Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  “This is not working,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  Half an hour later she appeared upstairs, looking angry and defeated.

  Dave looked at her. “I have a suggestion,” he said. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  Morley didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away.

  Dave said, “You could spend the next few days down there wrestling with that material and you’ll cover the chair, and we both know you’ll end up with a bad chair.”

  Morley nodded.

  Dave said, “Forget about the foam padding. Forget about the upholstery. Don’t put fabric on it. Put wheels on it. What you have down there isn’t a chair without covering. What you have down there is a go-cart without wheels. Put wheels on that thing and you will have one very happy little boy on Christmas morning.”

  And then he said, “I’m going to walk Arthur.”

  —

  THE NEXT NIGHT after supper Sam called Morley into his room. He was frantic.

  “The needles won’t go through anymore,” he said.

  He waved at a pile of wool lying on his bed—another six-inch square of knitting—each line of the square getting progressively tighter, giving the work the appearance of a triangle resting on its point.

  “You have to relax,” said Morley.

  “I only have two days left,” said Sam.

  “Two days is not a lot of time,” said Morley.

  Sam nodded his head in vigorous agreement.

  “But it should be enough time for a pro like you to knit a scarf,” she said.

  “I’m knitting a coat, not a scarf,” said Sam.

  “Oh,” said Morley, “I thought you were knitting a scarf. Let me start it for you.” Once again she began a row of stitches and once again handed it to her son. Then she stood up. “I have to do the dishes,” she said.

  —

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, after Sam and Stephanie were in bed and the last present was wrapped and under the tree, Morley called Dave down to the basement. “Can you help me carry this upstairs?” she said.

  She had taken the wheels off Sam’s old wagon and attached them to the bottom of her chair. Dave climbed into it and smiled. She had left the wagon handle in place. It rested between his legs like a joystick.

  “He’ll love it,” he said.

  And then he screamed.

  She was pushing him toward the washing machine.

  First gently. Then faster and faster.

  “Where’s the brake?” is the last thing he howled before he crashed into a wicker basket full of dirty clothes.

  —

  THEY COULD SEE light spilling out from under Sam’s door when they went upstairs. They could hear the sound of his needles rocking together.

  “He’s still at it,” said Morley. “What should we do?”

  It was almost one.

  “Come to bed,” said Dave. “His door is shut. He wants to do this himself.”

  “He was working on a scarf,” said Morley as she prepared the bed. “But this afternoon it changed into a headband. It wasn’t going to be big enough to be a scarf. When I suggested headband, you know what the little bugger said? ‘But isn’t her head the fattest part of her?’ It is the most pathetic headband you’ve ever seen. God, I hope she’ll wear it…at least around the house.”

  “He’s going to love his go-cart,” said Dave.

  Morley was sitting on the edge of the bed. She turned around.

  “Stephanie drew your name,” she said. “There’s something you should know about her present.”

  “No,” said Dave. “Don’t tell me anything. I want to be surprised.”

  Morley stood up and walked toward the bedroom window.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dave. “It will be fine.”

  —

  AND SO IT was.

  Stephanie, it turned out, had not paid Becky Laurence to make her father’s present. She had written to her grandmother in Cape Breton and asked her to ship a photo of Dave and his father to the Laurences’ house C.O.D. It was a photo that had amazed Stephanie the moment she saw it—which had been two summers ago—when she had gone to Big Narrows for a week by herself.

  The picture was taken when Dave was five years old. In it, he is standing on the piano bench in the parlour, which makes him the same height as his father’s bass fiddle, which they are both holding between them. And laughing—both of them—her grandfather’s head moving backwards and to the side, her father (a little boy) starting to fold over at the waist, his hand moving toward his mouth. The way her brother’s does in moments of hilarity.

  The photo had haunted her for two years. The first time she saw it she thought the boy was her brother and the man standing beside the fiddle her dad.

  “Where am I?” she had said.

  She didn’t believe her grandmother when she said, “No, no. The boy is your father.”

  When Becky Laurence gave her the picture, Stephanie took it to a photographer and had a copy made. She sent the original back to Cape Breton. She had her copy framed. It was wrapped and hidden in her cupboard two weeks before Christmas. Three times she had opened it so she could look at it. Three times she had to wrap it again.

  —

  BUT MORLEY DIDN’T know any of this as she climbed into bed. As she fell asleep she was still worried about Christmas morning, about Stephanie, and about the go-cart. She slept for a restless few hours, and then woke up. When she couldn’t get back to sleep, she decided to make herself a cup of tea. She was almost out of the bedroom before she noticed the ribbon tied around her wrist. Red.

  It ran to the floor, into a red pile, gathered at her feet. She was still dopey with sleep. She started to gather the ribbon up, and it was only as she did that that she realized it didn’t end in the pile at her feet but continued toward the stairs. She followed it: down the stairs and past the tree and into the kitchen. By the time she got to the back door she had gathered an armful of ribbon. And she was smiling.

  Dave and Morley have a pear tree in the corner of their backyard. Morley followed the trail of ribbon out the back door and across the yard to the pear tree. The end of the ribbon, the end not tied to her wrist, led to a switch fastened to the base of the tree. There was a note: Merry Christmas. I chose you. Love, Dave.

  Morley flicked the switch. The most amazing thing happened.

  The pear tree slowly and gracefully came to life.

  Little lights began to snap on in the branches above her head and then, as if the tree had been animated by Walt Disney himself, the lights spread along the branches until the entire tree was glowing a dark-red crimson, a crimson like dark wine, a red light that cast a magical glow over the backyard.

  Dave woke at three and sensed he was alone in bed. He reached out his arm for his wife and didn’t find her. He lay still. He tried to will himself awake. He got up and called her name. He walked to the back bedroom and looked out the window. Morley was sitting at the picnic table. She was wearing his work boots, the laces undone, and his winter coat over her nightie. On her head was a toque that belonged to Sam. She was cradling a mug of tea between her hands. From the perspective of the bedroom she looked twelve years old.

  It had started to snow—big fat flakes of snow were dropping lazily out of the sky. Morley was staring at the snow as it floated out of the darkness and into the circle of red light.

  Dave pushed the bedroom window open and said, “Merry Christmas.” Morley bent down and made a snowball, glowing now as she stood in the red light of the tree, her hair wet and sticking to her forehead. She was not working so quickly that Dave didn’t have time to gather a handful of snow off the window ledge himself.

  The two of them threw their snowballs at almost the same moment, and they both laughed in wonder when they collided in mid-air, spraying snow like a shower of icy fireworks through the silence of the night.

  THE ANNUAL HOLIDAY concert at Sam’s school is a December celebration with a thirty-seven-year tradition that has been struggl
ing for an identity of late—ever since the school board decreed that any December pageant must acknowledge the cultural diversity of the school. It’s a dictum that does not sit well with certain parents—and changes to the concert have been debated passionately over the past few years.

  Efforts to find a middle ground, to accommodate both the Christmas traditionalists and the Board of Education, have met with varying degrees of success. Last year’s “Solstice Celebration” made no mention of Christmas until the end of the show, when the grade-three class lined up on stage holding big cardboard letters that spelled out Merry Christmas. One by one, kids stepped forward with their letters and shouted out their greeting:

  M is for Muslim, E is for Ecumenical, R is for Reform Jew.

  When they got through Merry and it was time for the C in Christmas, Naomi Cohen held up her big green C and sang out, C is for Chanukah; and then Moira Fehling, who was standing beside her, held up her red H and said, H is for Hanukkah too.

  Then the grade threes sang, “Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel.”

  That was Lorretta McKenna’s grade three. Loretta was perky and keen and full of ideas like that. She didn’t come back this year.

  The concert managed to offend so many parents, on both sides of the issue, that a committee was struck to review the whole idea. It was Rita Sleymaker, the committee chair, who came to Morley in April and asked for her help.

  “You’re in theatre,” she said. “We want to put on a musical. A holiday sort of musical. We were hoping you would direct it.”

  “I can’t imagine anything I would rather do,” said Morley. Although she had no trouble imagining other things she would rather do as soon as she had hung up.

  “I would rather have a needle in my eye,” she said to Dave that night. “But I couldn’t say no.”

  Morley began attending the Wednesday-evening committee meetings. When she came home from these meetings, it would often take her hours to wind down.

  “They’re all crazy,” she’d say, pacing back and forth. “I’d rather chew tinfoil than go back next week.”

  But before summer vacation her impatience began to dissipate.

  “We’re getting to the meat of it,” she said one night in June. “It’s down to The Wizard of Oz or Frosty the Snowman.”

  Frosty won. It was the perfect play for the pageant. They could do it without carols or mention of Christian tradition.

  “It captures the true spirit of the season,” said the school trustee enthusiastically when the script was sent to her. “It has music. And shopping.”

  Morley spent the summer rewriting Frosty the Snowman, essentially expanding the play so there would be a part for all 248 children. She added lots of street scenes, and when she was finished, there was a role for everyone, including a cameo for the principal, Nancy Cassidy, whom Morley coaxed into playing a talking pine tree.

  In September there was an unexpected registration bubble, and Morley found herself a dozen roles short. She fussed with the script for a week, until, in a flash of inspiration, she added a narrator. She conceived of the narrator as a chorus, a chorus that would easily soak up the twelve new kids and any others who wandered along before Christmas. All her early reluctance had given way to outright enthusiasm. She had her arms up to the elbows in the mud of this play.

  “This is fun,” she said to Dave one night as she collated scripts. She couldn’t wait to get going, couldn’t wait to start with the kids.

  —

  THE SATURDAY BEFORE the auditions were scheduled, parents began showing up at the house offering help. Katherine Gilcoyne was first.

  “I’m a seamstress,” she said. “I’m sure there’ll be lots of sewing. I’d love to help with the costumes.” Morley was delighted. They had coffee and talked about the play and then, after an hour, when she was leaving, as if it was just an afterthought, Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out a brown manila envelope.

  “This is Willy’s resumé,” she said.

  Willy was her son. Willy was in grade five.

  It was a twenty-page resumé, including an eight-by-ten glossy.

  “He really wants to be a snowman,” said Katherine, standing in the doorway. “Get him to recite his Lions Club speech. He won the gold medal. I think he would make a great Frosty.”

  Ruth Kelman arrived about an hour later. Right-to-the-point Ruth. “I heard you weren’t considering girls for the snowmen,” she said, her arms folded across her chest. Her car was in the driveway, still running. Her daughter, Joanne, was sitting glumly in the passenger seat; her husband was in the back.

  Seven-year-old Joanne has been the breadwinner in the Kelman family for three years: the star of a series of soap ads and an obnoxious peanut-butter commercial. Ruth spends her life jetting around town with her daughter, lining up at one audition after another.

  “What’s the difference,” said Morley sourly when they were gone, “between those auditions and a rug factory. If they got Joanne a job in a rug factory, they wouldn’t have to spend all those hours waiting around at auditions.”

  —

  AS THE RAINY mornings of November folded into dark December afternoons, the play gradually took shape. The children were slowly settling into their roles. There were, eventually, four Frostys—two girls and two boys. At the beginning of the month, however, with only three weeks to go before the big night, no one knew the lines by heart, not even Joanne Kelman, whom Morley had cast as a villainous troll. But everyone was coming along, and Morley trusted the kids would eventually arrive where they should. Or close enough. Besides, there was a bigger problem than unlearned lines.

  The story, as Morley had rewritten it, turned on a flash-back—a scene in which Frosty recalled his days as a country snowman. For the all-important farmyard scene Morley had drafted Arthur and cast him as a sheep. Arthur, a docile and well-behaved dog by nature, did not adjust easily to the stage. The first few times Morley Velcroed Arthur into his sheepskin, he stood in the wings and refused to move, staring balefully out from under his sheep ears in abject humiliation. But as the weeks progressed Arthur underwent a character change. He grinned whenever he saw his costume, curling his lips back so you could see his teeth, flattening his ears, and squinting his eyes. It was while he was dressed as a sheep that Arthur sniffed out and ate the contents of every lunch bag from Miss Young’s grade-four class. He had his sheep costume on when he devoured the huge gingerbread house that Sophia Delvecchio had constructed and donated to the school. And it was while he was dressed as a sheep that he snarled at Floyd, the janitor, when Floyd found him padding down the corridor heading for the cafeteria.

  The closer they came to opening night, the more problems Morley uncovered. The afternoon they moved rehearsals into the auditorium, it became clear that there was not enough room for everyone on stage.

  “The stage isn’t big enough for the narrators,” said Morley to Dave one afternoon on the phone after rehearsal.

  It was Dave’s idea to erect scaffolding and put the chorus of narrators on what amounted to a balcony.

  “Perfect,” said Morley. “Brilliant.”

  Dee Dee Allen’s father, who was in construction, said he could provide scaffolding.

  Morley had thought one of the benefits of working on the play would be an opportunity to get to know some of the kids. Mostly she got to know Mark Portnoy. Mark who couldn’t sit still. Mark who spent one entire rehearsal pulling the window blinds up and down, up and down. Mark who tied Jane Capper’s shoelaces together. Mark who brought a salamander from the science lab to technical rehearsal and dropped it into Adrian White’s apple juice.

  Late one afternoon when she thought she was the only person in the school, Morley came across Mark in the grade-five classroom. He was going through a desk with a suspicious intensity. She had a feeling it wasn’t his desk.

  “Hello, miss,” he said guiltily when he saw her, picking up his bag and leaving the room.

  Morley now had a constellation of mothers orbiting
her. Alice Putnam, perpetually cheerful, was in charge of the refreshment committee. Pale, gaunt, and efficient Grace Weed was in charge of programs. Patty Berg, loud but trustworthy, was in charge of decorations.

  By the beginning of the second week of December, life at the school had built to a fever pitch—all pretense of academics had vanished. Everything was focused on Wednesday night’s performance. When the kids weren’t rehearsing, they were waiting to rehearse—or making decorations.

  Patty Berg’s decoration committee had transformed the school into a riot of red and green. There were streamers and balloons in the halls and large murals on scrolls of brown paper. Frank Quarrington of Quarrington’s Pizza Palace had donated Santa Claus pictures for the grade twos to colour: Santas with their jackets off and their sleeves rolled up—rolling dough and flinging it in the air.

  There were five Santa images in all—each one in the pizza motif. The grade twos fell on them with gusto—everyone except Norah Burton, who brought hers to the front in tears.

  “I can’t colour this,” she said, holding out her paper. It was a picture of Santa Claus standing over a kitchen table, doling out pizza slices to a group of ravenous elves. “Those are anchovies,” said Norah, pointing at the pizza. “I hate anchovies.” And she broke into tears.

  “Those aren’t anchovies, sweetie,” said Mrs. Moffat, putting her arm around the little girl. “Those are green peppers.”

  “What are these little hairy parts?” asked Norah sobbing. “They look like anchovy legs. Green peppers don’t have legs.”

  “That’s just mould,” said Mrs. Moffat sweetly. “The green peppers have gone off.”

  “Oh,” said Norah.

  —

  ON WEDNESDAY THE kids were sent home early with instructions to return at six o’clock with their costumes and props. They were to assemble in the science lab, where they would be supervised by a group of parent volunteers. The parents would use walkie-talkies to maintain contact with the auditorium. They would send the kids to the stage as they were needed.

  The kids were told they could bring quiet games to play while they waited for their cues: cards, books, stickers—no Walkmans, no video games.