by Sandra Kring
And then the phone rang.
Mom was still laughing when she answered it. She asked who was calling, then said, “Nordine? Is that you?” She stopped laughing.
There is only one Nordine in town (or maybe anywhere in the whole world), so I knew who she was talking to. Nordine clerks at the Holiday gas station by day and waitresses at a supper club on the outskirts of town by night Everybody always raves about how pretty Nordine is, and I guess she is, even if she’s got to be as old as Dad. She’s blond, trim, and has the kind of face that should be on a ceramic Christmas angel. Nordine is the mother of little Ralphy, the puny kid who played Rudolph in this year’s Christmas program He stunk at acting, but he broke all of our hearts just by entering the stage, skinny-necked and pale as a snowflake, the plastic clown’s nose clamped over his, so big that it was making his eyes water.
Nordine is the wife of Henry Bickett, a hot-tempered little drunk who hasn’t worked a day in his life and won’t take care of Ralphy while Nordine works, so she has to drag him to work with her, even if that means keeping him up until after eleven o’clock on school nights.
Ma called Dad, her hand clamped over the receiver. She told him it was Nordine Bickett and that she sounded like she was crying. Ma sounded confused, though I’m not sure if the confusion was about why Nordine was crying or why she’d call our house and ask for Dad.
Dad yanked the phone from Mom and started toward the bathroom, but Clay was in there. He stretched the cord as far as it would go in the other direction—’til he was standing under the archway between the kitchen and living room Dad’s voice was as high-pitched as Mickey Mouse’s and sounded to tally fake when he said, “Nordine? Hello there!”
Ma came back to the table where I was sitting, plucking excess dough from around the cookie shapes. She pretended she was looking at my Marie cookie as she bent over me, but her attention was on what Dad was saying on the phone.
Dad didn’t talk long, and he listened more than spoke. Finally he said, “It’s okay, Nordine. You can trust me when I say that won’t happen.”
Dad hung up the phone and hurried to grab his boots from the mat by the door.
Ma asked Dad what Nordine wanted, and Dad told her, “Never mind.” He grabbed his keys and went out the door.
Ma and I both stood at the kitchen window, watching as Dad stomped a trail through the fresh snow, straight to his workshop. He left the door partly open as he slipped inside.
“Oh, God, don’t tell me …” Ma said when the curled tip of a toboggan peeked through the doorway.
My heart sank as Dad carried a toboggan the color of honey around the side of the house.
I ran to the spare bedroom that overlooks the driveway and pulled back the shade. Cold wind from the leaky window frame chilled me—or maybe it was the sight of Dad tossing our toboggan into the back of his pickup, then driving away.
“Tell me you didn’t do it, Sam,” Ma said when Dad got home an hour later. “Tell me you didn’t give away your kids’ toboggan to that woman.”
Dad shimmied his feet out of his boots, and snow clumps rolled from the cuffs of his work pants onto the newly waxed floor. “I didn’t give anything to ‘that woman.’ I gave it to her kid,” he said.
“Oh, but, Sam …”
Dad turned to her. “Shut the fuck up.” And Ma did At least to him.
The minute Dad turned on the TV, Ma asked me to watch the last batch of cookies in the oven, then she dialed Marie’s number. She stretched the phone so that the cord was hardly spiraled so she could talk from the bathroom, where Dad couldn’t hear her. Minutes later, Marie’s truck pulled into the yard and Mom opened the drawer where she kept her grocery money, then hurried out. When she came back, she made Clay and me go stand in Dad’s study, which is on the opposite side of the house from the driveway, so we wouldn’t see what she was bringing in and hauling into the basement—as if Christmas wasn’t already ruined.
I pause and let the notebook rest on my legs. My stomach is clenched so tight it hurts, and my eyes feel hot, like tears are boiling behind them.
When I had my computer, sometimes I’d sneak in a game of Spider Solitaire when I got bored with my school-work. It’s a glorified version of solitaire, played with ten columns of cards instead of seven. I like playing it better than regular solitaire because, if you don’t win, you can just click Restart this game again.
When I first started playing it, I wondered if maybe the cards were delivered in such a way that it was impossible to win a particular game no matter what move you made. But after a few failures and then an ultimate win on the same board, I saw that the difference between winning or losing often depended on one simple move. Maybe there’d be two cards facing down—two blind choices—and you’d choose one and lose the game the first time, then you’d play it again and choose the other card when the same choice presented itself, and you’d win. I remember wondering then if life didn’t play by the same principles as a game of Spider Solitaire and whether making one simple move over another might make the difference between winning or losing in the end. I think of this game as I run my fingers over the notebook on my lap, and I wonder if maybe Grandpa Sam would have won Mom and Uncle Clay’s love forever if he’d just made the other choice and not given their toboggan away.
I dab at my damp eyes—I’ll have no explanation for crying once I get back downstairs—and I continue reading, hoping that Mom and Uncle Clay ended up with at least one reason to be happy on Christmas Day.
Christmas morning:
This morning I unwrapped a blue sweater made out of the same material and knit in the same style as my grass-green lint-ball sweater, and Clay got a model of a Camaro. In place of the toboggan that should have been was a sled with metal runners. Dad’s name was written on the tag—in Ma’s handwriting, of course—a Holiday gas station price tag dangling from one blade (Ma never thinks to remove price stickers from gifts).
Clay took one look at that sled and said Dad might as well use it for firewood in his shop because hell was going to freeze over before he used it.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Dad asked. “Ralphy’s six years old. You want a six-year-old kid to think that he wasn’t good enough for Santa to bring him anything?” Then Dad told him how Nordine’s husband—“that horse’s ass,” he called him—spent what money Nordine had saved for Christmas to buy a useless junk car for parts and how he couldn’t let a little kid like that go without a Christmas. He told Clay to grow up, then reminded him that with the grades he got this semester, he was lucky to get anything.
When Clay stomped off, bawling, Dad told him to shut his “baby-ass mouth.” And when Clay’s feet pounded up the stairs, Dad shouted after him, asking him what in the hell was the matter with him that he couldn’t see that a store-bought sled was better than a stupid homemade one. Then Dad yelled at Ma for telling us he was making the toboggan for us in the first place, since it was supposed to be a secret, and had it been kept that way, Clay wouldn’t be carrying on like a “sissy.”
But it wasn’t Ma’s fault that we found out. I had weasled it out of her over a week ago, after she sent me out to the shed to tell Dad that dinner was done. And there he was, sitting in a pool of curly wood chips, his flannel shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows because the wood stove was burning hot. He had a stick with a bunched rag at the top and was dipping it into a pot of water boiling on a hot plate, then brushing it over the end of the planks.
He didn’t look up when I slipped inside the door and told him dinner was ready. He set the stick down and slid what he once told me was the brace over the wet tip of the planks, then he pinned his knee below the brace so he could bend the wood I didn’t get to see him do it, though, because he told me to go so he could concentrate on what he was doing. The second I got back inside the house, I asked Ma if the toboggan was ours. She wouldn’t admit that it was, but I could tell that it was by the sparkle in her eyes, and I ran to tell Clay. Now I wish—for Ma’s sake, and Clay’s
, and mine—that I’d never asked.
“Lucy?” Oma calls up the stairs.
I scramble to tuck the notebook back in the closet. “Yes?” I call back, delivering it in a short clip so, hopefully, she can’t tell that I’m hanging out of the doorway of Mom’s room rather than in the bathroom.
“Your schoolwork, honey,” Oma says.
I crouch down and scoot across the hall and into the bathroom, where I flush the toilet. “Cominggggggggg,” I yell.
I go downstairs and take my place at the table and open a book. “You okay?” Oma asks. “You don’t look so well, and you were in the bathroom an awfully long time. Maybe you should have some ginger root tea.”
“I’m fine, Oma,” I say. I make a note to practice my expressions in the bathroom mirror so I can stop showing my guilt when I’m being snoopy.
I watch Oma as she sits on a stool next to the phone, a New Age supply catalog spread on her lap, and listen as she orders a portable Reiki table, some essential oils, a Pilates exercise ball because her stomach’s getting flabby, a book on boosting your psychic powers, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I hear Grandpa’s snores in between Oma’s recitation of item numbers, and I just feel sad.
I know Mom didn’t have any reason to lie in her own journal, but I want what she wrote to be a lie because I don’t want to think of soft, kind Oma being sworn at. And I don’t want to think of Grandpa Sam not being a good husband to her or a good dad to Mom and Uncle Clay.
When Oma is done on the phone, she looks at me again and her pretty eyes squint until they rim with feathery lines. “You sure you’re okay, Lucy?”
It’s the lemongrass tea. I’m sure of it. And I know there’s no distracting her. I look down at the novel Mom brought me home from the library. Some new young adult book with a picture of a sad-eyed girl on the cover. “Oh, it’s just this book I’m reading,” I say, even though I haven’t even finished reading the first page yet and have no idea what it’s about.
Oma picks up the book, scans the copy on the back, and fans the pages a bit. “It doesn’t sound like a sad story to me,” she says. “But maybe it’s the emotions that were present in the author as she wrote them. I’ll bet if you took ten writers and gave them each ten words from the endless pool of words to choose from, even if they ended up arranging them in exactly the same order, you’d still feel something different from each one, depending on who wrote them. A story, a painting, a piece of music—anything created—gets infused with the emotions and the essence of who created them.
“I’m a sensate, a highly sensitive person, just like you are. Here …”
Oma plucks a carved cardinal from the windowsill, explaining that Grandpa Sam carved it before his fingers got crippled with arthritis, and puts it in my hand. “Close your eyes as you hold it. See what you feel.” I take it reluctantly, hoping it’s not like when she handed me a chunk of amethyst and asked me if I felt the energy. I didn’t.
I do as Oma says, holding it and concentrating, just as she does when she holds her rocks and gems. For a time I’m aware of nothing but the fact that she’s watching me, waiting, hoping that I feel something.
At first I don’t feel anything, but then I start to see something, though I’m not sure if I’m only making pictures up in my mind. I see Grandpa Sam sitting on a stool, bent over, a curved metal-tipped tool scraping the wood and sending blond curls to the floor. And I know that he feels fragile as he carves it, even though he’s big and strong as he was in the picture hanging in the living room. Oma is waiting with such a hopeful expression that I don’t want to disappoint her.
“Well? What do you think attached itself to that carving?” she asks.
“Fragility,” I say, and Oma smiles and tells me again that I’m as bright as the stars.
She takes the bird and turns it over in her hands. “Sam carved this at a time in his life when he was emotionally frail. Vulnerable. And he carved that emotion right into the wood. That’s probably why people who feel they must always be in charge and strong—even the ones who love birds—would rather just look at this figurine than hold it and be reminded of their own fragility.
“Sky Dreamer told me that when you’re a sensate, you have to clear your space from negativity from time to time, because you absorb the emotions of others easily and can become overwhelmed. Here, I’ll show you how.” Then she demonstrates how to clear your space by lifting your arms above your head and whooshing them down to your sides, though I’ve seen her do it a thousand times already. Her left arm hits a plastic cup off the counter and it goes bouncing across the floor. Oma leans down to pick it up, then notices the dust bunnies under the fridge and goes for the scrub bucket. While I sit and pretend to study, I’m thinking about how the sadness, fear, and depression that attached themselves to Mom’s words way back then are probably responsible for the emotions that make her swallow her Paxil and hide out in the clump of trees at the edge of the yard now.
I’m restless, so while Oma pulls the refrigerator out so she can clean under it, I wander off.
There’s nowhere to go, really, since it’s begun to rain outside. I peek in the study, but Milo doesn’t look up from his books. Feynman is asleep at his feet. So I wander off and end up outside Grandpa Sam’s room. I look in at him and I don’t like him, remembering that he broke things and said mean words to Oma and Uncle Clay and gave their toboggan away.
He’s lying in his bed, awake from his nap and staring at the ceiling. I think of how it would be if that’s all I had to do all day—lie and stare at the ceiling, or at flashing TV stations with my broken mind—and then I can’t see that mean dad and husband anymore. Only an old grandpa lying on his bed, sick and alone, waiting to die.
“You’re awake,” I say, stating the obvious—something that drives me nuts when other people do it but knowing that, in this case, the obvious may not be so obvious, so it’s probably not a stupid comment after all. I slip into his room and stand by the bed.
I don’t know if anyone’s home inside that stare, but I feel like talking, and I decide that even if Grandpa Sam doesn’t register what I’m saying, what difference does it make? Milo doesn’t seem to register much of what I say either.
“You know what, Grandpa Sam? Upstairs there is a stack of notebooks Mom wrote in when she was a girl. My mom’s your daughter, Tess, in case you’ve forgotten.”
He turns his head to look at me when I sit on the edge of his bed, but I don’t know if it’s just his brain stem telling him to turn toward the source of noise or a conscious decision to look at me. I decide it doesn’t matter.
“She writes about you being her dad and Oma being her mom. About the things that happened, and what she was thinking about at the time. She wrote about you making toboggans.”
“I make toboggans,” Grandpa Sam says.
“Did you make one for Mom and Uncle Clay?” I ask.
His watery eyes look away, but I don’t know if that means he’s thinking or not, because he doesn’t rotate his eyeballs upward, like he’s trying to search his mind for the memory. “Yeah,” he says.
“Mom wrote about you making them one for Christmas, but you ended up giving it to Ralphy Bickett. They got a store-bought sled instead. They wanted the one you made for them, though,” I say.
Grandpa Sam doesn’t comment.
I want to ask him why he kicked the ornament box, but I don’t want him to feel bad. “I never went sledding before, did you?” I ask.
“I was sick,” he says.
“You mean you were going to go sledding once, but you got sick and couldn’t go?”
“No. Then I had to go to work.”
“Maybe this winter you and I can go sledding, huh? There’s a sled in the basement. Would you like that? I’d help you get on it.”
Grandpa Sam lifts his head and strains. His stiff hands grab a handful of bedsheet and he tugs.
“You want to get up, Grandpa?”
“Yeah,” he says.
I’ve seen Oma ge
t him up, so I pull back his quilt and I take him by the ankles and swing his feet as far off the bed as they’ll go. Then I grab his arms and yank until I get him in a sitting position. We both need a rest after that, so I use the opportunity to ask him the question I want answered the most.
“Grandpa? Did you know my dad? Howard Smith?”
Grandpa Sam actually looks like he’s thinking for a minute, then he says, “Junice lives in the Howards’ house now.” He looks down at his bare feet, which have thick, flaky toenails—toenails that were so long yesterday that, as Oma was clipping them and Mom happened to walk through the living room and glance down, she said, “Crissakes, give him a tree branch and he could perch.”
Grandpa Sam studies the floor. “What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Where’s my slippers?”
I get on my knees and look under the bed, and I see them. They’re brown suede, the toes scuffed. I pull them out and slip them over Grandpa Sam’s feet, which are bony and feel cool like doll skin.
Wrinkled and dull-eyed as Grandpa Sam is, and with his hair sparse and white and standing on end, he suddenly looks as cute as a homely baby, and I reach out and give him a hug.
“I like you, Grandpa Sam. Do you like me too?” I ask this as if the person I’m talking to isn’t the same person Mom wrote about when she was a girl.
“Yeah,” he says, but he doesn’t smile like I do, so I’m not sure if he means it.
I reach out and pat his hair down, but it springs right back up. “Grandpa Sam, can you tell me anything about my dad, Howard Smith? Did you know him? Did he live here in Timber Falls?”
“You didn’t have a dad,” Grandpa Sam says.
Scientifically, of course, Grandpa Sam has to be wrong. But as he said himself, his brain is broken. I sigh, realizing I’m not about to get any answers about my father from him either.