The Christmas Letters

by Lee Smith

  Oh well! Who am I to say? I had it so easy, by comparison. And as for the kids today, well . . . “‘nuff said”! We give them too much, if you ask me. I think they all ought to work. But strangely enough, Sandy disagrees with me on this, he is just so proud that they don’t have to! He wants them to concentrate on extracurricular activities so they can get into real good schools. So that’s what they are doing.

  This means that I am in the car constantly, driving everybody everywhere to clubs, practices, etc. As I told Sandy recently, sometimes I feel like I am part of the car, like a fancy gearshift or something. But I guess it will be worth it. James is already a state-ranked Junior tennis star at 11. This past year, he has had matches in Greensboro, Wilmington, Kinston, you name it. And those matches last forever, let me tell you. Actually I am privately not even sure that they are good for kids, what with John McEnroe as a role model! They throw their rackets and everything, often (it seems) encouraged by their parents, who are just as competitive as they are. I am proud to add that James never does this. He has beautiful manners on the court, his coach insists on it. Sandy thinks tennis is good preparation for life, but I am not so sure. Anyway it is a big relief for me now that we have moved so close to the club, so James can just walk over there for his lessons. It will also be convenient for Claire and Melanie next summer, as they are both on the swim team.

  At school, however, they go off in opposite directions. Claire is the cheerleader and math whiz, while Melanie is very active with the drama club and literary magazine. I’ll swear, it’s like each of them represents a different side of the brain! (I guess Claire must take after you, Ruthie!) I have never seen so much energy, or so much talking on the phone. Actually, this goes for both of them. We have had to put in a separate phone line for the twins. They remain best friends despite their different interests, though it’s easy to tell them apart now that Claire has cut her hair and Melanie has let hers grow so long. I’ll be glad when they can get their driver’s licenses —or I think I will. It will certainly be easier for me, but of course I will never know exactly where they are then. . . . Well, there are things you can’t afford to think about too much, as a mother. The whole world is so dangerous, isn’t it? and yet we have to let them go. Somehow it is harder to let girls go than boys, Sandy feels this way too, I know it is a sexist attitude on our part.

  Andrew has already been accepted at an art school in Boston, after winning the Danziger Art Award last May when he was only a junior. Even I am forced to admit that all those years of a messy room (read, creative kid) have really added up to something special. I will actually miss the mess!

  Sandy has always expected the boys to enter Copeland Construction Company with him, but it looks like he will just have to wait for “James McEnroe Jr.” to come along, since Andrew clearly marches to a different drummer. Andrew didn’t even tell us that he had applied for early admission to art school! In a way, Andrew is just as independent and bull-headed as his dad, I guess this is why they have clashed so much over the years. Of course Sandy is just as proud of him now as I am. I confess, I can’t seem to get it through my head that Andrew is actually graduating! It seems like just yesterday to me that I was walking him to first grade at the old Cobb School, when we lived on Rosemary Street. I remember how tight he held my hand.

  Ruthie and Jay have finally produced their first child, Eliza—Ruthie says her biological alarm clock finally went off! Now she acts like she invented motherhood. (Just kidding, Ruthie!) Seriously, she has also developed a new line of maternity clothes called Mother Nature. Look for them in stores everywhere, starting next summer. Personally, I think this is a great idea, remembering all those awful plaid overblouses we used to wear back in the old days, with bows and things . . . where does the time go? Now the idea is to let your belly show, Ruthie says it’s much more natural. Some of the Mother Nature dresses are actually knits!

  Mama is fine, in fact she’s amazing, still running her little restaurant. Of course she is heartbroken over Joe’s disappearance, as am I. Sorry to interject a note of sadness into the Christmas letter, but I want to ask all of you to let me or Mama know immediately if you hear from him, or if you spot him anywhere. (Randy Billings, one of Sandy’s foremen, swore he saw Joe on the street in Chattanooga, Tenn., but this lead did not pan out either.)

  Sandy and I have now joined a couples gourmet club which is a lot of fun. The other couples are John and Dovie Birmingham, Hap and Sarah Swann, Brenda and Roger Raines, Mary Lib and Bo Clark, and Sam and Ruth Wingate, many of them neighbors here at Stonebridge Club Estates. Each couple is responsible for dinner once a year (we meet every two months). So far we have had a Hibachi Grill-Out, a Northern Italian Evening, a Mexican event, and an English High Tea—Sandy nearly starved! It will be our turn in May. Any ideas? Maybe I should just bring Mama over here to cook for everybody—Sandy is really “into” gourmet, but I still think there is nothing like Mama’s home cooking. This reminds me of something funny Mama said the last time she came for a visit. I had taken her and the girls to an early morning swim meet, picking up some coffee and bagels on the way. Mama didn’t say a thing when I bought the food, but the funniest look came over her face when she bit into her bagel. “Well!” she said. “Whoever thinks this is good has clearly never tasted a biscuit!”

  What else? I continue to volunteer at the PTA Thrift Shop and the Altar Guild (I have given up the Sunday School class) and recently I joined a women’s book group— I decided it was time to take “time for myself.” I am really enjoying it.

  . . . And to all a good night,

  Mary

  P.S. From the files of the Gourmet Club (these are really good)

  RUMAKI

  (Chicken Livers with Water Chestnuts)

  6 chicken livers (about ½ lb.), each cut into 3 pieces

  6 canned water chestnuts, drained, each cut into 3 pieces

  9 slices bacon, cut in half lengths and partially cooked

  6 scallions, cut in 1-in. pieces

  Marinade:

  ¼ cup soy sauce

  ¼ cup dry sherry

  1 tsp. brown sugar

  2 Tbsp. sesame oil (optional)

  1 slice fresh ginger root, 1 inch in diameter, ¼ in. thick (or) ½ tsp. powdered ginger

  Combine soy sauce, sherry, brown sugar, and sesame oil in non-metallic container. Squeeze in fresh ginger root with garlic press. With sharp knife, cut a small incision in each piece of chicken liver and insert a piece of water chestnut. Place prepared chicken livers, precooked bacon slices, and scallion strips into marinade. Mix well to coat, and let stand for at least one hour, longer if possible. Drain, reserving marinade.

  Wrap a bacon strip around each piece of chicken liver with water chestnut. Secure firmly with small well-soaked bamboo skewer. On 9-inch bamboo skewers place 3 wrapped chicken livers, alternating with scallion slices. Lay on platter and pour reserved marinade over all.

  Place on oiled grill over medium coals for 5 or 6 minutes, turning to crisp bacon evenly. Serve each skewer on individual plate with small fork. These should be served hot!

  (Contributed by John and Dovie Birmingham)

  Dec. 10, 1989

  To my dear family and friends,

  It’s early for me to be writing the Christmas Letter, but there’s so much to say, it may take you until Christmas to read this one. Mama died peacefully in her sleep this past August, at age 67. She had no illness, or symptoms of any sort, beyond the slight “slowing down” you would expect. She was as mentally sharp as ever, right up to the day of her death. The last person to talk with her, her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Muncey, said Mama was fussing about where the paperboy had thrown her paper—up in the shrubbery by the porch where it was hard to get to, instead of the yard. Mama always read the paper, and always watched the news. She was a remarkable woman.

  It’s funny—I can’t say I actually had a presentiment, but that Sunday right before her death, I suddenly dropped everything and got in the car and took off
to see her. I can’t say why—I just felt like it. Sandy thought I’d gone crazy, of course, but it was the Member-Guest Invitational at the club, and I knew he would never miss me. I knew he’d be over there all weekend anyway.

  It was a hot day with a white sky that seemed to blend in with the fields on the horizon. The road ahead of me was shimmering in the heat, the way it does in summer. There’s never any traffic on 111 South—my kids used to call it the “ghost road”—so I got there in no time. I found Mama walking around the house in her black and white voile dress and her stocking feet, just home from church. I stood outside the screen door for a minute and watched her. She opened first one drawer, then another. She peered all along the top of the mantel, then felt behind all the books in the bookcase, those old Reader’s Digest Condensed books which she had had ever since I could remember. She reached up to touch the top of the grandfather clock.

  “Surprise, Mama!” I said from the door.

  “Why, hello, Mary.” But Mama did not seem at all surprised. She smiled her old sweet smile at me and gave me a big hug when I stepped inside. I did not point out that she had left the door unlatched—we were always trying to get her to lock it. Though she had been losing weight for a year or more, she seemed strong as ever when she hugged me. Then she held me out at arm’s length and looked at me good, her blue eyes starred by the cataracts which the doctor said weren’t “ripe” enough to operate on.

  “How’s the kids?” she asked, and I said, “Fine.”

  “How’s Sandy?”

  “Fine.”

  Then she asked, “Heard from Joe lately?” and I said, “Mama, you know I haven’t heard from Joe. I would have called you if I had.”

  “Well . . .” Mama said. She kind of let it trail off. “I was just thinking that you might have heard from him,” she said. She was looking at me with her head cocked to the side like a bird. It was the first time she had mentioned Joe in I don’t know how long. Then she slapped her thighs in that familiar getting-down-to-business gesture. “It’s a good thing you came up here today,” she announced. “I can use you, Miss Mary!” and before I knew it, she had stuck an apron on me and had set me to cutting up green tomatoes and onions at the same old white enamel kitchen table I remember so well from childhood.

  “How come we’re making so much of this pickle relish?” I thought to ask when I’d been chopping for almost an hour. Mama looked at me darkly from the stove, where she was stirring up the first batch. “Why, Mary,” she said, “you know perfectly well that Mr. Hughes won’t eat a thing without it!” So that was that. Mr. Ray Hughes, who runs Hughes Hardware Store across from the courthouse, had been coming to Birdie’s Lunch every day for 20 years.

  We sweltered all afternoon in that hot kitchen, breathing in pickles until our eyes watered. Of course Sandy had insisted upon air-conditioning Mama’s house years before, but Mama refused to turn it on, claiming that air-conditioning was bad for her arthritis, a medical notion she had gotten from Parade magazine. We cooked while it got darker and darker outside, then windy, as a thunderstorm came up all of a sudden out of nowhere, rolling in across the fields from the coast. We cooked while the air grew heavy and the light failed, and thunder crashed over our heads, and lightning branched across the sky. Then the rain fell hard for ten minutes, pounding on the roof. In an instant I was transported back to the world of my childhood on the farm, when Joe and I used to huddle under an old blanket on the porch glider during thunderstorms, caught up in delicious fright, telling each other long, complicated stories that scared us both to death. I kept on chopping tomatoes.

  After a while I looked up to see Mama smiling at me. “You’re cutting them up too big, honey,” she said, and I started cutting smaller. I don’t know where the afternoon went. Before I realized it, we were done, the jars in a glistening row on the windowsill, the green tomato pickles glowing from within, like jewels. I kissed Mama good-bye but paused in the doorway to look back and see her searching those bookshelves again—for what? I will never know. There is so much that we can never know.

  I headed north on the “ghost road” toward Raleigh with a warm, full heart. I imagined Mama getting ready for prayer meeting, exchanging her house slippers for those old black lace-up shoes that the twins called her “witch shoes,” powdering her face with the same loose powder she had used since time immemorial, Lord knows where she still bought it, and driving that old green Buick over to church as she had done twice every Sunday for so many years, through a long succession of preachers whose names I could never remember (she had taken to calling the most recent one, Mr. Trimble, “that nice little boy-preacher”).

  The next day she went to the dime store as usual. She fed some of the new pickle relish to Mr. Ray Hughes, who was heard to pronounce it “damn fine.” Then she came home from the store, complained about the newspaper to Mrs. Muncey, watched—I am sure—the news and “Major Dad” on TV, and went to bed. I’m also sure she said, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” as she always did when putting Joe and me to bed. I do not say this prayer myself, nor have I taught it to any of my children. I don’t know why not, actually. But now this strikes me as awful. I have always envied Mama her faith, and now I envy it more than ever, as I struggle to go on without her. I keep forgetting she’s dead—whenever something happens, I automatically reach for the phone to tell her about it. I guess I will go on doing this for a while.

  Sandy says I should consider it a blessing in disguise, as Birdie’s Lunch was due to be closed this coming spring along with the dime store, a new Wal-Mart out on the highway having put them out of business. James Grady had been running the store at a loss for the past two years— mainly, I suspect, to give Mama something to do. He was just about as fond of her as we are. Were. As we were.

  Anyway, it is hard to imagine how we will face Christmas without her, since she always made the gravy for the hen, and brought the Sticks and Stones and pound cake with her. I have already made the pound cake and the Sticks and Stones, but I don’t know how I will make the gravy. I never could make gravy worth a damn. I believe it is a lost art among my generation!

  But on a happier note, we have had lots of other changes in the Copeland household, too. The biggest news is that I have gone back to school. I have always had a secret dream of doing this, have long held this possibility in the back of my mind. And all of a sudden, after Mama died, I just did it! I drove across town and registered at the McKimmon Center for Continuing Education at N.C. State. Technically I am classified as a special student. But if all goes well, I will become a regular student, starting second semester. This thrills me beyond belief. I guess I have realized that we don’t live forever, and that the only time to do what we really want to do is now. This is the thing about a parent’s death—especially the second parent’s death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that darkness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen: the time is now. We are the next in line.

  I guess you think I am being pretty dramatic when all I’ve actually done is sign up for a few classes! But to me this is a big deal. My stomach was actually turning flip-flops when I turned in my first paper. I was terrified! My humanities professor is a young man named Dr. Winters, from up North. (I can just hear Mama now—“that little boy-teacher,” she would have called him!) He is a thin, moody, intense young man not much older than my Andrew, very smart, and he is a Marxist! I have never met one before. It is quite interesting in class, because everything we read, we have to look at the economics and the politics of the time. Dr. Winters believes that any book is primarily a product of its time. I am not used to thinking of things this way, and at first I just bit my tongue, but now I feel free to argue with Dr. Winters, who actually seems to like it when people disagree with him!

  My other class is Narrative and Expository Writing, and here I am having a “field day.” My teacher i
s an old fat rumpled fellow past retirement, Dr. Rutledge, who seems “out of it” much of the time yet occasionally fixes us with his bleary old eye and says something I know I will never forget, something I have to write down in my notebook and mull over for days, like I used to do with Gerald Ruffin. Dr. Rutledge has been extremely encouraging about my writing, as well. All this writing (we have to do weekly compositions, with revisions) has taken me right back to myself as a child, to Joe and me and those Small Reviews we used to sell in the neighborhood, to myself and how much I used to love to read and write. It’s like a string that was broken has been re-tied, or re-attached—suddenly I feel a sense of continuity between that child I once was and the woman I am now. I did not realize how completely I had been cut off from her, and for how long. Obviously I will major in English, as I started out doing so long ago, but I will have to struggle through the other courses too, of course. I’m sure it won’t hurt me a bit! Though I have never felt so ignorant.

  One of my first assignments in my composition class was to write about a process, so I wrote about how to take out a stain. It was the only “process” I could think of. And I can get a stain out of anything, as Sandy will tell you! Hair spray removes a ballpoint-ink stain, for instance. Put meat tenderizer on fresh bloodstains, and salt on red wine stains. White vinegar and water for pet urine. Mr. Rutledge was simply astonished. He gave me an A, commenting upon both my writing and my “esoteric area of expertise.” (I had to look up “esoteric.”)