by Jennie Nash
You’re just looking for a moment of grace, a moment when your house and all the years you’ve lived in it are seen for exactly what they are. I wish I could give you that moment of grace wrapped up in a bow this Christmas morning because even though you don’t know me from any one of the thousands of people who’ve traipsed through your life these past few weeks, you’ve given it to me.
Merry Christmas,
April Newton
I slipped back into bed somewhere close to 5:00. It was still dark. Then, around 6:00, I heard Rick start to stir. He turned over, shifted his weight so that he was lying on his back. I was on my side, turned away from him, as had become my habit. Normally, I would have slipped out of bed. Normally, I would have pretended that I didn’t hear the way his breath had changed from a sleeping breath to a waking breath.
I rolled over and pressed a leg against Rick’s body.
He reached his arm over and rested it against the thick part of my hips.
I was astonished at how warm his skin felt.
I moved closer so that my stomach pressed against his hip and my breasts pressed against his chest.
He began to rub his thumb over my hip bone, very slowly.
“I love you,” I whispered.
He shifted his weight so that he was facing me and gently kissed my lips. I pressed my body more firmly into his and opened my mouth to kiss him back. I moved so that I could welcome him.
Then the phone rang.
We heard Jackie answering down the hallway, then her footsteps coming toward our room. I turned away, pulled the sheets up to my chin.
She knocked.
“It’s Grandma,” she said, handing me the phone. My mom. Calling from Chicago where she would be ruling a kitchen that wasn’t hers and whipping up animosity from my brother’s wife as surely as she was whipping up the mashed potatoes.
“Merry Christmas,” she said with cool efficiency. I was an item that needed to be checked off her list. It was a long list that included braising and broiling, separating and grilling.
“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said.
“How’s the house?”
“I don’t really know yet,” I said.
“I bet you’ll be happy to finally cook in a real kitchen.”
“Yes,” I said. “How’s Cal?”
“Fine,” she said. “We’re all fine.”
The call went on for fifteen minutes, even though we had nothing to say. When I finally hung up, Rick had slipped on his sweatpants and gone downstairs with Jackie to start making pancakes.
CHRISTMAS DAY
We sat on the floor around the sad Target Christmas tree. I gave Rick the laser tape measure, which I knew he liked because he immediately got out the instructions and started to read about how the thing worked. We made Jackie close her eyes as we walked her to the den, where we had laid out all the new things for her room—the beanbag chair and the desk, the fluffy rug and an alarm clock in the shape of a beagle. She flung herself onto the beanbag and asked if she could open her present from Max.
It was in the pocket of her robe—a tiny box with something written right onto the cardboard with ballpoint pen. She read the words, pulled off the top and gasped. It was a yin/yang necklace on a leather string. She slipped it over her head, gushing, “Isn’t it so amazing?”
It was so amazing, in fact, that I felt choked up. “That’s very sweet,” I managed to say.
There was a large box under the Christmas tree from my mother. Jackie handed me the card that said, “For your new bedroom.” Rick and I had imagined our new bedroom as a clean, neutral space, earthy and plain like the beach. It would be our retreat from the loud and noisy world, our perch overlooking the ocean. The ceiling beams were sandblasted and whitewashed. The rug was the color of sand. The comforter I had selected was the palest shade of turquoise blue, my ultimate response to the Swiss Coffee on the walls.
Inside my mother’s box was a complete set of linens for our new bedroom—a heavy Ralph Lauren pattern in red and blue paisley, with a white eyelet dust ruffle, blue pillow shams, a red throw pillow, and a matching set of towel sheets, bath mat, hand towels and washcloths. It looked like the bedroom set of a hunting lodge.
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“Mom, it’s Christmas,” Jackie warned me. “Be nice.”
I bit my lip, and then Rick pulled a box out from under the tree. It was a large, flat rectangle wrapped in plain brown paper.
“The gals at the planning commission dug it up for me,” Rick said.
I tore open the paper, expecting a photo of the newly finished house, or the blueprints framed for posterity. It was an aerial photo of Redondo Beach taken a very long time ago. You could see the pier and the curve of the Esplanade, but there were few trees, few roads and few houses. It looked like something familiar, yet foreign at the same time. I couldn’t figure it out.
I looked up at Rick. “What is it?”
“It was taken the year the house was built,” he said. “I thought she might like it.”
The gears in my mind were grinding, but I still didn’t understand. “Who?” I asked.
“Peg Torrey,” he said.
“Who’s she?” Jackie asked.
“You sound like you practically know her,” I said to Rick.
“I’ve been inside the house.”
“You have? When?”
“While you were having your massage.”
"But I . . .”
“Vanessa took me through. She is, after all, a Realtor.”
“What is it, Mom?” Jackie asked, positioning herself behind me so she could see the photo. “And who is Peg Torrey?”
“She’s a woman who owns a bungalow down by the beach.”
“Why did Dad give you a picture of someone else’s house?”
“Because it’s exactly what I wanted.”
“An old photo?”
I shook my head. “The chance to follow a whim.”
Jackie stood up. She wasn’t fooled for a minute. “What kind of a whim?” she asked.
The problem with setting a precedent for telling the truth to your children is that you have to keep it up. You can’t suddenly decide that you’re going to start lying, or that you’re going to pick and choose. They understand what truth is, and once you give it to them, they expect it. All the time. There was never a moment when I was going to lie to Jackie about having cancer. She was only ten, and I may have used softer words, or softer concepts, but I told her the truth. I met a woman a few years ago who was a fifteen-year cancer survivor. Her children were grown, with children of their own, and houses far away. “I’m still wondering,” she told me, “how I’m going to tell my children I had cancer.” I was speechless. I had no advice for her whatsoever. She was too late for the truth.
“Peg Torrey is giving her house away in a contest,” I explained, “and I thought I’d try to enter.”
Jackie squinted at me. She stood up even straighter so that she looked like some kind of angry queen. She looked at her dad, then back at me, and at the photo in my hands.
“You’re kidding,” she said, flatly.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said.
“Dad built this house for you,” she said. “That’s like . . . it’s like. I swear, it’s like having an affair.”
“Jackie!”
She spun on her heels, grabbed her purse and walked past the Christmas tree and all the presents and out the door.
I got up to follow her.
“Don’t,” Rick said. He’d stepped in front of me, pressed his hand against my arm.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t go after her.”
“It’s Christmas! We don’t even know where she’s going!”
“Probably just down the hill. I’ll go after her. Why don’t you take that photo over to Peg Torrey’s house.”
“Rick, that’s crazy. Let me go.” He was still holding on to my arm.
“Didn’t you listen to the sermon last ni
ght?”
“The sermon? Please. Let me go.”
“It was about how we tell the same story year after year and say the same prayers and sing the same songs, but we never know where the magic is going to come on any given year. We never know when we’re going to feel moved. All the anticipation—the gifts and the decorating—it’s all just about waiting, and watching for when we’re going to feel moved.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You might find what you’re looking for if you take that photo over today.”
“I just want to find Jackie.”
“I said I would go.”
I don’t know what shifted—the planets in their courses, the molecules in the air, the way the blood flowed through my head—but I let him win. I let Jackie go. I allowed myself to honor the gift he’d given me.
"OK,” I said.
I took the photo and gathered up the letters we’d written to Peg Torrey and drove down the hill to Pepper Tree Lane. The daughter I had met at the open house was sitting on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee. She looked tired. There was a large basket tied up with cellophane sitting next to her, and a bottle of merlot with a plaid bow.
“It’s like gifts from the Magi,” I said.
She laughed. “That’s good,” she said.
“Shall I just add my offerings to the pile, then?”
“Go right ahead.”
I set down the gift-wrapped photo and the homemade envelope of letters, but felt like I should say something before turning to leave. “It’s a lovely house,” I said.
I wrote an article for Family Circle last year on the ten rules for good conversation. It was supposed to be a primer for mothers who were having trouble talking to their daughters, or wives having trouble talking to their spouses. My expert source was a young professor from Cornell who had done a study that involved timing people’s responses in conversation. Step number one for good communication, she said, was to allow the empty spaces in the conversation time to expand. You were supposed to breathe in and breathe out two whole cycles before talking again after you asked a question, which was the equivalent of twenty seconds. I breathed, and breathed again, and just like that, Sarah started talking.
“I know,” she said. “Most of the houses on the street were like this when I was little. There was a Foster’s Freeze a few blocks that way on Pacific Coast Highway and all the kids would go over there for chocolate-dipped ice cream cones. And there was a restaurant the other way called Millie Riera’s. It was right on the water. I mean, you could sit there, have swordfish steaks and look out at the dolphins playing in the waves. That was the place my dad always took us for big birthdays.”
“No wonder your mom wants to preserve it.”
“She wants to handle the sale of the house the same way my dad would have handled the death of a patient—by being present for it, by being attentive to it, by not running away from it, by trying to find meaning in it.” She stood up abruptly, then. I was standing on the sidewalk at the bottom of the front steps and she was standing on the porch. She towered above me. “It’s hard to be the child of saints,” she said.
She bent down and picked up the basket, the bottle of wine, my photo and my letters, then disappeared inside the front door. I imagined that the long dining room table was groaning with gifts. There were probably honey-baked hams and tins of English toffee, exotic coffee and potted poinsettias. My wish was that my offering would stand out like the house itself—that Peg Torrey would see it, and respond to it, just like I had when I came across her house on a day when I was least expecting it.
When I got home, Jackie was sitting at the kitchen counter, looking grim. I resisted the urge to hug her the way you’d hug a small child who had packed a suitcase and tried to run away.
“Dad drove me by the house,” she said. She slipped off her stool and began walking toward her room. “And just so you know, I’m never living there. Never.”
Vanessa had us over for Christmas dinner. She had a huge family with sisters and brothers and cousins who all lived nearby, so their holidays were always loud and boisterous. They often roasted three turkeys, and people brought everything from Jell-O salads to nutmeg martinis. Jackie disappeared into the rec room with Tom and the other kids. I spent much of the evening talking to Jane, a friend of one of Vanessa’s sisters, who was a breast cancer survivor of ten years. She had recently opened a boutique in Hermosa Beach called p*i*n*k. It was an upscale clothing shop that sold Isabella Fiori purses for $450 a pop, and Diesel jeans for $265, and she wanted to pick my brain about publicity. What was the best way to get to the fashion editors, she asked, and how did you go about sending around a press release? I asked her what her hook was because usually when people ask me that question, they’re talking about an aunt who ran in a marathon or an old roommate who was working in the Peace Corps and wondering how they could land them on the cover of O, The Oprah Magazine.
“I’m giving one hundred percent of the profits to a foundation that’s running clinical trials for breast cancer patients with metastatic disease,” she said.
“One hundred percent?” I asked, astonished. She had such a good story. In a world where giant corporations were donating one percent off the sale of a candle, or one dollar for every customer in the month of October, giving away every penny you make is a good story.
“I’m eager to help all women,” she explained, “but I’m mostly eager to help myself.”
I had assumed that when she had said ten years, she meant ten years and done. What she meant, however, was ten years and still sick, ten years and still fighting, ten years and still praying for a cure. Her hair, I now noticed, wasn’t just cut fashionably short. It was growing in from chemo.
“It’s a great story,” I said. “I’d love to pitch it myself.”
“You mean it?”
“Absolutely.”
She shrugged. “At least I’m going to die surrounded by great clothes,” she said.
It’s possible to try to argue someone out of a stance like that—to try to say, Oh, no, you’re going to be fine or Come, now, you can’t think like that. But people die the way they live. To try to take that away from them or talk them out of it is to deny the power of death. There was no way I was going to do that. I laughed and told her she sure would.
Secretly, I was jealous of every single thing about that woman except for one.
It was Christmas, and she was going to die.
FRIDAY
Jackie played in the Holiday Classic, just like she promised she would. I sat in the stands, as always, and mostly watched Max watching Jackie.
“How’s the boy?” Gina asked, following my line of sight.
“He’s nice,” I said, “but it’s hard not to wonder what’s going on.”
“Don’t you read Jackie’s e-mail?”
I turned and stared. “You do that?”
"Of course I do,” Gina said. “I’m the mother. It’s my right.”
“If Jackie found out I was reading her e-mail she’d never speak to me again.”
“You can’t be scared of your own daughter.”
I turned back toward the game. She had a good point.
Jackie had thousands of e-mails, none of them with any recognizable names attached. I poked around a few threads about the Iraqi soldier project, the final paper in English, and what people were wearing to the winter formal before I stumbled on a note from Max. His screen name was flyboy247, which made some sense for a swimmer. He was having a hard time selecting a Christmas gift for her, he wrote, because he wanted to give her the whole world. He wanted her to know exactly how much he adored her, and exactly how beautiful she was, and exactly how he couldn’t stand to be without her. She was, he said, the most amazing girl he’d ever known, and no mere trinket could possibly convey his feelings.
I clicked the note shut and then scanned the e-mail list, terrified of what I would see and hungry for it at the same time.
&nb
sp; In one note, he was supposed to be studying but was instead dreaming about holding her close.
In another, he was supposed to be doing math but instead remembering their kiss by the cafeteria.
She wrote back saying she couldn’t stop thinking about it, either.
I love you, he said.
I love you, too, she said.
I clicked off and called Vanessa.
“Have you ever read Tom’s e-mails?” I asked.
“All the time,” she said.
“I just read through a month of Jackie’s and I’m freaking out.”
“What’s going on?”
“She loves this boy. He loves her. I think they’re going to elope.”
“You don’t remember being in love at that age?”
What I remembered was being in love when I was ten. There was a boy who lived next door named Charles Gray. He had a tree house in his backyard, which made him something of a rugged hero in my mind. It was built around the massive trunk of a pine tree. A big flat floor had been built around the tree trunk, with a ladder that went up through a hole right in the middle. You could see three of the neighbors’ houses from the platform and a corner of the playground at school. We kept books up there in a wooden box. There was a copy of Treasure Island and Stuart Little. The paper was flaky and spotted with mold, but reading those books wasn’t the point. They were the leaping-off point for adventures where we would pretend we were stranded or being chased or hiding out. When Charles was in the tree house, he would throw pinecones into my backyard. There was a thin space in the enormous hedge that separated my yard from his. I would slip through the brush and climb up the ladder. By the time I emerged on the platform, I would have assumed a persona, and our story would be set in motion.
Charles Gray was the boy I always thought I would marry. Even when we moved away and I lost touch with him, I would still dream about him and how we would meet someday on a bus or a train or a boat or a plane. But he was almost wholly the stuff of dreams. I don’t recall that I ever touched him. I certainly never kissed him or exchanged passionate promises of love. And when I was fifteen and would have wanted to, I was a new kid in a new school, too shy to even say hello to the boys I liked.