“Can we get this?” He pointed to an empty video box for Frosty the Snowman.
“Sure, sweetie.” I took the box over to Cindy, the teenager who always seemed to work here, her chin in her hands with her elbows on the counter as she stared at a small TV.
“How’s Bernice doin’?” Cindy asked as she handed me my change.
“Pretty good today,” I answered. I was beginning to sound like Barbara.
My son threw snowballs as we trudged back to the house, and then asked me why Santa didn’t bring presents for grown-ups.
“He’s given up on us,” I said. Then I glanced at Lester, worried that I sounded as despondent as I felt. “I’m just kidding. He has his hands full with you kids, that’s all.”
Lester spied an icicle and attempted to dislodge it while I wondered how long it would be before his curiosity about everything in the universe led him to the truth about Santa. When I was eight, as I recall, it dawned on me for the very first time that the prospect of one fat man entering and exiting several million chimneys around the globe within a span of twenty-four hours was unlikely, and I asked my mother to review the logistics. She declined, but upon further interrogation she conceded that Santa Claus was “somewhat mythical,” and that she had felt it best that I come to that conclusion on my own. Having admitted as much, she settled back into her armchair and resumed reading My Mother, My Self by Nancy Friday.
I vividly remember standing ramrod straight and trying to bite back a sudden flow of tears. “LIAR!” I burst out. “You lied to me!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” my mother responded dryly, “Santa Claus is a wonderful Christmas tradition, and it didn’t do you any harm to think your stocking was from him, and not from me.”
My mother was a psychologist. Everything was relative, in her view. She practiced Christian rituals with a similar indifference as to whether they were rooted in truth. She even sang me the classic nursery song “Jesus loves me, this I know.” And look what else she claimed to know, the liar. When Santa imploded, right away it raised the dubious authenticity of God. I didn’t want that to happen to Lester. He was showing me something that I had forgotten about myself: a natural capacity for reverence.
My son believed in Santa, and that was entirely his parents’ doing, albeit with some assistance from multiple viewings of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman and numerous seasonal commercials, billboards and lawn ornaments. But where was he going? He was being led toward betrayal. Was that recommended by Dr. Spock? And what would he do when he got there? Santa would take Jesus down with him.
“You know what?” I said, as we reached the carport Stan had built to house the car he rarely drove. “It’s still early, maybe we could go to church. They might have a Christmas pageant, which is a play that tells the story of Jesus and the Wise Men. Do you want to do that?”
“Okay,” he said, always up for an excursion.
Sunday was a beautiful day for a drive. Provided that we stayed in our rental car with the heat cranked up and ten hats on our heads, and peered at the scenery through the breath-dampened slit beneath hats and above scarves as I attempted to drive without the benefit of flexible arms. The snow was smooth and glassy, and the ocean deceptively bright—although we weren’t far from where the Titanic foundered. This ocean chilled bones in April. Ahead of us on a snowy rise was St. James Anglican Church, of pristine clapboard and straight, slender steeple. I do love all the Anglican churches I attended at Christmas in childhood, so wonderfully lit with glimmering candles, and redolent with the scents of wool and snow and incense. I felt sweetened by this vision of St. James, and after we parked, I led Lester into the vestibule for his first-ever church service.
The air was warm and thick inside. The organ murmured as parishioners tilted heads one to the other and whispered their gossip and recipes. The church’s interior was unpainted, built of honey-colored cedar, which warmed the pale winter light streaming in through the windows. Beyond the wreath-laden altar, and the wooden crucifix of Christ in his dying moments, a stained-glass window faced the ocean. It was a lovely church, a wonderful place for God. Lester suddenly stopped dead beside me, exclaiming in high alarm: “What happened to that guy?” He was pointing at the crucifix. I hushed him, but then started laughing, and as we took our seats in a pew, I grew deeply worried that I wouldn’t be able to stop. It would be like attending chapel during my years at school, when we were made to stand up and sit down and stand up and sit down and then drone a hymn in unison, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” about as melodiously as accountants on quaaludes. Me and my friend Mary Ann would start giggling until we thought we might burst.
Here I was, introducing my son to the House of the Lord as I pissed myself laughing. I squirmed and gritted my teeth and lectured myself with icy sternness: How dare you succumb to hysterics in a church service, at your age.
“Momma, what’s so funny?” asked Lester without moderating his voice, even as the hawk-nosed priest intoned, “Let us pray.” Two elderly ladies behind us smiled at Lester, more taken with his innocence than they were dismayed with me. How could I thank them? At last I was able to vent my hilarity by joining the congregation in belting out “Joy to the World,” as boisterous as Ethel Merman.
When it came time for Communion, I took Lester’s hand and we made our way to the altar, inching up the aisle in blank, obedient silence. We reached the velvet-cushioned pew and I sank to my knees, head bowed reverently with my hands clasped like a schoolgirl. When the deacon came to me and held forth the chalice, I leaned forward to have a sip, but it was nearly empty and he wasn’t holding it at a sufficient tilt, so that I sipped air fruitlessly from its rim. I jutted my head forward and tried to slurp, which provoked a deeply offended stare. The deacon indicated that I was supposed to tip the chalice myself, instead of keeping my hands clutched piously at my waist. The Communion wafer was a smoother affair, thank God; I didn’t have to snap at it like Pac-Man. The deacon and his assistant glided past me, and also past Lester, who burst out in dismay: “Why don’t I get a chip?”
On the way out, I saw a note in the vestibule advertising the pageant for next week. I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to return.
* * *
Driving back to Bernice’s, I wondered anew at my stunningly poor religious education. When I looked back at those Sundays when I attended the High Anglican services at holidays, it seemed to me that the trouble always lay in the language, which was so stiff and archaic that it lost me. Sermons delivered without charisma, the congregation incapable of emoting or moving a muscle to the music—most of the services I went to were as insufferably dull as after-school detentions. This was curious, in a way, because the church was actually founded in the fervent pursuit of sexual passion by Henry VIII, who broke from Rome in order to dump Queen Catherine of Aragon so he could caress Anne Boleyn’s “duckies,” which were being withheld from him. Yet Henry’s Church of England, forged in the exalted spirit of desire, went on to become such a stodgy dowager that modern Catholicism looks positively histrionic by comparison.
I will fall over and die the day that I see an Anglican parishioner slapping her thighs, swaying, clapping and bellowing “halleluja” in the presence of the Lord, instead of staring stone-faced at the backs of other people’s hats. It’s no longer about God, as far as I can tell. It’s about decorum.
If one belongs to the Church of England, one bakes biscuits for the after-service social in the parish hall. Not too many biscuits, however, for one does not wish to appear vain and bountiful.
One is never bountiful, and certainly never ecstatic. One does not get knocked off one’s horse, like Paul on the road to Damascus, for one could not abide such wild and discomposing surrender—the equivalent of making a sound during orgasm.
How does one find God, once one has lost Him, in all the distracting busy work of making biscuits and writing books of etiquette, one might ask?
One does not know.
10
On Monday, I had a glorious epiphany. After twenty years of drinking takeout coffee, it suddenly occurred to me that the little square dent in the middle of the cup lid was put there to hold down the plastic flap, so that it doesn’t slap against your lip when you drink.
I announced my discovery to Calvin during our evening phone call, and he reminded me that it took me two years to realize that I could skip messages on my call-answer service by pressing the number six.
“Not that that’s important,” he added. “Congratulations on your new relationship to coffee-cup lids, Frannie, but you’d be better off knowing how to start a fire with twigs.”
Calvin ought to know, of course. He has started approximately no fires, ever, with twigs, or anything else, not even matches. The only thing he lights is his hash pipe. Still, he merely warms to concepts of self-sufficiency, inasmuch as his world-view distills into something like this: The world is gonna end. We’ll blow ourselves up and germs’ll take over; good riddance to humans. This is Calvin’s version of clarity. He gets it from his father. Anybody who survives Armageddon will subsist on a diet of rodents, and if they don’t know how to hunt rats with pointed sticks, they can shove their Palm Pilots up their asses and beg for mercy.
Now and then, I press Calvin to elaborate on this vision, or at least on its psychological origins, and he argues that he is not a gloom-ridden misanthrope, not at all, but that it is hubris for anyone to believe that technology improves our lives in a meaningful way. In the end, he says, it cannot save us from ourselves.
The most important technology in Calvin’s life at the moment is the kitchen blender, upon which he has recently learned how to play “A Bicycle Built for Two.”
11
Here are some of the important technologies in my life, and I can’t help noting, as I jot them down, that the majority have yet to be invented:
A TV that automatically turns on at seven every morning, and shows three back-to-back episodes of Franklin the Turtle.
A breakfast robot—other than myself—that can dispense toasted English muffins with peanut butter on a plastic Ikea plate to small children watching Franklin on TV.
A genetically engineered money tree.
Laser-guided eyeballs for the back of my head.
A remote that can put other people on mute.
A radar device that can track the flight of angels.
On Tuesday, technology confounded me again. It was teatime at the Regional. In a hospital, teatime generally means supper time, because everyone keeps farmers’ hours for no apparent reason. Bernice and I were discussing the foodstuffs on her tray.
“Dr. Richardson said to put the medicine in my ginger ale?” she asked, her expression a wondrous mingling of horror, skepticism and disgust, as if I’d just advised her that she’d swallowed a grub.
“He just suggested it,” I reassured her. “He thought you’d be happier about taking it if you dissolved it first in a drink.” I squeezed her hand, which was papery and cool.
“It’s a cancer medicine, isn’t it?” she demanded to know.
I shook my head. “I really don’t think so, Bernice, I think it’s for indigestion.”
Her expression grew pensive. She rolled herself onto her side, away from where I sat on the chair. “These doctors don’t know nothing,” she muttered. “When I get home, I’m changing to that doctor in Sydney. The one Shirley had last year. Get him to switch my asthma medicine and take me off all them other pills.”
I dipped my head down. Felt my chest tighten. Did Bernice need to arrive at some sort of reckoning about her predicament? I tilted a can of strawberry Ensure into her glass, and then sat quietly for a few minutes. To judge from the rise and fall of her shoulders, she was falling asleep.
“Do you want to have a nap now?” I asked softly.
She nodded weakly. I got up to reach for her mask. I had initially thought it was an oxygen mask, but Celia explained that it misted some sort of respiratory medication that Bernice needed to inhale before sleeping. A jumbo dose of Dristan, or something. I pulled the mask off its hook, and wondered if it hadn’t gotten a bit smudged and dirty in the last few days, going on and off her face with no one cleaning it. So I breathed into it—“haaa”—and wiped it with my sleeve, the way you do when you’re cleaning your sunglasses, and was just thinking that I really shouldn’t have done that, when the neon lights blinked out overhead. All at once the room was lit only by the pallor of a winter afternoon, which felt simultaneously more natural and somewhat alarming.
“Good heavens,” said Aileen, who had been listening to the radio. “My music stopped and now my fan isn’t whirring.”
A most interesting coincidence.
“It’s the power,” murmured Celia, who was sitting cross-legged in her bed with one hand massaging her back, and the other lightly on Lester, to whom she had been reading Poppleton in Spring. She was sweating profusely. “My morphine drip has cut out.”
“Good heavens,” Aileen said again, but now she was staring at Julia’s corner of the room.
Julia’s special air mattress was slowly deflating. The electric pump that regulated its pressure had stopped. She was sinking, fast asleep, between the metal bed rails, like a noblewoman on a funereal Viking boat drifting out to sea. We all gaped, open-mouthed.
“You’d better do something, Frannie,” Aileen said.
I dutifully rushed over to Julia’s bed without being able to formulate the slightest inkling of what the something was that I should do. “Julia! Wake up!” I urged softly as I clutched her bed rails. It turns out that a deeply slumbering and arthritic ninety-three-year-old is slower to leap into action than you might hope. I tried to cushion her slow-motion descent, as she perilously closed in on the bed’s metal underpinnings, by … oh … hmmm. I yanked Bernice’s pillow from under her tousled head—which went thwack against her mattress—and began trying to push it under Julia’s back.
Aileen struggled to get up and help me, throwing her arm out with such haste that she knocked over her fan, whereupon the power surged back on, Julia suddenly reversed course and began to ascend, and a large number of Hostess potato chips flew across the room like a cloud of locusts, propelled by the overturned fan. Lester shouted in delight and reached out to catch them. Celia curled forward, head to knees, collapsing in laughter, and Aileen joined in, covering her mouth with the back of one hand and looking mischievous, as if she’d played a deliberate prank. Bernice, on the other hand, flailed at the chips and began to wheeze.
“Oh dear,” I said, trotting to her side. “I’m so sorry.” I fumbled with her mask as she gasped for air, bug-eyed. But I couldn’t make out which button to push to start misting her, and came close to tears at my own stupidity. When I finally had her settled, I went and stood in the hallway, bereft.
Dr. Richardson was approaching with his arms behind his back, and this time, I was the one who ran away.
I am comforted by sunlight, like a cat. I basked in it the next morning, as I sat by the tall, bright windows of the hospital meeting room, face tilted upward, hands behind my head, waiting for Father McPhee. The light was so serene and the room so neutral that I felt briefly out of time, the way one feels on an airplane when the sun has just risen above the feathery bed of clouds outside the window, radiant, and there’s nothing to anticipate but coffee and a square of scrambled eggs.
“You wanted to see me?”
Father McPhee barged into my solitude. I opened my eyes to greet him, and saw that he was enormously fat, mostly about the middle. He was shaped rather like a top. He whirled in, grabbed a chair, swung it around and plunked himself down, knees apart, directly in front of me, chair to chair at the window. He had a huge grin on his face.
“You’re Frances, Bernice’s daughter-in-law,” he announced, slapping me on the leg. His movements were expansive and cocky. This jarred me. For some reason, I thought Bernice’s beloved “Faa’ther McPhee” would be a member of her own generation, morose and outdated, a fad
ing apparition of piety. But no, this guy looked as if he were barely pushing forty, with trim, receding chestnut hair, a pointy nose and sharp little eyes that glinted through rectangular spectacles.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right. Or, at least, I’m with her son Calvin. I don’t know if you know him.”
“The orchestra player,” he replied, his expression brightening back into a grin. “Bernice wouldn’t know the difference between Sid Vicious and Mahler, is that fair to say?” He winked.
I stared at him in surprise. “You know that Calvin doesn’t play in an orchestra?”
“Oh, sure, sure.” He kept grinning. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. I suppose he and Calvin met when Stan died. To arrange the funeral. It quickly became evident that Father McPhee was expansive with his physical presence, but not with his words. He kept staring at me. Kept grinning, his hands clasped between his knees. I cleared my throat.
“Right. Well, anyway, thank you for meeting with me, I appreciate it because I wondered if I could have your advice.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I need to talk to Bernice about her health.”
“What health?” He winked.
I smiled, har har, and looked down at my hands. “Well, exactly, that’s the problem. Her cancer has come out of remission and the chickens are, as some might say, coming home to roost.”
“Sounds like you’ve been talking to Dr. Richardson.” He winked again.
“Well, yes, so I don’t know the specifics, but I have to assume that she’s close to dying—I mean, I guess that’s what Dr. Richardson means—and I feel this is something she should be discussing with people who love her.”
“Oh sure.” He was jiggling one fat knee up and down. Too much coffee?
I wondered—what should I call him? Father or Your Honor? I wasn’t sure and it seemed important. Doctor, doctor, what do I do?
“The thing is, um, sir,” I cringed, “it’s difficult to talk to Bernice about the situation in medical terms.” I frowned, trying to think of the right words. “Or even, you know, even existentially or spiritually, or …” I tilted my head back and breathed in deeply, fiddled with an earring. “Am I making any sense? I feel like I should be reading her some Dylan Thomas poetry—you know that famous poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’? Although, of course, Thomas wound up dying by falling drunk off a barstool, so I can’t say he set the most inspiring example himself, maybe that’s not a good idea, but there’s a wonderful poem by Walt Whitman I could read her, this beautiful section of Leaves of Grass.”
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