering under the glare of the lights.
When the report ended, she turned to Kate, whose tense expression was hard to read. Mary-Sue teared up, in spite of herself. “Come here.” She stretched her hand out to her daughter, who reciprocated the move. “If you’d done that to me, dear girl, I would have killed you.” She grabbed her hand and rubbed it possessively. “I swear I would have murdered you myself.”
Kate’s earlier hunch had been right. Of course, Bluto was in the area. Pheromones, maybe. He was standing in the driveway when she went out with the trash.
She was almost relieved that he’d come.
“I was invited, but I didn’t feel it was my place,” he said. “Want to go for a little walk? Up the hill to Mount Curve? Stop in at the am/pm to partake in our traditional Mountain Dew, Sprite and iced tea combo?”
“You can’t just waltz back into people’s lives and expect everything to be the same as you left it, okay? You can’t just lurk, and then show your face when it’s convenient to you!”
“You heard about Brittany?” He lurched forward and locked her in an embrace. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going back East. For good.”
She stopped breathing.
“I’ve come to my senses,” he said. “When did you become one of those lobotomized sleepwalkers?”
She slapped him. Her hands were small and soft and bare. She punched him in the chest. The tears came. “Fuck you, Paul Corot.”
He grabbed her hands and shushed her with a light kiss on the forehead. From inside his jacket he pulled out a small parcel wrapped in Christmas paper.
“Open it.”
She did. Inside, a stack of folded papers, grimy with age. In the moonless night, it was hard to see what they were. Each page was a pastiche—newsprint, photos, ransom notes? She moved them into the pool of light spilling from the kitchen window. These were the collages they made together as sulky teenagers . . .
“All these years, I carried them everywhere with me, like religious relics. Bill Cosby’s in there somewhere, strangling Idi Amin with his sweater. So’s our ad for the Sid Vicious birthday cake company.” He laughed quietly. “And that imaginary review of Macbeth starring Hervé Villechaize, Zelda Rubinstein and assorted Scottish bagpipes. This is all of it.”
All of it? She flipped through the artifacts covered in childish squiggles. This was a collection of no more than thirty pages. Somehow she’d inflated their creations to well over a hundred. Seeing them now—so many gags targeting the ungainly, the elderly and the unconventionally shaped—these were the private craft projects of two unhappy teenagers who shared an affinity for certain pop-culture references and were sheltered enough to think that this made them brilliant. In her hands half a lifetime later, the papers seemed so redundant, so . . . unspecial. They made Mr. Park’s short stories seem daringly original.
“Keep them.” She pushed the pile back into his hands, her own hands shaking.
“I’ve long outgrown them,” he said. “Anyway, they’re not for you or me. She might want a laugh or two someday. To know where she came from. Borne of snark, boredom and nostalgia.”
Not knowing what else to say, Kate grabbed his hand. After a while, he gently pulled away. She didn’t fight it. They glanced across the street at the darkened van der Holt house. It had once been the Corot house, Paul’s house, and they had spent many sleepy afternoons there, giggling at the cleverness of their collages.
“She must know we tried,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”
The white beard made Raymond’s entire face itch. What was this thing made of, the pubic hair of ancient hippies? He looked more Rasputin than Santa Claus. Enthusiastic volunteers had plied him with endless mugs of cocoa which, in his absolute boredom, he’d thoughtlessly sucked down. Now he was trudging home to pee.
As he scrubbed away the gumminess from shaking the drool-slicked hands of toddlers, he saw in the mirror the beard-induced rash on the lower half of his face. It looked like sunburn. Goddammit. He felt like slipping into his pajamas and not leaving his house again until the New Year. Only then would he venture across the street to that Ireland woman and conk her over the head with one of her own crutches. What a sap he was, taken in by her Tiny Tim act!
As he stepped out of his baggy red pants, the hairs at the back of his neck stood up. He turned. There was a smeary gray silhouette in the small, frosted bathroom window. Someone was trying to prize the window open from the outside. From where Raymond stood, he could see that the person was wearing one of those hood
ed sweaters favored by the local gangs. He backed gingerly out of the room in his underwear, then sprinted madly upstairs for his gun. When he returned, the window was open but the prowler was gone.
“I fucking give up!” He stamped his feet and crumpled to the cold marble floor.
When the chill got to him, he pulled the Santa suit back on. His fingers discovered a deep secret pocket in the pants—for St. Nick’s hip flask? Haha. He slipped in his gun. Then, with the resignation of a man who’d made no plans for the rest of the year, he reattached the itchy white beard and stared into the mirror. He was Santa Claus, and he would save the day.
He armed the alarm system before setting foot outside, and circled the pitch-black perimeter of his house—no sign of forced entry. Somebody’s orange tabby squawked in terror as he bolted down the driveway.
On the sidewalk, a squat Salvadoran in a gaucho hat was selling battery-operated wands with colorful whiskers. He nodded at Raymond in commercial complicity—it’s Christmas, amigo, let’s milk these suckers for all they’re worth.
“Did you see anyone walking onto my property?”
“No, no, Santa.”
Across the street, the Ireland gals were emerging from their house, followed by a trio of paunchy, lobster-faced guys. He saw Mary-Sue pointing him out to her friends, tee-heeing with great amusement. He was the unicorn she’d lassoed and tricked into costume. He gave her the finger when none of them were looking.
Raymond moved quickly along, avoiding all eye contact. Next door, on the Parks’ front yard, an open house sign swung forlornly in the breeze, joints squeaking. Good fucking riddance, he thought, and walked on. House after house, nativity dioramas competed for God’s love: some had two Virgins, one had three. The secularists were also out in force, with their giant inflatable snow globes featuring Snoopy and Woodstock. Bulb-encrusted reindeer bobbed their heads in a simulacra of animal indifference—he had to resist pulling out the gun and popping them like a kid at a shooting gallery. Funny how much jollier he felt having a gun in his pocket. Why hadn’t anyone told him about this years ago? Packing heat cools heads. Now there’s a bumper sticker.
Cars jammed the street, crawling, headlights off, with rubbery baby faces smooshed against the windows. And on every corner, cabals clustered. They sang an old Bing Crosby song about conspiring and dreaming by the fire, and facing the plans that they’ve made.
“Mr. Claus?” A Boy Scout ran up breathlessly behind Raymond and tugged at his sleeve. “There are six children . . . waiting to have an audience with you, sir. They’ve been, they’ve been waiting . . . fifteen minutes, sir.” Raymond nodded but continued to walk on past the Santa booth, scanning the street for the hooded prowler. “Mr. Claus?”
He heard a little girl cry, “See-anta!” from across the way but knew better than to turn. “See-aantaa?”
Something caught his eye. With a leap and a bound, he cut across some grinch’s bare yard and stormed toward an unlit, unloved dead-end street named Des Moines.
Rosemary ambled up Mount Curve, greedily filling her lungs with the notes of clove, fresh pine and charred marshmallow. The local newscasters expressed incredulity that it’d be 78 degrees on Christmas Day, yet refused to address the issue of global warming. This was why America was fucked. She savored this feeling of fuckedness, already nostalgic. This, she knew, would be her last winter in America.
The hot, dry Santa Ana winds appeared to have blown somebody’s nylon Santa off their roof, leaving him dangling limply from the eaves like a hanged man. Or maybe that was intentional. Oh, how she would miss this messy mixed-messaging of America.
Over There, they’d be living in a grim little apartment in a crowded high-rise, the airless corridor smelling of pickles and shellfish, each entryway cluttered with the sandals of unseen children, each sidewalk stained by the spatter of old suicides. Over There, unable to speak the language, she’d be considered slow and be ridiculed by classmates. There’d be no coolness factor in being American—the youth of Korea had the chauvinism of K-pop and K-everything. She’d fall in with the wrong crowd, green-haired kids striking for their lack of original thinking, and learn from them how to upload camera-phone videos of herself making peace signs and pouty faces. They’d teach her that selling her used underwear in online auctions would bring her easy cash. Eventually, she’d drop out of school and wind up working bad shifts at a neighborhood 7-Eleven, one that did a brisk trade in condoms and cup noodles at 3 a.m. There would be a microwave oven at the back of the store she’d have to wipe out three times a day from pranksters heating up cans of mackerel. There’d be the awkward Friday night when she’d recognize a couple of the troublemakers as members of the green-haired tribe from school. She’d pray they wouldn’t remember her, and they wouldn’t. And that lack of recognition would make her feel even worse. Finally, after three or four years at the 7-Eleven, when she’d gained thirty pounds from depression and jjajang ramen, a man so ordinary-looking as to defy description would walk into the store, pull out a long, serrated knife and plunge it into her heart.
“Pssst!”
Rosemary was jolted from her fantasia.
“Hey, Ghost! Over here.”
She turned. The wind slapped her hair back against her face. The man who’d given her the gold pendant was standing on the sidewalk, outside Mr. Z’s house. He had on a long coat and black leather gloves, the outfit of one who’d traversed the continent and hadn’t expected to encounter warmth.
She looked around. Nobody for miles. There was a theatrical quality about the setting—backstage at midnight, dark, muted, and witness-free.
“I used to live in that house next to yours,” he said. “And then I lived in this very house. It looked less fancy back then though, it must be said.”
“I know someone living here now.”
“You’re friendly with the Singhs? Dr. Singh, with that holier-than-thou look of his? My dad had to sell and Dr. Singh bought. I guess that’s capitalism.”
Rosemary shut her eyes, her doubts confirmed. He walked over to her, and she felt her skin prickle. Somebody nearby was playing Christmas music—pa-rum-pum pum-pum. The snare-drum backbeat to “The Little Drummer Boy” always gave her the chills.
“I came back to say my goodbyes,” he said. “It’s become obvious a girl and I were not meant to be.”
“I’m here to say my goodbyes, too.” Quietly, she started walking away.
“Hey!”
Goosebumps coursed up her arms, but she continued to walk. The man quickened his pace after her. She could hear his breathing close behind. Then he grabbed her with his gloved hands—which felt inevitable. And fierce. And a relief.
He spun her around and saw the tears cascading down her cheeks, soaking her hair. She was trembling. He brushed the wet strands from her skin.
“Kill me . . .” The words slipped out of her mouth in a hiss.
The man smiled gravely. “What a thing to say.”
“Please . . . I mean it.”
“Come here.” She was already as close to him as two people could possibly be. He put his arm around her lower back. “I told you I came to say goodbye.”
Mrs. Park was tired of waiting. Four times she had yelled for the girls to come to dinner. The pizza was cold. Large Domino’s loaded with pepperoni and extra cheese. But this was Christmas Eve—she’d even let them have ice cream. By her second slice, Mrs. Park no longer worried about the food.
One last shot. “Rosie! Miraaaa!” She called Rosemary’s cell but it had been switched off and wasn’t accepting voicemail. She ran to Rosemary’s room. The door was locked. She tried Mira’s—also locked—and was overcome by a sickly sense of déjà vu. The hollow silence that was ringing in her ears was the same kind of silence, the same kind of deadened air she’d felt in the moment before she opened the door and found Kee Hyun hunched in that sea of red.
She used the master
key and freed Mira’s door. The lights were all on but the girl was nowhere to be seen. She breathed again—and thanked Jesus—and was about to leave when the clutter on the nightstand caught her eye. All of Mira’s little religious icons had been glued together to form one monster amalgam, the chemical sealant still pungent, and this thing stood in the shoebox framed with walls of prayer cards. In its own clear plastic frame overlooking this pantheistic mess was a five-by-seven photo of Mr. Park in his pastor outfit, filched from the family album. It was the same, sacred photo that had sat on his coffin at the funeral.
She snatched it out of the frame. On the back, Mira had written in her wobbly cursive:
Dear patron and assistant of the Pure and the Soaked.
With this prayer I request Your assistance,
And with the aid of the Holy Spirit may You always protect me
During sickness or in health.
St. Bath, Give me the strength to overcome
All the rage that lives in my heart
And the horrors that live in my head.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
Protect my Sister and me from you-know-who.
Amen.
Mrs. Park always had enough English in her to make out insults. For the next minutes, she moved as if in a trance. She carefully put the shoebox shrine back as she had found it and headed to Rosemary’s door. Without knocking, she unlocked it and entered. Compared to Mira’s, the room was a haven of order. But there was a draught—the window had been left wide open. Drifting in from the street were jubilant carolers: When it snows, ain’t it thrilling./ Though your nose gets a chilling.