This Christmas

by Jane Green

  I raced ahead of Isaac and was halfway down the stairs before I realized that something really seemed off. When I swung into the dining room, everyone looked up from various poses of reaching out for slices of pizza from the boxes that were strewn across the dining room table.

  I froze. Pizza?

  The others seemed frozen, too. They were staring at my chest.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I decided we should go more casual this year,” Mom said, in almost a singsong. “Come have a slice.”

  I was still having a hard time taking it all in. I don’t think I had ever seen my parents order pizza. Ever. But there they all were, my assorted loved ones, balancing giant wedges in their hands, looking ridiculously pleased with themselves. Jason had a pepperoni slice that was about to spill a waterfall of cheese onto the tablecloth. Ted was leaning back glassy-eyed, chewing a crust. Vlad had a pile, one of each kind, on his plate. It was hard to tell if he intended to eat them one by one or cut into the pile as if it were a triangular layer cake.

  Jason laughed. “Oh—I forgot about the sweaters!”

  No kidding. He was wearing a plain navy blue sweater—no googly-eyed Santa in sight—over a red plaid shirt.

  Isaac, behind me, put his hand on my elbow and steered me to a chair. I have to say, I needed the help. I felt like an idiot.

  The dining room was set up buffet style, and Mom passed us plates. At least we were using the gold-rimmed Havilland china we always brought out for nice holiday meals. I flopped a piece of pepperoni on it and bit back a sigh. “Pizza on Havilland. I guess I should be glad tradition hasn’t been completely thrown out the window in this family.”

  “Here,” Isaac said, reaching for a bottle of red wine, “let’s have some traditional holiday booze.”

  As I was pouring a few glugs into my wineglass, Ted shot up from the table so quickly he nearly tore the tablecloth off with him. He ran down the hall, then slammed his door shut, leaving us all staring bug-eyed at each other. A few moments later, his voice carried through the shut door and down the hall.

  “Damn it, Melinda!” he hollered. “Are you just going to let tradition be thrown out the window?”

  I drew back guiltily, since I seemed to have set him off.

  “What do you mean, calm down?” he yelled, as we all pretended not to listen. “You’re the one who ran off half-cocked!”

  The man definitely needed a phone coach.

  “Don’t you hang up on me. Don’t you—”

  There was a short silence.

  “Damn it!”

  I guess Melinda hung up.

  The atmosphere in the dining room was tense as we all waited for Ted to come out again. He didn’t. He just started muttering to himself and throwing small objects around his room.

  “Well!” Mom said after a few moments. She took a long sip of wine. “I was going to wait for Ted to make my little speech, but I think maybe I should just go ahead, don’t you, Laird?”

  Dad sighed. “If you must.”

  I looked over at Jason and smiled. This was always priceless. Every year my mom made a little speech at dinner at how happy she was to have all her family around her. It was the one time of year my family came close to vocalizing love for each other.

  “I just wanted to let you all know that having you here means more than ever before.”

  Maddie tapped on her wineglass with her fork, like an attendee at a Lion’s Club meeting. “Here, here!”

  I frowned. Why would it mean more than ever? “Is everything okay?” I asked Mom.

  “Everything’s just terrific,” Mom said, in a tone of voice that made my hair stand on end. It was a tone that had an implied but built into it.

  My heart began to pound double-time. For some reason, through all of this I had been looking at her failing to get the house ready as just forgetfulness, or laziness. As if she could have forgotten Christmas! Now all sorts of terrible scenarios started parading through my head, supplying possible answers for that implied but. But she has cancer. But she’s checking herself into alcohol rehab. But she’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder…

  I cut a worried glance at Isaac. He looked startled, too.

  “The thing is,” Mom went on, “next year I probably won’t be here.”

  Maddie gasped.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned aloud. It was cancer. And here I had been running around for two days whining about the fake Christmas tree, and the lack of food in the fridge. And walnut people, for heaven’s sake.

  No wonder she had given me a tongue-lashing for taking her for granted, and for selfishly worrying about trivialities! Anguish shuddered through me. “Mom, why didn’t you tell us?”

  Mom frowned at me. “Well…for one thing, I thought it was personal and we shouldn’t drag you into it.”

  Personal, I could understand. But not drag us into it? “But—”

  “Also, I just signed the lease two weeks ago.”

  “But—” My mouth snapped closed. Lease?

  “I’m moving into my own apartment after the new year,” she announced.

  I had to hand it to Mom—she had managed to come up with a pin-drop moment this family hadn’t seen since my brother had announced he’d wrecked my dad’s car back in 1989.

  Maddie’s face, I’m pretty sure, mirrored my own at that moment. She was wide-eyed, blinking repeatedly, and openmouthed. Flabbergasted pretty much sums it up.

  “An apartment!” she exclaimed. “What are you going to do with one of those?”

  My mouth twisted. “I imagine she’s going to live it in it.”

  “But why? She lives here!”

  “Um, Maddie…”

  Her eyes flashed at me. “Don’t sit there pretending you’re not upset, Holly. I know you’re upset, so don’t act like you can detach yourself from this one.”

  “What do you mean, detach?” I shot back.

  “Like it’s just beneath worrying about. That’s what you always do during a family crisis, isn’t it?”

  My head was spinning. “Why are you turning this into a referendum on me?”

  “Oh, never mind,” Maddie said, flopping against the back of her chair. “You so don’t get it. You never do.”

  I swung my gaze back to my mom. “What are you moving out for? Are you and Dad…splitting up?”

  I glanced over at him, but he was still leaning back impassively, staring at his pizza as if he would simply rather not be having this conversation. Mom chuckled nervously. “Well, I suppose you could say that it’s something like that. It’s completely amicable, isn’t it, Laird?”

  “Don’t drag me into this,” he said, picking at his pizza crust.

  “Dad, she’s leaving. How much more dragged into something can you be?”

  He lifted his hands. “Her decision. Me, I’m staying here. All my books are here. My files. Everything.”

  Naturally, when my parents split up, they couldn’t even do it the normal way, with a lot of screaming and broken crockery. Or maybe that was just the part we had missed. Maybe we were all actors who had bumbled onto the set of the wrong play during the third act.

  And now only Maddie seemed to be behaving as was expected of her in the movie-of-the-week sense. Tears stood in her eyes, her cheeks were mottled red, and she was trembling. “How come you didn’t tell me any of this?” she railed at Mom. “I always know everything!”

  “Are you two divorcing?” I asked, speaking the dread word. “I mean, have you seen a lawyer?”

  “It’s like professors taking a sabbatical,” my dad explained to us. “Your mom needs a sabbatical.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was in denial, or if he really believed this. Or course, maybe it was true.

  But how many couples took “sabbaticals” and then wound up together again?

  Maddie snatched her napkin out of her lap and blew her nose loudly.

  Mom shook her head. “Right now I just want some privacy. I’m going back to school in January…�
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  “But you said this was your last Christmas here,” I pointed out.

  A high-pitched squeak came from across the table—my sister, dramatically holding back a wail of despair. I tried not to look over at her. She just wants attention, I thought peevishly.

  But of course I couldn’t help myself. I had to look. And when I looked, I was appalled. There was Maddie, the twenty-six-year-old victim of a newly broken home, mewling pitifully. And there was my boyfriend’s hand rubbing her shoulder. Comforting her.

  Vlad, who I had forgotten about, cleared his throat and mumbled something in Russian.

  “Pass him a slice of Italian sausage, Holly,” Maddie translated, with a pathetic sniffle. “You’re the closest.”

  I did as told.

  “Thank you very much,” Vlad said.

  For the next few moments the only sound in the room was that of Vlad chewing his slice. (He had a slight jaw pop, I noticed.) Except, of course, I could imagine the sound of Jason’s hand, which still hadn’t moved from Maddie’s shoulder. If the pressing of flesh against two layers of cashmere twinset could make a sound, it was ringing in my ears right now.

  Maddie jumped up. “Excuse me!” Her voice was a tremolo of pain. “I need to be by myself for a moment.”

  She cupped her hands around her face, almost as if she had a nosebleed, and swept out of the room.

  When Jason all but leapt out of his chair to go chasing after her, I picked a greasy piece of pepperoni off the congealing cheese on my plate and popped it into my mouth. It tasted like salty leather.

  “Well!” With her big revelation out of the way, Mom was her old Florence Henderson self again. “Maybe I should go see what we’ve got for dessert. I forgot to fix anything.”

  “I brought a cake,” I said dully.

  “Oh, terrific!” she said, getting up. “That’ll hit the spot.”

  I hated to tell her that no one seemed much interested. No one except my dad, who suddenly perked up. “Do we have any of that peppermint ice cream to go with it?” he yelled after her retreated back. He looked over at me. “There’s this really good peppermint stick ice cream—the old-fashioned kind that’s vanilla with little chunks of red and green peppermint candy in it—but you can only get it during the holidays.”

  “I thought you couldn’t eat too much fat.” He already chowed down two slices.

  He shrugged. “A little bowl of ice cream, what harm can that do? They only have it during the holidays.”

  When Mom left him, his cholesterol was going to shoot through the ceiling.

  “There was a day when peppermint stick ice cream was de rigueur,” Dad said, leaning forward, his brow furrowed as if he were going to lecture us on the Peloponnesian War. “When I was a boy, it was one of those ubiquitous flavors, like vanilla, and strawberry. But now everything has chocolate,” he said, his nose wrinkling in distaste, as if chocolate were some kind of newfangled thing that had come along with hip hop and the Internet.

  Isaac and I nodded numbly. Even Vlad was nodding—confirming my hunch that wheezy geezer-speak knew no borders.

  Dad tossed his head back. “Is there any of that peppermint stick ice cream?” he bellowed at my mother.

  His reply was the sound of a clattering pan.

  “I’d better go myself,” Dad grumbled. “She can never find anything.”

  Isaac and I swiveled toward each other. For a moment, neither of us said a word, but it was comforting just to look into the dark, understanding pools of his eyes. I was so glad he was here.

  He poured some wine into my glass. I drank it down in one gulp.

  “How are things at your house?” I asked.

  “Fine. My little brother’s going on a ski trip with his girlfriend’s family tomorrow. I promised to fill in for him at work at the Valu-Rite drugstore.”

  That sounded weird, but I really didn’t give it much thought. My mind was still trying to wrap around my parents’ dilemma, and the fact that my boyfriend was now providing TLC for my sister. While her boyfriend, or whatever he was, was sitting here without a clue.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t try beating Jason to the punch in comforting Maddie,” I told Isaac.

  He cleared his throat. “Jason was quick on the draw.”

  “He was Annie Oakley.” I picked at the tablecloth. After witnessing my parents’ implosion, I supposed I shouldn’t whine about my faltering relationship. And I was also better off than Ted…which, at that moment, seemed like setting the bar awfully low.

  I shook my head. “This is just so out of the blue. My parents have argued occasionally, but it never meant anything.”

  “Maybe it just never meant anything to you.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “But I can’t believe that they can just split up this way. There has to be a catalyst. And what is this apartment she’s talking about?”

  Isaac looked at me. “Maybe you should ask your mom, not me.”

  “You’re right.” I got up. Then I looked back at him. “Have some more pizza. I’ll be right back.”

  In the kitchen, Mom had stacked dessert plates and was cutting pound cake.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  She waved a hand. “Oh, he trudged off in the direction of his office, grumbling about peppermint ice cream.”

  I guessed we were out.

  “You want some cake?” She bit her lip. “Maybe I should just let people cut their own…except this cake is like a rock! I don’t know what bakery you used, but I wouldn’t go back there again.”

  I tried to take comfort in the fact that my cake at least looked like a professional failure. “I don’t know if you realize this, but the party has, er, dispersed.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really? Did Isaac go home already?”

  “No, but…well, Mom, you sort of dropped a bombshell in there.”

  She looked as if she couldn’t quite comprehend. “I just thought you all should know. Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”

  “But, Mom, you told us, but not in a way that we could understand. What’s going on? Did you and Dad fight? Is he cheating on you?”

  She laughed. “Holly, really.”

  “Well? Would that be so odd?”

  “Yes. Your father’s been teaching at a college for thirty-two years, at a place just filled with randy academics, and I’ve never known him to succumb to temptation. Not once. And don’t think there hasn’t been any. But that’s just not the way he is.”

  “Well, then, are you having an affair?”

  “No!”

  “But you’ve just rented an apartment.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well why should you? Why not just stay here? Don’t you care about Dad anymore? How can you just leave like this and risk ending up your life all alone?”

  She tilted a frustrated glance at me. “I hope I’m not at the end yet—I might still have a few non-senile years left, you know.”

  “Well, of course, but—”

  “And I would think that you would be the last person to lecture me about being alone. You’ve always lived alone, for yourself.”

  But not by choice! I wanted to screech at her. “Where is this apartment?”

  She seemed more comfortable with concrete facts. “It’s a little fourplex not far from here, near Shirlington, on Twenty-fifth Street South. A one bedroom on the first floor. It’s adorable—though a little on the small side. You’d feel right at home there.”

  Why, if she was moving, wouldn’t she be going somewhere farther away? “Do you know someone else in the building?”

  She tilted a glance at me. “No. It’s just a place I had…well, seen…a few times. And then a one bedroom came open.”

  Uh-huh. I was beginning to catch on. Love nest. Though I shuddered to think of the term in context of my mom, I couldn’t make sense of the situation any other way. Poor Dad! His life was going to be shot to pieces…and why? I wondered whom my mom was seeing. Or what kind of place this was she w
as moving into. I imagined some swingin’ singles scene from the seventies. In the real seventies, of course, my parents had been the most stuffed-shirted baby boomers in existence.

  Could it be that this was Mom’s way of compensating for all she had missed out on?

  “I think I’ll go hunt down some peppermint ice cream for Dad,” I announced.

  “Right now?” Mom asked, startled.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “Won’t you have some cake first?”

  “Thanks.” I grabbed two hunks and spun back toward the dining room. “C’mon,” I told Isaac, as I sped by him. He was still at the dining room table, watching Vlad eat what had to be his tenth slice. I gave the cake to Vlad, who thanked me very much.

  Isaac hopped up. “Where are we going?”

  “We’ve got a mission.”

  We passed through the living room, where Maddie had gotten out her old student cello and was accompanying Jason on piano to “O Holy Night.” I guess music therapy was preferable to touch therapy.

  Outside, the snow was coming down hard. I waited for Isaac to make the expected snide comment, but instead he observed, “Jason plays piano really well.”

  “I didn’t even know he played at all,” I said. For some reason, that fact was too depressing for words. What I didn’t know about Jason could apparently fill a book. “We’re taking your car, if you don’t mind.”

  He stopped next to his parents’ old Pontiac. “Where are we going?”

  “Twenty-fifth Street South, near Shirlington. I just want to have a look at this place.”

  “What place?”

  “Mom’s apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” I wasn’t sure I could explain. “It’s just something I have to do, okay?”

  His lips twisted as he measured humoring me against the risks of driving his parents’ car several miles through ice and snow. “Okay.”

  I slid in next to him. We didn’t say much on the way there. We were both adjusting to the snow smacking against the windshield in front of us. On Twenty-fifth he turned and we began to crawl slowly down the street, looking at street numbers.

  I finally spied Mom’s place. “Stop!”

  He braked, and we skidded halfway into someone’s drive.