My mother did her fair share of crying, too, in part out of sheer sympathy for the rest of us and in part because my stepfather’s four children from his first marriage arrived every year on Christmas Day. Coincidentally, they lived in California not far from my father, although they didn’t know him, a fact that all of the children found puzzling. Every year my stepsiblings (a boy and a girl slightly older than me, a girl and a boy slightly younger) spent Christmas on a plane so as to split the day between their parents. When they got to the house they always seemed happy at first, diving into their presents with real energy and interest, but then, one by one, they’d start to realize it was Christmas and their mother was on the other side of the country alone. That was the point at which they put their new baseball mitts and board games aside and began their own weeping. I would move into my sister’s room, where I would sleep with my stepsisters, Tina and Angie, while my stepbrothers, Mikey and Billy, moved into my room. My sister, Heather, would move into the walk-in linen closet, where she’d sleep on a pile of towels until everyone went home again.
As bad as this situation was, there was one year very early on when we tried it another way, and the other way was worse. My stepfather surprised us all by taking us to California. My mother and sister and I thought we were taking him to the airport to fly out to visit his children, but when we unloaded the luggage from the trunk I noticed that the corner of my favorite quilted bathrobe, the white one with the little rosebuds embroidered on it, was hanging out of one of his suitcases. Why, I wanted to know, a tremor of hysteria creeping into my voice, why was my step-father taking my bathrobe to California? To give it to one of his daughters for Christmas? It was then he confessed that we were all going together, as a family.
Except, of course, there had to be a drop-off. The children had to change hands, and that was tricky because the stepfather didn’t want to see the father, who most certainly didn’t want to see the stepfather with the mother. It was finally decided that my sister and I would be left with my stepfather’s parents, the originators of Bad Christmas, while my mother and stepfather went safely away. We spent a stupendously miserable afternoon with these people, who were packing for their own Christmas Carribean holiday. They were noticeably less than pleased to have temporarily inherited the two little girls from the second marriage of their son for whom they never bought a birthday present. After our father got off of work, he came to the bottom of their steep driveway and we were sent down the hill to him, lugging our suitcases. That night we discovered that along with our bathrobes, our stepfather had packed the entire contents of our sock and underwear drawers. Nothing else.
After that, we stayed in Tennessee and did things the old-fashioned way. We had moved to a shockingly modern house built in the side of a hill far away in the country. The house was so poorly assembled that often large patches of mushrooms sprang up unexpectedly in the shag carpet of my sister’s bedroom in the summer, forcing her to move back into the linen closet. In the winter, all the little mice in the fields walked in beneath the uneven wallboard and settled into sofa cushions for their long winter’s nap. Our first Christmas in the country, my mother and stepfather thought we should turn our backs on commercialism and make all of our Christmas presents. While my mother sewed comforters and my sister and I knit slippers and pot holders, my stepfather was more ambitious. He got himself some wax and, using a set of surgical tools (he was a surgeon, so they were easy to come by), he made a group of tiny initials for the girls’ earrings: an Hand a P for my sister, Heather, a T and a G for Tina, an Aand a G for Angie. For the boys, he shaped wax rings, and for me, who never had my ears pierced, he made a single large A that could hang from a chain. After he had the wax cast into molds, he sifted out all the bits and pieces of gold he could find in the Box of Important Things he kept on his dresser—some old fillings that had been pulled from his teeth, the wedding ring from his first marriage, class rings from high school and college—and had them all melted together. Afterward, we wore these amalgamations of my stepfather’s personal history from necks and fingers and ears.
In the spirit of keeping things homemade, and because my mother hadn’t had room in the car for Christmas ornaments when we drove away from California, the tree was decorated in strands of popcorn and cranberries that took us a week to string. We baked hooks into sugar cookies cut into the shape of stars and then frosted them yellow. We chose candy canes over foil tinsel, and when it was done we stepped back and breathed in our Little House on the Prairie triumph. As did the mice. By the next morning the lower branches were stripped of snacks, and the day after that the tree was clean up to knee level. I dreamed of star-shaped cookies scampering across the living room as if propelled along on their own tiny feet. They rounded the corner into the laundry room and disappeared under the dryer. Mouse H.Q. The mice shimmied up the trunk and took away the popcorn and the cranberries piece by piece, and though they could not lift the candy canes from their branches, they could stand on their back legs and nibble the lower ones until their collective mouse breath was pepperminty fresh. In the end, we stripped off what they’d left behind, the candy canes and bare strings and gnawed wire hooks, and had a naked tree that Christmas. We all thought it looked very natural.
The next year we employed our learning curve: scratch the homemade gifts (we were out of gold anyway), build a better mousetrap. This year there were boxes of rat poison nestled among the shiny presents, enabling us to keep our little prairie Christmas tree. We hung our cookies with impunity, and everything was pretty again. What nobody counted on was that the mice, who had come in for the winter to get warm, didn’t much feel like going back outside to die in the snow. Instead, they crawled into the walls of the loamy house and breathed in their last breath of Christmas. The stench of death was so overpowering that we had to wrap up in blankets and leave the doors open for air. It was then that the aunts and uncles and cousins of the dead mice came in and ate the cookies.
Though the verses were different, the chorus of the song never changed: our father was far away, our stepfather had always lost out to the Christ child for birthday recognition, the unhappy stepsiblings appeared like clockwork and forced my sister into the closet. My mother, ever hopeful that what was bad could be made better, decided to strike Christmas from the month of December once and for all. The year before, she had tried moving my stepfather’s birthday to June 25, throwing a summertime barbecue where friends sang the Happy Birthday song and brought presents, but he didn’t fall for it. It wasn’t his birthday, and therefore the good wishes were hollow. Christmas, then, should be the holiday to get the boot. For one year, December 25 would be a day for my stepfather alone. There would not be the slightest mention of Santa or Jesus. There would be no sweet potatoes, no baked ham studded with pineapple and cloves. It was going to be one whole round-the-clock birthday, with birthday hats and birthday wrapping paper only and homemade chocolate birthday cake. An entire lifetime of wrongs would finally be set right! Actually, I remember this as one of the better Christmases of my childhood because for once we simply didn’t try. My mother said it was really much more logical to celebrate the Feast of the Magi, a holiday tailor made for gift exchange and conveniently located on January6. Among the many unforeseen benefits to the celebration of the Epiphany was the fact that a Christmas tree (known that year as the “Magi tree”) could be picked up for free at any grocery store or Boy Scout tree-selling kiosk after the twenty-fifth and that all presents could be purchased with after-Christmas discounts. When my father called tearfully to wish us a Merry Christmas that year, we explained to him that the deal was off. We were celebrating the stepfather’s birthday.
“What about the Christmas presents I sent?” my father asked.
“We’re saving them for the Feast of the Magi,” my sister said.
My father explained to us that what he had sent were Christmas presents, not Magi presents, and that we were to go upstairs to our rooms and open them immediately.
But
was that the right thing to do, seeing as how this year was only and completely the stepfather’s birthday?
“Now,” my father said.
The Magi angle didn’t seem to stick, and by the next year we were back to business as usual. Even though I was only eleven at the time, I had long since reached the point where Christmas made me insanely nervous. One night a few days before Christmas I woke up in such a sweaty state of panic I could not go back to sleep. By the soft glow of the plug-in night-light in its baseboard socket, I decided it might make me feel better if I could unwrap a single present that my father had sent to me and then wrap it back up again. The gifts were in my bedroom, so it wasn’t much of a problem. If a package is disassembled slowly and reassembled precisely, who ever knows the difference? I took my time. I carefully slid off the ribbon and peeled back the tape. I was surprised to find that this small act of defiance made me feel calmer immediately. Now there was something I didn’t have to wonder about, to worry about: my father had gotten me a sweater and a matching skirt. I didn’t like them, but I found it comforting to know in advance that I didn’t like them. The next night I opened the other two presents he’d sent: a stuffed Siamese cat and the game of Life, both of which were much better choices. I didn’t care what I was getting for Christmas, but somehow knowing in advance made me feel I had a secret life, one in which I could watch the pageant of Christmas with critical detachment. I slipped back into bed and felt happy.
But the peace never seemed to last. The next night I was up again. I felt the encroaching holiday circle my throat like a cord of tiny blinking lights pulled tight. I had to go downstairs. I had to get under the tree.
This was no small task. While mice could roam the house freely (we never used poison again), the human beings were more or less electronically confined to their rooms. We had a complex security system that included weight-sensitive pads secreted in different locations underneath the wall-to-wall carpeting. The only Off switch was hidden behind my stepfather’s night table. To get downstairs, I had to cling to the banister that overlooked the sunken living room. As long as I could feel the bite of the carpet tacks on the balls of my feet, I knew I was off the alarm pad. Inching along step by step, I took about thirty minutes to make it down the hall and then down the stairs. By then my nerves were in such bad shape that I had to unwrap and rewrap several presents, presents that weren’t even mine, before I felt calm enough to try to make it back to my room again. The second night, when I was halfway down the hall, I remembered a thoroughly rotten little boy, the son of my stepfather’s friends, who had taught all six of the children how to squeeze between two banister rails and jump down onto the sofa twenty feet below. His family had been to see us the summer before, when my stepsiblings were visiting, and at one unfortunate point, all of the children were left alone together in the house. One by one he shoved us through the railings, except for my oldest stepbrother, Mikey, who was too big and so had to go over the top.
On that night before Christmas there was plenty of moonlight with which to locate the couch, and saying a prayer for the souls of any mice who might have been sleeping in the cushions, I flung myself into the darkness to speed up the process of maniacal unwrapping. If I had missed by a foot or so and hit the coffee table instead, leaving my family to find my broken body on the living room floor in the morning, they would have just assumed I’d had enough of Christmas. Instead, I survived the jump year after year, and everyone always wondered why I was so hard to surprise. I’d hold up a box on Christmas morning, close my eyes, and give the thing a shake. “Hat and gloves,” I’d say, and everyone would marvel at the way I always seemed to know exactly what was coming up next, even though technically such knowledge should have been impossible.
THE ACCIDENTAL SANTA
Joni Rodgers
I had stopped believing in Santa Claus long before his powder-blue Buick Skylark ripped through a busy intersection in Allentown, Pennsylvania, clipped the back of a pickup truck, bolted over the curb, and slammed into the corner of an abandoned gas station.
The gray day was filled with stinging, sleetish precipitation. Too cold for rain, too ill-natured for snow. I’d pulled into the empty parking lot to salvage a few of the carefully decorated Christmas cookies my daughter had just dumped out of a foil gift box and onto the backseat of the car as we rushed, late as usual, to her preschool Christmas pageant.
“Oh, Jerusha! God bless America.” I was better at biting back my cuss words back then.
“I want a cookie,” she sobbed.
“We fixed them up all pretty for the bake sale. Now look. Who’ll want these?”
“I will!” My girl. Always willing to sacrifice for the greater good. And so quick on the uptake, it made me laugh out loud.
That’s when the Skylark and pickup truck connected with a pop on the street in front of us. That frozen puff of laughter was still hanging in the air. The old Buick hit the wall eighteen or twenty feet away. I felt the shock wave, the noise of it. Then that altered-time sense in which images (crumpled metal, buckling bricks) become gut response before they translate to actual perception and, finally, a semi-reasoned impulse to help.
Leaving Jerusha latched in her car seat, I scrambled across a crusty, brown snowbank toward the Skylark. A strange odor steamed from the angled hood. Not gasoline. Something slick and transmissiony. The old man behind the wheel was weeping and frantically pushing on the deeply indented door. His false teeth were half out. Blood flowed from his mouth and nose into his long, white whiskers, spattering dark spots on red velvet, red spots on white trim; making a horror movie costume out of the most recognizable ensemble between here and the North Pole.
Santa Claus.
I called for help. Cars on the slushy street slowed but kept going. Someone rolled down her window and shouted that she was calling 911. The truck driver sat in the cab of his pickup, beating back the air bag, yelling something about F-ing old coot don’t know the brakes from the gas. Santa battered his hand against the spider-veined window. I braced my foot on the side of the car and yanked until the door groaned open.
“Someone’s coming,” I said. “Stay calm.”
He seized my hand, croaking and babbling in some Slavic language. Or maybe the language of panic; an utterly foreign expression of how baffling it is to suddenly find your face in tatters. He leaned against me, and I stroked his long, white hair.
“Here,” I said, “let me tuck this jacket around you.”
But as I shucked my winter coat off my shoulders, he swung his legs out of the car, grasped my torso, and pulled himself up. He wasn’t a fat man, but he was a head taller than me and much fuller than he’d looked folded into the driver’s seat.
“No! Sir, please! Do you speak English? Please, keep still. The ambulance is—”
He swayed, then slumped heavily against me. I did my best to steer our trajectory as we awkwardly stumbled back onto a jagged bank of snow and mud left by the street plow. We ended up in a clumsy Pietà; me with one coat sleeve still on, him laid out across my lap, still grasping the waist of my sage-green dress.
“Crap!” I whispered. “Please, Jesus… shit… tell me what to do.”
Santa didn’t move. I yanked my coat the rest of the way off and spread it over him. Wadding part of my full pleated skirt in my hand, I gingerly applied pressure to his streaming nose. I know nothing about first aid, but that seemed like a first aid–ish idea. Apply pressure. Santa made a small, wet sound, breathing through his shattered mouth.
“Schum schie, schum schie…”
I am a mother, not an EMT. When in doubt, we lullaby. This little German carol I’d learned in grade school always soothed my children when I rocked them in their footie PJs.
“Joseph dearest, Joseph mine, help me cradle this child divine.”
“Mommy?” Jerusha called from the open car door. “What’s the matter with Santa?”
“He, um… he bumped his nose,” I called back to her. “He’s resting for a sec. You
stay in the car.”
“Can I see?” She craned forward, trying to get a better look.
“No! Stay in the car, Jerusha.”
“I want to give Santa a cookie.”
“Not right now, Twinkie. Santa doesn’t feel good.”
“Can I have a cookie?”
“Sure. But stay in the car. I’m watching you.”
“Is Santa watching me?”
“Yes! Santa is watching! And he told me… he says…” Oh, I hate those little lies. I had vowed I would not be a mother who manipulated her children with those little hoptoad lies that leap so easily to the tongue. “He says if you get out of that car… he’ll be seriously pissed!”
She nodded solemnly and pulled the door shut.
The sprung trunk of Santa’s Skylark bobbed in the wind, which riffled up bright red bows and Mickey Mouse wrapping paper. On the dashboard lay a street map of the city and a beat-up leather Day-Timer. Santa probably knew he was too old to be driving around in a world where no one yields the right of way to reindeer. Probably found himself having to check his list more than twice lately. He was an old man. But he was an old man on a mission.
“Schum schie, schum schie…”
I was wearing patterned tights that matched my dress, but my skirt had billowed up when we fell. My legs felt raw and freezer-burned against the icy embankment. We waited the same eternity it takes for the teakettle to whistle. Finally, the sound of sirens came, and then came closer. Father Christmas gripped my hand.
The Worst Noel Page 4