The Christmas Letters

by Lee Smith

  During my recent “shrinkage” I have learned all about “denial” of course, but really it seems to me that denial is often a good and useful thing, keeping us going, allowing us to do what has to be done in the world.

  Another story I didn’t write at Greenacres Park was the story of Gerald Ruffin, that charming brilliant alcoholic Gerald Ruffin who loved me (and he really did love me, probably as much as Sandy and more than anybody else ever will love me again), and how we used to sit out on those crummy lawn chairs talking and talking all night long sometimes while I patted Andrew’s back as he lay facedown on my lap and mewed like a cat from colic, while the bugs flew around and the BIG AL’S TIRE sign shone all night long just beyond the blooming honeysuckle that covered the stockade fence enclosing us from the “bad neighborhood” which surrounded us on every side. Oh, how sweet that honeysuckle smelled—I will never forget it. And Gerald Ruffin’s profile, outlined against the sign’s red glow . . . well, he was simply the handsomest man I have ever seen. He looked (oh, I don’t know) English, I thought, with that fine aquiline nose, the chiseled chin, nothing weak about it though he was weak, poor thing, he couldn’t bear his vision of the world. Oh, Gerald Ruffin had a story too, of course, and it was a tragic one, involving a brother’s betrayal and a child’s death by drowning and his young wife’s suicide, years before. Gerald Ruffin was 41 years old when I met him. I was 22. I thought he was ancient, of course, but now that I’m older than he was then, I realize he wasn’t ancient at all, and I can understand how a person such as he might take to drink.

  Gerald Ruffin had been living in Greenacres Park for several years when we moved there, and I believe I was the only person he had ever really talked to in all that time. Once a week, a dignified black man wearing a porkpie hat would arrive at Gerald’s trailer, sent by his brother, and deposit two paper bags full of groceries on the stoop by the door, tip his hat to me if I was outside with Andrew or standing in my own doorway, and then disappear, and sometime during that day the groceries would disappear too. Not that Gerald Ruffin ever ate much, growing thinner and thinner before my eyes.

  In fact I never saw him eat anything, and I never saw him without a drink in his hand. He drank from a silver julep cup, a remnant of better days. He drank vodka and vodka only—Stolichnaya—he called it his “one extravagance.” Whenever he ran out of vodka, he’d call a cab (he’d lost his driver’s license years before) and jump right into it, sometimes still wearing his bathrobe, and have the cabbie drive him to the liquor store and then go in to make his purchase for him, while Gerald sat in the cab magisterially surveying the world outside Greenacres Park “which certainly does not have much to offer,” he’d announce grandly upon his return.

  Did I ever sleep with him? No. Did I ever kiss him? Oh yes, Lord yes, many many times in the dead of night with the overpowering smell of that honeysuckle all around us and my own hard-working Sandy asleep inside the trailer. I kissed him in the daytime too, and people saw it—I know Mrs. Pike saw us at least once, but she never said a word about it, I guess she was old enough and wise enough to know what was important and what was not.

  I was a good wife. And I was a good mom, too. I got the hang of it. I was also a desperately lonely unhappy girl who might not have made it through those first two years of my marriage without Gerald Ruffin’s conversation (“palaver,” he called it, a word I have never heard anybody else use) or those sweet, sweet vodka-flavored kisses, all the sweeter for their hopelessness. This is why I don’t drink vodka now, by the way. I have never been able to taste the stuff since without the memory of Gerald Ruffin springing straight to mind, which always makes me cry. I am crying now. They say that vodka has no taste, but this isn’t true. You can taste it. I can taste his kisses still, all those years ago.

  Which is one reason I got so upset when that marriage therapist urged us to “put all our cards out on the table” and talk about “any infidelities.” Sandy came up with plenty, of course. Over a dozen. Over a dozen women (“girls,” he called them) he’d slept with while he was married to me! But they were “not important,” he said. Just girls he ran into while “out of town” or “at conventions,” or “sales meetings,” where he was “lonely,” so it “didn’t count.” (Dovie Birmingham did count—more on that!) Anyway, the point is that Sandy had all these affairs to put out on the table, so to speak, while I had not one infidelity to report, not one.

  I could have kicked myself for not sleeping with Gerald Ruffin, who loved me, I know he did. Perhaps I could have rehabilitated him, saved him, married him . . . certainly, I would have learned a thing or two!

  Oh, but that would be another story, wouldn’t it? Another story altogether. Gerald Ruffin died of cirrhosis of the liver in the VA Hospital in Durham in 1979, while we were living at Hummingbird Estates. I kept up with him all that time, calling every week, visiting every month. He weighed 85 pounds when he died. I never mentioned these visits to Sandy, who probably wouldn’t have remembered Gerald anyway. It was another story.

  As is the story of my brother Joe, a real tragedy. Joe never should have gone to Vietnam. He never should have gone to any war, he was not cut out for it. I could have gone to Vietnam more easily than Joe. I have always been able to pull myself together to do what needs to be done, but this was not true of Joe. Joe was so sensitive, so imaginative, fragile really, though he kept this side of himself successfully hidden from most people. The fact that he was good at working on cars and engines made him seem like he was stronger and tougher than he was —you know the connotations, the connections we all make between cars and men, between men and war.

  Well, Joe was not even really a man, not yet—he was just a boy, and not even a very tough boy. (In later years, I would see so much of Joe in my own Andrew, though of course Joe was not gay. Or: I don’t think Joe was gay. But who knows? He didn’t have a chance to be much of anything, I guess, before we lost him.)

  And we did lose him in that war, as surely as if he had been killed.

  This was the awful tragedy of it, Joe-who-was-not-Joe coming back, Joe who looked exactly like the old Joe (the curly black hair, the one-sided grin, the snaggletooth) and laughed like the old Joe, and walked like the old Joe, that easy shamble, but was all hollow around the gray eyes which had gone flat and distant somehow, eyes which could no longer quite focus on whoever he was with. And he couldn’t pay attention either. He’d be talking to you, and then he’d simply stop talking, and stand staring at a point somewhere just beyond your face. And then he’d walk away.

  This is what happened when Sandy tried to give him a job at the construction company. The first day on the job, Joe’d be great, firm handshakes all around, joking with the guys. And he’d outwork them all—he could build anything, put anything together. He’d be whistling, Sandy said. Enjoying himself. Joe was always a great whistler. Then the second day, or maybe the third or the fourth, he’d just walk off the job. Leave for lunch and never come back. Take a cigarette break and bye-bye.

  He’d be gone for a day or two, then show up at Mama’s or back at our house, all smiles, whistling, glad to see everybody. So then Sandy would try to talk to him, and give him another job with another crew, and before you knew it, the same thing would happen all over again. Sandy knocked himself out to no avail. I have never seen him so frustrated. Sandy always liked Joe (well, Joe was so likable, wasn’t he?) even though he never really knew him until after Vietnam. And I think perhaps Sandy felt guilty himself because he never had to go, because we had a baby. But Mama felt guiltier than anybody, and talked about it constantly, assuming all the blame, which was wrong, of course. If anybody was to blame it was Daddy, who never could see more than one side to anything. Right or wrong, black or white. Mama was fond of saying that Daddy had “the courage of his convictions.” But is this strength of character, or is it stupidity? Now I wonder.

  I remember that time Daddy hit Joe when we were kids, the day of the flood, when he was whipping Ruthie, and Joe tried to stop him.
(Isn’t it funny how some things will stick in your mind forever while others, more important or so you’d imagine, simply disappear?) I remember that Joe had on a green International Harvester cap, that he nearly fell down the front steps, that his feet made a sucking noise in the mud as he stumbled away.

  I also remember, as if it were yesterday, one of those discussions they had (Mama, Daddy, and Joe) about what Joe would do if he got drafted. Sandy and I had driven over from Raleigh shortly after our marriage. I was in the first trimester of my pregnancy, and couldn’t keep anything on my stomach. So in addition to being sick, I was really nervous, for I knew that my elopement had broken their hearts, no matter what a brave front Mama was trying to display at the time. It was already cold, sometime after Halloween. I remember how the dead stalks of corn stood up in the fields, how the sky was all red and silver. I have always liked winter sunsets the best. Sandy had to pull over twice to let me throw up. But then finally we were there, driving slowly through town just as the streetlights came on, past the dime store (closed, it was Sunday).

  We pulled up in front of the house. Sandy opened my door and took my hand and kissed me once, hard, before I turned the glass doorknob and stepped inside. This was the third time I had been home since my marriage. The first time was awful —Mama cried, Daddy stalked upstairs, and Joe tried in vain to hide his disappointment. The second visit had been strained but cordial. Joe was not at home.

  So I was praying that this visit might be better—we had come to pick up a loveseat and a rocking chair that Mama had offered us in a gesture of what I hoped was reconciliation.

  And as soon as we walked into the kitchen, I knew it would be all right. For I was no longer the problem.

  Joe was the problem now. He and Daddy sat facing each other across the old white enameled kitchen table where Mama did all her cooking (this table I have now in my own kitchen in my own little house). Both of them were smoking. Cigarette smoke hung blue in the air above the white table, beneath the hanging globe of the lamp. Mama was at the sink, back turned, tension evident in the way she stood. Daddy and Joe were staring at each other. They looked exactly alike: handsome, angular men with long faces and those wide expressive mouths.

  “No son of mine . . .” Daddy began.

  “Hi, everybody,” I said, and Mama whirled around to hug me with her hands still wet, the first real hug I’d had from her since our marriage, and I was so glad to get it.

  “Honey!” she exclaimed. “How are you feeling? Did you all get any dinner?” she asked Sandy, who allowed as how we had not, since I hadn’t felt up to eating, and then Mama was feeding us cold fried chicken, and they were telling us everything.

  Daddy was trying to get Joe to enlist, believing that this would give him “more choice” than if he waited around to get drafted. Sandy immediately agreed (I believe this is the very minute that Daddy decided he was okay) and recommended the Marines. Joe sat there like a rock looking so miserable that at last I took pity on him and said, “Why not the Navy? I think their uniforms are the cutest,” which made everybody laugh, it was such a silly remark in the middle of this serious conversation. (Here is another thing that I have always been good at, playing a little dumb in order to make everyone laugh, to relax a room.) Joe grinned at me but remained uncharacteristically silent in the center of that conversation which whirled and eddied all about him, a rock in the midst of the current. Sandy ate three or four pieces of chicken and praised it extravagantly. He and Daddy were deep into a discussion about what the government ought to do about draft dodgers when Joe slipped away.

  It was the first time I ever remember him slipping away like that, and it was the last time Sandy and I were to see him before I had my baby and Joe was drafted.

  Only of course we didn’t know any of that then. I just thought, Oh well, Joe’s gone over to the shop to work on a car and listen to music (his favorite occupation). I didn’t really think anything about it at the time. I was just happy that Daddy was finally talking to Sandy (I always knew they would get along if they’d give each other a chance) and that Mama seemed glad to see me.

  And in fact, the worst was over. Right as we were getting in the car to leave, she gave me a whole set of dishes that she’d gotten for me with Green Stamps, saying, “Well now, just go ahead and take these with you. I was going to give them to you for Christmas, but I can’t wait.” Which was typical of Mama!

  Daddy knew it, too. “Aw, shoot, Birdie. Now you’ll just have to get her another damn Christmas present,” he said from the dark front porch. All I could see of him was the red tip end of his cigarette in the dark. “You all be careful now,” he yelled as we drove off.

  So Mama blamed herself for what happened to Joe. She couldn’t blame Daddy, as he was dead, and anyway she had sanctified him in her memory as he never was in life, where he had been a stubborn opinionated hard-working man like most others of his time and place, no better and no worse. Oh, how I had loved him myself, for his faults as well as his virtues! (I guess it is easier to love a father than a husband in this way.) In any case, Mama never got over it, just as Joe never got over it. “If only I had stood up to your Daddy!” she’d say later. Or, “If only Joe had gone to college!” etc. But it was too late. (Sometimes it can be too late, sometimes things are irrevocable.)

  And you know what I think Mama was looking for, that very last time I saw her? I think she was still looking for some clue as to what had become of Joe, searching in the only places she could search, the little familiar nooks and crannies of the life he once had shared with them but then could share no longer. Or perhaps Mama was remembering all those endless detective games which Joe and I had played as children, especially the Hardy Boys games, when I was Frank and he was Joe, of course.

  And now I am Mary Pickett again, having resumed my maiden name. I did this yesterday, at the courthouse downtown. It’s a very simple procedure. I’m not sure exactly why I chose to do this, since I am still “holding on” to all those things in my storage unit. But clearly, the name change has something to do with reading through these old Christmas letters. For one thing, I was fascinated to note how many different ways I’d signed my name over the years —there are all these different names at the ends of the letters. So I have decided to have only one name from now on: Mary Pickett, though I suspect I will always see the “Copeland” there too in my mind’s eye, my ghost name, just as Nov. 2nd will always be my ghost anniversary.

  Another fascinating thing about the Christmas letters is all the recipes —I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crêpes phase, and now it’s these salsa years. I have spent my entire life cooking and (Lord help me!) putting the leftovers into smaller and smaller containers.

  That brings up the Gourmet Club, so I guess I’d better get the business of Dovie Birmingham over with right now.

  As far as I was concerned, it all began at Dovie and John’s anniversary party in the summer of 1988. It was billed as a “pool party,” designed to inaugurate their new swimming pool as well as celebrate their twenty years of marriage. I didn’t even take a bathing suit, of course, as I had no intention of showing my body to everybody in town, especially to all those people you see in other contexts, such as your dentist or pediatrician, for instance. And sure enough, it was a huge party. All the members of the Gourmet Club were present, of course, plus lots of other neighbors from Stonebridge Estates, members of John Birmingham’s law firm, and their many other friends. The Birminghams had a wide circle of acquaintance due to his civic interests and her vivaciousness. (This was the word everybody used whenever Dovie Birmingham’s name came up: “vivacious.”) In fact, Dovie was a small energetic woman with too-large breasts that almost seemed to tip her over, like Dolly Parton, short thin fluffy white-blond hair and pale eyes that always darted around a room, assessing the situation, seeing how she was doing. I don’t mean to be too hard on her here. In fact I alwa
ys liked Dovie Birmingham just fine until that very night, the night of her anniversary party where I was only trying to be helpful, in a neighborly way, by volunteering to go out to their new pool house and get some ice from the deep freeze since they were running low at the bar inside and at that moment our hosts were nowhere to be seen.

  Have I mentioned that the Birminghams’ party featured a Hawaiian motif? It also featured blue drinks that looked like Windex, with little umbrellas in them, and leis for the ladies, though so many ladies had come that they’d run out of leis early on. I had not gotten one. I wore a long loose flowered dress which looked vaguely Hawaiian, I hoped, though I’d bought it in the lingerie section of Dillard’s that afternoon. Getting into the spirit of the party, I’d taken off my shoes at the door, and I can still recall exactly how the damp grainy pebbled concrete of the patio felt to my bare feet as I walked out to the pool house, examining the Birminghams’ new pool which I found almost ostentatious, actually, since it was so big and the country club was practically next door anyway. It was an irregularly shaped pool with that pebbly concrete (plus lots of plants and fake “rocks”) laid out in such a way as to make it all look “natural,” though it was not natural, of course, no more natural than the plastic lily pads floating on the water. A little artificial waterfall trickled endlessly into the pool, making ripples. No one was swimming yet.

  The pool house was supposed to look like a pagoda. I went around the back and pulled the door open and there was my own husband Sandy kissing Dovie Birmingham who immediately began to squeal like a stuck pig. She was holding one foot up in the air like a teenager in one of those old Beach Blanket Bingo movies. In fact they both looked like people caught in a still shot from a Grade B movie, standing there beneath the humming fluorescent lights of the pool house.