I bit off his nose.
“Why, Margaret, you can’t possibly mean that!” my grandmother shrieked from the other room, before bursting into peals of laughter. “Oh, but that’s just the most precious thing I have ever heard in all my life.”
And it was this, the sound of my grandmother’s laughter, that lifted me out of my love mist, my strange new hunger, that made me pull away from Santa and look at him again with fresh, clean eyes. And I saw that what I had done had gone alarmingly beyond kissing.
Carefully, silently, I stepped down from the chair and I carried it back to the dining room table.
Even from across the room I could see the carnage that was Santa’s face. I’d disfigured him, hideously. I felt sure that even Jesus, with his love for the maimed, would turn away. Santa now looked like his sleigh had crashed on a roof, his face slamming hard into the brick edge of a fireplace chimney.
I’d devastated the life-size Santa.
I began to tremble, this time not with anticipation, unnamed and unknowable excitement, but from dread. I was going to get in a lot of trouble for this.
But then, could I maybe hide what I had done?
And I had an idea.
Quietly, I padded back to Santa and I placed my arms on his legs. I turned him counterclockwise so that now, instead of standing beside the tree and looking out into the room, waving at everyone who passed, he was facing the tree and his raised arm made him appear as though he was going to smack the tree, knock it over. Or, I realized dreadfully, he looked like he was about to mess with my mother’s special decorations—her nut mouse, her corncob friends.
Still, it was better. And when one of them came into the room and made a move to turn him around, I could act like a baby and fuss, “But I like him better this way. He looks more real. Don’t turn him around. Leave him alone! Don’t look!”
Unfortunately, things never progressed that far.
Just a moment later, my mother and Carolyn strolled out of the kitchen and into the living room. I held my breath and prepared for them, the same way you would prepare for a cold wave that’s about to hit you at the beach.
“What on earth?” my grandmother gasped.
My mother was staring at my chest. “Augusten, what is that mess all over your shirt?”
I looked down and saw bits of fleshy wax, chewed white hairs, tiny shreds of lip all down the front of my shirt.
My mother lowered herself onto her knees and began to inspect my shirt, brushing the curious crumbs into her open hand and examining them.
My grandmother, I knew without being able to see, was standing before Santa. Her complete silence told me she had seen Santa’s face.
My face was hot and I knew it was bright red. Why wouldn’t Carolyn say anything? The mangled face had shocked her mute. It had been more awful than I imagined. I might have to go right to hell tonight.
And then finally, she did speak. “Margaret, put Augusten into the Cadillac. We’re going to have to drive to the hospital and get his stomach pumped.”
I absolutely detested having my arms and legs strapped to the table, but the nurse told me, “It’s the only way.”
The medical staff gathered around the gurney inserted a terrible, seemingly endless tube down my throat. My mother stood at the back of the room chewing on her fingernails. “But why? Why, Augusten?”
It wasn’t like I could answer her. At least not until they removed the thick plastic tube they had snaked into my mouth, down my throat, and into my stomach.
Horribly, I could see the waxy chewed contents of my stomach rising up through the tube and into some sort of pail. Bits of pink lip and fragments of Santa’s blue eyes, along with clumps of white beard were sucked out of me, as though modern medicine itself was trying desperately to reverse what I had done and save Christmas.
I was terrified, humiliated, in extreme physical discomfort, and confused. On top of this, the only way I could make the room vanish was to close my eyes. But every time I did, I saw the ghoulish, ruined face of Santa, staring back at me with his questioning, kind eyes. “Why did you do this to me? I got you the ID bracelet last year, the two-tone just like you wanted,” he seemed to be saying to me, though of course he no longer had a mouth.
I knew for a fact that I would never receive another Christmas present. And there wasn’t a child in the world that would want to sit on Santa’s lap now and stare up at his horribly maimed face. He would have to wear a leather face mask now and he would need a seeing-eye dog.
In the recovery room, I thought about all the items on my wish list: the Texas Instruments calculator, the saltwater aquarium with real sharks, the platform shoes. None of it would be mine.
For the rest of my life, I would be on Santa’s naughty list, right there at the very top. Mine was the one house he could mark off his list with black, permanent marker.
And Jesus, God’s only child, certainly he, too, was watching me from the sky, his eyes narrow with bewilderment, disgust.
I had displeased them both and would be punished.
I’d ruined not only Christmas, but any chance I ever had of getting into heaven. And this realization caused my nose to itch madly but I could not scratch it. Because my hands were still bound to the rails along either side of the hospital bed. I may have been lying flat on clean white sheets, but I was most certainly crucified.
And Two Eyes Made
Out of Coal
FOR AS LONG as I could remember my mother would buy an intricate, often handcrafted advent calendar and hang it on the refrigerator. It was she who introduced me to the concept of a calendar for the month of December, a countdown to Christmas. Where each date from 1 to 25 was printed on a little door you could open. And behind the door, a visual surprise—a little scene or charming sketch. I wanted nothing more than to sit on the floor with the thing and tear off all the doors at once so I could get immediately to Christmas.
I had, over the years, developed something more than a fondness for the paper calendar. Each Christmas when the calendar went up, I stopped living and started waiting. My mother surely must have regretted ever introducing me to the advent calendar, because now she could never take it away. It would be like getting your child hooked on heroin and then withholding their needle.
Only one row of doors remained closed on the advent calendar. For the last eighteen days, it had been the single focus of my life. My mother would not allow me to open a new door before eight o’clock in the evening. By seven each night, I was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator like a dog, staring up at the calendar and asking her every few minutes, “Is it almost eight o’clock?”
Always, there was a fleeting disappointment upon opening the door because the image revealed was never one I recognized. “What is that? What does some old man on a camel have to do with Christmas?”
My mother leaned over to inspect the image in question and then she explained. “Oh, look at that! What a beautiful image. See, now I believe these are actually woodblock prints behind the doors. But done with such fine, fine detail. I would love to be able to achieve a line like that,” she said, pointing to the hump on the camel’s back.
“But what is it?”
“Well, this is one of the Three Wise Men, I imagine. On his way to see Jesus. Or maybe he’s just riding around in the desert for some fresh air. Look at the way they captured the wind on the sand, it’s gorgeous. You know, I bought this calendar from Faces in Amherst. It’s German. I wish I’d picked up those napkin rings while I was there.”
By this point, I was no longer listening to her and was instead focused on the next night’s door. Surely, there was something better under that door.
The last week was always the worst. It was like an unbearable itch I could not reach. “You have waited patiently for three hundred and forty-five days and you only have one more week,” my mother would tell me.
But somehow, this one week seemed longer than all the others combined. So I was constantly seeking a distr
action, but one that was related to Christmas. My mother helped by offering to sit with me and string cranberries and popcorn together into long garlands for the tree. We each had a needle and thread as we sat before the television set with a large bowl of popcorn and a bag of fresh cranberries on the table between us.
But even this couldn’t go on for a week. “Oh my God, you need to put that mess down now and go wash your hands and put some Band-Aids on your fingers.”
“But I don’t want to stop. I can keep going. We need more.”
“Augusten, you are going to get blood all over the house. You have just pricked your fingers to death with that sewing needle. And see? Look at that; your entire rope of popcorn is bloody. You don’t want to hang bloody popcorn on the tree, do you?”
“Mine can go in the back!” I said, protectively clutching the needle and thread and bloody popcorn rope to my chest.
She shook her head, no. “Go wash your hands. And use some Bactine before you put on the Band-Aids.”
The stores had begun filling their shelves with Christmas decorations way back in October, so along with jack-o’-lanterns and paper turkeys, you could buy a can of spray snow.
By this point, I had burned through numerous cans, even though my father paid good money to have the real stuff removed from our driveway and front steps.
I had sprayed it on my bedroom windows, adding a string of wildly blinking lights. Tinsel, my favorite product, was draped from anything in my room that protruded even slightly: the needle arm of my record player, curtain rods, the switch to my desk lamp. My room was a festering, glittering shrine in honor of my favorite day of the year. But there were only so many times I could move my own small artificial Christmas tree from one side of the room to the other. At a certain point during that last painful week, I simply ran out of preholiday amusements.
So I would wander into the living room to at least be in the same room with the real tree. As it had for weeks, my scratchy copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas continued to moan away on the record player.
Because all the magazines that had arrived featured Christmas trees and stockings and other holiday paraphernalia on their covers, I would thumb through these, searching only for the colorful ads.
This was what I was doing the Saturday morning before Christmas, while my parents were downstairs sleeping. On Saturdays, it was rare for them to come upstairs before ten or even noon. That gave me a good five to seven hours alone.
Upstairs.
With complete, unsupervised access to a fully equipped kitchen.
The photograph on the cover of my mother’s Woman’s Day magazine appealed to me enormously. A gumdrop-bejeweled gingerbread house from a spun-sugar fantasy world.
The tall, peaked roof was swirled with mounds of frosting snow. Glittering, crystal-sugar icicles hung from the eaves. And the walls, smooth sheets of pure gingerbread had been pressed into raw sugar, giving them the appearance of stucco.
Hansel and Gretel had been fools to abandon such a house after they cooked the witch alive in her own oven. I absolutely would have claimed the house as my own and used the witch’s skull as a soup tureen. When I thought about it, Hansel and Gretel deserved to die for their lack of imagination and poor real estate choices. But that was just a stupid fantasy; a story for babies.
This gingerbread house was real. There was a recipe. GINGERBREAD DREAMS: BUILD THIS FOOLPROOF FANTASY HOUSE! directed the headline.
I would make it as a surprise for my mother. I would bake the gingerbread house and I wouldn’t get any blood on it and it would be the center of our Christmas table. Won’t she be surprised, I thought, when she comes upstairs in six hours and sees my glorious gingerbread house resting on a plate, two candy cane trees beside the front door!
The word foolproof spoke to me because my older brother often said, “I believe you may be a complete fool, quite nearly retarded. I’m going to have to find out what kind of pesticides were in use when our mother was carrying you.” If even a fool could make the house on the cover of this magazine, I should be able to make it, too. Then again, I knew that merely boiling water was not foolproof. Not when you got sidetracked by Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and forgot about the water, which then evaporated and the pot fused to the burner of the stove.
Had they actually tested this recipe on a fool? I wondered.
But this was no pot of boiling water. This was only gingerbread! And gumdrops! It was just plain silly to be worried about candy canes. No, the gingerbread house would look exactly like the one on the magazine cover. I knew it would.
I loved to experiment in the kitchen and if I ever used a recipe, it was only for inspiration. Recipes, I felt, were for the unimaginative. However, with this particular project I would do my best to follow the recipe to the letter. And where that wasn’t possible, I would at least stay true to its spirit.
Molasses, whatever the hell that was, sure wasn’t in our cupboard. But I knew it was a liquid because you were supposed to “gently pour” it into the other ingredients, so I used some of my mother’s cooking sherry—something she herself often incorporated into fancier recipes.
We had flour. Because the gingerbread house was gingerbread colored, I used the brown flour made out of wheat and not the other flour made out of white.
And wasn’t baking soda the same thing as baking powder? I thought so, so I used the latter.
As for the spices—cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, fennel—I skipped them all. Because right there next to the Tabasco sauce and peeking out from behind a bottle of my mother’s saccharin was a little jar of allspice. Just the name tasted like gingerbread. It was all the spices I needed plus the rest of them. It was all of them; allspice!
Briefly, I worried about the spectacular mess I had somehow created. I had managed to use my mother’s entire set of six white mixing bowls, her electric beater, a number of pans, each of which I had greased with corn oil, and assorted spatulas, knives, forks, a cheese grater, and my father’s hammer from the basement.
It was just a shame that I wouldn’t be able to help my mother wash all these dishes, but I couldn’t get all my Band-Aids wet so she would have to do them herself.
I smiled.
She always said that art was born from chaos. “The creative process can be very messy. You have to be comfortable with that.”
I was comfortable.
I poured the thick, gluey batter onto trays and baked it stiff. Prying the gingerbread, which was nearly black, from the cookie sheets, I set about to assemble my Gingerbread Dreams Fantasy House.
Gloomily, I came to accept the fact that it was a structural impossibility to create a steep, peaked roof, like in the picture. The gingerbread kept breaking. The instant coffee I had added for color must have made it brittle.
So I gave the building a flat roof—like the modern house down the street that my mother often admired—and then spent an hour applying white frosting from a can for snow. Which looked nothing like mounds of snow, but like piles of insulation left behind by a work crew that had gone on strike. It looked, actually, just like the house even farther down the street; the one built in the center of a dirt field. With plastic stapled to the outside in place of siding and asphalt nailed here and there to patch holes. My mother hated that house. “It ruins the entire damn street.”
I had made that house, in black gingerbread. If only I had two miniature flat tires and an upside-down swing set to place in front.
I cut out more windows. Two rows of them. Immediately, this looked wrong. It looked nonresidential.
The deeper into the project I tumbled, the more dire the results. The colorful gumdrops I’d attached randomly to the front façade didn’t look cheerful, they looked like what they were: an easy, colorful ploy to manipulate the eye and distract it from the wanton ugliness right before it. The more I did to try and decorate my way out of the monstrosity I had built, the worse it looked.
By not even the most elastic stretch of the imagination was this
a gingerbread house.
Four walls, a flat ceiling, rows of windows, four stories high: I had built a gingerbread public housing tenement, a little gingerbread slum.
And I could populate my small-scale confectionary representation of urban blight with the deformed gingerbread men that I had baked alongside the cake. Men with misshapen arms and legs, heads that had expanded into great amoebalike structures. I had baked an entire population of pitiful, armless and legless subjects, each with a physical deformity worthy of the most corrupt circus.
I didn’t even bother to frost my gingerbread misfits. Why shame them with frivolous frosting hats and raisin eyes? Let them be plain and blind. I could give them that much dignity.
I would think of them as a large family who had, unfortunately, farmed too near a leaking nuclear power plant. And now they only wanted to live the remainder of their sad lives in the solitude of the cookie jar and not displayed on a platter near my public housing unit.
It was almost like I had baked a scene from the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
My mother made a bold and insincere fuss. “Oh, it’s just precious,” she said. Precious being the word southern women have always used to describe the indescribable, the unsavory. It’s also what my grandmother had said after peering at the harelip on the baby of a friend’s daughter. Precious meant So positively hideous, I could produce vomit this instant and without the aid of my index finger.
She was reduced to bland compliments. “It’s so original. I like it very much more than the picture in the magazine.”
When I asked her, “But doesn’t it look like one of the slums on the news? Like something out of Springfield?” she replied, “No, honey, not at all.” But I could see in her eyes the distinct flicker of recognition and then agreement. Her eyes said, Exactly!
I knew that what I had constructed was an insult to the picture in the magazine, to the entire magazine itself and to baking in general. If the people at Woman’s Day ever saw my gingerbread horror they would cancel my mother’s subscription.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 3