by Carlson, Ron
Every year on the day after Halloween, I tip the sled out of the rafters in the garage and Elise and I sponge it off, clean the beautiful dark blond wood with furniture polish, enamel the nicked spots on the runner supports with black engine paint, and rub the runners themselves with waxed paper. It is a ritual done on the same plaid blanket in the garage and it takes all afternoon. When we are finished, we lean the sled against the wall, and Elise marches into the house. “Okay now,” she says to her mother: “Let it snow.”
ON THE first Friday night in December, every year, Elise and Drew and I go buy our tree. This too is ritual. Like those families that bundle up and head for the wilderness so they can trudge through the deep, pristine snow, chop down their own little tree, and drag it, step by step, all the way home, we venture forth in the same spirit. Only we take the old pickup down to South State and find some joker who has thrown up two strings of colored lights around the corner of the parking lot of a burned-out Safeway and is proffering trees to the general public.
There is something magical and sad about this little forest just sprung up across from City Tacos, and Drew and Elise and I wander the wooded paths, waiting for some lopsided piñon to leap into our hearts.
The winter Drew and I became serious, when I was a senior and she was already in her first year at law school, I sold Christmas trees during vacation. I answered a card on a dorm bulletin board and went to work for a guy named Geer, who had cut two thousand squat piñons from the hills east of Cedar City and was selling them from a dirt lot on Redwood Road. Drew’s mother invited me to stay with them for the holidays, and it gave me the chance to help Drew make up her mind about me. I would sell trees until midnight with Geer, and then drive back to Drew’s and watch every old movie in the world and wrestle with Drew until our faces were mashed blue. I wanted to complicate things wonderfully by having her sleep with me. She wanted to keep the couch cushions between us and think it over. It was a crazy Christmas; we’d steam up the windows in the entire living room, but she never gave in. We did develop the joke about “condition,” which we still use as a code word for desire. And later, I won’t say if it was spring or fall, when Drew said to me, “I’d like to see you about this condition,” I knew everything was going to be all right, and that we’d spend every Christmas together for the rest of our lives.
One night during that period, I delivered a tree to University Village, the married students’ housing off Sunnyside. The woman was waiting for me with the door open as I dragged the pine up the steps to the second floor. She was a girl, really, about twenty, and her son, about three, watched the arrival from behind her. When I had the tree squeezed into the apartment, she asked if I could just hold it for a minute while she found her tree stand. If you ever need to stall for a couple of hours, just say you’re looking for your tree stand; I mean the girl was gone for about twenty minutes. I stood and exchanged stares with the kid, who was scared; he didn’t understand why some strange man had brought a tree into his home. “Christmas,” I told him. “Christmas. Can you say ‘Merry Christ- mas’?” I was an idiot.
When the girl returned with her tree stand, she didn’t seem in any hurry to set it up. She came over to me and showed me the tree stand, holding it up for an explanation as to how it worked. Close up the girl’s large eyes had an odd look in them, and then I understood it when she leaned through the boughs and kissed me. It was a great move; I had to hand it to her. There I was holding the tree; I couldn’t make a move either way. It has never been among my policies to kiss strangers, but I held the kiss and the tree. Something about her eyes. She stepped back with the sweetest look of embarrassment and hope on her pretty face that I’d ever seen. “Just loosen the turn-screws in the side of that stand,” I said, finally. “And we can put this tree up.”
By the time I had the tree secured, she had returned again with a box of ornaments, lights, junk like that, and I headed for the door. “Thanks,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
Her son had caught on by now and was fully involved in unloading the ornaments. The girl looked up at me, and this time I saw it all: her husband coming home in his cap and gown last June, saying, “Thanks for law school, honey, but I met Doris at the Juris-Prudence Ball and I gotta be me. Keep the kid.”
The girl said to me, “You could stay and help.”
It seemed like two statements to me, and so I answered them separately: “Thank you. But I can’t stay; that’s the best help. Have a good Christmas.”
And I left them there together, decorating that tree; a ritual against the cold.
“HOW DO you like it?” Elise says to me. She has selected a short broad bush which seems to have grown in two directions at once and then given up. She sees the look on my face and says, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Besides, I’ve already decided: this is the tree for us.”
“It’s a beautiful tree,” Drew says.
“Quasimodo,” I whisper to Drew. “This tree’s name is Quasimodo.”
“No whispering,” Elise says from behind us. “What’s he saying now, Mom?”
“He said he likes the tree, too.”
Elise is not convinced and after a pause she says, “Dad. It’s Christmas. Behave yourself.”
When we go to pay for the tree, the master of ceremonies is busy negotiating a deal with two kids, a punk couple. The tree man stands with his hands in his change apron and says, “I gotta get thirty-five bucks for that tree.” The boy, a skinny kid in a leather jacket, shrugs and says he’s only got twenty-eight bucks. His girlfriend, a large person with a bowl haircut and a monstrous black overcoat festooned with buttons, is wailing, “Please! Oh no! Jimmy! Jimmy! I love that tree! I want that tree!” The tree itself stands aside, a noble pine of about twelve feet. Unless these kids live in a gymnasium, they’re buying a tree bigger than their needs.
Jimmy retreats to his car, an old Plymouth big as a boat. “Police Rule” is spraypainted across both doors in balloon letters. He returns instantly and opens a hand full of coins. “I’ll give you thirty-one bucks, fifty-five cents, and my watch.” To our surprise, the wily tree man takes the watch to examine it. When I see that, I give Elise four dollars and tell her to give it to Kid Jimmy and say, “Merry Christmas.” His girlfriend is still wailing but now a minor refrain of “Oh Jimmy, that tree! Oh Jimmy, etc.” I haven’t seen a public display of emotion and longing of this magnitude in Salt Lake City, ever. I watch Elise give the boy the money, but instead of saying, “Merry Christmas,” I hear her say instead: “Here, Jimmy. Santa says keep your watch.”
Jimmy pays for the tree, and his girl—and this is the truth—jumps on him, wrestles him to the ground in gratitude and smothers him for nearly a minute. There have never been people happier about a Christmas tree. We pay quickly and head out before Jimmy or his girlfriend can think to begin thanking us.
On the way home in the truck, I say to Elise, “Santa says keep your watch, eh?”
“Yes, he does,” she smiles.
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Eight.”
It’s an old joke, and Drew finishes it for me: “When he was your age, he was seven.”
We will go home and while the two women begin decorating the tree with the artifacts of our many Christmases together, I will thread popcorn onto a long string. It is a ritual I prefer for its uniqueness; the fact that once a year I get to sit and watch the two girls I am related to move about a tree inside our home, while I sit nearby and sew food.
ON THE morning of the twenty-fourth of December, Elise comes into our bedroom, already dressed for sledding. “Good news,” she says. “We’ve got a shot at the record.”
Drew rises from the pillow and peeks out the blind. “It’s snowing,” she says.
Christmas Eve, we drive back along the snowy Avenues, and park on Fifth, as always. “I know,” Elise says, hopping out
of the car. “You two used to live right over there before you had me and it was a swell place and only cost seventy-two fifty a month, honest.”
Drew looks at me and smiles.
“How old are you?” I ask Elise, but she is busy towing the sled away, around the corner, up toward Eleventh Avenue. It is still snowing, petal flakes, teeming by the streetlamps, trying to carry the world away. I take Drew’s hand and we walk up the middle of H Street behind our daughter. There is no traffic, but the few cars have packed the tender snow perfectly. It could be a record. On Ninth Avenue, Drew stops me in the intersection, the world still as snow, and kisses me. “I love you,” she says.
“What a planet,” I whisper. “To allow such a thing.”
By the time we climb to Eleventh Avenue, Elise is seated on the sled, ready to go. “What are you guys waiting for, Christmas?” she says and then laughs at her own joke. Then she becomes all business: “Listen, Dad, I figure if you stay just a little to the left of the tire tracks we could go all the way. And no wobbling!” She’s referring to last year’s record attempt, which was extinguished in the Eighth Avenue block when we laughed ourselves into a fatal wobble and ended in a slush heap.
We arrange ourselves on the sled, as we have each Christmas Eve for eight years. As I reach my long legs around these two women, I sense their excitement. “It’s going to be a record!” Elise whispers into the whispering snow.
“Do you think so?” Drew asks. She also feels this could be the night.
“Oh yeah!” Elise says. “The conditions are perfect!”
“What do you think?” Drew turns to me.
“Well, the conditions are perfect.”
When I say conditions, Drew leans back and kisses me. So I press: “There’s still room on the sled,” I say, pointing to the “F” in Flexible Flyer that is visible between Elise’s legs. “There’s still room for another person.”
“Who?” Elise asks.
“Your little brother,” Drew says, squeezing my knees.
And that’s about all that was said, sitting up there on Eleventh Avenue on Christmas Eve on a sled which is as old as my marriage with a brake that is as old as my daughter. Later tonight I will stand in my yard and throw this year’s reindeer droppings on my very own home. I love Christmas.
Now the snow spirals around us softly. I put my arms around my family and lift my feet onto the steering bar. We begin to slip down H Street. We are trying for the record. The conditions, as you know by now, are perfect.
SANTA MONICA
I’M IN the King’s Head at the end of Santa Monica Boulevard drinking my fourth pint of bitter wondering if maybe I should eat something and just go home. I’m sitting under the window watching one guy play darts against himself, and he’s not very good. Judith called and said to meet, so I’ll stay. The bitter is good; I haven’t been here for a couple of months, so I might as well wait it out. If she doesn’t show, maybe she’s not in trouble after all.
I’m trying to make a catalogue in my head of all the pubs in Hampstead. It’s been two years, but I remember the Three Horseshoes at the High Street, where we’d go and watch the teenagers pick each other up. Monday nights they had poetry readings upstairs. I remember one guy read poems with a dummy; he was a ventriloquist. And there was Sir Something who was ninety-six years old. He read from a book he had published at twenty and talked ironically between the poems about what a stupid young man he had been. It was hilarious, but at the end, he said something like he was glad they had asked him to read, but it was the saddest thing he could remember doing. He had to be helped to a chair. Late that spring they invited Judith to read, but we were packing by then for the return.
Across the street, there was the Bird in Hand, which was full of worn-out working men, and down a block was the King of Bohemia, which was warm and cozy, always half full of older married couples. The women had learned to drink. We had lunch in there on Tuesday’s, back in the nook by the aquarium. Across the zebra from the Bohemia was King Henry the Fourth, which was gay and way too small, but they had a little garden. All the men in velvet drinking John Courage, everybody’s hands above the table, moving. And then down the street, below the fish-market and the newsstand and the doner-kabob shop, was the simplest pub of all, the Rosslyn Arms, which was where we drank, where we met all the American teachers, and where Gordon would get drunk and finger each new necklace Judith wore—the smashed penny, the Parcheesi tokens—pulling her as close as people get while talking to each other. He was as big as a bear and would always get drunk and offer to “bite her bottom,” but he was harmless. He wasn’t a writer. It was in the Rosslyn Arms where I learned to play real darts, in fact, where behind the bar, in one of the three cigar boxes, my best darts sit right now.
I order another bitter from the girl, and I notice she’s a pretty girl about twenty-six, and I tell myself again: I’ve got to begin noticing women, but by the time she returns with the pint, I’ve begun my catalogue again, going way to the top of the High Street, at the corner of the heath, and I’m starting with Jack Straw’s Castle. I’m trying to decide whether or not to include The Spaniards, where Judith and I walked only one day, but we were too late for lunch and the staff was all cranky. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Judith lifts my glass and drains the whole pint until I can see her eyes closed through the bottom of the glass.
“Hello, Douglas,” she says. “Let’s eat later.” She leads me outside.
If we were strangers, or acquaintances, or anything less than what we are, whatever that is, I would now ask What’s up?, but we don’t talk that way. There is going to be some theater first, I see, as Judith walks two steps ahead of me across the boulevard, through the park, and down the winding steps to the beach. She’s wearing a blue oxford shirt under the brown baggy cardigan I bought her in Hampstead. She always wears clothes from the old days when she meets me.
There aren’t many people out, since it’s a gray day in February, but there is a brighter band of light on the horizon and a warm breeze comes off the sea. I walk behind Judith and kind of enjoy it; the air feels good and I’m full of beer. The light over the ocean makes it seem as if there is a lot of the day left. It’s sunny for brunch in Hawaii. I swing my legs, stepping in every other of her footprints. It feels wonderful to move this way; she can take her time. I don’t really want to hear about Reichert or the studio.
Judith walks in a forced jaunt, bunched a little against the weather, her fingers in her sweater pockets.
“You kind of walk like David Niven,” I say to her back. I’m suddenly thinking this doesn’t have to be a terrible interview; the beer has made me careless. She walks on. I let her go a little farther ahead, and then I follow doing crazy steps: five-foot leaps and then micro-steps, inches apart. Backward steps, duck steps, and then a few real long side steps. She’ll see this stuff on the way back.
We approach a couple who have committed themselves to a full-scale beach picnic. They are both sitting on a real checked tablecloth and we hear the man say “Voila!” to the young woman as he pulls a bottle of red wine from a large basket. He is wearing a dark sweater which I see has a large crimson “H” on the front. I’ve seen him in the story department at Paramount.
Judith stops. “Where are we going?”
As she faces me, I see the new necklace, a silver doodah of some kind. When she first came out, she wore a half pence and a New York subway token. When she finally moved in with Reichert, she made a string with six of my cigarette filters, painted turquoise, to make it look like it was my fault. She wants to show me this new one and holds it out. Taking it in my hand, I am as close to her as I’ve been in ten months.
“Pretty, right?” I see it is a smashed .38 cartridge. “I found it last week at the bottom of the swimming pool.”
We start back, but I steer her higher along the beach. I don’t want to see those tracks in the
sand after all. “You want to go up to the pier?” I say. “You always like the pier.”
“The guy back there, the Harvard guy,” Judith says, now walking beside me, “he’s at Paramount in the story department.”
On the pier I finally ask her why she has the day off. She says that a rat has died in the office and they can’t find it even though there are two carpenters taking all the video cabinets apart, and the smell is so bad that Reichert sent everybody home. “He’s taking meetings at the house, telling everybody that they’re so special he’s meeting them in private. Today, it’s Jamie Curtis. The smell is bad, but you get used to it. I just couldn’t take those two stoned carpenters taking the doors off everything and chuckling their heads off.”
We buy ten tokens and go into the arcade. She leads me down all three aisles of video games and then back to the booth where she says to the kid: “Don’t you have any of the old games? Where’s Space Invaders?”
All the games we’ve seen have “Mega” in the titles. The kid points out a Donkey Kong game in the corner which has seen a lot of use. Judith makes me go first and then she asks questions: “What do you think the point of this game is?” “Do you think the girl is even worth saving?” I’m trying to concentrate, but the little guy acts drunk. He can’t decide which ladder to take, and Judith is beside me doing her show: “Do you think the guy really wants the girl?” I never get him above the second tier. The flaming barrel drops right on our heads.
Then, while she plays, she makes statements. She moves him expertly up the levels and says, “The guy could care less about the girl. He wants to get near the ape. He’s just curious.” She jumps two barrels at once and says, “See this, the guy only likes the outing; he loves to jump the barrels.” He seems to run faster when she plays. Judith takes him all the way to the top three times, but when he reaches the girl, Judith steps back, hands off the controls, and lets the monkey grab them both and close the game. “It’s fate,” she says. “I’m not getting in the way.”