The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “We’ll make cookies,” I said. “Would you like that? Real Christmas cookies with sprinkles. And cocoa, and we’ll sing carols!”

  “No,” she said. “That stuff only makes me sad.”

  “Why?”

  “It just—it’s not Christmas. I’m afraid to leave you,” she said, and sniffled, stood up straighter. “That’s all.”

  I looked into her face, trying to see what she meant. “It’s just for a few days,” I said.

  “I just, I have the feeling you won’t be here, when I get home,” she said.

  “Lee, where would I be?” I started to say “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” but changed it quickly enough that she couldn’t feel it, I don’t think. Though I know people do feel things the people they love don’t say. “I live with you; I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  She shook her head vehemently, like a child. “It’s such a strong feeling.”

  And strange, here in the midst of a Christmas tree farm, coming from someone who seemed on an even keel. There was something stilted about it: she was trying to show me a piece of herself that she usually took pride in concealing, so it sounded awkward and false. And I, who’d insisted she open up to me, wanted to shake her now she had—she’d tricked me into thinking she was one of those strong and able people I longed be, and now she was sobbing over nothing on a freezing hillside. As I listened I watched a mother hold a snowsuited baby up over her head to smell its diaper, then tuck it resolutely under her arm and head down toward the parking lot.

  I took Lee’s wrists and pulled her to face me. “I will be here when you get back,” I said, in a voice quiet with conviction. It was amazing how clearly I knew what to say. “I will be right where I am now, right beside you. Okay?” She nodded, head down, an abject child. “Okay. So, what about this tree?”

  “I guess you’re supposed to bring a saw,” she said. “Maybe they have saws in the shed. I’ll go see.”

  I stayed by the tree, to protect it—it was the last vestige of some old dream and I felt I’d kill anyone who’d try to take it from me.

  Lee came back with a rough-toothed saw and knelt in the snow, but after much effort she said, “It’s not really working,” in the droopy, disappointed way she had, so I realized she’d never expected it to work and was pleased now to see she’d been right all along. I got down and saw she’d only scarred a wide section of bark, without even cutting through.

  “Let me try.” I might have been irritated with her ineffectuality but I was used to it. It was the pleasure of my life to sweep in and fix everything while the lost souls stood by in awe.

  The saw jumped back at me. “Jesus, this tree might as well be made of marble!” I said.

  She looked pleased. “I guess we’ll have to get one already cut.”

  She wants me discouraged, I thought. Otherwise I might escape her. My response was a flash of defiance. I’d seen my father cut our Christmas trees on the hillside behind our house. And whatever he could do, I could do better.

  “Here,” I said, and holding the sawblade straight between my hands, I pulled it back and forth and felt it grip, finally. I sawed on with raw determination until my fingers cramped, and the cut went halfway through.

  “Now.” (I thought of Pop’s hands reaching through the branches to pull the trunk back and keep it from binding the saw.) “Take the tree like this, okay? Just pull gently.” And the saw went through, and Lee staggered back under the weight of the tree. “We did it! We did it!” I said. “Do you see?!”

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Everyone else did it too.”

  Everyone else, though, was a man. “But you didn’t think we could!” I said. I’d fallen back on the ground and was sitting there in the snow, catching my breath. Dusk was coming on, a wintry flush at the bleak horizon, and the lights—those strings of big, round lights that automatically go with Christmas trees for sale—blinked on. Lee smiled down at me as if my excitement was adorably naive.

  It was more expensive than we’d thought, and it took a huge effort for the farmer to get it tied to the Mustang’s roof. We drove home in evergreen splendor, our tree branching above us, ready to bless our home.

  “My God,” Lee said, when we got out of the car.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  The tree was about the right size for Rockefeller Center. Staggering beneath it, we approached the front door; the first two or three feet of the thing went in with no trouble, then caught on the doorframe and we were stuck.

  “You pull, I’ll push,” Lee said.

  “The branches will break!”

  “No, they’ll snap back,” she said, in a little singsong like a nursery rhyme. Was she really so ignorant? One rarely feels such perfect rage as when carrying an unwieldy object with another human being.

  “No, no.” I condescended to explain. “The branches will break off. Don’t force mechanical things.” My father’s adage: his way of communicating was to explain how things worked. He’d be telling me about carburetors and I, listening for any way in to his heart, had memorized every word. I was starting to feel like crying myself. This big, soft, fragrant tree seemed like the physical manifestation of all the love and unity I’d wished for back home, and we’d gone to such trouble to get it, and now it wouldn’t fit through our door.

  “It’s a tree,” Lee said, infuriatingly. “It’s not mechanical.”

  “It’s going to be kindling in a minute,” I snapped.

  “Beatrice, I can’t … hold it up anymore,” she said, and dropped her end—the heavier end (somehow we’d agreed that the heavier loads belonged to her) on the stoop, so that my end had to follow, and I slid down along the wall and sat beside it, in comfortable despair.

  “What next?” Lee asked, from outside.

  “I don’t know.” I felt stubborn; I blamed her. We were not going to become a family, we were just going to stagger a drunken path under the weight of some damned enormous symbol.

  “The slider,” Lee said, from way down at the other end.

  “What?”

  “It would fit through the sliding door. I think.”

  It did, and miraculously it stood, it stayed, it took up no more than a third of the living room, it smelled sharply of fresh hope and expectation.

  “We did it,” I said, falling back on the couch. “We did it.”

  I was glowing with victorious, exhausted pride. Our love could fell mighty trees.

  “We did,” Lee echoed skeptically. She couldn’t imagine why I felt such triumph. Then: “But we don’t have lights, or decorations.”

  “We’ll string popcorn!” I said. “We’ll go out and get some cranberries and popcorn to string!”

  She looked pityingly at me: “Do you know what time it is?”

  “No.” The tree was in front of the clock.

  “Almost midnight.” She had to get up at six-thirty.

  “I can’t believe it. We never ate supper.”

  “No,” she said, with some delicate irony. I’d gotten carried away again, and she’d forgive me as many times as it took for me to learn to moderate myself. She tousled my hair; she knew I didn’t mean to be difficult; it was my youth, my inferior upbringing.

  “Nighty-night, sweetheart,” she said, going into the bathroom. I’d always despised the phrase “nighty-night.” What can it mean? But my mother had hated it, along with “fridge” for refrigerator, “cukes” for cucumbers—“To make a lasting connection, one has to be open to the Other!” said my inner Salvation Army volunteer.

  “Nighty-night, hon,” I said. “I’ll be in in a minute.” I was going to respect her difference—to try to live up to it by giving up some of these notions of mine.

  She went to bed; I sat a long time in the middle of the white room, in front of the bare tree. No Christmas tree, however fragrant and perfect, was going to re-create the past—because that past hadn’t existed. Those wide-eyed children sitting beside the fire, listening for reindeer,
were phantoms from my parents’ dream. They’d thought it would save them, and I could never help secretly hoping they were right, that if my eyes were bright enough the dream would flood in finally through the windows. But no, so I had to find it some other way now. My head ached to think of all the billions of parental longings carried by billions of children, all over the world. Bleak it was, alone there, knowing how little I could do.

  Fourteen

  “THE ROCKING chair is for the little mother,” Ma said, pulling it out for Sylvie, who smiled so happily it frightened me. I remembered when she was little and Ma gave her a puppy—she was so stricken by its softness, she hardly dared to move. I’d thought then that it was awful to love things the way she did—it put you in such danger.

  “I’m not tired, Ma,” she said. “I can help. Do you want another Scotch? Then I’ll set the table.” She was showing, but nothing like I’d expected. I knew nothing of pregnancy, except whatever I’d gleaned as a child, watching Ma—I’d never imagined having a baby myself. When I thought of babies I thought of that instant of pure silence after they fell downstairs, before the shock wore off and they started wailing. Sylvie bustled back and forth, while I sat down heavily in the rocker. Ma’s rented house was small and cut into odd-shaped dark rooms—it was a good thing she hadn’t brought anything beside the piano, which filled the living room almost completely.

  “Use the poinsettia plates,” Ma said, nodding toward a package of Chinet. “Your father took all the dishware,” she explained. She spoke the words “your father” as bitterly as ever, and Sylvie caught my eye. We both knew he had the china because Ma had refused it.

  “Doctor Mengele,” Teddy said happily, wanting to please her. I laughed politely, wondering if he had any idea who Doctor Mengele was, and knowing Ma would be on guard to see if we properly despised our father.

  “Teddy tells me I’m drinking too much,” Ma said, turning her bitterness on Teddy now that Pop was gone, gazing into her Scotch glass as if it were a crystal ball with all her miseries swirling inside. It was a mood I knew, and I could predict its outcome—she’d go silently up to bed, leaving us wondering how we could have hurt her so, all feeling guilty and sniping at each other. In the morning she’d say she didn’t know why she should make breakfast for people who despised her as we did, and Teddy would blow up and say if she thought he despised her, she must really be as stupid as he’d always suspected, and Sylvie would apologize abjectly for the misunderstanding, and Teddy would accuse Sylvie of caving in, and I’d demand that Ma tell us how she could fall into such a state over a nine-year-old’s remark.

  “Oh, pfff! What does he know?” Sylvie answered, folding a paper napkin as a coaster and taking the drink out of Ma’s hand.

  “Top it off, will you?” Ma said, with a saucy glance at Teddy, who obliged:

  “Glad you don’t drink too much.”

  “Oh, do you have to?” I asked him. “You know perfectly well that she—”

  “That she what?” Mother asked. “That she’s an old drunk? That’s what you were going to say, so, say it. We can’t all be perfect, like you.”

  “That she is psychotic!” I said. “That she’s psychotic and that even though you, Teddy, are nine years old and she is your mother, you are the one who has to watch what you say around her because she is insane.”

  “Take that back,” he said. “Take that back! She’s my mother and I won’t let you say that kind of thing about her! After all she’s been through. Take it back or I’ll—” he’d picked up a knife from the counter and was holding it over me like an ice pick, and, reader, I’d only been home for an hour. Shortly, he dropped the knife, as if the force of absurdity had broken his grip on it, and was sobbing in the next room, and Ma was begging me to go in and apologize.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s just a little boy, Beatrice,” she said. “He’s just a little boy who’s had a terrible year and has gotten so worked up over Christmas, because he wants it to be so nice, such a warm family thing, he gets disappointed so easily. I know how he feels, I know what it is to be like that. Can’t you just tell him you’re sorry? Christmas will be ruined for everyone.”

  “Ma, he was threatening me with a knife.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, it was only a butter knife!” she picked it up and poked her own arm with it, the skin springing back, healthy and pink.

  So, I begged his forgiveness. “Apologize to her,” he said into his pillow. “She’s the one you insulted.” But his sobs were subsiding, and soon I heard the strains of “Lara’s Theme” from the living room.

  I went to sit with Sylvie in the kitchen, where the music wasn’t so loud.

  “When you set such store by a piano, wouldn’t you think you’d learn a couple more songs,” she said, shaking her head and blowing a smooth stream of smoke upward. I felt so happy here, full of energy, ready for the next challenge, whether it was delivered by tongue or knife or bolt of errant lightning. If I were back in Hartford I’d have been wanting a nap. Here we were all shrieking at each other, wonderfully at home.

  “I think she’s found the one piece that most completely expresses her inner being,” I said, and we laughed, in horror, because the lugubrious melodrama of that song, the aura of splendor in travail, was overwhelming.

  “Maybe that’s why they’re evicting her,” Sylvie said. In spite of the great simpatico between the real estate developers and the woman in the red suit so ably portrayed by my mother, the job at Parkington Estates had gone to a man. She was going to sue their pants off, for sex discrimination, but until it came to trial she was the pantsless one. On examination of the housing code, she’d discovered that her landlord couldn’t even press a charge for six months, and even then would have an uphill battle against her and Teddy, these wretched refugees from the siege of Moscow. So she had an enemy to butt against, an explanation for her misery, a dear little home with crooked (i.e., illegal; don’t think such a thing would escape her) stairs and sad old Masonite paneling, she had Teddy, and she’d put Dolly out of her mind. She had a pretty little spruce for a Christmas tree whose trunk was suspiciously similar to the stump sticking up beside the front steps.

  “We’re getting a donkey,” Sylvie said, changing the subject and getting up to stir the pot. It was venison stew—Butch had hit a deer up on Breakneck Road the week before.

  “Why?”

  “Butch wants one.” This—the ability to supply all of Butchy’s wants—was the small but constantly pulsing power cell of her life. She did not suffer indecision anymore—her ends were clear.

  There was a tap at the back door—businesslike, accustomed—and Sylvie put the outside light on and gestured through the window to the boy who was standing there. He made a quick, frantic motion with his hands, meaning that she had to come out instead.

  She opened the door. “Don’t be silly, Larry. It’s fine.”

  He was tall, one of those boys who gets his height so suddenly, he can’t quite bear it and stoops over to show he’s still partly a child, still in need. His cheeks were brilliant with acne, his hair black as his jacket and hanging in his eyes. “She won’t like it,” he said, looking as if he wanted to pull himself into the jacket like a turtle. “She’s playing that song.”

  “Oh, she’s had too much to drink, that’s all,” Sylvie said. He shook his head emphatically, and jerked it toward the back steps so that Sylvie handed me her wooden spoon and went out with him. Behind my own reflection in the glass I could see them worrying something together, and I saw how it might be to have him hulking over you, cupped like a hand around a match, wanting to protect you so you could keep him warm.

  “Well, I’ll tell her you were here,” she said as she came back inside, but he looked straight at her and shook his head no. “Okay?” she said, questioning, but he ran down the steps and around to the street and was gone.

  “He thinks it’s something he said,” she snorted. “He brought her this, to make up for it.” A small gift wrapped
in red and green paper. “It weighs a ton,” she said, putting it in my hand.

  “A sculpture,” I said, remembering a nude Philippa had as a paperweight that had been cast by some girlfriend long ago.

  Sylvie smiled. “Lug wrench, I’ll bet,” she said, bending down to hide it under some dishcloths in the bottom kitchen drawer. “Some kind of a tool. I’ll put it under the tree after she goes to bed. Ma, Teddy, it’s dinner.” The piano got louder and I looked around the door into the living room to see Ma turn the music back to the first page again.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, as if I were too low on the evolutionary scale to understand her dedication to art.

  No one likes to be called psychotic, no matter how deeply one believes madness is essential to brilliance and to love. (She did believe these things, and I’d absorbed them from her, the stories of women leaping into fountains, women who’d gone beyond life’s rules. She wouldn’t mind my sleeping with women, only my sleeping with bourgeois women. That was the betrayal. And in my mind I gathered Lee’s duvet tighter around me.)

  I closed my eyes; the music swelled, and Sylvie came out with the ladle and said, “Butchy’s here, Ma, time to eat. Please, Ma?” With that entreating child’s voice that said Christmas meant everything to Sylvie, and the threat that if Ma didn’t come to the table, Butch would know she was crazy. Ma cast a quick (defiant, of course) glance at me, stood up, lifted her chin, and went in to greet him.

  Everything about Butch was squared off—his shoulders and fingertips and his chin. His hair was wet—he must have showered after his day at the old Nubestos plant, and he was wearing a canvas jacket. His face was so bright and eager to please that I was determined to be pleased by him. And was reminded that I was a lesbian and didn’t—so there—need love like his.

  “Butch,” Ma said, looking into his eyes with abject, drunken gratitude, “what would we do without you?” Sylvie went over to put her arms around him, bracing her feet against his. He curled an arm around her waist and picked her up suddenly, so she started giggling and cried, “Put me down, put me down!” And he carried her into the living room, dropped her on the couch, and started kissing her, while she squirmed and squealed with joy.