Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  IN THE MIDDLE of December, ten-year-old Sam arrived home from school with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Honey,” he cried out as the door slapped shut behind him, “I’m home.”

  And then he scrambled up to his room before Morley could say anything.

  He didn’t come down for an hour.

  Because there were only a few weeks left until Christmas, Morley didn’t mention the cloth bag. And she didn’t ask what Sam had been doing in his room with the door shut. This was, after all, a season for secrets.

  Sam closed his bedroom door behind him the next morning when he left for school.

  “Promise you won’t go in my bedroom,” he said.

  “I promise,” said Morley, against her better instincts.

  Before lunch Morley went upstairs and stood in front of Sam’s door. There was a hand-lettered sign taped to the door.

  DO NOT ENTER

  TOP SECRET

  THIS MEANS YOU

  THIS MEANS YOU was underlined three times. There was a skull and crossbones at the bottom of the page.

  On Saturday there was a steady stream of Sam’s pals through the room. The kids were ever so polite; the door was ever so closed.

  They came, and they went, and they never said a word to Morley or Dave or Stephanie.

  It was driving Morley nuts. But a promise was a promise.

  On Sunday afternoon when Sam was at hockey, Morley walked by Sam’s room with a load of laundry, and she thought she heard a noise.

  A scurrying sort of noise.

  Something was moving in there.

  Morley pressed her ear against the door. And then Stephanie swanned by, her hair wrapped in a towel.

  “He has the class ferret,” she said archly.

  “The ferret?” said Morley.

  Of course. The ferret.

  And then, promise be damned, Morley opened the bedroom door.

  Not a wise decision.

  The ferret was perched on Sam’s bedpost, glaring at her.

  The room smelled dank, funky, how Morley imagined a weasel hole might smell. She slammed the door shut and leaned her back against it.

  —

  THEY HAD A family council that night.

  “It’s going back,” said Dave.

  The ferret was sound asleep, draped around Sam’s neck like a scarf.

  “He has a name. His name is Ralph,” said Sam, scratching the ferret under the chin. The ferret didn’t move.

  “It’s awfully still,” said Morley, looking at Ralph’s tiny razor-sharp claws.

  “Because it’s dead,” said Stephanie.

  “It smells dead,” said Dave.

  “His name is Ralph,” said Sam, again. Peevishly.

  “No way,” said Dave. “No ferrets allowed.”

  He looked at Morley. “Right?”

  Now the positions you take on public policy are informed by many things. One of those things is past experience.

  Two Decembers ago Morley organized the Christmas pageant at Sam’s school.

  The principal, Nancy Cassidy, had been more than decent about what had happened that night. Morley didn’t especially want a ferret in her house over the holidays, but she felt she owed the school. She didn’t want to be thought of as unreliable.

  She was sitting across from Dave, and she was now staring at her hands.

  She said, “It is Christmas, Dave. This is what you do at Christmas, isn’t it? You put yourself out; you open your home to people without a place to go.”

  Dave couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  He pointed at the comatose ferret around Sam’s neck.

  “That,” he said, “is not a people. That is a vermin. There is no room at the inn.”

  Morley smiled ruefully. “Couldn’t we make a little manger in the basement for Ralph?”

  —

  DAVE BUILT A ferret cage in the basement the next afternoon. What else could he do?

  When Sam carried Ralph downstairs, the ferret was asleep, still draped around his neck.

  “Do you want to try?” asked Sam. He lifted Ralph off his neck and held him out like a stuffed toy. “He won’t wake up.”

  Dave looked at the limp ferret and shook his head.

  Morley said, “I’ll try.”

  Sam positioned the sleeping ferret around his mother’s neck. It was lighter than she’d expected. And softer.

  As the ferret snuggled against her, Morley thought, fleetingly, that it was too bad you weren’t allowed to wear fur anymore.

  She felt kind of elegant with the ferret around her.

  She ran her hand self-consciously through her hair.

  “What do you think?” she asked Dave, striking a pose.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Wait until we get you a rat.”

  Morley passed the ferret back to Sam, and Sam brought him into the basement.

  Galway the cat hissed at them on their way past her dish. Arthur the dog looked away.

  —

  FOR FIVE YEARS now, Dave and Morley have been sharing the responsibility of Christmas dinner.

  Morley does the vegetables and the dessert. Dave cooks the turkey.

  Since that infamous Christmas years ago when Dave cooked Butch in the convection oven in the kitchen at the Plaza Hotel, cooking the turkey has been a big deal for Dave. This year he ordered the turkey from a butcher he’d read about in a gourmet magazine. A twenty-two-pound organically raised, free-range bird.

  “You get a twelve-pound bird,” said Dave, “and all you are paying for is bones and skin and not a whole lot more.”

  He’d driven across town to check the butcher out.

  “I’m going to brine it overnight,” he said. “McCail told me that if we do that, we won’t even have to carve it. We’ll just have to speak to it firmly, and it will fall apart.”

  “McCail?” said Morley.

  “My butcher,” said Dave.

  —

  RALPH, THE FERRET, had spent only eight hours in the basement before he figured out how to open the cage.

  He woke before dawn. He had a drink of water, and something to eat, and then fiddled with the latch on his cage for a few minutes before the door swung open.

  Ralph wandered around the basement for a while, and then he curled up in the pocket of a down ski jacket that was lying on the floor and fell asleep again.

  Dave came downstairs a few hours later. He grabbed the jacket and threw it in the dryer.

  He wanted to fluff up the down.

  He pushed the start button and started to walk away. He got as far as the stairs.

  There was a thumping coming out of the dryer. The sort of thumping you hear when you try to dry a pair of sneakers.

  There was a squealing sound too.

  Dave walked back, squatted, and peered through the glass door of the dryer.

  He saw the ferret fly by, its four paws extended.

  It looked like one of those toy cats you see stuck to the back of car windows.

  Dave opened the dryer door. The drum stopped spinning.

  He peered in. There was no sign of or sound of the ferret.

  Uh-oh, thought Dave.

  He stuck his head in the dryer. It was not the wisest decision.

  The ferret burst through the door like a wolverine on steroids. All Dave saw was a whirl of fur sailing by his face. And then absolutely nothing.

  Dave looked around, but the ferret was gone.

  —

  EVERYONE JOINED THE search for Ralph. They looked everywhere. But as far as they could tell, the house was ferret-less. There was a vacancy of ferrets. A ferret void. As far as ferrets were concerned, there was nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. A big goose egg. Sweet Fanny Adams.

  The ferret was more than gone, it was all gone.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dave, “I’m sure he’ll come back.”

  Not certain where Ralph would come back, Morley spent an hour taping ferret warnings around the house.

  CH
ECK FOR FERRET it said on the dryer and on the washing machine.

  FERRET CHECK, it said on the toaster and the microwave and the stereo.

  By the end of the week checking for the ferret had become an unconscious reflex. Before she turned on the oven Morley would rattle the door and call, “Ferret, ferret, ferret.” Before she sat on the sofa, she’d pat the cushion, saying, “Ferret, ferret, ferret.” Before she ran a bath, she’d pull back the shower curtain: “Ferret, ferret, ferret.”

  Morley was terrified that she might have to return Sam to school after the holidays with a dead ferret under his arm.

  “Which,” said Dave, “would be a darn sight better than not finding the body.”

  Morley was the first to spot Ralph. She saw him on the weekend. Well, she didn’t really see him. What she saw was a flash of fur in her peripheral vision.

  “I’m pretty sure it was Ralph,” she said. “It was definitely fur.”

  From that moment, their days were punctuated with glimpses of fur on the fly.

  They would go into a room and turn on the light and they wouldn’t so much see as they would sense the vanishing ball of fur.

  The ferret was moving through their house like a trout swimming up a stream. They saw flashes of him, and the occasional ripple on the surface, but that was all.

  At night, they’d be lying in bed and they’d hear: scurry, scurry, scurry, smash.

  And they’d get up, and they’d go downstairs, where the Christmas tree would be swinging wildly back and forth, an assortment of ornaments lying on the floor around it.

  Three mornings in a row Morley came down and saw that someone had been digging in the pot of her eucalyptus tree, the dirt flung all over the hall. The first time this happened, Arthur the dog saw her coming and started to back away. Almost holding up his paws as if to say, “It wasn’t me!”

  About a week before Christmas, Dave had an idea.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “If I knew where it slept I could get it. I was thinking I could track it to his den.”

  “You could track it to his den?” said Morley.

  “If it left tracks,” said Dave.

  That night, when everyone was in bed, Dave went downstairs and dug the flour sifter out of the kitchen cupboard. Then he got a bag of icing sugar and filled the sifter. Next he walked slowly back and forth across the kitchen floor, sprinkling icing sugar as he went.

  It was such satisfying work that he did the hallway and the dining room too.

  When he was finished, the house looked pleasingly seasonal, as if there was a light dusting of snow everywhere.

  He slept fitfully, and at 6:30 A.M., he hoisted himself out of bed and ran downstairs. He opened the kitchen door, full of hope—and there was Arthur, licking the last bit of sugar off the floor.

  Arthur looked at him and burped. Then the dog took two unsteady steps, vomited, and fell over.

  —

  THAT WAS THE night that Morley said, “I think the ferret is pregnant.”

  It was suppertime. Dave stared at her blankly.

  “I can just tell,” said Morley.

  “You can just tell?” said Dave.

  “Mothers know these things,” said Morley.

  “These things about a ferret?” said Dave.

  “I saw him yesterday—he’s getting bigger. He took one of my oven mitts. I think he’s making a nest.”

  Sam, who had been listening with growing dismay, said, “Ralph can’t have babies. Men can’t have babies.” It was more a question than a statement of fact.

  “Can they?” He said it in a small voice, his hand going unconsciously to his stomach.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING Morley was cleaning Sam’s bedroom when she came across a crumpled letter from his school. She took it downstairs and smoothed it out on the kitchen table.

  “I thought you’d like to see this,” she said to Dave.

  There was a brochure attached to the letter. The brochure was called Caring for Your Ferret.

  Dave began on page three: “Finding a Lost Ferret.”

  The first place to look for your ferret is in places you couldn’t go. They love little holes. Crawl around on your stomach and look for holes in the floor under cabinets.

  “It’s living in our walls,” said Dave.

  “No way,” said Morley. “You aren’t cutting any holes in the walls.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking of that,” said Dave.

  He took the brochure into the living room and settled down. There was a section called “Missing Objects.”

  Ferrets love to swipe things and drag them into the most inaccessible places possible. Protect your keys and wallet or you will always be missing them.

  “Hey,” said Dave. “Maybe we’ve had a ferret for years.”

  —

  ONE NIGHT DAVE and Morley were watching the news on television when a plastic shopping bag humped its way quickly through the room.

  Another night, a creature ran across the kitchen and smacked into the stove. It had a toilet-paper roll for a head.

  You never knew what was going to happen next.

  Galway the cat began licking her paws neurotically. Arthur wouldn’t stay in the room by himself. And he whined incessantly if anyone tried to leave him home alone.

  And then it was quiet. No one saw Ralph for several days before Christmas.

  “I’m worried,” said Sam at supper.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, Dave went into the basement to prepare the turkey brine. He’d gotten a new plastic garbage pail for the job. He wrestled the turkey into the salty water, then he came upstairs and said, “This is going to be the best ever.”

  After lunch he went to pick up Morley’s mother, Helen. Helen was going to spend Christmas with them.

  Helen was waiting by her front door with her coat on and two bags of presents at her feet. She was wearing a hat with a net veil and a fur stole.

  “I found it in the attic,” she said. “Roy gave it to me for Christmas the year we were married.”

  When they got back home, Dave hung the stole on the coat rack by the front door.

  After supper, he got the turkey out of the basement and brought it upstairs. He put it in the kitchen sink to drain.

  They had tourtière for dinner. And after dinner everyone disappeared to their rooms to wrap presents. Helen sat on the couch listening to carols with Arthur the dog snuggled up beside her as, one by one, the family drifted downstairs to put their presents under the tree.

  Dave was coming downstairs with the camera when something fell over in the kitchen.

  Dave, who had been heading for the tree, changed direction. When he reached the kitchen, there was Ralph, the missing ferret, perched on the back of Dave’s twenty-two-pound organic turkey.

  Ralph had the drumstick in his mouth.

  He looked like a painting by Robert Bateman.

  The ferret stared at Dave. Neither of them moved. And then the ferret burped.

  In his shock, Dave snapped a picture.

  “You’re right,” Morley will say when they are looking at their holiday photos later. “It does look like a Bateman.”

  But that won’t be for weeks.

  On Christmas Eve, when Morley came into the kitchen and saw the carcass, it didn’t look like art to her. It looked like another Christmas down the drain. She felt a wave of despair wash over her.

  The family gathered around the sink like they were gathered around a grave.

  Sam was amazed.

  “Look how much he ate!” he said.

  Stephanie pushed Sam away from the sink.

  “You can even see the wishbone,” she said.

  Everyone turned and looked at Dave. His pride and joy, his carefully brined delicacy, was ruined.

  They expected an explosion.

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Dave, with exaggerated calmness. “I know where we can get a last-minute bird.”

  —

  ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
, they didn’t wake until eight o’clock.

  “I can’t believe it,” Dave said to Morley. “Sleeping in on Christmas.”

  They actually had to wake Sam up.

  They opened their stockings upstairs, and at quarter to nine they headed down the stairs in a line. Morley in the lead, the kids following, Dave bringing up the rear.

  Morley was halfway down the stairs when she stopped unexpectedly.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  Sam bumped into Morley. Stephanie bumped into Sam. Dave bumped into Stephanie.

  Uh-oh? thought Dave.

  Dave couldn’t see the living room. Couldn’t see Arthur and Ralph the ferret snuggled together at the base of the tree, Galway the cat not a foot away. Couldn’t see the nest of shredded Christmas wrapping between them and a trio of mewling ferret babies.

  “Four,” said Morley, pointing to the baby everyone had missed. The ferret that had climbed onto Arthur’s back and was sucking gently on the dog’s ear.

  It was, maybe, the best Christmas morning ever—everyone so taken with the ferret babies that they had to keep reminding one another to open presents, the house filled with peace and great goodwill.

  Ralph was back, and clearly she was here to stay.

  Sam could return triumphantly to school with her and her brood.

  —

  AFTER DINNER, THEY sat around the tree and sang carols and watched the baby ferret nuzzling Arthur. Ralph had disappeared—but no one seemed to mind. Least of all, Arthur.

  At ten o’clock Helen said she had to go. Dave was lying on the couch in a post-dinner stupor. He struggled to get up, but Helen said, “Don’t get up. I’ve called a taxi.”

  Dave watched from the couch as she kissed Sam goodbye.

  He watched Helen hug Morley. He watched her blow a kiss to Stephanie and put on her coat and hat and pick up her fur stole off the coat rack and drop it around her neck.

  Dave squinted at her and struggled to get up, but his body wouldn’t respond.

  He tried to say something, he tried to say, “That’s not your fur muffler, Helen.”

  But no noise came out of his mouth.

  All he was able to do was lie on the couch and watch in horror as Helen reached into her purse and brought out the large gold brooch she used to hold her stole in place.