Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  Mary was wearing a long black evening gown and gold earrings. Her hair was a strangely artificial shade of orange, sprayed and pulled tightly up into a bun. The expression on her face suggested that she had been expecting the queen but was faced instead with a man from the stables.

  If you could have seen inside both of them, Mary in her formal dress and Dave in his cords and a flannel shirt, you could have watched their hearts sinking, both of them thinking, How did I get myself into this?

  Before either of them had time for a second thought, Dave saw Mary Turlington’s Christmas tree for the first time. It had a steel trunk and steel branches and steel needles and steel decorations. Dave, who had been expecting greenery, blinked. To Dave, the tree looked…rusty. The tree looked sharp, like a kind of giant, corroded medieval weapon. Or a bombed-out electrical tower left rotting in the fields of a wartorn country.

  These are the thoughts that were tumbling through Dave’s mind as he stood in the hall with his mouth open. And the very first words that came out of his mouth were not “Happy Christmas, Mary,” or “Mary, you look wonderful.” The first words out of his mouth were “My God…what happened to your tree?”

  Morley saw Mary’s jaw twitch. She thought she heard a faraway whoosh. It was the sound of an evening of merriment being sucked from the house.

  Dave glanced helplessly at Morley.

  I’m trying, his expression seemed to say.

  Morley stared back: Try harder.

  Bert ushered everyone into the living room, posing them around the rusting tree, chatting with forced cheeriness. He pulled out his new digital camera. “Everyone smile,” said Bert hopefully.

  Dave did try harder. In an effort to show Mary that he appreciated her hospitality, he sank his hand into a bowl of gourmet snack mix that was on the hall table. But as soon as he popped the stuff in his mouth he knew he had a problem.

  He glanced down at the bowl. There were dried cranberries in there, and what looked like bits of cinnamon stick, but what he had thought were tiny crackers or sweet-potato chips were now looking suspiciously like the stuff you might use at the bottom of a hamster cage. His teeth ground away at what he now realized were cedar shavings. It dawned on him that he was eating Mary’s Christmas potpourri. When he looked up to see if anyone had noticed, he caught Mary staring at him from the living room. Instead of spitting into his hand, which was what he had been about to do, Dave smiled gamely and swallowed.

  Bert handed Morley a glass of wine and reached for his camera. “Hold it there, Dave,” said Bert.

  The more Dave tried, the worse things got.

  “Just don’t touch anything,” whispered Morley, taking a clove-studded orange from Dave’s hand.

  —

  EVERYONE WAS IN the kitchen. And everyone was busy. Mary was dusting the turkey with saffron. Morley was tossing the salad. Bert was taking pictures.

  “What can I do?” Dave whispered to Morley.

  “Just be helpful,” said Morley. “Look around for something that needs doing and do it.”

  Dave couldn’t see anything that needed doing in the kitchen. He went into the dining room.

  There were flower petals and little pieces of bronze-coloured glitter all over the table.

  He went to the hall closet and got the hand vac and hoovered them up.

  Then he picked up matches from the buffet and headed toward the mantel. One by one, he lit the wicks in the heads of the little wax choir. The twenty-three candles cast a remarkable glow.

  A few of the oldest figures burned quickly. The little wax puddles at the tops of their heads sank into their skulls so that the flames of the candles shone through their eyes. It gave them a slightly demonic look. It would be more dramatic, thought Dave, if he dimmed the room lights. Then the candles would be the first thing you saw when you came into the room.

  They were certainly the first thing Mary saw when she walked through the kitchen doors. She was carrying a salmon appetizer.

  —

  THEY MANAGED TO pick most of the salmon up before the Turlingtons’ dog got too much. Dave scooped up the biggest piece and wiped it off on a napkin.

  “Five-second rule,” he said, grinning.

  “Hold it there,” said Bert, snapping away.

  Somehow or other, they managed to get through the meal. After the candles-and-salmon fiasco, Mary had headed back into the kitchen like an army general determined to overcome defeat in the field. Bert kept jumping up at regular intervals and blinding everyone with the flash of his camera. And Morley hung on to her wineglass like a drowning woman clutching a life preserver.

  In fact, by the time the turkey was finished, things seemed to have settled down so nicely that Dave felt it might just be safe to help out again. He headed into the kitchen to see about the plum pudding.

  “You’ll need more than that,” Dave offered as he watched Mary sprinkle the pudding with liquor.

  Whether or not she needed more is a moot point. The point is, if Mary had just added a little more, everything might have been all right. But she didn’t. Mary wasn’t about to let Dave tell her how things should be done in her kitchen.

  So instead of adding a little more brandy, Mary looked at Dave icily and said, “That will be plenty.”

  Dave, moved only by the best of intentions, not wanting anything more to go wrong, waited until Mary wasn’t looking and gave the pudding an extra shot of brandy anyway. And Mary, not wanting to be proved wrong about how much brandy you needed to light a plum pudding, waited until Dave wasn’t looking to give it an extra shot herself.

  So the pudding was well and truly soaked when Mary carried it to the table. She did this with great ceremony.

  First she called from the kitchen for Bert to dim the lights. She peeked out several times to ask for adjustments. When the lights were just right, Bert got out his camera and positioned himself at the end of the table. When he had finished focusing on where Mary would be standing with the pudding, he called out to her, and Mary, standing tall and regal, like a monarch carrying an orb and sceptre, advanced out of the kitchen into the dining room, the pudding proffered in front of her. When she got to the table, she lowered the pudding to the table slowly.

  Then she struck a match.

  There was a whoosh and a flash and the pudding went up like a Roman candle.

  A number of things caught fire.

  Perhaps most spectacularly, and certainly most alarmingly, the cinnamon-coloured silk ribbon that Mary had wrapped around the bun at the top of her head.

  The ribbon acted like a wick, and in an instant, blue flames were shooting out of Mary’s heavily hairsprayed hair. She stood stock-still by the table, looking like the Statue of Liberty set alight.

  Bert was snapping away like a paparazzo.

  Unfortunately, it was Dave who put her out.

  He used a pitcher of eggnog.

  —

  IT WAS HOURS later, after Mary’s hair had been put out and the dining room generally hosed down, the twins in bed and Dave and Morley safe at home, that Mary’s sister, Emma, phoned.

  Mary took the portable phone into the den while Bert finished tidying the kitchen.

  “Emmy sent her love,” said Mary when she returned. Her eyes were red. She had been crying.

  “I guess I miss her,” she said. “I hadn’t been missing her at all, but I have never had a Christmas without her. Did you know that?”

  “Did you tell her about the candles?” asked Bert.

  “And the pudding,” said Mary, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her housecoat. “She reminded me of the Christmas the dog ate the turkey. And the year Adam knocked the tree over. Remember?”

  “Family and friends,” said Bert. “They sure mess up our lives.”

  “They sure do,” said Mary. She was smiling now. “They sure do.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of November, when Jim Scoffield was cleaning out his attic, he came across a box of children’s books he neither recognized nor remembered. He brought
them downstairs, intending to do what he always does with books he doesn’t want. He was going to take them to the library and push them through the return slot.

  By Friday afternoon, the books had made it as far as his front hall, which is where Jim happened to be standing when he spotted Rashida Chudary pushing her daughter, Fatima, up the street in her stroller. Rashida and her husband, Amir, had moved into the neighbourhood in January, and everyone had taken great delight in helping the Chudarys through their first winter. When it snowed, people woke up all over the neighbourhood wishing they could be at the Chudarys’ to see their reaction.

  Jim grabbed some wrapping paper from where he keeps it, under the sofa, and quickly gift-wrapped the books.

  Then he ran outside.

  “An early Christmas present,” he said, handing the children’s books to Rashida and pointing at her daughter.

  Jim said the thing about the books being a Christmas present so she wouldn’t think he was odd, running out like that. He gave her the books and then he went inside to fix dinner and forgot about them completely.

  Rashida didn’t, however. Rashida went home and went into a tailspin.

  Rashida and Amir are from Pakistan. This was going to be their first Christmas in Canada.

  “Jim clearly said it was an early Christmas present,” she told Amir that night when her husband arrived home. “Do you know what that means?”

  Amir shook his head disconsolately.

  Rashida was pacing.

  “It surely means this whole neighbourhood gives each other presents,” she said.

  It was not two days since the start of Ramadan. Amir hadn’t eaten since sun-up. His head was throbbing. He couldn’t think about neighbourhood gift-giving. All Amir could think about was the carrot muffin he had seen in the doughnut store at lunchtime. He had only gone to the doughnut store to look at the muffins.

  “I don’t understand why we don’t have muffins in Pakistan,” he had said when he’d first tried one. “They are truly wonderful things.”

  Rashida could see that Amir was thinking about food—he had a certain muffin-hungry look about him. She wasn’t about to be distracted.

  “He was waiting for us…on his porch,” she said. She was holding out the books Jim had given Fatima. “They were beautifully gift-wrapped. If Jim did this,” she said, “imagine what Gerta Lowbeer will do. And what about Betty the Baker?”

  When they’d first arrived in the neighbourhood, Betty Schellenberger had brought them home baking countless times.

  “Maybe if you walked by her house tomorrow,” said Amir, “Betty the Baker would give you delicious carrot muffins for Christmas.”

  Rashida snorted. “Amir,” she said, “this is not a joking thing. Remember what happened in October.”

  What happened in October was Halloween, and Halloween was a disaster at the Chudarys’. No one had warned them about trick-or-treating. When the doorbell had rung unexpectedly during supper, Rashida had opened it to find a mob of chanting children. She had thought they were teasing her. Rashida shooed the children away and shut the door as quickly as she could, hoping Amir wouldn’t notice.

  Children kept coming to the door all night, of course.

  When they finally figured out what was going on, they were horribly embarrassed. Rashida didn’t want to repeat the disaster.

  “Amir,” she said, “we have to get to work.”

  Amir and Rashida spent November in a frenzy of preparation. They assembled elaborate gift baskets for everyone in the neighbourhood. Each basket had little packages of aromatic rice and tamarind and homemade chutneys. They stayed up late sewing little cloth bags for the spices.

  —

  THINGS AT DAVE and Morley’s house were more comfortable in the run-up to Christmas. Morley has been paring back her Christmas responsibilities over the years. She has pruned her shopping list. She doesn’t do as much baking as she used to. And Dave always does the turkey now. So as Christmas approached, Morley felt uncommonly sanguine about the season. She felt as if she were floating above it, as if she were a seabird floating effortlessly over the waves. She felt such a sense of control that she even sat Dave down one night and they sent Christmas cards to his Cape Breton relatives.

  On an impulse, Morley sent a card to Amir and Rashida. By coincidence, it arrived the morning Rashida and Amir finished making their neighbourhood Christmas packages.

  “Oh my golly,” said Amir. “Not cards too.”

  —

  UNLIKE MORLEY, DAVE had been preoccupied with Christmas since the end of October. The neighbourhood arena holds an annual skating party every December—a fundraiser to raise money for a new Zamboni.

  Dave went to an organizing meeting. When he set off, he knew he wouldn’t be leaving without something to do.

  Before the meeting began, Dave overheard Mary Turlington talking to Polly Anderson.

  “He flips a few steaks on the barbecue and he thinks he has cooked a meal,” she said disparagingly.

  She was talking about her husband, Bert.

  “Baking,” said Polly Anderson. “That’s the final frontier. Show me a man who can bake a cupcake and I’m all his.”

  They both cracked up.

  At the end of the meeting the chairman passed a typed list of jobs around the table. Dave looked down the list and without a second thought said, “I’ll bake the Christmas cake.”

  He said it for Bert Turlington. He said it for Ted Anderson.

  He said it for all the men in the neighbourhood.

  He said it for men everywhere.

  He saw Mary Turlington shoot Polly Anderson a raised eyebrow.

  And that’s how, on a Saturday in the middle of November, Dave came to be in his kitchen, surrounded by brown paper bags of sultanas and currants and lemons and figs and dates and prunes and nuts and glazed cherries and various sugars. And a giant jug of bourbon. He was wearing a Santa Claus hat.

  Morley had taken one look at him and said, “I think I’ll take Sam to a movie.”

  Dave had imagined his family at home while he baked—Sam licking the beaters, Morley with her arms around him.

  But Dave and Morley have been married for over twenty years now. Morley knows how these things go.

  “So we won’t be in your way,” she’d said, struggling into her coat. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  —

  AUTUMN DIMMED AND the rains of November arrived and the street lights went on earlier each night. The wind came up and the leaves blew off the pear tree in the backyard, and it was good to be inside. And inside at Dave’s house, life was sublime.

  Dave had his cakes wrapped in cheesecloth and aging on a shelf in the basement.

  Two or three evenings a week he would head downstairs and sprinkle them with a soaking mixture he’d made with the bourbon.

  “It is very European,” he said one night. “It’s like having a goat down there.”

  Sometimes on the weekends Kenny Wong came over, and they would go into the basement and sprinkle the cakes together.

  On Grey Cup weekend, Dave and Kenny watched the entire game without touching one beer. They sucked on half a fruitcake each.

  By the middle of December, Dave was ready for the arena. Big time. His cakes were moist and mature and, truth be told, delicious. Dave had eaten two of them. He had nibbled them both to death. He had the remaining dozen lined up like gold bars in a vault.

  —

  AMIR AND RASHIDA had their gift baskets ready to go too—wrapped in Cellophane, tagged and waiting in the front hall.

  But a sense of anxiety had descended upon the Chudarys. Amir and Rashida didn’t know when the neighbourhood gift-giving would begin. Knowing nothing about Christmas traditions, they didn’t want to jump the gun.

  “It wouldn’t be right, Amir,” said Rashida. “We must wait.”

  And then there was a party at Fatima’s daycare, and all the children were given presents.

  That night Rashida said, “I am t
hinking, Amir, that the gifting has obviously begun. We have not been included because they do not want to make us uncomfortable. If we are going to be part of this neighbourhood, Amir, it is up to us to make the first move.”

  Amir thought otherwise, and they had a steamy argument about what to do. In the end, Rashida said, “I am going tonight and that is all. If you are coming with me, Amir, you must come tonight.”

  And so they set off after supper, pulling their wagon full of twenty-eight gift baskets.

  —

  WHEN RASHIDA HANDED Morley her Christmas basket, Morley experienced a stab of guilt. She was ashamed of herself. She had been working so hard to minimize the hassle of Christmas, and these new neighbours, these new Canadians, had so clearly embraced the spirit of the season.

  She invited them in and she put their basket under the tree. Then she said, “I have your present upstairs.”

  She flew upstairs and, in a panic, grabbed a glass bowl she had picked up at a craft show. It was already wrapped. She had been planning to give it to her mother.

  “See,” said Rashida to Amir fifteen minutes later as they pulled their wagon along the sidewalk. “They were waiting on us, Amir.”

  It took Amir and Rashida three hours, but when they’d finished, they had left baskets all over the neighbourhood.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Morley noticed a tiny rash in the crook of her elbow—a spot that often flared when she was feeling pressured. While she was drying her hair she told Dave what was bugging her.

  “I gave the Chudarys that pretty glass bowl. We have lived right next to Maria and Eugene for eighteen years and we have never given them anything. And Gerta, too. If I give something to the Chudarys, surely I should give something to Gerta.”

  She could feel the muscles in the back of her neck tightening. As she headed downstairs for breakfast she was trying to figure out when she would have time to shop.

  —

  MORLEY WENT TO a flower store at lunch and bought two bunches of holly. She was planning on taking one to Eugene and Maria next door and one to Gerta. She was planning to do it after supper. But before she could do that, the doorbell rang and there was Gerta—standing on the stoop beside a wagon full of presents.