by Rachel Cohn
Some of these pop-up firriers were manned by guys who looked like they’d taken a break from drug dealing to try another kind of needle exchange. Others were staffed by guys in flannel who looked like it was the first time they’d ever left upstate, and, gosh, was it big in the big city! Often they were helped out by students in need of the most temporary of temporary jobs. This year, one of those students was my best friend, Boomer.
There was, to be sure, a learning curve for him once he started this employment. Too many viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas had led him to believe that it was the most wan and wayward of shrubs that was the most desirable one, because tending to it was much more in the Christmas spirit than bringing home a self-sufficient, virulent pine. He also thought Christmas trees could be replanted once Christmas was over. That was a hard conversation to have.
Luckily, what Boomer lacked in clarity he made up for in sincerity, so the stand he was working at, on Twenty-Second Street, had become word-of-mouth popular, with Boomer as the foremost tree elf. I think this recognition was enough to make him happy he’d forsaken boarding school in his senior year to be in Manhattan. He’d already helped me pick out trees for my mother’s and my father’s apartments. (My mother got the much nicer tree.) I was sure he’d love the assignment of picking out the best tree for Lily. And yet I was hesitant as I got closer. Not because of Boomer…but because of Sofia.
Along with Boomer’s jumping off board his boarding school, the new school year had brought a few surprises with it. Somewhat surprising was that my ex-girlfriend Sofia’s family had moved back to New York after swearing they’d never leave Barcelona again. Not at all surprising was the fact that while I was happy to see her, it was not in a my-ex-is-back-and-there’s-gonna-be-trouble way—we’d pretty much sorted that out the last time she’d visited. But it was SUPER SURPRISING when she started hanging out with Boomer…and hanging out with Boomer some more…and hanging out with him even more, so that before I could even wrap my head around the possibility, they were a thing. This was, in my mind, like taking the most expensive, finest cheese in the world and then melting it on a burger. I loved them both, in different ways, and seeing them together made my head hurt.
The last thing I wanted was to pop by Boomer’s workplace and find that Sofia was stopping by at the same time, so they could radiate their dating vibes throughout the greater metropolitan area. They were in their honeymoon period, and that made it awkward for those of us who’d left the honeymoon behind and had entered the part of the relationship where the moon waxes and wanes.
So it was with some relief that I found Boomer not with Sofia but with a family of seven, or eight, or nine—it was hard to tell, since the kids were running around so fast.
“This is the tree that was meant just for you,” he was telling the parents, as if he were some amazing tree whisperer and this tree had told him itself that their dining room was where it had always wanted to be.
“It’s so big,” the mom said. Probably imagining the pine-needle fallout all over her floor.
“It’s a bighearted tree, yes,” Boomer replied. “But that’s why you’re feeling such a connection to it.”
“It’s strange,” the dad said, “because I really am.”
The sale was completed. As he was swiping their credit card, Boomer spotted me and waved me over. I waited until the family was gone, mostly because I was afraid of stepping on one of the children.
“Man, you really got them pining,” I observed once I got to him.
Boomer looked confused. “Is that a Chris Pine reference? He is a handsome man, for sure, but I don’t think any of them looked like him.”
“Pine. Like tree.”
“Oh! Like Chris Pine playing a tree! That would be cool. He’s already so wooden! But not in a bad way!”
To Boomer, this thought process didn’t seem circuitous at all. Which was partly why I wondered how someone as direct as Sofia could be spending so much time with him.
“I need a tree for Lily. A really special tree.”
“You’re getting Lily a tree?”
“Yup. As a present.”
“I love that! Where are you getting it?”
“I was thinking here?”
“Oh yeah! Good idea!”
He started to look around, and as he did, he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like Oscar Oscar Oscar.
“Is Oscar one of your co-workers?” I asked.
“Do trees count as co-workers? I mean, they are with me all day long…and we have the most interesting conversations….”
“Oscar is one of the trees?”
“He’s the perfect tree.”
“Do all the trees have names?”
“Only the ones that share them with me. I mean, you can’t just ask. That would be invasive.”
He shoved aside at least a dozen trees to get to Oscar. And when he pulled Oscar out, he—it—looked like any other tree to me.
“This is it?” I asked.
“Wait for it, wait for it….”
Boomer lugged the tree away from its cohorts, toward the curb. The tree was easily a few feet taller than he was, but he carried it like it was no heavier than a magic wand. With a strange delicacy, he set it into a tree stand, and as soon as it was settled in, something happened—Oscar opened his arms and beckoned me under the streetlamp light.
Boomer was right. This was the tree.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Cool,” Boomer replied. “Do you want me to wrap it? Since it’s a gift?”
I assured him that a ribbon would suffice.
—
Catching a cab when you’re a teenage boy is hard enough. Catching a cab with a Christmas tree in tow is nigh impossible. So I ran some errands until Boomer’s shift was done, and together we wheeled Oscar over to Lily’s apartment in the East Village.
I hadn’t been there all that often in the past year. Lily said it was so her grandfather wouldn’t be bothered, but I thought it was more because I’d be adding one more element to the chaos. Her parents had been around more than they’d been in years—which should have helped her out immeasurably but instead seemed to have given her two more people to take care of.
It was Langston who opened the door, and the minute he saw me and Boomer with the tree, he said, “Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!” so loudly that I thought Lily had to be home and within hearing distance. But then he told me she and Grandpa were out at a checkup. His parents were out because it was a Saturday, and why would such social people be home on a Saturday? So it was just the three of us…and Oscar.
As we set him up on his perch in the living room, I tried not to notice how under the weather the apartment appeared, as if it had spent the last month or so coughing up dust and discolor. I knew the way this family worked, and I knew this meant Grandpa had been out of commission and Lily had been distracted. They’d always been the true guardians of the place.
Once Oscar was standing proudly, I reached into my backpack for the pièce de résistance that would, I hoped, not be resisted.
“What are you doing?” Langston asked as I looped things around Oscar’s branches.
“Are those tiny turkeys?” Boomer chimed in. “Is this going to be like the tree they had at Plymouth Rock?”
“They’re partridges,” I explained, holding up a piece of wood carved in the shape of the bird, with a big hole in the center. “Partridge napkin rings, specifically. There weren’t any partridge ornaments at that store whose name I can’t make myself utter.” (The store was called Christmas Memories, which was enough to make me want to drink Pop Rocks with Coke. I had to think of it as Christmas Mammaries in order to go inside.) “If we’re doing twelve days of Christmas, we’ve gotta do twelve days of Christmas. Lily can decorate the rest of the tree. But this is going to be a partridge tree. And on top, we’re going to have…a pear!”
I pulled said fruit out of my bag, expecting admiration. But the reaction went more pear-shaped.
; “You can’t put a pear at the top of a tree,” Langston said. “It will look dumb. And it will rot after a day or two.”
“But it’s a pear! In a partridge tree!” I argued.
“I get it,” Langston said. Meanwhile, Boomer guffawed. He hadn’t gotten it.
“Do you have a better idea?” I challenged.
Langston thought for a moment, and then said, “Yes.” He walked over to a small photograph hanging on the wall and took it down. “This.”
He showed me the picture. Even though it had to be over half a century old, I instantly recognized Grandpa.
“Is that your grandmother with him?”
“Yup. Love of his life. They were quite a pair.”
A pair on a partridge tree. Perfect.
It took us a few tries to get it placed—me and Langston trying out various branches, Boomer telling Oscar to stay still. But we got the pair perched near the crown of the tree as birds peeked out below.
Five minutes later, the front door opened and Lily and Grandpa returned. Even though I’d only known him a few months before he had his fall, it was still surprising to me to see how small Lily’s grandfather had become—like instead of going off to hospitals and rehabilitation centers, he’d really been put in the wash for way too long, coming back even more shrunk each time.
Still, there was the handshake. The minute he saw me, he extended his hand and asked, “How’s the life, Dash?” And when he shook, he shook hard.
Lily didn’t ask me what I was doing there, but the question was certainly in her tired eyes.
“How was the doctor?” Langston asked.
“Much better company than the undertaker!” Grandpa replied. Not the first time I’d heard him use this joke, which meant it was probably the two hundredth time Lily had endured it.
“Does the undertaker have bad breath?” Boomer barged into the hallway and asked.
“Boomer!” Lily said. Now she was definitely confused. “What are you doing here?”
It was Langston who cut in. “Much to my surprise, your Romeo here has brought us a rather early Christmas gift.”
“Here,” I said, taking Lily’s hand. “Close your eyes. Let me show you.”
Lily’s grip was not like her grandfather’s. Before, our hands used to pulse electric together. Now it was more like static. Pleasant, but light.
She closed her eyes, though. And when we got into the living room and I told her to open them, she did.
“Meet Oscar,” I said. “He’s your present for the first day of Christmas.”
“It’s a pair in a partridge tree!” Boomer yelled out.
Lily took it in. She looked surprised. Or maybe the stillness of her reaction was further tiredness. Then something kicked in, and she smiled.
“You really didn’t have to…,” she began.
“I wanted to!” I said quickly. “I really, really wanted to!”
“But where’s the pair?” Grandpa asked. Then he saw the photograph. His eyes welled up. “Oh. I see. There we are.”
Lily saw it, too, and if her eyes welled up, they welled inward. I honestly had no idea what was going on in her head. I shot a look at Langston, who was studying her just as hard, without getting any ready answers.
“Happy first day of Christmas,” I said.
She shook her head. “The first day of Christmas is Christmas,” she whispered.
“Not this year,” I said. “Not for us.”
Langston said it was time to retrieve the ornaments. Boomer volunteered at the same time Grandpa made a move to get some of the boxes. This snapped Lily back to attention—she shuffled him over to the couch in the living room, and said he could oversee them this year. I could tell Grandpa didn’t like this, but that he also knew it would hurt Lily’s feelings if he put up too much of a fight. So he sat down. For her.
As soon as the boxes were brought in, I knew it was time for me to leave. This was a family tradition, and if I stayed and pretended I was family, I would feel every ounce of the pretending, in the same way that I could feel the weight of Lily pretending to be happy, pretending to want to do what we were encouraging her to do. She would do this for Langston and her grandpa and her parents whenever they got back. If I stayed, she would even do it for me. But I wanted her to want to do it for herself. I wanted her to feel all that Christmas wonder she felt last year at this time. But that was going to take more than a perfect tree. It might just take a miracle.
Twelve days.
We had twelve days.
I’d spent my whole life avoiding Christmas. But not this year. No, this year what I wanted most this season was for Lily to be happy again.
Saturday, December 13th
I’m mad at global warming for all the obvious reasons, but mostly I’m mad at it for ruining Christmas. This time of year is supposed to be about teeth-chattering, cold weather that necessitates coats, scarves, and mittens. Outside, there should be see-your-breath air that offers the promise of sidewalks covered in snow, while inside, families drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire, huddled close together with their pets to keep warm. There is no better precursor to Christmas than a quality goose-bump chill. It’s what I count on to usher in the good cheer, happy songs, excessive cookie baking, favorite-people togetherness, and the all-important presents of the season. The days before Christmas are not supposed to be like this one was, a balmy seventy degrees, with holiday shoppers wearing shorts and drinking iced peppermint lattes (yuck), and tank top–wearing Frisbee players nearly giving concussions to dog walkers in Tompkins Square Park with their carefree spring-day bad aim. This year the cold couldn’t be bothered to bring in Christmas, so until it could, I wouldn’t bother getting too excited about the best time of the year.
There wasn’t enough cold outside, so instead I brought it inside and turned it on Dash, who didn’t deserve it.
“If you have to go, then go,” I said brusquely. Brusque. It was such a Dash word—obscure, unknowable, distant—that it felt strange I even knew it. Along with the other million obligations overwhelming me at the moment, there was SAT study time, which left an amaroidal taste in my mouth. (How could an SAT taker possibly be more prepared for university by knowing such a word? Right—not at all. Complete waste of word, complete waste of time, complete certainty I will still not achieve my parents’ hopes for my college admissions prospects by the addition of the word amaroidal to my vocabulary.)
“You don’t want me to stay, do you?” asked Dash, as if he was pleading for me not to demand his spending any additional time with my beleaguered grandpa and my brother, who at best tolerates my boyfriend and at worst is downright rude to him. I’d feel bad about Langston and Dash’s animosity except it seems to be an enjoyable sport between them. If Lily was the subject on Jeopardy!, the answer would be “She does not understand it at all,” and the question would be “What is the human male species?”
“I want you to do what you want to do,” I responded, but what I meant was: Stay, Dash. Please. This Christmas tree gift is so lovely and exactly what I didn’t know I needed—for the season, and from you. And even though I have a ton of other things I need to do right now, there’s nothing I want more than for you to decorate the tree with me. Or for you to sit on the sofa and watch me bedazzle it while you make snarky comments about pagan traditions misappropriated by Christianity. Just to have you near.
“Do you like the tree?” Dash asked, but he was already buttoning his peacoat, which was too heavy for such a warm day, and looking at his phone like there were text messages on it beckoning him to better places than at home with me.
“Why wouldn’t I?” I said, not willing to further profess my profuse thanks. I had only just started sorting through the decorations when Dash announced his intention to leave, and he did it at the exact moment that I opened the gift box from the Strand that Dash had given me last January 19, to celebrate author Patricia Highsmith’s birthday. Inside the box was a red-and-gold ornament with a sketch in black picturing Matt
Damon as the Talented Mr. Ripley. Who else but Dash would delight in a Christmas decoration displaying the face of a celebrated literary serial killer and give it to his girlfriend as a present? The present only made me adore Dash more. (The literary hero part, not the serial killer part.) In February, I had placed the gift box in the Christmas decorations storage box with a sigh of great hope—that Dash and I would still be together when it was time to put the ornament on the tree. And we were. But our relationship was ephemeral (finally, an SAT word that applied to my life). It didn’t feel real anymore. It felt more like an obligation that somehow had survived till now so we should at least see it through the holidays, because that’s where it started. Then we could stop pretending that what had initially felt so right and true now felt…still true, but definitely not right.
“Be good to Oscar,” said Boomer. He gave the tree a military salute.
“Who’s Oscar?” I asked.
“The tree!” Boomer said, like it was obvious and I had maybe offended Oscar by not knowing his name. “Come on, Dash, we don’t want to miss previews.”
“Where are you fellas going? How far’s the walk?” Grandpa asked them with a touch of desperation in his voice. Grandpa’s been mostly housebound since the heart attack and the fall. He doesn’t have much stamina for walking more than a block or two anymore, so he practically interrogates visitors about their outside activities. Grandpa’s not a guy used to having his wings clipped.
Really what Grandpa should have been asking Boomer and Dash was, How can you be so rude as to deliver this beautiful tree and then just leave before the tree—I mean, Oscar—is properly decorated? What kind of uncouth urchins are you kids nowadays?
“We’re seeing a movie that starts in twenty minutes,” said Dash. His face didn’t look remotely guilty, despite the fact that he hadn’t invited me.
“What movie?” I asked. If Dash was going to see the one movie I was dying to see without me, then that would be the last sign I needed that he and I really were not connecting anymore and maybe we needed an official break. I’d been counting the days till holiday vacation so I could see Corgi & Bess, and I’d probably see it at least five times in the theater if I could find the time. Helen Mirren as a centenarian Queen Elizabeth with a supposedly fantastic animatronic corgi at the side of her walker at all times until an unfortunate fireworks display causes the corgi to run off and frail old Bess and her walker have to find the corgi somewhere on the grounds of the enchanted Balmoral Castle, with countless adventures along the way for both queen and pup? Yes, please! Count me in, repeated viewings, IMAX and 3-D! I’d seen the trailer enough times to already know it was my favorite movie of the year, but I’d been holding out hope that Dash would give me a date-night first-time viewing of it as my Christmas present. Not just the movie—but the time with him.