My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  She moved to the piano at the far end of the room. Daphne got up onto the sofa, stretched out, and stared into the fire. Cynthia played. The music was slow and soothing, although Cynthia’s rendition of it was not particularly soothing, with all the clunkers she hit. But the music built and repeated and built some more, and when she had finished, Cynthia looked over to see that her mother had fallen asleep. She crossed the room, took up a quilt from her mother’s bedroom, and brought it into the living room. She bent over her mother’s sleeping figure and tucked the quilt around her so that it would not fall off. Daphne’s breath was deep and regular. Cynthia looked into her relaxed face. Then she turned to put the screen in front of the fireplace, and went up the stairs to her little bedroom in the attic.

  When Daphne heard the upstairs door open and close, she opened her eyes. She didn’t move. She lay there looking into the fire but seeing instead an encounter that had taken place between her and Hudson that afternoon.

  They had been at the college, in the outer office, on either side of Daphne’s desk, which held, in addition to the usual pile of files and papers, a little artificial evergreen tree that Daphne had decorated with candy canes and red-and-white-striped peppermints. It was almost five o’clock and everyone else had left earlier for the Christmas-carol celebration at the college chapel.

  Daphne and Hudson were exchanging Christmas gifts. They did this every year. At first the presents had been small, even silly, but with each passing year they became more serious.

  Daphne’s present was rather chiding and mischievous; she gave Hudson a book entitled Parallel Lives, a nonfiction book about five Victorian and rather sexless marriages.

  Hudson handed Daphne a small velvet box. Inside was a pair of small brilliant earrings: two rubies surrounded by diamonds.

  “Hudson!” Daphne said. “I can’t accept these!”

  “Please,” Hudson replied. “They will be beautiful on you. With your coloring.”

  “But, Hudson, they must have cost the earth. I really can’t accept such an expensive gift.”

  “They were my mother’s,” Hudson said.

  Daphne looked at him. “Oh, Hudson …” She would have embraced him, but they were separated by the desk.

  They were separated by the knowledge of Claire.

  In any case, Fred Van Lieu came along then, needing a ride because his car was in for repairs.

  “Merry Christmas,” Daphne and Hudson had said to each other. Hudson had left. Daphne had put the little box in her purse, where it was still. She cherished the present. She liked thinking of the two heart-red gems, gleaming valuably, secretly, in the darkness.

  She decided to sleep on the sofa tonight. The fire would keep her warm.

  7

  That night, after the holiday dinner at the Millers’, it was easy for Jack and Carey Ann to get Alexandra to go to bed. They simply surrounded her in her crib with the dolls and stuffed animals Cynthia had given her, until there was scarcely enough room for the little girl herself. Alexandra rolled luxuriously in her nest, sucking her thumb, looking around her at all the new treasures, the look on her face cherubic and blissful, the look that parents sigh to see.

  Jack put his arm around Carey Ann as they left their daughter’s room. He hugged her against him so that when they entered their bedroom, they naturally sank down on the bed together. They lay on top of the covers, on their sides, fully clothed, looking at each other.

  “Carey Ann,” Jack said. He was very much in love with his wife.

  “Wait a minute,” she replied. “Let me take this thing out.” She was wearing white wool slacks and a blue sweater, and had spent hours fixing her hair in an upswept style, fastened on one side with a large beaded sparkling comb. She couldn’t get her head comfortable on the pillow with the comb in, so she sat up, pulled the comb out, and her long blond hair slid down around her face and shoulders. “Now,” she said, and lay back down and smiled at Jack.

  “Did you have fun?” Jack asked.

  “I suppose,” Carey Ann said, pronouncing it “s’pose.” She arched her head back, thinking. “I like Cynthia. I like the way she dresses and walks and carries herself. She’s got style. She’s so slender and graceful. I just couldn’t believe it when she gave Lexi that box of toys.”

  “I don’t think Daphne was very happy about that,” Jack said.

  “I know. I could tell. The old cow. What a selfish old broad! Why shouldn’t Lexi have those toys? Cynthia certainly won’t be playing with them anymore, and Lexi will have a ball. See what I mean, Jack, about Daphne? She’s uptight, or coldhearted, or something. Not to want little Lexi to have those toys.”

  Jack was silent a moment. “I think those things have sentimental value for her,” he said. “You know, looking at those pictures in the album, Daphne didn’t look much different from how she does now. But look at the difference in Cynthia. It’s absolute. Daphne probably just wanted to keep those things around to remind her of the days when her daughter was little.”

  “Maybe,” Carey Ann said dubiously.

  Jack ran his hand lightly from his wife’s shoulder up along her neck to her face. “Angel face,” he said. He didn’t often say things like that because it was hard for him to, but right now he was very much in the grip of strong emotions that he could not define or even realize had infested him but that had been growing more powerful in him, about him, all evening. When he spoke, his voice was thick with love. “Let’s have another baby, Carey Ann.”

  Carey Ann’s blue eyes flew wide open. “What!” She jerked back from his hand as if it had the power to impregnate her right on the spot.

  “I said, let’s have another baby.” Jack grinned.

  “Are you seriously crazy?” Carey Ann was so troubled she sat up in bed and stuck some pillows behind her back and leaned against the headboard and crossed her legs tightly, one over the other.

  Jack sat up too. “No, I’m not crazy. Carey Ann, I thought you wanted lots of kids. You told me you wanted lots of kids.”

  “Well, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want lots anymore. Or at least not now.” Carey Ann kept her profile to him.

  “But why not? I don’t understand. I thought you … don’t you love Alexandra?”

  “Well, of course I love Alexandra. I adore Alexandra. She’s the meaning of my life, Jack, you know that. I just don’t want any more kids, not yet. Not now.”

  “Why not?” Jack brought his voice back down to a reasonable tone. He wanted to be a reasonable man even though he was totally baffled.

  “Because … oh, a million reasons.” Because of Jack’s pleasant voice, Carey Ann turned to look at him. She counted on her fingers. “First, I want to get a degree in early-childhood education. Now, I just can’t do that and have another baby too. I really want that degree, Jack. Second, I don’t think it would be fair to Lexi. All these changes, the move, the new house … well, it would be just too much to throw a new baby in on top of it all. Until we get all settled. Third, you know what a mess a new baby is, no one gets any sleep for a year, and you’ve got to think of your career, your papers you have to write, all that stuff you’re pressured to do. Why, you can barely keep up with it now. All your life you’re dying to write a novel and you’re always depressed because you can’t write that novel and you know you sure wouldn’t be able to do that with a new baby around, and you would be so miserable. And fourth … well, fourth, you know how I feel about my figure. I’m only now getting it back. I just can’t stand the thought of getting all blimpy again. Not for a while.”

  Jack stared at his wife as if she were something he had just pulled from a Cracker Jack box that he had to learn how to put together. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “if we had another baby, we could ask your parents to help us like they did last time. You know, we could have a housekeeper/babysitter sort of thing. Then you could still do your degree.”

  Now Carey Ann looked at him as if he had just come from a Cracker Jack box. “What are you talking about?” she s
aid, shaking her head in amazement. “You nearly have a hissy fit every time my parents give us anything. I can’t believe after all the speeches you’ve given me about not taking anything from my parents, about growing up and being independent and having some pride and all that stuff, I can’t believe you’re saying this! Besides, in Kansas City we had a bigger house, there was room for a live-in housekeeper. We don’t have room for one here.”

  “I could give up my study. We could make that into her bedroom.”

  “Then where would the new baby go? Jack, the house is too small. Where would you write?”

  “Then she wouldn’t have to be live-in. She could just come every day.”

  “And the baby would cry all night and you and I wouldn’t get any sleep, not to mention Lexi not getting any sleep. She’d be cranky all day, and you wouldn’t get your work done and I’d be too foggy-headed to even think of doing any work. Jack, what has gotten into you?”

  “What’s gotten into you?” Jack responded. “You’re the one who wanted to have a big family. Now you’re acting like I’m Charles Manson or someone crazy because I want another child.”

  Carey Ann’s chin jutted up and her lips clamped tight. She had a bad memory for names and events, Jack knew, and she was probably trying to remember just who in hell Charles Manson was, and she was angry that Jack had mentioned someone she didn’t know about. He should have said Jack the Ripper or Richard Nixon.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Jack,” Carey Ann said. She drew away from him, rose, went toward the bathroom, talking as she walked. “I guess I can understand how you’re feeling, a little, but I’m sorry. I’m just not ready for another child.” She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  Jack sat on the bed a moment, stunned. Then he got up and went to the door, pressing his nose nearly on the wood. “So that’s it?” he asked. “That’s it? Discussion over, the end, good-bye? Your word is law and you’re just going to walk away?”

  Carey Ann opened the door so fast it made Jack dizzy. She stood there holding up her slacks with her hands. “Jack, I had to go to the bathroom,” she said slowly, like someone teaching an idiot child the alphabet. “What has gotten into you?”

  “Well, I just don’t think it’s fair,” Jack said. “You make up your mind about something, and that’s it. You won’t even discuss it.”

  Carey Ann edged past him and went to the closet. She began to undress, hanging her clothes up neatly, slipping her nightgown on over her head. “I’ll discuss it,” she said flatly.

  “Oh, great. Thanks a lot,” Jack said. “You’ll discuss it, but your mind is totally made up. Right? You’ll ‘discuss’ it, but I’ll just be wasting my breath.”

  Carey Ann looked at Jack. She was wearing a pink flannel nightgown with a little bow at the neck and she looked about three years old. “That’s pretty much how I felt when we were ‘discussing’ moving back east,” she said. “Your mind was set about that and there was no way I could change it.”

  Jack scratched his head. He was trying to hold on to his temper. “Are you punishing me, then?” he asked. “I mean, since I made you come back east, is this your way of getting back at me?”

  “Oh, Jack!” Carey Ann said, exasperated. She yanked the covers on the bed and plopped down. “No, I am not trying to punish you.”

  “Well, I can’t exactly have a baby by myself,” Jack said. He glared at his wife, then went into the bathroom. While he brushed and flossed his teeth, words galloped through his head like horses in a race, Sarcastic vying with Righteous, edged out by Reasonable, with Romantic finally taking the lead. Carey Ann looked so pretty in her nightgown. He could talk with her about this another time.

  And he did. He talked with her about it for the next four days, right through Christmas Eve, Christmas Morning, and Christmas Day. Talked at her was more like it. No matter what he said or how he said it, Carey Ann just looked at him, a saint of patience, like a cow eyeing an irritating gnat. It was a strange Christmas. Jack had had a vision in his head of how it should be, and although he knew that vision was a collage of Charles Dickens at his most sentimental, memories of his Christmases as a little boy, and television commercials for a frozen turkey containing a pop-up plastic thermometer, still he had thought it not completely unrealistic. This vision involved a Christmas tree that touched the ceiling, Alexandra ecstatically (but silently) absorbed with her new toys on the floor next to the tree, Carey Ann bustling around in the kitchen cooking pumpkin pie, and himself seated by the fire with a good novel and a brandy, while snowflakes floated dreamily past the window. Reality did not live up to this vision. It was impossible, of course, in the first place, for them to have a tree that touched the ceiling—their living room had a cathedral ceiling and there were no twenty-foot trees available, or if there had been, at four dollars a foot they couldn’t have afforded one. Still, Jack had been dismayed to find that this year Carey Ann wanted a tree that stood on top of a table. A little short tree. A pathetic little twerp of a tree, the kind that one saw in movies about very old lonely unloved widowers in New York City apartments, the kind that got only three small ornaments, four wrinkled icicles, and no lights.

  It had been terrifically cold and windy the night the Hamiltons went out as a family to get the tree. First they had had dinner at Howard Johnson’s as a treat, then they had piled in the car and driven out to the country to the farm where the best trees were sold. Jack had wanted to come out earlier in the season to walk the fields where the rows of trees were planted, and choose their own tree and label it—even cut it themselves, that seemed like a romantic thing to do—but Carey Ann had vetoed that idea. She said she didn’t see anything romantic about watching Jack make a fool of himself with an ax, which he had never used before in his life, while she and Alexandra stood around freezing. Still, he hadn’t realized that she had her heart set on a short tree. Families didn’t have short trees!

  “It will just make things so much easier,” Carey Ann had said. She had Alexandra in her arms and was bouncing her a little. “That way, I can leave the room without worrying about ‘someone’ pulling the lights off and causing a fire or taking the ornaments down and trying to eat them.” Carey Ann was talking through her teeth in a tense monotone, as if that would keep Lexi from knowing whom they were talking about.

  “Carey Ann, Alexandra’s two and a half,” Jack said. “Last year she was younger!”

  Carey Ann rolled her eyes. “Last year we were all younger.”

  “I mean last year she was more of a baby, she got into things more. This year she minds. This year she won’t tear the tree apart.”

  “I really don’t want to be bothered with it,” Carey Ann replied.

  “Bothered!” Jack shouted. He realized that he’d raised his voice enough to cause several other families to look over at him. “Who is bothered by a Christmas tree?” he hissed at his wife.

  “You’re not home all day with her and a tree,” Carey Ann said. “I am. I have papers to do, things to do. I can’t be a watchdog. Besides, we’re leaving late on Christmas Day. A great big tree just isn’t necessary.”

  Jack stared at his wife, turned around, and walked away, down the row of cut and bundled trees that leaned against each other like a vast drunken forest. He walked until he was clear out of the Christmas-tree area and standing so far away from the farmers’-market shed that he was outside the circle of light and in the dark. It seemed even colder here. A dark shape huddled against a wire fence; a pile of greens, the crooked tops of trees that had been removed to shape the evergreens, and gnarled hacked-off stumps. This sight filled Jack with a terrible sadness. He stood, hands shoved down deep in his parka pocket, staring at those useless greens.

  “Jack.” Carey Ann spoke softly, right at his shoulder. “Honey, remember, we’ve talked this all out. I asked you if you wanted to go to Kansas City with me and you said you didn’t. You said you have so much work to do. You said you want to try to write a paper over the break. You said you didn’t want a b
ig Christmas. You said you didn’t want a lot of fuss. You said it would be just fine if I took Lexi with me for a while and left you alone in the house, with all that peace and quiet, and you could work. You said you wanted some serenity, remember? You don’t want a big tree cluttering up the house.”

  Slightly mollified, Jack said, “I don’t think a big tree would exactly clutter up the house.”

  “You’d be surprised. Right after Christmas, all the needles start falling off. You can sit right there and hear them, they sort of sift down with a little whispering noise, a little ‘ping,’ it’s just like a dripping faucet, it could drive a person crazy. And when you take a big tree out of the house, it sheds all its needles in a great big trail and they poke holes in the vacuum-cleaner bag so dust and stuff starts foaming out all over and you never get all the needles up—if you go barefoot, you get one stuck in your toe. Not to mention Lexi.”

  Jack stared at Carey Ann. This is really wonderful, he was thinking, this is really just charming. Christmas isn’t even here yet and already Carey Ann is complaining about cleaning up after it.

  Carey Ann stared back at Jack. As if she could read his mind, she said, “I don’t have the time this year to do a mammoth Christmas and clean-up. I’ll be starting courses for credit in January. There are some books I need to read before then. I’m beginning from so far behind everyone else. It can take days cleaning up after Christmas. And I won’t be here to do it this year. And I don’t think you have time either.”

  “Alexandra—” Jack began.

  “Alexandra will have enough excitement with two Christmases, one at our house and one in Kansas City. Not to mention the airplane trip and the fuss my parents and friends will make over her. Jack, you can’t have it both ways at once. You said you wanted a quiet Christmas so you could work.”

  So he had sighed and shrugged and put his arm on Carey Ann’s shoulder and gone to the front of the farm to find a short tree.