“The Lawyer!” my mother yelled from the hallway. My father threw his hands up in the air. “Babe! You just ruined it for the girls!” He always called my mother “Babe,” even in the most serious of moments.
Chloe came running in wearing one of her Disney’s Aladdin costumes, biting off pieces of her candy necklace and yelling, “The lawyer! The lawyer! The lawyer!” Then Mara chased her out of the study, and they went shrieking and galloping into the kitchen for more hot chocolate.
“What, I’m not allowed to play too?” my mother said, playfully.
My father handed me the $20 anyway. “Don’t tell your sisters,” he said with a wink. I stuffed the bill into my pocket. “But wait: Dad, what is that hanging from the owl’s forehead?” I asked.
“Those are the scales of justice, Bambina.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the symbol for truth and fairness.”
“Well, it looks silly.”
I thought about the painting, how much my father loved it, and what it stood for. And I wondered how much the things we held on to represented our most truthful selves—if at all—depending on the motive behind buying it.
It was almost Christmas. My mother and Richard were away in San Francisco again, and I was driving to their house. The city of Los Angeles, covered with white lights on palm trees, fake snow in windows, frantic and buzzing with holiday angst as people scurried around town panicked to find their perfect gifts.
I pulled into the driveway of Richard’s newly renovated house near the top of Mulholland Drive. Brown boxes sat on the doorstep, my name written on each side in black Sharpie.
“You’d better come pick your things up, or Richard is going to throw them away,” my mother had warned me. “He doesn’t want them in the house; there’s no room for them.” I had resisted picking them up for a while because I didn’t want to have to carry them with me the next time I moved—which I knew would be soon because Mara and Brian were discussing getting engaged.
I stepped out of the car and went to open one of the boxes filled with memories of my childhood. My pink box of love letters from old boyfriends, my ballet pointe shoes, my mother’s collection of Nancy Drew books from the 1960s, which she’d passed down to me on my tenth birthday. And more books: The Napping House, The Giving Tree, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
I dumped the heavy boxes into the backseat. Before I got back in, I looked through the front window and noticed their Christmas tree, decorated intricately with all of the ornaments from years of our family Christmases. Now, I had bit my tongue at the discomfort of being in Richard’s home filled with the furniture from my childhood, and how he slept in my parents’ old bed—the thought of which made me queasy. Still, the child in me, not wanting to accept the divorce, held it all in, all of the things I wanted to say, sucked up in me like a vacuum. I had managed to remain as polite as possible whenever I visited. But now I lost it, wounded that they hadn’t included me in their tree decorating. Standing there with the scraps of my childhood dumped in brown boxes from Ralphs grocery store because there “was no room for them.” To me it meant that Richard didn’t want the baggage that came with my mother. He didn’t want three daughters. He had said to Chloe once, “I’m done raising children. I’m not planning on raising more.” He had two grown sons, whom I’d never met.
I pressed my nose a little harder against the window, and I could see our angel and the ornaments we had made as a family displayed on someone else’s tree, locked in someone else’s home, and I didn’t have a key.
Adrenaline shot through my veins as I got back in the car. I would send my mother an email, that’s what I would do, and tell her how I really felt.
I weaved down the canyon as the sun began to set. The glittering colors and twinkling lights dangling from trees and houses, my father’s voice playing on a loop in my head. “Soon we’ll have a King Air and we’ll be able to go where we want to when we want to. San Francisco for lunch! Aspen for dinner! And we’ll go shopping in Dad’s 1962 Aston Martin DB-4! And our martinis will be shaken not stirred.”
I decided then that I hated Christmas; everyone shopping, happy, cheerful, benevolent—not me. I stormed into the apartment, opened my computer, and hammered out an angry email to my mother.
“I am tired of being polite, tired of biting my tongue, tired of bowing down to your needs, and tired of ‘accepting’ your new life, Mom.”
She was moving on too quickly, and I wanted to press the Pause button. I wanted everyone to stand still and just wait a minute so I could regain my balance, but I kept falling farther and farther behind.
My mother wrote me back doing the best she could to comfort me from afar, letting me know that my feelings of anger were a normal part of the process of learning to accept the things we could not change. “What is done is done,” she said. Having been the daughter of divorced parents herself, she understood that it was doubly hard during the holidays. Of course, I felt her response was preposterous. She didn’t have a father in prison! I was consumed with self-righteous indignation; she couldn’t possibly understand the depths of my pain!
As with my mother, I sensed Mara slipping from me too. She had found refuge in Brian. And Chloe got harder and harder to reach in Santa Barbara; most of the time, she wouldn’t call back at all. I had expectations—a fantasy—that living with Mara would somehow resemble our past despite how everything around us had changed. I was terrified I was losing my sister to a life that excluded me. I was stuck, fixating on our past, and unwilling to embrace any kind of a future. I couldn’t bear watching everyone else move on, because it implied that the family we were had been merely a facade.
A few days before Christmas, I was sitting alone on the balcony of our apartment, smoking a pipeful of marijuana to distance myself further from reality. Doing so was becoming more and more of a habit, along with my drinking for free at the bar. I plucked a fur coat from Mara’s closet and sat with it wrapped around me while I blew smoke rings into the cool air as if I were actress Edie Sedgwick from the Andy Warhol film Poor Little Rich Girl.
I heard the front door slam shut, and knew Mara and Brian wouldn’t be happy with me for breaking their no-smoking rule. But I continued anyway, not knowing how to express what I was experiencing. The bond between us was interrupted by how far I could run from my own grief. I was so afraid of the things I could not say. Instead they were erupting and unfolding in outer rage.
Mara thrust open the glass door to the balcony. “Are you smoking pot in my coat?” she demanded.
I didn’t look at her; I took the lighter, lit the bowl, and continued to smoke.
“You are becoming such a pothead, Christina. Just because you’re unhappy with your life does not mean you can take other people’s things and disrespect our rules.”
“I’m such a pothead? Do you even remember the six-foot bong you smoked out of in college? Stop pretending to be so perfect,” I shot back.
“Take off my coat.”
“No.”
“Take it off.”
“No.”
“Take it off now, or I’m taking your drugs away.” She eyed my Ziploc bag of weed on the table. I sat there, refusing to listen, daring her. Suddenly Mara lunged for the bag, grabbed it, and then ran into the kitchen and dumped it down the garbage disposal.
I gasped, grabbed my lighter, and ran for her Nantucket purse, a gift my father had given her on her eighteenth birthday.
The Nantucket purse is technically a basket. It is a symbol of high status on the island, hand woven with carved scrimshaw (whale bone) in the shape of a whale on top. If you want, and most do, it comes with a mini plaque inside bearing your name and the date the purse was made, engraved in cursive. The basket costs between $2,000 and $10,000, and, depending on how much money you have, one is often put on a wait list.
I held the basket hostage and threatened to light it on fire.
I wanted her to think the same, to feel the same—to survive in the same
way that I was. And in that moment, I wanted to see how far she was from believing the possibility that it was all a lie; that maybe our childhood wasn’t what it had seemed. The drugs, the basket—the things we clung to. We were two opposite extremes in fight-or-flight mode, and there was so much that went unsaid between us. We could never admit, not even to each other, the confusion and the embarrassment we felt after losing our home, after our father’s conviction, after leaving Washington, DC, abruptly for fear of how we would continue to be ostracized.
She lunged at me, and I threw the basket as hard as I could so it broke against the wall.
After Christmas, I’d be moving out.
It was cold and bleak on the quiet Sunset Strip. On Christmas, bars are a place for the lonely, the rebellious, and those whose fears and failures are too painful to face. It was this Christmas that I found myself driving through neighborhoods after the sun had set to peer through yellow-lit windows and watch all the families gathered around the kitchen, where they were safe and warm. In my memory, I kept hearing the sound of John Palmer’s voice reporting from the White House lawn for NBC News, the garage door rumbling open, letting us know that Dad was home, the smells of my mother’s famous banana nut bread and southern-style green beans. The nostalgia pulled me into a euphoric state of mania where I became obsessed, studying each home I drove by and wondering if the families were happy and if everything on the inside was as beautiful as it looked on the outside. I hoped that someday the answer would come to me, or some other force of nature would pull me back to the reality I wanted instead of the one I had been given. There were some nights where I couldn’t even bring myself to drive away—to drive away from some stranger’s life that I wished I could be a part of—to the point where I would make myself late for work. All because I longed to be a part of something other than what I had, and to be anywhere but inside myself.
It was just Jimmy and me working on Christmas. All the other girls had requested the night off, but I didn’t bother. It would be lousy either way. There were only a few customers sitting at tables, sipping on Coronas and eating prepackaged Christmas dinners that left the taste of lingering plastic on your tongue. Slow nights like Christmas were easy, and I could steal things that I needed, like toilet paper. Single rolls of the cheap kind: thin, rough, and wrapped up in tissue tucked in the center. The kind they sell at gas stations. I used to shove a few into the bottom of my purse and cover them with a sweatshirt. I justified it because I needed money for tampons; they were expensive, and it was easy to steal toilet paper as long as the extra rolls were stacked behind the toilet in the bathroom.
I stood sipping a hot toddy in front of Jimmy as “Feliz Navidad” repeated for the fifteenth time. Every so often, Jimmy’s hand would appear clutching a shot of Patrón. “Merry Christmas, baby,” he’d say. I’d shoot it each time. But Christmas was quiet that year, and at around eleven o’clock there were only a few customers left when a man in a New York Giants jersey stumbled over to me. He was about to order something when suddenly yellow liquid and chunks of meat spewed from his mouth, splattering to the dusty floor. He caught part of it with his hands as he lurched toward the bathroom. I jumped back, covering my mouth, and spun around gagging from the sour stench of chewed-up cheap turkey and too much whiskey. I started feeling nauseous from all the Patrón, whiskey, and spices I’d been drinking on an empty stomach. I tried to walk away, assuring myself that I was not responsible for cleaning up the reeking vomit, when Jimmy threw a mop and a bucket at me. “No bussers tonight,” he said.
Before I could shoot him an “are you fucking kidding me?” face, I was conscious of how I would respond, not wanting him to think I was too good to clean up the mess. I closed my eyes, as one does when praying to God, took the mop in my hands, and catatonically dumped it in the orange bucket of soapy water. I mopped the meaty chunks and yellow liquid poured from someone else’s pain, focusing on anything but what was right in front of me.
“On Christmas eve many years ago, I lay quietly in my bed. I did not rustle the sheets. I breathed slowly and silently. I was listening for a sound—a sound a friend had told me I’d never hear—the ringing bells of Santa’s sleigh . . .” My mother’s voice was soft as she read to us from our favorite Christmas story, The Polar Express. Flames popped behind the fireplace screen at the other end of the master bedroom, and the warm glow extended toward us as Mara, Chloe, and I snuggled between Mom and Dad in their king-size bed. Our bellies were full of honey-baked ham, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. Our hand-knit stockings hung from the fireplace downstairs in the family room next to the Oreo cookies, milk, and carrots we left out for Santa and Rudolph.
On Christmas morning, I awoke in Chloe’s other twin bed. Before we moved into the estate in Virginia when I was five, I had been used to sharing a room with Mara. I became easily frightened in my new queen-size bed, so I’d tiptoe into Chloe’s room in the middle of the night to curl up beside her.
I sat up with tousled hair in my white nightgown, looked to the foot of my bed, and gasped. A black Labrador puppy with a red bow tied around her neck was fast asleep.
Trying to restrain my excitement, I whispered, “Chloe!” She was drooling on her pillow in the bed across from me.
“What?” she mumbled, cracking open her eyes.
“Look!”
Chloe lifted her head to look down at the foot of my bed and then shot up. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “A puppy!”
The little black Lab rolled over stretching her hind legs as she yawned. Then she leapt into my lap and began licking my face. Chloe giggled and jumped from her bed to my bed so she could pet our new furry friend.
Through her lace curtains, I could see the bare trees and white sky preparing for the snowstorm that was coming our way.
“Mara! Wake up!” Chloe cried.
A note dangled from the puppy’s red ribbon: “To Mara, Christina, and Chloe—Take care of her for me. Merry Christmas. Love, Santa.”
We ran downstairs as our new puppy tumbled after us. We skipped through the dining room, through the loggia, and into the family room, where the cookies and carrots had been eaten and the milk had been drunk. Dozens of presents swallowed the tree, and our stockings were stuffed to the brim. Like clockwork, Dad would make us his famous pancakes before we opened presents.
“Dad, it’s going to hit the ceiling!” we cried.
“One more time, one more time,” he insisted. He expertly flipped the pancake high in the air, shuffled his feet while concentrating on the airborne pancake, and then, falling to his knees, caught it in the pan before it hit the floor.
“Perfecto!” Dad yelled.
Once the video camera was recording and my mother had her cup of coffee, we ravaged through presents like three Tasmanian devils, “Nintendo 64!” “Look at my dollhouse!” “Life-size Barbie!” “Mom, look! It’s Addy! The new American Girl doll!” My parents would laugh and look at each other, knowing they had done their job well.
With snowflakes falling from the sky, we stayed in our pajamas all day by the fire in the family room, playing with our new toys. But what I remember the most was my father sitting by the fire with his reading glasses on, a cup of hot tea in front of him. He was reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The 1844 classic novel tells the story of a young Frenchman who is wrongfully incarcerated, escapes from prison, and obtains a fortune while plotting his revenge.
It was his favorite book.
I washed my hands over and over again with the pink soap that made the skin of my fingers crack, and I missed Josh. Since we’d visited my father in prison, we hadn’t seen each other often. It had been the longest we were apart from each other. He had meant it in Sheryl’s office when he said that his going with me to see my father didn’t mean we were getting back together. But I didn’t want to be alone on Christmas.
Josh opened the front door, surprised to see me. He wiped his eyes, bloodshot and sleepy. It was three in the morning by the ti
me I showed up.
“Christina,” he sighed, looking at me shivering on his doorstep in my black hoodie.
My mother had heard from Madeline that Josh was trying to move on and was dating other people. At the time, I said I didn’t care, even when I did. I knew he wouldn’t turn me away, because it was Christmas. It didn’t matter to me how anyone loved me that night. Just as long as I didn’t have to listen to the stillness inside me for fear of what it might say.
I bent over the bathroom sink and lifted my skirt, as if Josh taking me in were a favor he’d done, and this was how I wanted to return it. I remember looking into the bathroom mirror and seeing his reflection behind me. It was as though we were trying to will ourselves back to love, back to the days of The Partridge Family where we still felt innocent, where my heart beat fast at the thought of sitting next to him at the lunch table, before the affairs, before the divorces, before the lying and the stealing and the cheating—before prison.
“What’s wrong with you?” one of us had said, both of us sweating and shocked that neither one could come.
“Nothing.”
It was everything. Josh walked away, wiping the sweat off his face. I knew that the kind of love we’d had for each other wasn’t sustainable anymore and that running back there had been a mistake. But I followed him into the bedroom, where we crawled into bed without saying a word. I would hold on to him for one more night, hoping that I would wake up and feel something different.
The next morning, I woke up hungover, my hair reeking of cigarette smoke. I put on my Corona belly shirt that smelled of Patrón and was sticky with specks of salt, when Josh sat up in bed and looked at me. “So what does this mean? Do you want to get back together?” Finally, the words I wanted to hear, but just as they became real, I looked at him and couldn’t give him an answer. Afraid to say no—afraid of who I’d be without him. And afraid to say yes—afraid of who I’d become if I stayed with him. Wishing ambiguity could be our answer.
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