3. Glossies
But where was wisdom to be found in the three-bedroom Springfield, Virginia, tract-house-with-carport that was my holding pen? My father had an old King James Bible, but I’d given up on Christianity after two years of attending a wood-paneled Wesleyan chapel called, oh, Something Tum-tum-diddy in the Valley. As for other books, well, most of the volumes on our shelves were titles my mother had forgotten to cancel from the Book-of-the-Month Club. Titles like Rule Britannia and The Arms of Krupp and The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels.
And so, by a slow process of elimination, I arrived at the texts that were to be my salvation.
I’m still not sure why we had so many of them. Or why, in a house where disputation was as much a part of dinner as potatoes, these should have been the only journals at our disposal (other than National Geographic, an ongoing gift subscription that was stacked, issue after unread issue, in a yellow-rimmed column in my father’s basement office). The names, I remember, had a precise allure. McCall’s. Ladies’ Home Journal. Redbook. Woman’s Day. Family Circle. Unabashedly domestic—full of home and hearth and the joy of wax—and yet to my eyes, they were like a portal into another world. A world where “Other Mothers’ Milk Kept My Baby Alive” and you could “Cheer Up a Chicken Dinner” with Jell-O apricot salad. A world of “Bags! Bags! Bags!” and needle-lace heirloom bedspreads. A world of faintly ripe fiction (“Wicked Loving Lies”) and testaments (“I’ll Never Be Fat Again”) and, now and then, a touch of condescension (“Your Car: What Makes It Run?”). A world where even the ads seemed to float on tides of mystery: the honey-tressed woman in white peignoir slumbering beneath the words “Shh! Super Plus Tampax tampons at work.”
It was a world, more than anything, marked by certainty, and that, for me, was as good as wisdom, if not better.
And I was just in time! Thanksgiving hadn’t yet come, and the December mags were already rolling in. Issue after issue, jammed with “109 Happy Holiday Ideas for the Whole Family” and “250+ Ideas to Make Your Holidays Merrier.” I could make champagne-glass ornaments or tissue-paper garlands, I could paint pillows or sew Christmas bells, and if the holidays were getting me down, I could treat myself to raspberry-leaf tea and a geranium-oil bath.
But I still had no clue about how to survive Christmas until I found, like a sage atop a mountaintop…
4. Dr. Wayne Dyer
…who, until then, had been nothing more than an occasional guest on the Dinah! show. The only thing I could have told you about him, honestly, was that he was bald. And happy, yes, I remembered him being happy, but I had decided by then that happiness was no more transmittable than gallstones and that hearing someone tell you how to be happy was like having someone with a double-jointed body tell you how to dislocate your wrist.
But there was no escaping this particular column. No escaping that headline: “Christmas Is for Children… Enjoy It Like a Child!” And no escaping the thesis: “In order for you to thoroughly enjoy the upcoming holiday season in the way you once did,” wrote Dr. Wayne, “you must reclaim it from the youngsters.”
He then proceeded to diagram all the ways in which pure childhood responses are curdled by adult living. A child, wrote Dr. Wayne, would say, “What can I buy to give to Grandma, Billy, my teacher, the neighbors, etc.?” An adult would ask, “Why should I do anything for those people? They aren’t important to me.” A child would ask, “Do we have to take the tree down already?” An adult would exclaim, “Thank God the holidays are finally over!”
The key, said Dr. Wayne, was to rediscover that lode of childlike joy and wonder, and drive our spades straight into it—to revel with newly minted senses in the lights and decorations, the stores, the people, the gifts. And if we succeeded in overhauling our jaded beings, the big day would once again be The Big Day.
“Yes, Christmas is for children,” concluded Dr. Wayne Dyer. “The children in all of us!”
5. Show Business
No sooner had I read those words than I remembered the sign I’d seen while emerging empty-pocketed from the video-game arcade: wanted: teenager, high school preferred, to be rudy the reindeer! (no benefits)
I knew Rudy. Knew him well, having seen him any number of times in Christmases past. He lived on the ground floor of Springfield Mall, somewhere between Garfinckel’s and Waldenbooks and JCPenney. He was not, strictly speaking, a whole reindeer. More like a spotted head and a pair of front legs bursting from a bank of “snow.” His head, I remembered, was tilted to one side, as though someone had pistol-whipped him, and he had eyes of black mesh (for concealing the human within), and his nose blinked according to some weird circadian rhythm all its own, the kind that could be decoded only by paranoid schizophrenics.
Rudy, in short, was the best a fledgling mall could do in those days; it didn’t matter. That cheap, stunted little half-reindeer had become, in a stroke, the answer to my prayers. For what better way to reclaim my childhood joy than by bringing joy to children?
Instantly, there grew in my mind the picture of a long line of boys and girls, sparkle-eyed, apple-cheeked, quivering in their parkas. Are we there yet, Mommy? Can you see Rudy yet? I would be the cyno-sure of all their hopes, the fulfillment of their dreams. In the guise of a reindeer, I would give them the happiness they had always wanted, and I would find my own happiness. And Christmas wouldn’t kill me.
So that’s how I ended up in a tiny windowless room in the back of Springfield Mall, being interrogated by a man who had likely tortured Viet Cong. And that’s why, when he asked me why I wanted to be Rudy, I vacillated between candor and lies… and ended up groping down a middle path, mapless and dangerous.
“I like children,” I said, edging my way along. “I really like making them happy. Happy children, that’s, personally speaking, what makes me happy.”
“Do you have any experience in working with children?” he asked.
“Experience.”
“Well, do you have younger siblings, for instance?”
“No.”
“Do you tutor?”
“Not… not right now, no.”
“Maybe you’ve done some babysitting.”
I ran a quick tabulation: Eric Hyde (once), Johnson kids up the street (once); I’d never been asked back.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I have done babysitting. I think you’ll find I have excellent references.”
He was silent for a moment, making a close study of his cuticles. And then he declared (to nobody in particular): “We usually prefer to hire girls.”
“Sorry?”
“Girls, in our experience, have more empathy than boys. Younger children find them more approachable.” He leaned forward in his orange chair. He was warming to it now. “You may have noticed this reindeer is called Rudy, not Rudolph. We keep his sex as neutral as possible. This enables us to hire either a boy or a girl.”
“Well, the thing is,” I said. “The point is that, despite being a boy, I’ve got loads of empathy. I’m considered highly empathetic.”
“Is that right?”
“People come to me, you know, to talk about their problems. They come to me a lot, which is fine because I’m a listener.”
Those frozen-turd eyes got even colder and harder. He was taking my measure down to the scrotum.
“Very well,” he said. “We’re going to set up a little scenario. Do you know what a scenario is?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to pretend a little girl has come to you. She’s in distress. She’s crying.”
“Why is she crying?”
He looked at me as though he hadn’t heard me right. “She’s crying because she’s lost.”
“Ah.”
“Is that clear? She needs… help… finding her… mother.”
“So, in other words, she’s not interested in a particular gift item. She just wants help.”
“Help, that’s right,” he said. “And you are the only friendly face she can turn to.”
“I’ve g
ot it.”
We stared at each other for a good half-minute.
“You can begin,” he said dryly.
“Oh, so she’s already come up to me?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s made her situation clear, and now I’m going to respond.”
He expelled a long breath through his nostrils. “Yes.”
And still I held back. And the longer I stayed silent, the more I felt the air crackle around me.
“Is there a problem, son?”
“No, the thing is I’m just wondering if you want me to speak in my own voice.”
He leaned forward, and he said, “Whatever makes you comfortable.”
And then came the smile—the smile he had used on the Viet Cong—and I saw in a flash the trap that lay yawning before me. I couldn’t speak in a grownup boy’s voice—boys weren’t welcome here; and I couldn’t summon back the treble of my youth—that was gone for good. And so in the same way I was trying to steer between truth and fantasy, I would now have to find a voice that lay in the trackless region between boy and girl. A voice that might convincingly emerge from a sex-neutral reindeer in a low-rent mall in a high-density suburb.
I would have to find this voice now.
“Well, hello there, little girl!”
It was a sound I had never heard coming out of myself—or anyone—or anything. High and brittle and vibrato-free and strangely shaggy around the edges and piercingly, damningly unpleasant. It was the kind of voice that could wake up sheep.
“Don’t cry! It’ll be all right…”
It might have been a mercy if he’d laughed. But he sat there with his arms crossed, daring me to go on. And so I did. I went on.
“Tell Rudy. Rudy’s got lots of pals back at… back at Santa’s shop…”
The tiniest tingle of sweat then: cold and fugitive, stealing along my hairline.
“…and they can take care of you, everything’s going to be…”
A tightness in the chest, a shortness of breath… all the signs of a coronary, I thought… except for this voice, this Voice, which carried on independent of breath, independent of me.
“Everything will be all right!” it shrieked.
And by now, I could no longer look at my interrogator. No, that way lay Death. My eyes scuttled across the room, looking for new attachment points, and not finding any, they scrolled up. And in the ensuing darkness, I tried to call back the acting class I’d taken back in fourth grade, in the Brookfield Plaza strip mall… and found that the only thing I could remember was playing an elephant named Tuscaloosa.
This would not do. I would need to channel Lee Strasberg. What would Lee Strasberg have said?
Lee Strasberg would have said: Create an image, a sense memory, of this little girl, in the full pitch of her abandonment. Find her in you. Tell me who she is, what she looks like.
She is… eight. She has orange hair and dull eyes, and her tears have left furrows along her cheeks, and her chest is heaving… inside a… a green velvet dress with a red bow and a Peter Pan collar…
“Oh, my, that’s a pretty dress you have! What a pretty dress. Hey, what do you say we find your mother? Don’t cry, little girl. Don’t cry!”
She was fading as quickly as she had come, and I was now back inside my own symptoms. The trail of snail sweat on my face. The shuddering of lungs. And the sound of my own fingers scratching on my chair like a coffin lid.
“You just wait right here while I get my… magic… North Pole phone. Because the North Pole is also a… a telephone pole. And I’m going to call for… call for…” I broke off. “Excuse me, does the reindeer come with a telephone?”
He pushed his lips out. He regarded me for a long time.
“Walkie-talkie,” he said.
“I’ll just call up the old walkie-talkie—you know how those work!—and please don’t cry ’cause Rudy hates when little girls cry. It makes Rudy want to cry himself. Boo hoo! See, you’ve got Rudy crying. Boo hoo!”
And now, at last, shorn of breath, shorn of will, the Voice—in all its garishness and nakedness—began to fail.
“We’ll find your mother. What does she look like? Is she… maybe she’s… she might have a, you know,a…”
And like that, it was gone. No more Voice. No more Hope.
I stared down at my blue jeans. I murmured:
“If you want, I could try another voice.”
Which, of course, was the final, the most exquisite humiliation. That after all this, I would still be begging to be his reindeer.
He raised himself from his seat. Studied me one last time and then angled his watch toward his face. “Well,” he said, suddenly breezy. “Thanks very much for your time. We’ll call you if you’re still in consideration.”
I shook his hand, feeling the hard, knobby carapace of his bones close around my soft, green turtle flesh.
“And if we don’t speak again, son, happy holidays.”
It wasn’t his voice, though, following me home. It was The Voice, scalding me with its memory. And, yes, speaking to me, though it would remain forever silent. It was telling me that Dr. Wayne Dyer was wrong. It was saying there was no going back—no going forward—only a kind of stumbling in place. That was my best of hope of living through Christmas.
And so, like a sick caribou about to be abandoned to predators, I staggered on against my body’s own promptings.
That Christmas, I organized a group of carolers to serenade neighborhood homes. (We scattered after one of our friends’ dads stormed out with a gun.) The next Christmas, using a recipe and grid from the Ladies’ Home Journal, I made a gingerbread house. (It broke so many times that it had to be sheathed in confectioner’s glue, over and over again, until it resembled the body cast of a house.) In the coming years, I would bake cookies, make macramé snowflakes, attend Anglican midnight services, memorize T. S. Eliot poems, perform anonymous acts of charity… I would do many things in the name of surviving Christmas… but the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do was confront Rudy the Reindeer.
Whenever I had occasion to visit Springfield Mall, I would travel half a mile to avoid encountering him (her), and if for some reason I couldn’t avoid the thing, I would pass by on a current of steam, with my eyes averted.
Only when I was well into my twenties did I feel strong enough to face Rudy straight on. He was much as I remembered him. The head was tipped a little more to the side, the bank of “snow” was grimy with the undersides of Converse All-Stars, and the nose was still carrying on its anemic and fitful blinking—the strange private rhythm that now, as I studied it, assumed a larger meaning.
For it seemed to me that, in the end, there was no better example to follow than Rudy’s. There was no better answer to Death’s cold, hard stare than this. Flicker our sad little off-kilter lights. Leave Death trying vainly to guess our pattern. Dazzle him with our sheer human incomprehensibility. And in this manner, Death could be, if not defeated, at least blinded, held at bay.
Which was exactly what I’d done, I now realized, not through any system but through a sheer want of system. And it was something of a miracle in its own right that, having spent all that time trying to survive Christmas, I had never stopped to notice the most salient fact: I had survived. Survived gingerbread houses and Dr. Wayne and Family Circle and actuarial statistics and Bette Davis. I had even survived Rudy. Here, here was my dark victory.
I’LL HAVE CHRISTMAS WITH THE WORKS ON RYE,
HOLD THE HAM AND JESUS
Valerie Frankel
The worst Christmas I ever had was the year we celebrated Hanukkah. This was in 1974. I was nine. Our family had just moved from racially diverse, middle-class West Orange, New Jersey, to the affluent suburb of Short Hills. In all fairness, Short Hills did have some diversity. In most parts of town, the people were pure white. In others, they were tanning-bed white. In still others, they were whiter-than-white, i.e., blue.
Steered by a canny real estate agent, my parents boug
ht a house on a long, steep street called Great Hills Road. Later on, when I got to junior high and met kids from other neighborhoods, namely, the St. Rose of Lima Catholics and the über-WASPs of the Short Hills Club, I learned that our hilly section was known as Kike’s Peak. We lived about halfway up.
Near the top of the peak, veering half a mile to the left, was Deerfield Elementary School. On my first day of third grade, I instantly grasped that I wasn’t in West Orange anymore. The complete absence of black faces was one clue. And when the teacher took attendance, I didn’t hear a single name that ended in a vowel (except Shapiro). When she read the list, “Feldstein, Lebersfeld, Steinberg, Denberg, Berg. Stein. Feld,” I almost laughed. I thought she was making it up. After school, I overheard my mother on the phone describing our new neighborhood as “a Jewish ghetto.” Perhaps it was the only ghetto in America where the moms wore mink coats and drove Mercedes-Benz station wagons.
In West Orange, with its mixed bucket of Italians, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, I wasn’t aware of being a member of any race or religion. In Short Hills, with its wall-to-wall Jews, I was suddenly self-conscious and confused. I knew I was Jewish, but my religious identity was muddled by my nonobservant upbringing. We were Jews who broke the rules. We celebrated Christmas. And we did it right, throwing a party, the grown-ups laughing and drinking, the kids loading too much tinsel on the trees. I got to wear a brand-new velvet dress, white tights, and black patent-leather Mary Janes. One of the West Orange dads dressed up as Santa, and gave out little gifts like PEZ dispensers, Kiddles, and MatchBox cars. In old photos of those days, my sister, brother, and I are standing in front of a heavily laden tree, mad grins on our round faces.
I associated Christmas with family, friends, presents, food, fun—the same things Gentile America thrills to in anticipation of the holiday. My family (on both sides) had been celebrating Christmas with a feast and a tree for three generations. We did not go to church for Midnight Mass, carol about “Holy Night,” hang wreaths, stage nativity scenes, burn myrrh incense. Certainly, we never basted a ham. (Not that we were kosher—even nonobservant Jews have an innate aversion to ham.) As Americans, we enjoyed the secular aspects: Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, sugar cookies, a tree in the living room, opening presents in pajamas, emergency runs to 7-Eleven for batteries.
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