Grace was still wearing her mittens—a good thing, because she’d lose one or both once she removed them; these weren’t even a true pair. One was bright blue stripes and the other was black with cat eyes and whiskers. My mother had given up and handed over any old left-hand mitten and right. By now, maybe Grace didn’t get that mittens were supposed to match.
“Are you sure?” I asked Grace again. “I could go, too, sit by you and Santa.”
A pause, maybe thinking that over. An explosion of ho-ho-ho, and Santa boomed, “What do you want for Christmas, little girl?” and Grace’s shoulders twitched, then went rigid.
“Okay,” and I grabbed her hand and tugged her away from the alleged wonderland. “Let’s just have fun at the mall. We’ve got time before the bus.”
“He knows my list,” she said, and as I nodded, she dropped into a whisper, “He knows everything.”
“‘He sees you when you’re sleeping, ’” I sang.
I thought she’d join in, but she whispered, “I wrecked it.”
“No, no, no,” I said. But Santa did have a creepy obsession about ferreting out who was naughty and nice. Grace was smart to be suspicious. “We’ll have fun anyway,” I said. “The mall is fun.”
It wasn’t. I associated the mall with my terrible job at Karmelkorn, which, because it was food service, paid less than minimum wage. I’d been working there since I was fifteen, being bossed around by a rotation of snotty thirty-year-olds who couldn’t get better jobs and burning my wrist on the popcorn kettle, that sticky, scorched-sugar stink of caramel corn—the proper spelling, thank you—lacing my dreams, penetrating my pores. I had applications everywhere, but there was that stupid recession. Places all wanted college kids anyway.
This was our town’s first mall and it wasn’t complicated—a straight line of maybe twenty stores on either side of a center walkway—and I led Grace the length of it, on the side opposite Karmelkorn, so no one would see me, because I was thinking I might have to call in sick tonight if I didn’t get Grace home on the three thirty bus. At the end was Drug Fair, which was a good place for wandering without feeling hassled. I mean, it was the last Christmas shopping weekend and we were two kids spending no money, so why would a nice store want us hanging around?
I steered Grace to the cosmetics aisle, where we sprayed our wrists with perfumes. Then we looked at nail polish, arranging our fingers under each plastic fingernail-sized shape in the vast Cutex display of dozens of colors, names that made me hungry—Raspberry Sherbet, Blueberry Pink, Pink Almond, Beyond Peach. Her too. I caught her stomach grumbling, and I giggled first so she would, too. We spun the rack of Timex watches, debating which to fake-buy, stuck in the end between Mickey Mouse with his gloved hands pointing to hours and minutes or the candy-apple-red watch face with the stretchy silver band. That’s when the ladies at the cosmetics cash register intensified their laser glares and hisses of “some people,” with “some” like a thousand letters long. There was the toy aisle, but why let Grace come across that doll she wanted? I would tell my mother she had to buy it because Grace was too young to hate Christmas the way the rest of us did. She could get me nothing, but Grace needed that doll off her list.
“Time to go,” I said, and I grabbed her right hand—now without a mitten, which I hoped was in her pocket—and we cut through the checkout lane jammed with people waiting to buy what we’d been looking at. I suppose I was used to it, but Grace was a little kid. She hardly knew there were this many things out in the world, and only so much money.
Grace said, “I get it. There’s no Santa’s workshop,” and I said, “Um,” and she said, “Everything comes from the mall,” and I said, “Um,” and she said, “It’s okay. I knew it last year,” which I didn’t believe, and I said, “We probably have to think about getting to the bus stop,” which was all the way down at Sears.
I veered us to the opposite line of stores, away from the tempting A&W—not that she would ask about root beer, because she was good at not asking, better than I was about not wanting. That draft root beer was icy-tangy cold, so sweet, and the heavy mugs were as frosty white as the signs promised; sometimes I stopped by after an early Karmelkorn shift, that tiny luxury I allowed myself maybe a truer reward for my hours than the stinking paycheck. As we passed Musicland, I thought I spotted my friend Janey’s pothead brother flipping through 45s, and I paused to catch his face, but when he looked up it was another pothead.
Grace stood outside the next store over, Waldenbooks, and as I reached her, she said, “A library! We can check out some books anyway,” and I kept walking, pondering why I was wishing it had been Janey’s pothead brother, and called to Grace, “It’s a bookstore. You have to buy them,” and her voice pierced the Christmas Muzak, “Books cost money, too?”
I stopped, stared back at her—one mitten on her hand, the other who knows where, and her mouth open in a little round O of true shock—and looped back to where she stood. I wanted to slug someone, hard, if I only knew who, because my little sister didn’t know that, yes, books cost money, too, and fuck Santa Claus, fuck that spying bastard and his ho-ho-hos, fuck that massive American lie of a man—because here I was, having to shake Grace to the core of her heart, rattle that deep, deep book love she had. She was dopey and dreamy, a girl who lost mittens and didn’t like to talk, but she was a strong reader, a smart kid, devouring books, reading like words were the air she breathed. Right now she was moving from horse books to my old Nancy Drews. There were scads of books in our house, a collection I’d carefully accumulated from garage sales and library discards, enough that I suppose it made crazy sense that she never thought of books coming from a store, or even a place beyond our house or the library, where I or sometimes my mother took her every couple of weeks, where the librarians knew her name and set aside books they wanted her to read. She read them all. Here are books, and here are more books: and they’re all free. It made absolute sense. I mean, unless you understood that you lived in a world that had a hundred shades of nail polish when, I don’t know, five or six might be enough. My fury was a living thing rattling my chest. I’d been born understanding a price tag was tacked on everything. How could she not know? I think I was angriest at her, though I didn’t want to be.
She wouldn’t cry. She never cried. I could say the bus was coming and she’d believe me and off we’d go. I never cried either.
So I smiled. I smiled at her standing in front of the wide Waldenbooks entryway crammed with cardboard displays of gaudy paperbacks and tables stacked high with holiday cookbooks, and I said, “Books do cost money, but we can buy one. We can go in and buy you a book.” And I smiled and smiled, and finally she mustered a twinge of a smile, no teeth showing, and said, “Any book?” and I was about to explain about the price difference in paperback versus hardcover but I stopped: “Sure. Any book.”
I had no plan. There was no plan that was possible to have, unless the plan was to glance down and discover on the floor the Christmas miracle of a dropped ten-dollar bill. That was my plan. I’d lifted trinkets—eye shadow, Carmex, M&M’S, just little junk—but it felt wrong and, frankly, harder to steal a book. Maybe the plan could be to tell her Santa would bring the book later. Santa to the rescue. Good one.
She dashed into the store, then halted, possibly overwhelmed by the clusters of shelving, the books towering to the ceiling along all three walls of the store, the tables loaded with fat thrillers, the hair-tousled women lustily pouting off the covers of the historical romances, and I caught up to her again. I said, “We’ll go to the back with the Nancy Drews and horse books.” We edged through the skinny aisles bordered with cookbooks and travel books and joke books and sports books and books about animals and planets and movie stars. Anything you wanted. Once something was important, there was a book for it, a title and an author’s name.
The children’s section was a jumble: puzzle books, paper doll sets, picture books, book report books like The Yearling, cardboard books for babies to chew, and series
books, including three whole long shelves of yellow-spined Nancy Drews. There were numbers we didn’t have; our set was haphazard, so I guessed Grace would go for #18, The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion, our first gap (and one I hadn’t read). She was desperate to follow in order. Me too back then, until I realized nothing ever changed in River Heights, which we were supposed to like about Nancy. But that fact made me despise Nancy. “They’re all brand new!” Grace called.
A Christmas tree filled the end of the aisle, decorated with large red and green construction paper stars, and I let Grace poke around as she did at the library, flinging open books and plopping on the floor to read with immediate intensity, while I looked at the tree. It was a bad fake with stick-straight branches and scratchy, squared-off needles the color and texture of the plastic basket grocery store strawberries came in. Twinkle lights draped the branches, but one strand was burned out. It was worse than the Charlie Brown tree, especially with the construction paper stars Magic Markered with employee names. Or that’s what I thought until I read the names more closely: KIM, AGE 10. STEVE, AGE 7. BRENT, AGE 14. TRACY, DAWN, ERIC, TIM, KEVIN, JULIE... It was one of those Secret Santa trees where you picked a paper star and bought a book for some kid. LISA, JAN, MICHAEL, another MICHAEL. Someone writing names in black caps off a list they’d been given, checking it twice, like Santa.
My face flushed hot, embarrassed and ashamed, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong, as if I’d read my own name up there. We weren’t poor-poor, not Secret Santa poor. My parents didn’t believe in crying, and they didn’t believe in charity. No one in my family did. We don’t give to it, and we don’t take from it—I’d heard my father holler that to my mother plenty of times. “We’ll do without,” she’d tell me later in a scorching tone to humiliate me for asking. That’s why I rode the bus instead of getting to borrow the car, or getting my own car like some kids at school. That’s why Grace’s mittens didn’t match, why we ate the bread heels instead of throwing them away like I’d seen Janey’s mom do at their house, why we didn’t have a dog or cat, why our sleds were flattened cardboard boxes, why times a thousand: because we could do without. For the whole rest of our lives, it seemed, we would do without, and it occurred to me, perhaps for the first time, that this had not been a choice for my parents. Only the acting proud was; that was what they had decided to do.
I stared at that tree for a million years, enough time for Grace to grow up and shrivel into an old lady. Enough time to be furious and then not.
I snatched a star off the tree. My hand trembled as I carried it up front to the cash register, where I got in line behind a man with a wall calendar with pictures of lighthouses. He asked for gift wrap. He refused the Santa paper, so someone had to come from the back with non-Christmas paper. His gift got wrapped. I was next. I sucked in lots of breath and arranged the paper star on the counter so the clerk could read the name. She said, “A Secret Santa—” and I interrupted: “This is my sister. She’s here today, back in the kids’ section, and I wonder if maybe we could just get the free book for her right now. It would mean so much to her. To Amy,” I added, reading upside down off the paper star. It was red. Red was girls and green was boys.
The clerk looked like a college student, earnest, without makeup. Four inches of curly black hair haloed her face. She seemed startled, and her mouth twisted in confusion, a grimace that wasn’t smiling or frowning, an expression that wasn’t yes or no. She took off her glasses and polished each lens with the hem of her T-shirt. Stalling. She was going to call over the manager. Managers said no. My family also hated managers and bosses, cops and government do-gooders. People who had to be asked, people who granted permission. She lowered her voice into a whisper: “It doesn’t work like that. I’m so sorry.”
“Please,” I said. I imagined my father listening to me beg. I imagined my mother pretending she didn’t know Grace might want something simple like a brand-new book, unread by anyone else. I pushed their stupid faces to the back of my mind. “Reading is her favorite thing,” I said.
She picked up the paper star. Maybe she was the one who had cut out the stars. Maybe that long list of poor kids hadn’t seemed real to her as she Magic Markered each name. She put on her glasses and abruptly seemed a different person, her dark eyes larger, rounder, with purplish circles underneath, like she had a hard time sleeping. Like she might be the kind of person to be haunted by a poor kid wanting a book. Like she wouldn’t want to remember me and my sad, begging face and this crooked red paper star when she was opening presents on Christmas morning. Like reading was also her favorite thing, like she was surprised that I might guess that, that I might understand her secret life, me, just a nameless stranger.
“She’s a little kid,” I said. “Eight years old.”
A woman impatiently pressed behind me, a stack of hardcovers balanced in one arm.
“Please,” I said, a little louder, so the customer could hear, could worry.
The clerk said, “One book.”
There was a moment when I was supposed to thank her. That moment stretched. Finally I said what I could, which was “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” she echoed, though there was little joy in the words we exchanged, just a barter.
I rushed to tell Grace to hurry up, that we had to catch the bus, that she should pick out her book, that we had to get moving or be stuck at the mall forever, that this was the last bus, all kinds of alarming exaggerations so we’d be out of there before the clerk changed her mind or went on break or decided to bust me. I was sick to my stomach, not about lying—wasn’t Santa Claus a big lie?—but for admitting want to a stranger, acknowledging I couldn’t do without. I snatched up some books off a table, barely glancing at the titles, and said, “How about one of these? Look, rabbits on the cover!”
She said, “Are we both getting a book?”
I shook my head. “Just you. Only one. And we have to hurry.” I shook my wrist wearing the watch. I was crazed. My throat was tight. Breathing felt unnatural.
She said, “Don’t you want one?”
“No,” I said.
“But they’re new.” She pressed her nose deep into the open book she held. “Smell how fresh it is.”
I shook my head again, afraid I was going to yell at her, and then yelling at her: “You’re the one getting the book, so pick it out right now before we miss the damn bus!”
She marched away, and I dropped the stupid rabbit books on the table and followed her to the next section over, mysteries. She pointed to the display of paperback Agatha Christies and said, “You like these,” jabbing her finger against one: “This looks good.”
It was And Then There Were None, showing a ropy hangman’s noose on the front framing a sprawled-out dead body and a bunch of jagged rocks. No cuddly rabbits, nothing a kid would (or should) pick, definitely not a book to satisfy a Secret Santa looking to feel virtuous. “Do you have it already?” she asked, removing it from the display and handing it over. I flipped to the back cover, satisfying her by pretending I needed to read the description.
It was a classic, easily scooped up used; of course I had it. The school librarian had recommended it, hooking me on Agatha Christie. I still remembered the murderer, the trickiness of the story. I couldn’t stand that this was the book Grace wanted, that she wanted for me. Her one book she would give to me. I couldn’t stand that. I wanted her to be the kind of kid who cried and sulked because she wanted Nancy Drew #18 and #23, wanted #45, too; who thought it was “unfair” she got only one book; who “hated” me for being so “mean.” I wanted her to want them all, all the Nancy Drews, all the books. I wanted her to want everything, to want.
“Sure you don’t have it?” she asked. “You have too many that look the same.”
“Not this one,” I said.
“Say thank you,” she said, and giggled.
“Thank you,” I said.
She hugged me, both mittens now missing. If she had a hat, it was also
gone. “You deserve a new book,” she said.
Up front, the clerk finished counting bills into someone’s hand. When she saw us, she pinned Grace with a tremendous, embarrassing smile. “What’d you pick, sweetie?” she asked, and Grace lifted my forearm, showing off the lurid book in my hand. I stared at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Let her think we were scamming Waldenbooks for a $2.25 paperback. What explanation wouldn’t be painful? Better to be silent.
The clerk said, “Get out,” and I said, “We’re going,” and the clerk said, “The judge is the murderer,” and I said, “We’re going,” and Grace called, “Merry Christmas! And happy New Year!”
As we left Waldenbooks on our way to the bus stop, I remember thinking, Grace, age eight, how can I take care of you when you don’t want me to?
JINX
(fall, junior year)
Jess and I lingered at the water fountain in the library, across from the room with the best vending machines. It was her idea to hover, seemingly absorbed in conversation, rating the butts of guys bending over to drink. We flashed quick and—we thought—subtle signals with our eyebrows. We thought we were sly and hilarious, or Jess did. I thought we were embarrassing. But this was what Jess wanted for a study break, and I agreed since it was a step closer to forgetting her fiancé. Truth be told, none of the butts we saw was better than his, and Jess had to know it. Tommy. Not wrong to think his name.
An older guy, maybe a grad student, sidled around the corner and said, “You two are laughing a lot.” Long blond hair hung straight down his back. His teeth held a pair of black plastic eyeglasses by the stem, so his words sounded tight and clenched. Instead of the preppy look everyone aspired to, he wore black jeans and a too-small black T-shirt printed, in all lowercase, with “anarchists unite—or not.”
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