Sam said, “Our family motto is, ‘There are sewers aplenty yet to dig.’”
The cop frowned and said, “Son, I want you to get out of the car.”
Sam slid over to the far side of the back seat and said, “Come and get me, copper.”
Then he threw up.
Dave folded his head into his arms and rested it on the steering wheel.
The Schellenberger baby started to cry.
So did Dave.
—
BERNIE SCHELLENBERGER CALLED a taxi from the police station.
By the time Dave had explained everything and got back to the party, the Andersons’ house was dark and locked up. Sam was asleep in the back seat. He didn’t stir when they got him home, and Dave carried him upstairs.
Just like the old days, thought Dave.
Morley was waiting in the living room. The whole house was dark except for the coloured lights glowing on the Christmas tree.
“I love it like this,” she said. She was sitting with her legs up on the sofa, an empty cognac glass beside her.
Dave sat at the other end of the couch so their feet met in the middle. They compared stories.
“It took five minutes for the police to get Sam out of the car,” said Dave. “They wouldn’t let me help. When they got him out, he had blood all over him, and he didn’t have a winter coat, and he was missing a shoe, and he was drunk.”
Morley told him what he had missed at the Andersons’. “It was like homecoming at a frat house,” she said.
“Pia Cherbenofsky got herself into the Christmas tree and no one saw her until Ted Anderson began to light the candles for the carol sing. Pia was hidden in the branches, halfway up the tree, and she started blowing the candles out as fast as Ted could light them.
“At one point,” said Morley, “there were ten adults trying to coax her down with candy.”
Then she told him about the McCormick baby.
“He was missing for half an hour,” she said. “He finally turned up asleep in a laundry hamper with the youngest Anderson boy squatting beside him.”
Bobby Anderson had wrapped himself in a large green terry-cloth towel.
“I’m the three wise men,” burped Bobby. “That’s the baby Jesus.”
Sam was never able to tell Dave the name of the girl he had his arms around in the basement. No one seemed to know who she was.
“She was in a red dress,” said Dave.
“When I left,” said Morley, “there was a girl in a red dress standing at the top of the spiral staircase, singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.’”
Dave got up and poured himself another drink.
“What did Polly say?” he asked.
“Last I saw of Polly Anderson,” said Morley, “she was in the hallway protecting her bonsai collection.”
Morley stood up and hunched over.
“She looked like a football player ready to make a tackle,” she said. “She was screaming: ‘Stand back. Stand back. Don’t come a step closer.’”
“Who was attacking the bonsai?” asked Dave.
“Her eldest son,” said Morley. “He was trying to shoot the origami birds out of the trees with a Nerf gun.”
The only child who wasn’t sick, singing, or passed out was their daughter, Stephanie.
“I told her I was proud of her,” said Morley.
The truth of that dawned on Dave later, when they were upstairs and Dave was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. He walked into the bedroom, holding his toothbrush at his side.
“Stephanie was the only kid drinking from the adult bowl,” he said.
“Oh,” said Morley. “Oh.”
“Merry Christmas,” said Dave.
ONE NIGHT AT DINNER, a Sunday night in late September, Morley pushed the dog’s nose off the edge of the table, looked around, and said, “I’ve been thinking about Christmas.”
Dave gasped.
Well, he didn’t really gasp. It was more a hiccup than a gasp. Although it wasn’t a hiccup, and it could easily have been misconstrued as a gasp.
Everyone at the table turned and looked at him.
“Excuse me,” he said. He smiled nervously at Morley. “I said excuse me.”
Morley began again.
“I’ve been thinking about Christmas,” she said.
“Me too,” said Sam.
“And I was thinking,” said Morley, “that it would be fun this year…” Dave was shaking his head slowly back and forth, unconsciously, staring at his wife while a confliction of emotions flickered across his face like playing cards—despair, hope, confusion, and finally the last card…horror.
“I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun this year, and more in keeping with the spirit of Christmas…” Dave was leaning forward in his chair now, staring at Morley the same way Arthur the dog stares at the vet: with a doggish mixture of forlorn hope and wretched presumption.
“I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun…if we made presents for each other.”
Morley’s words met dead silence.
Then Stephanie dropped her fork.
“What?” she said.
Sam said, “Everything I want is made out of plastic. Does anyone know how to mould plastic?”
Morley said, “I don’t mean every present. I don’t mean we have to make everything. I thought we could put our names in a hat, and we could all draw a name, and we’d have to make a present for the person whose name we drew.”
Sam said, “I like exploding stuff too. Exploding things are good…especially if they are made of plastic.”
Stephanie said, “Gawd.”
Dave was nodding, a small smile playing at his mouth.
Two nights later Morley wrote everyone’s name onto a piece of paper. She tore the paper up, folded the pieces, and put them into a pot.
“No one say who they get,” said Morley.
“What if you get yourself?” asked Sam.
But no one got themselves. And no one said who they got. In fact no one seemed particularly interested in who got whom. Morley had hoped that everyone would be excited. But no one was, at all.
Several uneventful weeks went by, autumn settling gracefully on the city as the family settled into the routine of their lives. It was a beautiful autumn. An autumn for gardening and walks and stock-taking. The days were bright and blue, the leaves yellow (for weeks, it seemed). A forgiving, perpetual autumn. Until, that is, the winds began to blow. One night there was a storm, and it rained and blew, and the next morning the trees were bare. Soon the clocks were turned back, and a greyness descended on the city.
It was October and everyone was busy. Only Morley, who was the busiest of all, was thinking about Christmas. The night they had pulled the names out of the pot Morley had waited for the last piece of paper. When she unfolded it, she read her son’s name. She had thought long and hard about what she could make a ten-year-old boy for Christmas that he would enjoy. And she was stymied. She didn’t know plastics. She didn’t know explosives.
Anyway, she wanted to make her son something…meaningful.
Dave was no help.
“There’s something about boys you have to understand,” he said. “They aren’t meaningful.”
Nevertheless, Morley wanted to make Sam something he would treasure as he grew older. Like a fountain pen, or a fishing rod, or a guitar. She had wondered about a chess set for a while. She decided that although, with help, she might be able to make a rudimentary chessboard, she would never, never in a million years be able to make the chess figures, and she had abandoned the idea of a chess set, along with a sleeping bag, baseball glove, and backpack.
The idea of building a chair for Sam came to Morley like a bolt out of the blue. She saw a brochure advertising a night course at the local high school. Ten Monday nights, two hundred dollars, all materials included. Morley checked the calendar. She would be finished a week before Christmas.
It was just what she was looking for—something she
could make for Sam that he could use now, but something, if she did a good job, he could use for the rest of his life. Something that he might even hand down to his children.
Morley imagined building a big, comfy chair. A chair you could get lost in. She imagined Sam as a grown man reading the paper in the chair she had made. She imagined him surrounded by his family. She imagined him saying, “Your grandmother made this for me when I was ten.”
She enrolled in the course and promptly missed two out of the first three classes. The first time it was work. The second time her mother had the flu. She had to take her supper.
She didn’t miss any more after that. She applied herself as diligently as she could. And although every step was a struggle—each screw, nail, and saw cut a mystery of momentous proportions—and although her chair was emerging so much more slowly and tenuously than all the other chairs in the class, Monday, the night she got to work on it, became Morley’s favourite night of the week.
She loved going to her chair class. The only thing that spoiled it was that no one else in her family seemed to have embraced the holiday project. She was alone on this Christmas journey.
She asked Stephanie about it one night.
“You don’t understand,” said Stephanie. “We’re different, Mom. You’re into the spirit of Christmas. I like the other stuff.”
“The other stuff?” asked Morley.
“The shopping,” said Stephanie, “the clothes.”
“Shopping and clothes?” said Morley.
“And the TV specials,” said Stephanie.
Then one morning, when Sam was getting up from the breakfast table, he looked at Morley and said, “I want to learn how to knit.”
—
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES of motherhood, for Morley, were always the surprises. She had long since abandoned the idea of priming herself for the next stage of her children’s development. She had long ago accepted that no matter how she prepared herself she would always lag behind Sam and Stephanie. If Morley could count on her children for one thing, she could count on them to pop up, at the most unexpected moments, with the most bizarre ideas of life and how it worked. She could count on them to hold fierce opinions so contrary to what they had believed, even the day before, that they would leave her open-mouthed and totally unequipped to respond. Like the afternoon Sam had returned from the co-op nursery school and announced with quiet determination that he had “quit.” Like when five-year-old Stephanie crawled, sobbing, under the kitchen table, and refused to come out until her mother promised never to serve hot dogs for lunch again. Never! “I don’t believe you,” she sobbed, when Morley made the promise. Like the spring Sam developed a pathological fear of Big Bird, which became a fear of all birds, a fear that lasted for months.
And now he wanted to learn how to knit.
Morley gave Sam his first knitting lesson that night, in his room.
“Shut the door,” he said.
She soon found out that teaching a ten-year-old boy to knit was about as easy as building a chair.
She didn’t have the words for it.
She sat him beside her on the bed, and they both held a set of knitting needles out in front of them, as if they were about to fly a plane.
“Watch me,” said Morley as she ever so slowly made a loop in the red yarn and slipped it onto the needle.
She was trying to teach him how to cast on.
She glanced at him. Sam staring at his hands in despair.
Morley took his needles and did the first row herself. She handed them back and said, “Okay. Now, do exactly what I do.”
After an hour or so, he sort of had it. More or less.
“What is it you want to knit?” asked Morley.
“A coat,” said Sam.
“Oh,” said Morley.
Sam had drawn Stephanie’s name.
Morley had to teach him again right from the beginning the next night. And once again two nights later. He did fine as long as he kept going, but every time he put the needles down he lost track.
By the beginning of November Sam was good enough to sit in front of the television and knit while he watched TV. Whenever Stephanie appeared, he would thrust the needles into Morley’s hands or stuff them under the couch. Morley hauled an old black-and-white portable out of the basement and set it up on his bureau. He sat in his room all weekend, the needles clicking away like a train.
“My fingers hurt,” he said on Sunday night.
—
THE NEXT SATURDAY he was invited to Jeremy’s house for a sleepover and he wanted to know what he could take his knitting in. Morley was afraid he would get teased, but she packed it up nevertheless, and he headed off with his toothbrush and his sleeping bag and his bag of wool. At nine o’clock Jeremy’s mother phoned and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. You know what they’re doing? They’re downstairs watching Lethal Weapon Three…and knitting.”
Suddenly knitting was the thing to do. Suddenly everyone wanted to knit.
The next weekend there was a hockey tournament in Whitby. Dave drove Sam, Jeremy, and two other boys.
“They all sat in the back,” he said. “And they were talking about hockey and the game and how they were going to cream the team from Whitby—the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear from a back seat of little boys. And then one of them said, ‘Damn. I dropped a stitch.’
“They’d talk about hockey some more. Then all you’d hear was the clicking of their needles, and then someone would say something like ‘Look how long Jeff’s is. Jeff, you’re going so fast. You must have done this before.’
“It got quite giddy. One of them said they should knit on the bench between shifts. It was rather wonderful.”
—
MORLEY DIDN’T THINK it was wonderful at all.
As far as she could tell, her Christmas project was headed off the rails. She was worried about Sam. She thought he was getting compulsive about the knitting. He would disappear into his room and sit on the edge of his bed and knit for hours. And he kept unravelling everything he did. It was never perfect enough.
“It’s fun to destroy it,” he said. “I like the feeling of the knots coming undone.”
It didn’t seem healthy.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
On Saturday afternoon while Dave was in Whitby, Becky Laurence had shown up at the front door.
“Is Stephanie home?” she asked. She was holding a package wrapped in brown paper.
“No,” said Morley. “Stephanie is out. Shopping.”
Becky had turned to go, but then she had stopped and held the parcel up and said, “Tell her the present is ready. Tell her she owes me fifteen bucks.”
She had shown up twice more that afternoon.
“Tell her I need the money,” she said.
Morley was fairly certain that Stephanie had pulled Dave’s name out of the pot on that night in October. And that placed Morley in a terrible position. She wanted to talk to Dave about what was going on. Stephanie had paid her best friend to make a present!—something so completely contrary to the spirit of the family that Morley had no idea what to do about it. But the present was supposed to be for Dave. And Morley didn’t want to hurt him.
Anyway, as far as Morley could tell, Dave hadn’t begun anything himself.
There was barely a week to go before Christmas, and her entire project was turning into a fiasco. Her chair was a mess. Stephanie was cheating. And Dave thought Sam’s knitting compulsion was cute.
“Jacques Plante used to knit,” he said.
“What?” said Morley.
“Jacques Plante was a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens,” said Dave.
“I know who Jacques Plante was,” said Morley.
“He was the oldest of eleven children,” said Dave. “And they were poor. And his mother needed his help to make clothes for his brothers and sisters. When he was in the NHL he knitted his own underwear.”
“What’s your point?” said Morley.
“He said knitting calmed him down.”
“You think Sam needs to knit?”
“I have a friend,” said Dave, “who thinks the reason Jacques Plante was such a good goalie was because of all the knitting. He believes the knitting improved his hand-eye coordination.”
That night, on her way to bed, Morley found Sam under the covers, knitting by flashlight. She went in and sat down.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“My wrists are sore,” he said.
The next night as she was preparing supper she could hear the knitting needles clicking against something.
When Sam came down for dinner he was wearing his skateboard wrist guards.
After dinner Sam called her into his bedroom. He was crying.
“I’ll never finish the coat,” he said.
He was pointing at the sum total of his knitting: a rectangle of blue wool about six inches wide and a foot and a half long. One side of the rectangle was completely asymmetrical. He didn’t seem to be able to maintain constant tension as he worked. Each row was coming out a different length.
“It’s…lovely,” said Morley.
“No. It’s not,” said Sam. “I hate it.”
He began to unravel it in front of her.
—
MORLEY BROUGHT SAM’S chair home on the Monday before Christmas. The next night Dave found her in the basement crying. She had a bolt of beige corduroy at her feet. She was trying to tack a huge piece of foam to one of the arms.
Dave watched her for a moment without saying anything. Then he reached out and touched the top of the chair. The legs were uneven. It wobbled unsteadily.
“It’s pathetic,” said Morley, dropping her hammer on the floor.
“It looks…like it was made with a lot of love,” said Dave.
“It looks like it was made by a two-year-old,” said Morley.
“Well, it hasn’t been covered yet,” said Dave. “Any chair without upholstery is going to look…awkward.”
“Pathetic,” said Morley. “Not awkward.” She picked up the hammer, swung it around her waist and laced the back of the chair.
Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe Page 4