Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  He gave the bellboy another twenty-dollar bill and said, “I am going downstairs to check out. Bring the bird and call me a taxi.” He walked by the security guard without looking at him.

  “Careful with that knife,” he said.

  —

  DAVE GOT HOME at six. He put Butch on the table. The family was due back any minute. He poured himself a drink and sat down in the living room. The house looked beautiful—smelled beautiful—like a pine forest.

  “My forest,” said Dave. Then he said, “Uh-oh,” and jumped up. He got a ladle of the turkey gravy, and he ran around the house smearing it on light bulbs. There, he thought. He went outside and stood on the stoop and counted to twenty-five. Then he went back in and breathed deeply. The house smelled like…like Christmas.

  He looked out the window. Morley was coming up the walk…with Jim Scoffield and his mother.

  “We met them outside. I invited them in for a drink.”

  “Oh. Great,” said Dave. “I’ll get the drinks.”

  Dave went to the kitchen then came back to see Jim sitting on the couch under the tall swinging lamp, a drop of gravy glistening on his balding forehead. Dave watched another drop fall. Saw the puzzled look cross Jim’s face as he reached up, wiped his forehead, and brought his fingers to his nose. Morley and Jim’s mother had not noticed anything yet. Dave saw another drop about to fall. Thought, Any moment now the Humane Society is going to knock on the door. Sent by the hotel.

  He took a long swig of his drink and placed his glass by Morley’s hand-painted paper napkins.

  “Morley, could you come here?” he said softly.

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  DAVE RECEIVED HIS new driver’s licence in the mail at the beginning of October. It was accompanied by a letter that began:

  Dear Sir,

  We were pleased to note that you are no longer required to wear corrective lenses.

  Dave has never worn glasses in his life. Somewhere in the pit of his stomach he felt a queasy twinkle…like the birth of a star in a distant galaxy.

  Before we can change the category code on your Driver’s Licence, [the note continued] we must receive notification from an optometrist of the change in your vision.

  Dave’s vision hadn’t changed in twenty years. The star in his stomach was burning brightly now. Ahh, thought Dave, I know the name of the galaxy. It’s the galaxy of bureaucratic misfortune—an abyss of swamps and labyrinths, a horror house of tunnels and mazes. Dealing with the letter would be like playing a real-life game of Snakes and Ladders. With a sinking heart Dave finished reading the note.

  We have reissued your permit subject to the following conditions.

  At the bottom of the letter it said:

  Driver must wear corrective lenses.

  Dave knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Do you have any idea,” he said to Morley, “how long you have to wait to get an appointment with an eye doctor?”

  The next morning, when Morley woke up, Dave was lying on his back, his hands cupped behind his head. He was staring at the ceiling. “This is the sort of thing that sends people into clock towers with high-powered rifles,” he said.

  —

  OCTOBER, AND THEN November, came and went. By early December Dave still hadn’t made even a half-hearted attempt to schedule a doctor’s appointment.

  “I’m too busy,” he said, when Morley asked.

  December is the busiest time of the year if you work in retail and things had been busy enough at the record store, but they both knew this was a lie. By the middle of the month Morley was ready to force the issue. Then she thought, He’s an adult. Why should I be the bad guy? Instead, as he left for work on Saturday morning, she reminded Dave that they were expected at Ted and Polly Anderson’s annual Christmas “At Home” that night. As he stood at the front door, his parka open, his hat askew, Dave gave Morley a look that said, Please say I can stay home and watch the hockey game?

  Morley was sitting on the stairs, frowning into her open briefcase. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “We have to go.”

  Dave’s shoulders sagged. “Okay,” he said. “But let’s go early and leave early.”

  And that’s how Dave came to be standing in his driveway, yelling impatiently at Sam, on Saturday evening at 5:30. “Just come without your jacket,” he said. “You don’t need your jacket. The car is warmed up. Just come.”

  Sam bounded down the front steps, his shoelaces undone, his shirt untucked, and jumped into the car beside his father.

  “Back seat,” said Dave as Sam reached for the radio.

  Morley was next. Slipping into the car and examining her lipstick in the mirror on the back of the sun visor.

  Dave had to send Sam back to fetch Stephanie.

  “What’s the hurry?” she said, slumping into the back seat. “No one will be there yet. This is stupid. There’s never anyone my age. Do I have to come?”

  They were, as it turns out, the first to arrive.

  “Come in,” said Polly Anderson, who hadn’t finished setting things out. “It’s good to see you.” Looking as though it wasn’t.

  “I told you it was too early,” said Stephanie.

  “It’s okay,” said Dave. “We’ll help out.”

  Five minutes later Dave was holding an open bottle of rum in front of two bowls of eggnog. He was helping out.

  “The Lalique crystal is for the adults,” called Polly Anderson from the kitchen. “The glass bowl is for the kids.”

  Dave took a step back and peered at the two bowls.

  “Which is the Lalique?” he called.

  The doorbell rang.

  Polly said, “The Lalique is on the left. Can you get the door?”

  Dave said, “Just a minute.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Dave frowned and said to himself, Glass left and crystal right…or crystal left and glass right?

  From the dining room Morley said, “Dave, get the door.”

  Dave said, “Eeny meeny miny mo,” poured the rum, and ran for the door. As he left, he saw Ted Anderson pick up one of the bowls and head down to the rec room where Sam had joined the Anderson kids.

  —

  MORLEY HAS ALWAYS left Polly Anderson’s Christmas party feeling defeated and inadequate. There was the spiral staircase, the Lalique bowls, and Polly’s bonsai collection in the hall—which this year she had decorated with miniature origami birds, each one no bigger than an Aspirin. Morley felt defeated by these things, and by the moment at the end of each year’s party—a moment that was not unpleasant, but just so perfect—when everyone gathered around the Andersons’ Christmas tree (it always seemed taller and straighter than the tree Dave and Morley had found), and Ted turned off the lights and lit the real candles, and they all sang carols. Defeated by these things that the Andersons seemed to do so effortlessly. And if that wasn’t enough, there were the Anderson kids—so polite and well dressed and most galling of all…so clean. It all made Morley feel small.

  But the thing that really ground her down was the mountain of food that Polly produced. This year it was Christmas sushi—pieces of salmon twisted into the shape of fir trees, little tuna wreaths, yellowtail angels with white-radish wings, and, in the middle of the table, a seaweed manger with a baby Jesus made from flying-fish roe and three wise men with pickled ginger robes and wasabi faces.

  Then there were the crackers. Polly Anderson’s crackers were better dressed than half the people at the party. It was as if Polly Anderson had Martha Stewart working for her in the kitchen, and any moment Martha Stewart was going to march out carrying something on a silver platter: a stencilled roast beef, Cajun fillets of peacock tongue, a roasted unicorn, or maybe quail, a flaming wreath of baby quail with cranberry and mango salsa.

  The last time she had entertained the Andersons, Morley was so determined to measure up that she had gone to the library and checked out a pile of gourmet magazines. She had come ho
me and rolled cylinders of salmon in a soft cream-cheese dip and stuck toothpicks at the end of each roll. It didn’t occur to her, until Sam pointed it out, that her creation looked like a plate of miniature toilet-paper rolls. She saw Polly Anderson looking at the plate quizzically, then watched in horror as Polly picked up one of the hors d’oeuvres and it slid off the toothpicks and landed in her drink. Morley hid in the kitchen until Dave forced her to join them in the living room.

  As Morley stood in the Andersons’ living room, staring at Polly Anderson’s Christmas crackers, she thought about the week following her own party. For days she kept coming across remnants of her toilet-paper hors d’oeuvres all over the house: under the couch, in the drawer where she kept her cheque book, in the bathroom garbage can, on a windowsill. All of them had one bite missing.

  Morley was so lost in these memories that when Ted Anderson came up behind her and offered her a drink she jumped.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  Ted, gliding from guest to guest in a grey suit and ivory collarless shirt, buttoned to the neck.

  Morley looked across the room at Dave. He was wearing the blue sweater his mother had knit last Christmas—it had a map of Cape Breton on the front with a large red dot marking the site of his hometown. One side of his shirt was hanging out from under the sweater.

  Morley had already had three cups of eggnog, but she just couldn’t seem to relax.

  “Sure,” she said, holding out her cup to Ted.

  Morley thought the party seemed stiffer than usual, though the kids seemed to be having a whale of a time.

  Sam wound by her with a plate piled with bread and salmon mousse.

  You’d never eat that at home, thought Morley.

  “This is the moose,” said Sam exuberantly, pointing to the orange spread. “And this,” he said, pointing to the gelatin, “is the moose fat.”

  He snorted and wheeled back toward the basement where the kids were. When he opened the basement door the sound of boisterous children singing Christmas carols came wafting up the stairs.

  —

  DAVE HEADED BACK to the punch bowl and poured himself another glass of eggnog—his fifth. He couldn’t seem to loosen up.

  Half an hour later Bernie Schellenberger lurched by Dave on his way upstairs. Bernie looked like he was being chased by wolves. He was holding his five-month-old daughter in his arms. The baby was howling.

  “Every night,” said Bernie.

  “When you try to put her down,” said Dave.

  “She screams for two hours,” said Bernie.

  “You ever try the car?” asked Dave.

  “What?” said Bernie.

  And Dave, who was looking for any excuse to leave the Andersons’, said, “Get your coat.”

  —

  SAM CAME OUT of the womb screaming, and every night at bedtime, for the first year of his life, he would lie in his crib and scream.

  Morley and Dave would sit in the kitchen as rigid as lumber and listen to him. They would say things to each other like, “We are not going in there. Not tonight. He has to learn.”

  Other parents in the neighbourhood would find excuses to drop in on Dave and Morley around bedtime, because listening to Sam scream made them feel better about their own children. If mothers were becoming short-tempered with their children, fathers would say, “Could you nip over to Morley’s and see how things are coming with…” and they’d make something up. And their wives would go, because they knew it would do them good.

  People who didn’t have children were horrified with the way Dave and Morley could offer them coffee and carry on a conversation while Sam raged against sleep. They would keep glancing toward the stairs. When they left they would say things like, “That was unbelievable. Our children will never do that.”

  On the rare nights when Sam stopped crying within an hour, Dave and Morley would glance at each other nervously and one of them would say, “Maybe I should check him.”

  As soon as they opened the bedroom door, he would start crying again.

  Once, Dave crawled into Sam’s room on his belly and pulled himself up the side of the crib, like a snake, only to come face to face with his son. They stared at each other for an awful minute. Then Dave slid back down. Sam smiled and waved. Dave had crawled halfway out of the room before Sam started to cry.

  They lived like this for a long time before Dave discovered the car. He took Sam with him to the grocery store one night and Sam drifted off to sleep in his car seat. After Dave had carried him to bed, he said, “I’m going to try that again.”

  The next night he drove around the neighbourhood for an hour before Sam conked out—but it beat sitting at the kitchen table. So every night Dave loaded Sam into the car and drove around until Sam fell asleep. He had to drive less and less each night. Soon Sam was falling asleep within a block of the house. One night he nodded off before Dave got out of the driveway. Eventually Dave could put Sam in the back seat, start the car, and idle it in the driveway. It was something about the sound of the engine.

  One night, instead of putting him in the car, Dave put Sam in his crib and said to Morley, “Watch this.”

  He got the vacuum cleaner and he carried it into Sam’s bedroom and turned it on and left the room, shutting Sam’s door behind him. Five minutes later, when they opened his door, Sam was out cold.

  By the time he was fourteen months they could put him to sleep by waving the hair dryer over him a couple of times.

  —

  BERNIE SCHELLENBERGER WAS standing on the stairs, at the Andersons’ party, his screaming daughter in his arms, listening intently to Dave’s story.

  “Get your coat,” said Dave again. “You’ll see.”

  Then he said, “I’m going to bring Sam.”

  He was thinking that after all those years his son should see what he put him through.

  When Dave went down the back staircase into the Andersons’ basement the television was on—but none of the kids were watching it. The videos Polly Anderson had rented to keep them amused were still piled on top of the TV. The TV was flickering like a yawning grey eye at a bunch of empty chairs. The twenty kids were at the other end of the room, pressed around the upright piano. Sam, to Dave’s astonishment, had his arms draped around the shoulder of a girl Dave had never seen before. Dave couldn’t see who was at the keyboard, but he recognized the tune. It was “The North Atlantic Squadron”:

  Away away with fife and drum

  Here we come full of rum

  Looking for women to…

  Someone noticed Dave and the piano stopped abruptly.

  Sam said, “Hi, Dad.”

  He jumped toward his father and caught his foot on the edge of the piano stool and came down hard on middle C with his face leading. All the kids applauded, and Sam bowed, blood dripping from his nose.

  He said, “Our family motto is, ‘There are sewers aplenty yet to dig.’”

  Then he wiped his nose, smearing blood across his face and shirt. Dave said, “I’d like you to come with me in the car. Where is your other shoe?”

  Sam looked around. “Beats me,” he said.

  Dave held out his hand. “Forget it,” he said. He picked his son up and carried him out to the car.

  It only took twenty minutes before the Schellenberger baby was snoozing comfortably.

  Bernie couldn’t believe it. “Geez. I am going to have to buy a car,” he said.

  “Try a vacuum first,” said Dave.

  Bernie said, “We have central vac.”

  “Then move her crib to the basement,” said Dave.

  From the back of the car Sam said, “It’s the physics of baseball that has always fascinated me.”

  Dave looked at his boy in the rear-view mirror.

  Sam waved absently at his father, then he pressed his face to the window and started to sing something that sounded like opera.

  Carmen? thought Dave.

  Then something awful occurred to him.

&nbs
p; Dave slammed on the brakes and squealed to the side of the road. He twisted around in his seat and stared at Sam.

  “What have you been drinking?” he asked.

  “Eggnog,” said Sam.

  “From which bowl?”

  “From the bowl in the basement, of course,” Sam replied.

  Uh-oh, thought Dave.

  Bernie Schellenberger said, “Dave?”

  Dave looked at Bernie, then he looked at Sam, then he looked at Bernie again. Bernie was pointing. Dave peered into the darkness and spotted three police officers standing on the edge of the road half a block away.

  They were manning a roadside check for drunk drivers, and Dave had just fishtailed to a stop in front of them. The cops all had their hands on their hips. The street light shining from behind them made them look ominous. The only thing Dave could do was put his car in gear and creep toward them.

  Sam pulled himself forward so his head was beside his father’s. “This,” he said, “is an area of jurisprudence that has always interested me.”

  Dave pulled up beside the police and rolled down his window. He smiled.

  Two of the cops took a step back from the car. The third was shining his flashlight in Dave’s face. He didn’t try to engage in small talk.

  He said, “Could I please see your licence.”

  He peered at the licence and then he looked at Dave and said, “Where are your glasses?”

  Without waiting for an answer he handed Dave a little machine and said, “Blow.”

  Dave is not sure who was more surprised to find there was no alcohol in his bloodstream. Dave had, after all, drunk six cups of eggnog.

  Dave and the cop were both squinting at the machine when Sam joined the conversation from the back. “Can I blow too?” he asked.

  Dave said, “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

  But the cop, who was friendlier now, said, “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

  Dave said, “Oh, well.”

  Sam blew into the little machine.

  The cop pointed at it and said, “See, son, if you had been drinking, the arrow would be…” His voice trailed off. He squinted at his machine and took a step backwards. He looked at Dave, who shrugged and smiled. He opened the back door of Dave’s car and looked closely at Sam, the streaks of dried blood across his face, and said, “Is that blood, son?”