by Laura Ruby
This guy you’ve been with, I won’t forget about him, I can’t, but I won’t ask about him, either, I swear—I don’t want to know. He’s your memory, your secret to keep. I want you—laughing you, snorting you, you in the red shoes. And I know that we can work it out if we tried.
Let’s. Please. Try.
Ward
SAFEKEEPING
In an old photo album, dragged out only on holidays, there is a picture of Lu on Santa Claus’s knee. With lips pressed into a grim smile, one eyebrow cocked, and her arms folded tightly across her chest as if to protect her heart, Lu looks every inch the kindergartner who turned her back on Santa Claus a long time before, dismissed him the same way she dismissed all those other Technicolor phantoms of childhood: the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the white rabbit on the cereal boxes. Silly rabbit. This photograph was a sentimental favorite of Lu’s mother’s. It was taken around the time she had divorced Lu’s father. “If I’d wanted another child to raise,” she’d told Lu, referring to Lu’s dad, “I would have gotten knocked up again.”
Lu thought of this photograph when, on the way to the mall, she and her three boyfriends saw Santa Claus. Santa was driving an old Dodge Dart striped with blue house paint and talking on his cell phone. A cigarette that bobbed from the corner of his mouth threatened to set his frothy beard on fire. Lu, who had just given up cigarettes for good for the fifth time in her life, could practically taste the tobacco.
“Hey,” said Britt, the middle boyfriend. “Santa.”
“What? Where?” yelled Ollie, the youngest, craning his neck to see. “That’s not the real Santa. Santa doesn’t smoke, does he, Lu?” Just the other day, Ollie told her that she was not allowed to have a baby for at least five more years, when he was fifteen. “I’m the baby of the family,” he’d said. “Me.”
“Looks like Santa’s a smoking fiend,” Britt said.
“No, he isn’t.”
“Duh,” said Britt, an expression that always sent Ollie into a spasm of flailing limbs aimed in his brother’s general direction and which did so now.
“Guys,” Lu said halfheartedly. “I’d like to get to the mall without having to make a pit stop at the emergency room, okay?”
“Ow!” said Ollie. “He hit me!”
“No, he hit me,” Britt said.
“A likely story,” said Lu. “If you keep it up, I’m going to drive this car into a ditch.”
“Is that any way to speak to your stepsons?” said Britt.
“It’s the only way to speak to your stepsons,” Lu said.
“I don’t know why we have to go fricking Christmas shopping,” Britt mumbled irritably. “It’s not for weeks and weeks.”
“I don’t want what happened last year to happen again,” Lu said.
Ollie stopped flailing. “What happened last year?”
Last year, Lu had decided to blow her holiday budget on a weekend getaway for Ward, plus a little joke gift she claimed was from Picky the cat. It was the first year that they had all three boys on Christmas morning, yet she hadn’t thought to remind them to get anything for their father, nor had she bought presents on their behalf, as her own mother used to do. It simply hadn’t occurred to her until they were gathered around the tree, when she saw that she and the boys each were tearing through piles of gifts, and Ward, poor Ward, was left holding nothing but a picture of a lakeside cabin in Wisconsin and a spiked dog collar.
At the time, the boys hadn’t noticed. And here, Ollie didn’t even remember.
“Your father didn’t get any presents last year, that’s what happened,” said Lu. “Not one of you bought your own father a present.”
“I was only nine last year,” Ollie said.
“And I don’t have a car,” Britt added.
Lu glanced at Devin, the third and oldest boyfriend, sitting in the front passenger seat, but Devin wasn’t in the mood to provide excuses. Actually, Devin wasn’t often in the mood to provide much of anything but scowls, sneers, and vacant stares that made him look like a photograph of himself rather than the real thing. The approaching holidays had made him touchier than ever, and she had begun to dread coming home. He’d scrape his flinty eyes over Lu, over Ward, and over his own brothers and then whip his head away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of any of them. “At least he’s quiet,” Lu had told Annika, her sister. “At least he’s not taking drugs or robbing little old ladies.”
Annika had said, “How do you know what he’s doing in his spare time?”
Devin turned up the volume on his Walkman and jerked his head spastically. He loved music, but music did not love him back. “I gots ta go,” he muttered.
“Yes, you do,” Britt said, sending Ollie into a theatrical giggling fit.
“Yoodoo!” said Ollie, stressing both syllables, yoodoo, yoodoo, reminding Lu of the vast amounts of spam she got. She had spam on the brain. She read all of it that wormed through her filter, mostly because of the names. Spam was never from Sally Smith or John Jones. Spam came instead from the mailbox of Yes Yoodoo. Tragically Pigged. Transport P. Intoxicating. The names tickled her brain like poetry. They seemed to provide a running commentary on her life, a sly sort of jabberwocky. Just that morning, she’d gotten a message that read:
You look familiar. Haven’t we met somewhere previously?
Fathers, do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. [Ephesians 6:4]
Lu Klein, are you searching to shop for antidepressants?
Adults are obsolete kids.
Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue. Speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.
To accept civilization as it is means accepting decay.
There was something about it, that message, something nonsensical yet apt. And then there was its mystery sender, Disagreeably Dimorphosed. Now that she thought about it, Lu thought it was as good a label as any. And this was what she said out loud: “I’m Disagreeably Dimorphosed. Capital D, capital D.”
“Huh?” said Ollie.
But Lu could see Britt nodding in the rearview mirror. “Maybe you’re just plain disagreeable, no capital?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I’m less Disagreeably Dimorphosed than Tragically Pigged,” Lu said.
Britt snapped gum he wasn’t supposed to be chewing on account of the retainers. “Could be.”
As they passed, Britt waved at Santa, and Santa waved back cheerily, ash spraying out the window like seed.
Lu turned the car into the parking lot, shut down the engine, and herded the boys into the mall. True, it was early in the season, but the crowds, the relentless holiday Muzak, and the dispirited plastic wreaths with their limp red ribbons made Lu’s head ache even before the shopping began.
In front of a cart at which a bored teenager sold clip-on ponytails, Lu turned to her recalcitrant crew. “Where to?”
The boys looked at her like a trio of cats, as if to say, This is your show, Mrs. Claus. We’re just along for the ride.
“Okay,” said Lu. “How about we try the Gap first?”
“My favorite store!” Britt said with excessive sarcasm.
“Your father likes the Gap,” Lu said in a prim voice that embarrassed her as soon as she heard it. Being with the boys sometimes made her that way, prim and fussy, though she tried not to be. They were skilled at eliciting defenses, getting backs up. And the more they saw it happening, saw that you were on some downward spiral toward schoolmarm, the more they enjoyed themselves.
In the store, Lu started flipping quickly through sweaters. “What do you think of these, guys?”
Ollie climbed into the center of the circular rack and stuck his head up in the middle. “I’m a Christmas tree!” he said.
“You’re a Christmas fruitcake,” Britt told him. “Those sweaters are nasty, Lu.” Devin drifted over to stacks of oversize jeans, bobbing his head arrhythmically.
“Okay,” Lu said. “No sweaters.” She turned to the next
rack, where desperately wrinkled dress shirts crumpled in on themselves as if they were ashamed. “How about some of these?”
Britt flipped his retainer out of his mouth and sucked it back in. “Doesn’t Dad have like sixty of those?”
“A hundred!” Ollie said, popping like a jack-in-the-box from the center of the rack.
“I don’t think Dad needs a salmon-colored shirt, Loop,” said Britt.
Ollie crawled out from under the rack. “Salmon is a fish!”
“He does have a lot of shirts,” said Lu. “I don’t know. We need something. You need to get him something.”
“Give us a break,” Britt said. “We just got here.”
That’s when Lu saw the man, hovering behind the boys. Because he was wearing khaki pants paired with one of the nasty Gap sweaters, Lu guessed that he was an employee or manager who didn’t appreciate the public denigration of the merchandise. But then he pulled little yellow cards from his pocket.
“This is for you,” he said, handing them each a card, which they took without thinking. “Have a nice day.”
“What’s this?” said Britt, but the man was already walking away, the bald spot on the back of his head gleaming under the fluorescent lights.
Lu looked down at the yellow card: “God holds you in His hand and in His heart.” Next to the message was a smiley face.
Ollie frowned at the card, his lips moving as he read. “I know this already,” he said. “Does the man think I don’t know this already?”
Devin sneered, tossing the card to the ground. “I don’t know this,” he said, his voice thick as a smoker’s. “Who says God cares about us?”
Ollie bit his lip, and Lu could see he was calculating the benefits of a tantrum. “Ignore your brother, Ollie,” she said.
“Right,” Devin said in a flat voice. “Ignore me.”
Was Devin seething or sarcastic or his characteristic nothing? It was so hard to tell. “Devin’s just mad because I won’t buy him one of these pretty sweaters,” said Lu. “But we’re here to buy presents for your dad.”
“Christmas presents,” said Ollie. He glared at Lu and then at Devin. “I’m keeping my card.”
“Sure you are,” Devin said. Britt yawned.
“That’s fine, Ollie. Do you need me to hold it for you? I can put it in my purse.”
“No,” Ollie said. “I’m going to hold it in my hand. Just like God holds me in His.”
Next stop, Old Navy. More sweaters, cargo pants with pockets ballooning off them like polyps, kitschy old-man pajamas, mango-and-banana-colored shirts that Ward would never wear. Pink shirts were “in” back when Lu was in college, where Lu had majored in bad boyfriends. The first, a blue-eyed blond, tan as a surfer, often wore pink shirts to accentuate his coloring. It made him look innocent, he claimed. He’d told her this while lying naked on her dorm room floor, waggling his penis at her.
“I’m not sure if pink is right for your dad,” Lu said.
Britt poked at the tables of clothes and racks of garments. “All this stuff sucks.”
“What are you talking about?” said Devin. “You have tons of crap from this store.”
“I’m talking about Dad. He can’t wear any of this.”
Ollie tugged on Lu’s arm. “Devin said ‘crap.’”
“Stop saying ‘crap,’ Devin.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . . ,” Britt said, snickering.
“Are we at your house on Christmas or are we at Mommy’s?” Ollie said.
“Mommy’s,” Lu told him. “You’ll be with Daddy and me on Christmas Eve.”
“I thought we were going to be at Grandma’s on Christmas Eve?” Britt said.
“Early in the day you will. But you’ll be at our house for dinner. Then you go to Mom’s Christmas morning, and then I think it’s Aunt Louise’s afterward,” Lu said, surprised that she could keep it all straight. Blended family holidays were less blended than they were pieced up and fractured, balled up like old drugstore receipts at the bottom of a purse. With Lu’s mom and dad living in two separate states and Lu in a third, with Ward’s sons alternating households on alternating Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Easters, Lu and Ward ran from one end of the country to the other, one house to the next. The gifts piled up, and the kids couldn’t even remember which grandparent or stepgrandparent or not-really-my-aunt-but-whatever did the giving. Sometimes Lu herself gave up entirely and got on a plane to visit her own family by herself. On those occasions, it was hard not to feel a shameful relief.
She checked her watch, figuring that she had less than an hour before the boys’ patience would be worn down to the nibs and she would be stuck buying all the presents alone. And of course that would be the easier thing. But after her colossal gaffe last year, she wanted this year to be authentic. She wanted each of Ward’s sons to say to him, “I picked that out for you myself, Dad. Do you like it?” Just one genuine Christmas, and she would be satisfied that she had done her job right.
“Let’s move on,” she said. “There’s a Carson’s a couple of doors down. Maybe we can find something there.”
Carson’s, unfortunately, had some sort of thing for T-shirts with “funny” sayings on them. The boys, unfortunately, also had a thing for T-shirts with “funny” sayings.
“Look at this, Lu!” Ollie said, holding up a bright orange T-shirt. I’m a Secret Agent! shrieked the shirt. This is my disguise!
“That’s cute, Ollie.”
“Can I buy it for Daddy?”
“Uh, why don’t you look through some of the other shirts?”
Beam me up, Scotty. Denial is cheaper than therapy. I’m with Stupid. All the reasons why beer was better than women and why women were better than men. There was Sorry, this is not a slogan, but in letters so tiny that you had to have the shirt three inches away to read it. Britt took a liking to Mad as a box of frogs and got about as mad as a box of frogs when Ollie didn’t understand what it was supposed to mean.
“Huh?” Ollie said in that irritating way of his, curling his lips up to the gumline.
The huhs alone could drive a person crazy, Lu thought. Rule number 4,289 of stepparenting: Beware the huhs! “Ollie, don’t needle your brother.”
“But I still don’t know why the frogs are mad,” Ollie said.
Britt shrugged. “How about this, Ollie?” he said, holding up a shirt: This is my clone.
Ollie frowned. “Ooo!” he said, getting it, grabbing at it.
A woman motoring her way through racks of wrinkle-resistant slacks, blabbing into her cell phone, smacked into Lu and didn’t stop to apologize. “Ham?” the woman shouted into the phone. “Since when do you like ham?” Lu rubbed her shoulder. When she was young, she used to think that people were full of delicious and dangerous secrets, private thoughts about desire and despair. Now she knew that mostly they thought about meat products and who was getting the milk.
“That would make a great shirt, don’t you think?” said Britt, reading Lu’s thoughts. “Since when do you like ham?”
“That’s stupid,” said Devin, oddly angry. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“What about my shirt!” Ollie yelled, forgetting to whimper.
Lu took the T-shirt gently from Ollie’s hands. “This is a good shirt, but I’m sure we can find something better in another store, don’t you think?”
“When?” Ollie demanded. “When will we find something?”
“Soon,” Lu soothed. “We’ll find something soon.”
Lu put the shirt on the rack with all the others, hoping to make a quick escape, when Devin said, “There’s that guy again.”
They all turned and saw the man from the Gap, handing out his little yellow cards. “What’s he doing, following us?”
“I’m sure he isn’t,” Lu said. “I’m sure he’s just going store to store or something.”
“He’s coming this way,” Britt muttered. “He’s probably going to quiz us on God or something. Get ready, Ollie.”
The man marched in their direction, high-stepping like a majorette. His eyeglasses were huge square affairs that took up nearly half of his face. The strap of his canvas bag cut into his soft belly. “Here,” he said, and dealt Britt, Ollie, and Lu a yellow card.
“But you already gave us these,” Britt said.
The man smiled, a mirror image of his card, and turned to Devin.
“I don’t want that,” Devin said. The man smiled even wider and tucked the card into Devin’s shirt pocket.
“Get your hands off me!” Devin yelped, but the man was already moving on, his canvas bag parting the sea of shirts. Lu marveled at the man’s audacity. Nobody touched Devin. Nobody gave him stuff he didn’t want. Nobody gave him stuff he did want. Once, Lu had bought him expensive boots he’d been begging for after watching him slog through the snow in his Converse sneakers, after listening to him complain about his frozen feet. A month later, in a box in the laundry room, she found the boots, lacy with cobwebs.
“Is that guy crazy?” said Britt.
“Now I’ve got one card for each hand,” Ollie said.
“You’re crazy.” Devin yanked the card from his pocket and ripped it in half. The two pieces fluttered from his hands like moths.
“Why did you do that?” Ollie said. “Lu, he ripped the man’s card.”
“But he didn’t rip yours, so everything’s okay, right?” Lu could tell that Ollie wasn’t buying her logic, but he chose not to protest. That was a miracle in and of itself.
Devin was glaring at the man’s back as the man stalked off into the lingerie section, handing his card off to two unsuspecting old ladies buying Tummy Tamers. “If that guy comes near me again, if he freaking touches me again . . . ,” he said, trailing off.