by Jim Shepard
He made a face. “I’ll get some cereal.”
He poured the cereal and ate across from his mother, waiting, but nothing happened. Usually they said Happy Birthday, and his mother had once had special pastries for breakfast. Some years, though, they forgot, and this was one of them. He finished the Sanka, his feet cold in his slippers, and went upstairs to dress.
In school it was the beginning of the final week of Advent, and they returned to the chapel, where Sister had all four candles lit, and sang in the dark, starting with “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and finishing, this time, with “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Laura stood near him. Between songs she whispered, “Happy Birthday.”
When he got home, his father was in the kitchen and asked him if he wanted to go look for a tree. He agreed, surprised, dropped his book bag in a chair, and they left on the spot.
They searched through four different places, wandering up and down endless crooked aisles of trees, examining candidate after candidate that seemed fine to Biddy but never quite right to his father. When they left the fourth lot, he suggested one more place.
They didn’t find anything there, either. It was in Shelton, and by the time they pulled onto Route 8 for the drive back it was dark. Halfway home they stopped at a shopping center and his father ran in and bought razor blades, napkins, and camera film.
When they finally reached their driveway, it was ten after six. He wondered abstractedly if his mother would be angry at their being late.
Opening the back door, he saw his uncle’s car parked across the way in the Frasers’ driveway, recognizing it even in the gloom, and it hit him all at once before he stepped inside and the chorus of voices called “Surprise!” He remained in the doorway with his parents behind him, looking on a kitchen transformed with streamers, presents, faces. Two balloons drifted along the ceiling. Dom was there, Cindy, Louis, Teddy, uncles and aunts and cousins. Kristi, Simon, Ronnie, and Laura, holding her present against her leg. A white-and-brown cake lay centered on the table. The writing on the frosting was illegible.
His mother stepped around him. “Did we surprise you?”
He came farther in, admitting he’d seen his Uncle Michael’s car. Everyone groaned and spoke at once, largely to his Uncle Michael.
“Did we fool you up to that point?” his mother said.
He assured her they had. They led him to a seat and began to pile presents before him on the kitchen table, stacking them on the floor near his feet when they ran out of space. They demanded he open them and talked while he did about the preparations he had missed, the times they had been convinced they’d given the whole thing away. He didn’t remember any of the instances they spoke about. As he opened each present, someone claimed it as his or hers: toys from Teddy and Simon, one or two books, and clothes from everyone else. He thanked everyone, unsure what to do next, and the party began to gain an energy independent of him. One by one everyone shook his hand and wished him Happy Birthday, even Simon, who seemed proud to have been given his own separate opportunity. His Aunt Sandy kissed him and Teddy punched him on the arm. Cindy hugged him cheek to cheek, and he could smell her skin and the soap she washed with. Frank Sinatra came on the stereo. He slipped down the hall and into the den, Stupid barking and scratching at the cellar door as he went by.
Laura and Louis were watching the news. Rescuers were kneeling over a hole in the ice. Louis took the party hat off his head. Along the bottom of the screen, “Winter Storm Warning” was announced in small yellow letters. Motorists were advised not to drive unless absolutely necessary. In the other rooms, attention was also moving toward the weather: the snow was coming down harder.
The party started to break up. Michael and Sandy, with their long drive, left almost immediately, coming into the den to wish him one more Happy Birthday before leaving. Simon’s mother arrived to pick him up and Teddy’s parents phoned and told him to head home before it got much worse. A steady stream of people seemed to be saying goodbye, and then it was quiet. With Louis intent on the television, Laura reached under her chair and pulled out her present.
“Here,” she said. “I didn’t want to give it to you then.”
It was one of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. He held it with both hands and thanked her.
“Was it a surprise?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I’m glad.” He heard the doorbell over the noise in the kitchen and his father began to call her.
“That’s my mother,” she said, pushing herself out of her chair. “Bye. Happy Birthday.”
“Thanks,” he repeated, still holding the book.
No one flipped the Sinatra record when it finished. The sounds from the kitchen were subdued; only the Lirianos remained. His father called him.
Ronnie was standing away from the table, leaning against the counter. His parents and Cindy sat with their backs to the wall; Dom and Ginnie were more in the center of the room.
“C’mon in here,” his father said. “This is supposed to be your party.”
The presents had been moved to the back porch to make way for the liquor, coffee, and cake. His father sipped some anisette. “You made out like a bandit.”
“He gets two Christmases this year,” his mother said.
Cindy gestured toward the table. “You never had a piece of cake.”
“You never got our present either,” his mother said. She handed forward a small wrapped package. While they cut him a piece of cake, he opened it. It was a silver digital watch with a large face. The face reflected the lights on the ceiling.
“Seiko,” his mother said.
He lifted it from its box and snapped it around his wrist, and it slid around and down his arm, too big.
“It’s great,” he said. “Thanks.”
Ronnie raised a glass. “Here’s to the birthday boy,” he said. “Eustace Lee Siebert.”
“Eustace Lee,” Dom said.
“Eustace Lee.” They raised their glasses.
“Thirteen today,” his mother said.
“God help us,” Ginnie said. They drank.
He wandered into the den. “I think we choked him up,” he heard his father say.
Louis was dozing, his head to one side. The party hat was on the floor near his feet. Biddy sat down and pulled his legs up onto the chair, holding the book on aircraft in one hand and the Seiko watch in the other.
A commercial ended and Charlie Brown appeared. His head was down and he walked off the screen, leaving a tiny tree bent in half by an oversized ornament hung from its top. The rest of the Peanuts cast walked on and decided it wasn’t such a bad tree after all. They surrounded it, and when they backed off it was sumptuously decorated and no longer scrawny. Charlie Brown came back on screen and they all faced him, spread out behind the tree. Biddy wrapped his arms around his legs and held on, watch clacking on the book cover.
They all shouted: “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!” And started to sing: “Hark! the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King.’” Charlie Brown joined in, and after a chorus, so did Biddy, his eyes watering and his knees pulled in tight against his chest, mouthing the words as the screen filled with falling snow and credits.
Obtaining Clearance
Everyone asks about my brother and no one asks about me. I bent my finger all the way back a while ago and showed them, and they told me if it hurt the next day we’d go to the doctor. They didn’t ask me about it the next day. It still hurts and I don’t care and they don’t care.
The Sisters never yell at him. They said to me once I wasn’t as good as he was. They try to hurt me but they can’t. They all try, but they can’t. They can make me stand in front of the class and apologize or sit in the office alone. They can tell my parents things. I don’t care. When I get old, I’m going to Long Island or England, and I’m never going to see anyone again.
I’m tired of talking about him. He’s a baby sometimes. He never cries or yells but he gets his way anyway, and it doesn’t matter
what I do. When I do anything I’m just bad, but everyone treats him like Louis, and that’s not fair, because Louis is retarded.
Biddy lifted a stack of boxes from the bottom, raising himself slowly to his full height and pausing to make sure everything was balanced. The ornaments shook and rattled in the boxes like bones.
“Dad, you want all of these?” he called.
“Bring ’em all.”
He stepped gingerly into the hallway and took the stairs one at a time, the boxes shifting slightly every so often. He was leaning backward as far as he dared so that they would all rest gently against his chest. His head was turned aside for the top box, which lay against his cheek.
At the bottom step he stopped, unsure how best to execute the turn around the foyer into the living room.
“Oh, look at this,” his mother said. “Walt, look at this.”
He stood teetering, face to the wall and cool cardboard on his cheek.
The top box was lifted away and he could see his parents again. “Sometimes I don’t know about you, kid,” his father said. “All we needed was for you to trip coming down those stairs.”
More boxes were taken from him, and the two he was left with seemed weightless. He imagined the unlucky step near the top, his foot catching, knee bending sharply and unexpectedly, boxes spilling out in a lazy arc, the fragile flat sound of shattering Christmas ornaments, his wrists and elbows and knees landing on the boxes and stairs.
“C’mon here,” his father said. “Start unwrapping.”
His mother had their trim-the-tree music on the stereo, The Voices of Christmas, a hodgepodge of different artists’ versions of Christmas carols. Mahalia Jackson was singing “Silent Night.”
His father had picked out the perfect tree, and they’d sawed a good two feet from the top in the garage to fit it to the living room. Then they’d wrestled it onto the tripod base, where it had swayed unsettlingly, a full fifteen degrees off the perpendicular, and they’d sawed at the trunk once again at an angle and jammed chips of wood into the cylinder that held it in the tripod to straighten it. At present it stood, with reasonable steadiness, in front of the picture window. It really was a beautiful tree, although a bit full at the ceiling, and the living room was beginning to smell of pine.
Open boxes of ornaments were laid out on the couch side to side. He lingered over his favorite, a rose-colored, grapefruit-sized sphere with hand-painted red and silver bands. It had been part of a pair, and Lady had broken the other years ago as a puppy. His mother claimed they had belonged to her grandmother—they were that old—and if anything happened to this one she’d throw herself under a truck.
His father finished the lights and Biddy crawled underneath the lowest branches and plugged them in. He remained there, gazing up through the tangle at the artfully spaced colors. His parents circled the tree critically, replacing dead bulbs and exchanging a red for a green here or there to balance out the colors. He lay on his back on the rug, with pine needles poking his neck and tree-sap and wood smell filling the air. Danny Kaye was singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” His eyes followed the trunk of the tree from branch to branch and from color to color. So many of his most cherished moments he forgot from year to year, he realized.
His father pulled on his foot. “Hey. Let’s go. You pass away under there? Ornaments.”
They circled the tree slowly, ornaments swaying from each hand and catching the lights on their curved surfaces. Space them out, his father told him. Look for the gaps in the branches.
He found himself considering Cindy and her lie in the sporting-goods store. The image of her at the moment of the lie nagged at him.
His sister came into the living room and turned the stereo down. “I can’t hear my show,” she said.
“We still have to get something for Michael and Sandy,” his mother said. “And Cindy. What should we get for Cindy, Biddy?” She was concentrating on a clear ornament with a skiing scene inside.
“We can get her a gold chain or something,” his father said. “We’ll find something tomorrow.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with those two.”
“Who?” Biddy asked.
“It doesn’t concern you,” his mother said.
“Cindy and Ronnie?”
“If you don’t start hanging ornaments, we’re going to put a lantern in your hand and stick you in the front yard,” his father said.
Christmas was harder to stay with this year, he was noticing, harder to appreciate, to focus on. He set the ornament he held down on the stereo and lifted the tone arm on the turntable, interrupting “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and easing the needle back down with a crackle at the beginning of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
His mother woke him at seven the next morning. School had ended for Christmas break the day before, with grab-bag presents (he’d forgotten his and so hadn’t been allowed to draw one) and a half day, but the choir needed a final practice, Sister felt, so they were meeting at 8:00 a.m. three days before Christmas to give it one final attempt. This choir was going to come together, Sister said, no matter what the naysayers thought.
They sat in the places they would occupy on Christmas Eve. The church was cold and dark and the chapel colder. There was very little enthusiasm, even for misbehaving. Sister quietly went through the program. The robes still hadn’t arrived, but they could pick them up the day after tomorrow. Teddy sat behind him, pulling licorice sticks apart on his lap. Biddy put his hands behind his back for some. He tore off a piece, his eyes on Sister, and handed the rest back.
“You got it all sweaty,” Teddy whispered in his ear.
The trick was to chew when he could and not let the licorice interfere with his voice when he couldn’t.
They were two choruses into “Angels We Have Heard on High” when Sister said, “Stand up, Mr. Bell.”
Biddy froze and Teddy stood, wobbling a bit, his jaws clamping down on the licorice.
“Sing it, mister,” she said, and played the first few chords. Teddy began, with no chance of hiding the fact that something was in his mouth. Sister came over to him and took his chin in her hand and put her fingers in his mouth, to everyone’s horror, moving them around until she had located the offending object and pulled it out.
“Eeyou,” Sarah Alice said from the back, Sister or no, some of the others involuntarily echoing her, transfixed at the sight of the black goo dripping from the length of Sister’s finger: “Eeyou, eeyou, eeyou.”
“So how did Teddy Bell get himself kicked off the choir with three days to go?” Biddy’s mother asked. She had the happy air of someone making her final shopping trip of the season. She settled herself, adjusting the front seat, while Biddy got in.
“How did you know that?” he said.
“His mother told me. He won’t tell her why.”
He put his hand over the dash, tracing dust. “He was eating licorice.”
“During practice?”
He nodded.
“That was all?”
“He was grossed out by her finger, too. She took it right out of his mouth.”
“Did he say anything?” They backed out of the driveway, the house edging past. “I can’t believe that was all he did. Three days before the Mass she gets rid of him?”
He shrugged. “She’ll take him back, I think. We were short even with him.”
There were two roads out of Lordship, both through the great salt marshes that isolated it from Bridgeport and Stratford. During the great hurricane of 1955, when the flood waters had risen ten to twelve feet, there had been no roads out of Lordship. On a map the peninsula hung southward into Long Island Sound like the tattered hem of a dress. To the west his father’s Burma Road connected directly to Bridgeport, passing south of the airport into Interstate 95. To the north, the route they followed, Stratford Road, led to Stratford, past Avco Lycoming Industries and, again, the airport. They drove in a lazy arc around one of the runways guarded by h
urricane fences and lights, the tarmac freshly plowed and now stained by melting snow. The airport and all it was beginning to represent to him had been happily muffled somewhat in the last few days, and yet here it was, back again, parading before him and unwinding in a string of tarmac, lights, hangars, towers, and planes that seemed a kind of dark parody of temptation. And he realized that even if they’d taken the other route, the effect would have been the same: there was no way out of Lordship that did not run past the airport. The realization did nothing to lessen the feeling that something somewhere was steering his affairs.
He had been collecting information on Cessnas and how to fly them. It was a passing idea that was beginning to take shape and, like the sailboat that stormy afternoon, to thrust itself upon him.
His mother’s left turn through the terminal gates and into the parking area seemed additional confirmation. Enjoying his surprise, she explained only as they passed the hangars that they were meeting his father, who was putting in a half day and picking up a package for Sikorsky.
His father hadn’t arrived yet; they had to wait. Biddy sat facing the panorama of the winter airport, surprised at how relentlessly it suggested itself to him. Piper Cubs and Cessnas were lined wing to wing toward the sun, the silver wings glinting over the cockpits and creating the illusion of a single long band of metal or a straight-edged frozen stream leading into the Sound and beyond. The snow edged the tarmac around them unevenly, stubby lights on the shoulders emerging here and there like winter growths.
To his right the tower rose on the other side of the runway, two stories high with a line of simple, oddly shaped antennae rising from its top. Nothing seemed to be moving. The enormous hangars shielded many of the aircraft parking areas from view, either from the tower or from the Bridgeport Flight Service. In the distance a bluff rose behind the far runway, surmounted by a fence that was the end of Birch Street. The small-scale geography was conspiring even there, he realized; the street he lived on was a dead end, leading to the airport.