I will make it till Christmas. I will make it to the end of the school year. Tonight, I will tell my mother, I took another sanity day, and she will write my excuse on a piece of the thick, creamy stationery she receives from her own students every year, along with the bottles of perfume, the fruitcakes, the knickknacks, and homemade ashtrays.
Of course, there is another side to all this. There is the part of my life that is neither school nor church, the part that I love, the part that I sense I will lose for good if I ever step out of its rhythms. There is my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, and her hundred-acre farm, and the gentle swell of fields, fringed with woodlands. There is the color of the landscape, the tans and browns and winter-whites, the spectacular greenness of springtime. There is my mother and father. There are my uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, the hearty clamor of reunions and holiday suppers, Grace that swells like a symphony: Bless us O Lord and these Thy Gifts. There is the shared language of absolute faith, the shared reason of people who have lived out their lives within twenty miles of the place where they were born, the land beneath them like the heart of a single organism, a vast and powerful drum. There is the comfort of such numbers, the ease of being swept along with the tide, of giving yourself over to the seasons of marriage and birth, and birth, and birth, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, land and a house and a garden behind it, a kitchen like my grandmother’s, humming like a hive.
Where does the piano fit into all this? The hours I spend practicing, or listening to music, or talking with Mr. Celeste about composition, theory, the Greeks? I imagine Orpheus attempting to transform my grandmother’s soul with his lyre. She stares at him hard, neither friendly nor unfriendly. She says, Are you supposed to be a boy or a girl? She says, When you finish up your racket there, run down the road and tell Uncle Joe to bring his gun, there’s another opossum trapped in the silo.
Discipline means nothing to my grandmother either. Discipline is simply the way you live your life. You don’t sit down until your work is finished, whatever that work might be, and your work will not be finished till God calls you to the grave and, if you’re lucky, lets you rest a while before He dreams up something else for you to do. My grandmother isn’t sure what to think about my music. She believes it is a gift from God. She also believes that it’s something that could lead me away from home and into trouble. I am her godchild, her particular responsibility. I am also the oldest child of her youngest child, her baby’s baby. Her love for me is as concentrated, as rough and raw as a cat’s tongue. I squirm beneath it, half in pleasure, half in pain.
“Music is the language of angels,” she says in the same tone she’d use if she saw me about to squirt lighter fluid directly into the burning barrel. The tone she’d use if something I’d said came close to disrespect of the Church.
It is the day of Christmas Eve. I am sitting at my grandmother’s table while she stands frying doughnuts at the stove. As I peel withered apples from the bucket I’ve hauled up from the root cellar, two little girl cousins sit across from me, licking their fingers. Each time my grandmother lifts another doughnut from the crackling grease, it’s their job to fetch it, shake it in a bag of sugar, then arrange it, still warm, on a plate. The air simmers with the burnt, sweet smell of frying dough. More cousins are playing on the floor with a cigar box full of dominoes. They stand them on end, arrange them in precarious lines, argue over who gets to knock the first one down. “Jeez!” they say, and “Youse guys!” and “Cut it out, once!” In the rocking chair, a cousin just two years older than I am is nursing her second child. Her first crawls around on the floor, menacing the dominoes, but the older children push him patiently aside, as if he is a windup toy instead of a beautiful, tow-headed boy. My second cousins all seem to be beautiful tow-headed children. All I would have to do is graduate, and get married, and produce a beautiful tow-headed boy like this one, and it would mean more to my family than any scholarship I might win, any concert career I might achieve, more than any other single thing I might ever do with my life.
There are shouts from the living room, where my uncles and older male cousins are watching sports on TV. The house cat rockets in, wild-eyed; the crawling baby abandons the dominoes and motors after him, chiming, Kee! Kee! One of my aunts is making another batch of dough; another aunt washes lunch dishes; another aunt is making a pot of Maxwell House Coffee, vaulting the children, the cat, the dominoes on her way to the sink. My mother has taken the trash outside to the burning barrel. From the window, I can see her at the edge of the bean field, the black plume of smoke rising—so it seems—from the top of her head like a feather. She feeds the fire slowly, adding to it piece by piece. To her right is the outhouse attached to the chicken coop; to her left is the double shed. Beside that stands the old corncrib where my brother and cousins and I played jail. There’s the milk house and the barn with its double silos. There’s the cow pen, empty now, the barbed-wire fence coming loose, and the steeple of Saint Nicholas Church, poking through the dark line where the fields meet the sky.
My mother and I have been here since early this morning, helping with Christmas preparations. Tomorrow, the house will fill with over a hundred people, families arriving to eat the noon dinner in shifts, others arriving for the evening meal, everyone bringing a dish to pass. In addition to the kitchen table, where twenty-odd people can sit, there will be card tables in the living room for the young people, an oilcloth spread on the kitchen floor for the children, everybody eating on paper plates and drinking from plastic cups. There will be dollar bills for the grandchildren, fifty-cent pieces for the great-grands; there will be Secret Santa exchanges, fruitcakes and pfefferneusse, homemade Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths, candles, pinecones rolled in glitter. There will be a pile of coats on my grandmother’s bed that reaches halfway to the ceiling. All day, children will sneak into the bedroom to tunnel into the middle of those coats, just the way I once did. All day, there will be the slamming of doors, the rasp of coats coming off and going on, the crying of babies and the fussing of children, the hearty laughter of the men, the peals of out-rage and delight from the women, the clatter of plates, and the sound of the television.
I have finished the bucket of apples, and now I set down the paring knife, rest. Any kitchen task like this—chopping onions, slicing bread, peeling apples—bothers my wrists and arms, but I don’t want to say anything. It would look like I’m just being lazy. It would look like I’m trying to get out of work. And isn’t it true that even when I hurt, I still manage to play the piano at least three hours a day? The house cat slinks down from the windowsill, wriggles in beside me on the long wooden bench my grandfather made. He rubs his broad flat face against my sleeve as if he is a kitten instead of the big, bad broken-eared tom he is. I scratch his chin. My wrist aches.
“Have the barn cats been fed?” I ask.
My grandmother looks up from the stove, a quick, fond glance I understand. She leaves these little tasks for me—feeding the barn cats, gathering eggs—because she knows how much I enjoy them. Knows that, like my mother, I enjoy working outdoors.
In the refrigerator, there’s a Tupperware container full of multicolored scraps: Jell-O, the dried-out heel of a roast, stale potato chips, leftover breakfast cereal, sour milk. I carry it out to the entryway, stepping over my cousins, the dominoes, the baby. In the chilly bathroom by the stairs to the basement, I add a few scoops of cat chow from the fifty-pound bag my grandmother gets at the mill. My coat hangs on a peg by the door; I put it on, step outside into the sudden silence of a vast cathedral. The cold is stunning. Radiant. My eyes smart and tear. Snow has erased the roof of the barn, the shed, the milk house. The winter sky presses down, the color of smoke, and I smell the burning barrel as I follow the partially shoveled path toward the barn, follow the harsh rasp of my sneakers. Somewhere, a crow coughs. A loose shingle flaps. Around me, the fields hold the absolute weight of sleep, fringed by yellow stubble, a few dark clots of earth.
A word
shapes itself in my mind: holy. It splits the crude shell of the word I’ve been taught and emerges, shimmering and whole. God is here, in these dormant fields, in the bald-headed woods beyond. God is in the crow’s call, and the watery shadows cast by the barn. God is in my restlessness. God is in my love of this place and my fear that I will never find the courage to leave it, that it will smother me gently and sweetly and indifferently, like a sleeping parent rolling over upon a child. God is in the thrum and hush and spin of the world beyond. God is a moment like this one: reverent, transcendent, when the very air seems to shine.
The barn door is frozen shut. I bump it hard with my hip, jump back. Icicles fall from the eaves like diamonds shattering at my feet. Now the heavy door slides just enough for me to slip inside. “Kitty-kitty-kitt-eee,” I say, imitating my grandmother’s call. The barn is silent, empty except for the pigs grunting softly in the adjoining lean-to, the rattle of mice in the grain bins. I remember how an aunt once led me out to the barn on Christmas Eve, back when I was small enough to need to hold her hand. There were dairy cows then, and their sweet grassy smell; there was a bull with a ring in his nose. My aunt had promised me that at midnight, the animals would speak, and when I said I didn’t hear anything, she said, well, it wasn’t midnight yet, so they were probably still thinking about all the things they wanted to say.
“Kitty-kitty-kitteee!”
Now I feel them watching from the rafters, from the top of the steps leading to the second floor where the machinery is stored. I dump the Tupperware’s contents into an old pie tin, fill the other with snow from the drift beneath the broken windows. The cats appear like ghosts, eyes aglow in the dusky light. They dance forward and back until I step away from the food. Then they surge forward, a dozen or so. I recognize an orange tabby, a dirty white tom with a missing eye. There’s a new one with a tail shaped like a crank, broken in at least two places. A tiger-stripe rubs against my legs, but flinches when I stoop to pet her. She darts out of reach, then rolls and rolls in a pile of loose straw.
It’s a far cry from a storybook manger with its clean, yellow straw, its fluffy white sheep. Cobwebs hang in dirty clots from the crossbeams. Breadlike clumps of old manure fill the troughs. The barn cats growl and purr, tails lashing; the ceiling groans with every gust of wind. Still, it is Christmas Eve. I am a child again, clinging tight to my aunt’s mittened hand. I am waiting for the animals to speak, believing, for this moment, that they can.
We spend Christmas Eve with Grandpa and Grandma Ansay, the way we do every year. My mother invites them over for a six o’clock supper, something simple, for my grandmother doesn’t care for rich foods. After ward, as the broiler pan soaks in the sink and the odor of chicken settles everywhere, we all sit around the Christmas tree and begin, one at a time, to open Christmas presents. It’s an awkward time because my father never gives anybody anything—though my mother always hopes it will be otherwise. My grandparents give everybody the same thing: one-hundred-dollar U.S. savings bonds. As my brother and I open my mother’s gifts, my grandmother laments the cost, the waste, the excess. “Oh, say!” she says at my new pair of boots. “Too much, too much!” The stroke has robbed her of all but a few phrases. She pokes my grandfather until he opens the single gift my mother has addressed to them both, then peers into the box of chocolates as if it contains tarantulas. “Oh, say!” she says, laughing unhappily. But—as my mother well knows—my grandfather loves chocolate, and he is a man who does not love much. Love has been worked out of him, toiled out of him. Even in retirement, his hands are splayed with monstrous yellow calluses. When he takes the first piece of chocolate, tucks it under his mustache, my grandmother slaps at his hands. He ignores her, takes another. She slaps harder. She hits him as hard as she can, limp-wristed, flailing. He makes a swift, rough gesture and their knuckles click.
“G’wan,” he says.
She says something nobody understands, but my grandfather says, “That’s enough.”
It’s time to distribute my presents: an antique teacup for my mother’s collection, a sweater for my brother, matching pillow shams I’ve sewn for my grandparents’ beds. Because the pillows shams are homemade, my grandmother lets them pass. My grandfather, bright-eyed with sugar, pats them with a massive hand. I don’t give my father a gift because, if I do, he’ll simply return it. He does this even if somebody gives him something he really needs, something he’d buy for himself. Or else he’ll refuse to open it. He’ll joke about it, urge us to open it ourselves, then set it on a shelf to open “later.” It will stay there for several days, several weeks. One day, we’ll glance at the shelf and discover it is gone.
This year, my brother has gifts for everyone, too, and this is unexpected because lately, like my father, he has shied away from gift-giving, from family events, from emotion. At fifteen, a loose-boned shrug has become his sword; selective deafness his shield. Now, he seems like his younger self again, eager and sweet-natured. For my grandparents, he has made a towel holder in the shape of a frog. My grandmother is delighted with this. For my mother, there’s is a floral coffee mug with her name on the side, and a bag of coffee mug with her name on the side, and a bag of coffee beans to go with it. My mother flushes, proud and pleased. For me, there’s an adjustable ring, mounted with a circular frame in which a little round-eyed girl holds a little round-eyed kitten. I love this ring. It is exactly what I’d have chosen for myself. I put it on my finger, squeeze to make it fit. “Thanks,” I say—everybody says—impressed, but my brother isn’t finished. It seems he has a gift for Dad, who is already laughing, waving it away, asking, “Did you keep the receipt?”
“You have to open it,” Mike says. “Once you open it, you can have the receipt?”
Mike wears his hair long so that it covers his eyes. He pushes the gift at our father’s chest, then steps away, so that Dad has to grab it to keep it from falling. “If you break it, Dad,” Mike warns, “you won’t be able to take it back.”
The gift makes an oddly musical sound when our father turns it over in his hands. Now everybody is curious. Dad stands up and sits down and stands up again, and then he tells my brother he should open it. “You open it,” my mother tells my father, giving him a no-nonsense look, which inspires my grandmother to cry, “Too much, too much!” which means she is taking my father’s side, which means that now my father has to open it to save face. He sits. We all watch as he loosens the tape, peels away the wrapping paper carefully, so that it can be reused.
There in a tall, thin glass jar, rolling around in the murky water, are a dozen flesh-colored balls.
Testicles?
For a moment, nobody says anything. Mike waits, his long hair curtaining his eyes.
“What’s this?” our father quavers, holding out the jar for my mother to read. “What does this say?”
My mother sounds out the words on the bright orange label: Gefilte fish. None of us have ever heard of such a thing. None of us can imagine where he might have gotten it.
“Fish balls,” Dad says, too heartily. “Well. How very nice.”
My brother says, “Do you want the receipt?”
For a moment, we all imagine Dad carrying the fish balls back into the store where they were purchased. We have seen him return just about everything: half-eaten foods that weren’t quite right, umbrellas, towels, clothing, even a two-year-old pair of shoes that had been “guaranteed to last a lifetime.” But can he go through with this?
“Uh,” he finally says. “No. I think this is something I better keep.”
A shadow of a smile plays around the corners of my brother’s mouth.
In fact, everybody is smiling now, even Dad, and I finally release my breath, thinking, Well, that wasn’t so bad. But thoughts like this only tempt the gods. After the wrapping paper has been folded and saved for next year, my father suggests a little piano music, a recital, how about it, Pumpkin? My grandfather has been dozing in a sweet sugar coma, but now his eyes fly open with alarm. “Play! Play!” chim
es my grandmother, knowing how my grandfather will hate it. “I’ll be right there,” Mom sings from the kitchen, where she’s doing something wonderfully aggressive to the broiler pan. Mike is halfway out of the room, but the old man is quicker. “Hold up there, Tiger,” Dad says, jiggling the jar of gefilte fish. “Let’s listen to the Pumpkin play.”
The Pumpkin doesn’t want to play any more than the Tiger wants to listen, but I sit down at the piano anyway and begin, cruelly, the first of the Bartók Opus 20 improvisations. It will be another hour before my grandparents finally go home, another three hours before my mother and brother and I will put on our coats and head to Midnight Mass, where we’ll take turns nodding off between shrill bursts from the aging choir. Bartók is perfect for a moment like this. It is every word I’ve been holding back since my grandparents stepped through the door. It’s my father’s jolly refusals to open his gifts, the mysterious hurt this masks. It’s my mother’s hand-to-hand combat with the broiler pan. It’s my brother’s brief sphinx of a smile. It’s the round-eyed girl holding the kitten, and the round-eyed girl who wears that image on her finger, trying to live up to all that it suggests even as she knows she cannot. Eight variations. Eight states of mind. I relish the dissonance, the irregular meter; I flatten my fingers to achieve an even brassier, percussive tone. I am into this now, it’s no longer a recital, I have disappeared and something wild and wordless is shining in my place like fire. When I finish the final improvisation and rise, lending the weight of my body to the final chord, I can’t quite remember how I came to be in this room.
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