The Holiday Season

by Michael Knight

  “You’re still here,” he said.

  “I talked to Dad.”

  Ted made a noise in his throat. You couldn’t see the city itself, the buildings and the houses and so on, but across the bay, Mobile pushed a dome of ambient light into the sky like a sci-fi movie force field.

  “You know what he said to me this morning? He said I needed to bring the twins over to see Mom’s grave.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t know what Ted wanted me to say.

  He cupped his hands over his head. “They haven’t been since the funeral. They were babies then.” He closed his eyes. “Did he sound all right?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “He told me to tell you that he loves you and Merry Christmas and everything.”

  “It’s weird,” he said. “I can go weeks without even remembering that Mom is dead. And then some little thing reminds me and I miss her and it hurts but it doesn’t last for long.” He pinched his nose against the cold and his voice went funny. “Do you miss her?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Right now.”

  After a moment, he said, “Do you believe in God?”

  “Are you about to go evangelical on me?”

  He dropped his hand and laughed softly, a little bitter, a little sad but nonetheless amused.

  “I’m an Episcopalian, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Then I don’t know,” I said.

  He looked at me a second, seemed about to speak, then looked away. He crossed his arms and thrust his feet out. At bottom, I thought, his question had to do with Mom, whether or not she could see us right that minute and what she would think of us if she could. I had no answers, of course, nothing but platitudes regarding love and memory. I considered all the things I could tell my brother, Madame Langlois and miniature Graceland and how proud Dad was of him, and maybe I was being selfish, maybe I just wanted to keep those things for myself, but somehow none of it seemed right.

  “You ever do any fishing on this boat?” I said.

  He was a little reluctant at first but I prodded and Ted explained that he’d only had the boat a month but in the spring, when the reds were running, he didn’t intend to miss a weekend. He showed me the loran and the live-bait well. For some reason, he cranked the motors and we sat there listening for a long time like they were playing a song he wanted me to hear.

  That night, I woke desperate and panting and not at all sure where I was. The blinds were sort of half twisted shut, moonlight snaking in between the slats, casting unfamiliar shadows. There was something vaguely floral and cold-smelling in the air. I blinked and rubbed my eyes and one of the shadows moved and Marcy materialized like magic at the foot of the bed.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “No, no,” she said. “I was just thinking. In class, we had to set an alarm at night so we could wake up in the middle of our dreams and write everything down before we forgot. I just thought, you know, maybe you might like to try.”

  I pushed up on my elbows. She was wearing gray silk pajamas, her hair held back with a terry-cloth headband. Moonlight. Silk. Her face exposed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “Let’s see.” I reached for the lamp but Marcy said, “Leave it off. The dark helps sometimes.”

  I closed my eyes. My mind was empty but for the afterimage of her face, hazy and silver as a photographic negative. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  “There were trees,” I said. “Birds.”

  The mattress shifted with Marcy’s weight. I opened my eyes and she was sitting there with her legs crossed, pinching her lower lip. “That’s a start,” she said. The next thing she said caught me off guard. She lay back on the bed and rolled onto her stomach and bent her knees so her feet were in the air. Her heels were white as ice.

  “Would you mind if I put my head on your shoulder?”

  I shook my head and she crawled toward me and rested her cheek upon my chest. She drew my arm around her like a shawl. It was her I’d smelled. Skin cream or hand lotion or something in her hair.

  “Your brother’s not so bad,” she said.

  I said, “I know.”

  “He loves you, you and your father.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Do you have someone, Frank?” she said. “It makes me sad to think of you alone.”

  “I have someone,” I said.

  “Do you really? Who? Tell me what’s her name.”

  “Louise Langlois,” I said. “She’s French.”

  “Ooh la la.” Marcy wiggled at my side. “Tell me more.”

  “I’ll tell you this much: She’s an older woman.”

  “How much older?”

  I said, “Thirty years,” and Marcy gasped and slapped my stomach. “No,” she said. “Really?”

  “It’s true.”

  “You’re terrible,” she said and I didn’t know if she meant the age difference or if she knew that I was lying. “Don’t let me fall asleep,” she said and I told her I wouldn’t but it wasn’t long before I sensed her breathing even out, her body soften against me. I had no idea how she could sleep with my heart pounding beneath her ear. Against my will, an erection had perked up in my lap and I waited until it subsided before waking her. I didn’t want to wake her up at all but I couldn’t let my brother’s wife pass the night with me in bed. I shook her gently and she blinked and pushed her fingers through her hair. “Oh,” she said, in a voice filled up with wonder. “I dreamed I was in a caravan in the desert. Except instead of camels we had ponies. They had these chests of rare spices and jewels and magic carpets on their backs.”

  “You’re making that up,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I swear.”

  This would be a better story if I could report that I organized a reconciliation between my father and my brother. Maybe I convinced Ted to tag along when I went to look in on Dad and, because we were none of us bad men, all of us well intentioned, we put the last few months behind us and spent the day after Christmas pitching horseshoes and drinking beer. But that’s not what happened. What happened was I overslept the next morning and stepped into my pants from the night before and pulled a T-shirt over my head and bumbled downstairs, hoping Ted and Marcy had left a little coffee in the pot. As I approached the kitchen, I heard Marcy’s voice, hushed but intent, and I stopped shy of the door to listen.

  “They’re afraid,” she said.

  “And coddling them isn’t going to help,” Ted said. “In the long run coddling never did anybody any good.”

  “Just wait a day or two. It’s my fault they’re scared. You said riding double was a mistake. I know. But I don’t want to rush them into anything. I don’t want to make it worse. In a couple of days, they’ll have forgotten about being scared.”

  “There’s an old saying about this, Marcy.”

  “I know but—”

  “It applies,” Ted said.

  “Yes but—”

  “There has never been a more perfect application.”

  “Fine,” Marcy said.

  “I’ve already called the farm. They’re expecting us at noon. The ponies will be saddled and all the twins will have to do is walk a couple of laps around the ring.”

  Marcy said, “I stopped arguing three sentences ago.”

  And I backpedaled as quietly as I could and tiptoed up to my room and brushed my teeth and slicked some water through my hair and collected my duffel bag, intending to make my exit as soon as I politely could. Likely Ted was right, I thought, but even so, I wasn’t interested in bearing witness while the twins faced down their fear.

  By ten o’clock, we were gathered around my Subaru. The scene was such a near approximation of my arrival I felt a wash of déjà vu. Marcy had the twins give me a hug good-bye and she kissed me on the ear and I shook my brother�
�s hand. Then his new house was fading in the rearview mirror, the first Christmas of the new millennium already in the past. I crossed the bay on 1-10, dipped under the river in the Bankhead Tunnel, reemerged on Water Street, Mobile rising around me like an ambush.

  When school resumed after the holidays, I went back on the road with Shakespeare Express, first through Georgia, then a lap through Tennessee, then a few dates in Mississippi. At a military school in Pascagoula, I slipped midscene into Puck, when I was supposed to be doing Oberon, and on the ride home I couldn’t quit thinking how sad it was all that poetry had blurred up in my mind, sadder still that no one but my scene partner noticed the mistake.

  Near the end of March, on a beer run, I spotted Madame Langlois at Winn-Dixie with a man about her age. He had a goatee and walked with a limp. They were arguing over lamb chops. I ducked behind a freezer case to spy.

  “Non,” Madame Langlois was saying. “Listen to me, Brock. The lamb, it must be simmered patiently in a dry red wine. This is not—how you say?—fast food.”

  Brock limped over to the butcher’s counter and tapped a big class ring against the glass.

  “Sounds like an awful lot of trouble when I’ve got a perfectly good grill collecting cobwebs in the carport.”

  Madame Langlois took his arm and drew him up and pecked his cheek. “You Americans,” she said.

  I hustled to the beer aisle and through the checkout line and beat it out of Winn-Dixie undetected. I had no idea what, if anything, my father had done to “fix it” with Madame Langlois, but I was glad for her, glad she’d found someone. Even so, seeing her like that had left me feeling at loose ends. On impulse, I drove over to Magnolia Cemetery, where I hopped the fence and toted the six-pack around looking for my mother’s grave. Magnolia Cemetery covers about three hundred acres, however, and I got disoriented among the sarcophagi and the headstones. I wound up sipping beer at the base of a monument to a Confederate sailor named Hawkins Dent who met his end during the Battle of Mobile Bay.

  What else? I took Dad out for a burger now and then or went over to his place to run a load of laundry if Lucious Son or Chloe Jones had the machine in use at Mrs. Mauldin’s. While we waited, he’d drink scotch and whip me at chess or backgammon or whatever. Shakespeare Express zipped through the Florida panhandle. Ted and Marcy invited me to dinner a couple of times and once Marcy arranged for a part-time yoga instructor friend of hers to join us. This woman was so flexible she could bend all the way over backward and look out at you between her knees. She showed us after dessert. Ted gave me a bug-eyed, hubba-hubba smirk but the truth is she freaked me out.

  One night, late, Lucious Son knocked on my door. Despite the martial arts and the weed peddling, he was generally a quiet neighbor, kept to himself, early to bed and rise, maintained a strictly regimented schedule of workouts and meditation. I was surprised by the hour of his visit.

  “I saw your light was on,” he said. “I thought you might gimme a little taste.”

  He was wearing a yellow gi with a red monkey on the back. I waved him toward the desk chair but Lucious kept his feet. I could hear rain on the roof and on the trees, cars hissing by on Dauphin Street.

  After a moment, I said, “Tis all men’s office to speak patience / To those that wring under the load of sorrow / But no man’s virtue nor sufficiency / To be so moral when he shall endure the like himself.”

  Lucious shrugged and looked around. I figured he was in the mood for something more upbeat.

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not with me. But you been moping around here like somebody died.”

  And all of a sudden I was afraid that I would cry. I blinked and sucked air over my teeth. I didn’t know what was going on but I didn’t want to cry in front of Lucious. I gripped the back of my desk chair. I kept my eyes fixed on the floor.

  “It’s been a weird little while,” I said.

  Lucious said, “You should fast.”

  Maybe it was the utter out-of-the-blue-ness of his proposal but as quickly as that rush of emotion had bubbled up, it began to subside, drawn off into nothing like water down a drain.

  “You think I should quit eating?”

  “Narrows the focus, man. Your body understands what it needs. You just have to know how to ask.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “That or I could get you stoned.”

  I said, “Some other night.”

  He cupped his hands and bowed, one corner of his mouth drawn up into what might have been a smile, then pulled the door shut as he backed into the hall.

  In May, the twins turned five years old. They had a party at their house, pony rides and presents and other kids from their school. To my surprise, Dad agreed to let me drive him over. He marveled at my brother’s house, roamed through the rooms, trailing his fingers along the walls as if he needed to touch something solid to remind himself that it was real. At first he and Ted were a little awkward together but I saw them slip away from the party at one point and sneak down to the wharf and I wondered why the holiday season had seemed so fraught when we were in the middle of it and then I thought it seemed that way because it was. Just because time and circumstance had conspired to smooth things over after the fact didn’t change the way anybody felt at the time. Or that everything might have turned out differently if each of us hadn’t played our roles exactly as we did.

  Eventually, Marcy spotted me sitting alone at the picnic table. She walked over and sat beside me and looked where I was looking. Ted was demonstrating the live-bait well for Dad.

  “Does that make you happy?” Marcy asked.

  I told her, “Yes.”

  She looked at me slyly for a second, then took my hand and said, “Come with me, young man. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I let her tug me to my feet and lead me into the kitchen, where a woman with shortish, curlyish, brownish hair was poking candles into a pair of matching birthday cakes. She was wearing a traditional white chef’s coat with plastic flip-flops and faded jeans. On the counter beside the cake was her chef’s hat, the top caved in like a failed soufflé.

  “Frank,” Marcy said. “This is Dori Vine. Dori’s son is in school with the twins.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’m divorced.” She poked the chef’s hat out and set it lightly atop her head. “Almost six months. Marcy thinks you should be my rebound guy.”

  Marcy socked her in the arm and said, “In addition to being tactless, Dori owns a bakery in Point Clear.” She raised up on her toes and whispered, “She thinks you’re cute,” into my ear, her breath making my skin go goose-pimply and warm.

  I liked Dori well enough and her son turned out to be a nice kid and they both liked me, I think, but we barely got off the ground. Two dates: one dinner, just the two of us, and a trip to the Exploreum with her son. That was it, before Dori decided she wasn’t ready to move on. I was disappointed at first but that wore off and I felt oddly heartened for the effort.

  After that, Shakespeare Express went back on hiatus for the summer and I did The Beautiful People at The Playhouse and right when we were gearing up again for the fall, I got a phone call from the principal at my old high school. It seemed the regular drama teacher, one Minerva Trout, was on maternity leave for the semester and her original replacement had pulled out at the last minute and would I be interested in filling in? I didn’t have to think about it long. By November, Minerva Trout had decided that she loved motherhood more than teaching, and I’ve been filling in ever since. I have a little office behind the auditorium and the students call me “Mr. Posey” and they’re game enough on stage if not exactly brimming with talent. Just last week, Ted and Marcy accompanied Dad to our production of Romeo and Juliet. Unabridged. Every beautiful word. I started this account as a play, in fact, hoping my students would be willing to put it on. It became clear after a while, however, that I had no third act, that our story had no clear-cut resolution and li
kely never would, that whatever we had gained, whatever accommodations we had reached, something was lost as well, some opportunity missed, perhaps, though the nature of that something is hazy to me even now. So here I am with you, dear reader, weary and unshaved but narrating for us Poseys as honestly as I can.

  Love at the End of the Year

  The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm, tympanic page.

  —Donald Barthelme,

  “Rebecca”

  Katie

  The Butters, Katie and Hugh, were stopped at the intersection of Cottage Hill and Cummerbund, lost, late for the Marchands’ New Year’s Eve party, when Katie decided to leave her husband. At that precise moment, Hugh was craning to look over his shoulder, headlights reflecting on his glasses. He faced front just as the light was changing, wiped the corners of his mouth, eased them uncertainly into traffic. Her husband, Katie knew, hated to be lost.

  “I’m all turned around,” he said. “What was that last street? Did you notice the sign?”

  Katie shook her head.

  “What?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m trying to watch the road,” Hugh said. “I can’t watch you and the road at the same time. Audible responses, OK. I’d be grateful for a little help here, Katie.”

  Katie nodded, caught herself, cleared her throat.

  “What street are we looking for?”

  “Bow tie Lane.”

  “I’m leaving you,” she said.

  Right away, she wished she hadn’t spoken. The patent symbolism of the occasion (new year, new life) hadn’t occurred to her until that moment. It embarrassed her somehow, made her feel like a cliché. The unhappy housewife. She had spoken on impulse, on the strength of her emotion, but the truth was she couldn’t have put to words the way she felt. Hugh leaned forward now, shut both the radio and the heater off. Cold and quiet seeped into the car like the very gist of winter.