Finally, I come to a classroom with the door standing open. People are going in, so I follow them, but there’s no place left for me to sit. Everyone’s already working on something. Then a girl in the back gets up from her desk and comes over to me, putting her arm around me. It’s my mother. I go limp with relief. I know she’ll show me what to do.
She takes me back to her desk, sits down, goes back to what she’s working on. I just stand there watching her. She looks at me and smiles from time to time, but it’s clear I’m not going to get any direction from her.
At Thriftway that afternoon, I buy all-purpose flour and granulated sugar and a box of food colorings. In the parking lot, couples are picking out trees; women are buying garlands and waterproof bows while their kids run splashing through puddles. Everyone’s bundled up in heavy coats, with bright mufflers and knit caps, and there’s an old guy in a patched sport coat, roasting chestnuts on a little brazier. I buy a small bag, and as the first one crumbles into creamy smoke between my teeth, I know I have to have a tree.
Linda has a black eye. Actually, “black eye” is something of a misnomer. It’s more a hideous purple-green, and the white of the eye has a slick red patch along one side from a broken blood vessel. Her lower lip is twice its normal size.
It’s not the sort of thing you can pretend not to notice, so I say, “What the hell happened to you?”
“My ex-old man, that’s what happened to me,” she says.
“I hope you gave as good as you got.”
“That I did, missy. That I did.” She cracks a tiny smile. “Stupid son of a bitch came over drunk. Howlin’ like a coyote. I had to let him in before somebody called the cops. ‘Course then he tries to get all lovey-dovey, and when I told him to stick it in a knothole, he hauled off and slugged me.” She touches her jaw tentatively. “We mixed it up pretty good before a couple of the neighbors came down and threw him out.”
“Are you going to press charges?”
Her expression is contemptuous. “Big waste of time. Mine, mostly.”
“You could get a restraining order …”
Her laughter is wheezy, and she flinches from the pain. “What am I gonna do? Say, ‘Lookey here, Bubba, this paper says you can’t come around me’? Restraining order, my ass. I could paper my walls with ‘em.”
All at once she remembers who she’s talking to, and she’s especially pissed off because I look sympathetic. “Nothing you’ll ever have to worry about, missy.”
Christmas morning I wake up at five o’clock. I should have kept to my schedule, as Linda’s forever preaching, but I couldn’t face being up all Christmas Eve with nothing to do but remember other Christmas Eves. I turn over. It’s still dark, maybe I can go back to sleep. Too late, I wish I’d made some plans for today. Just going through the motions is hard, but sometimes not going through the motions is worse.
At seven-thirty, I get up, wrap a blanket around me, curl up in the chair. A red and shrunken remnant of last night’s fire glows in the stove. The smell of wood smoke carries memories of Christmases at Lake Tahoe, the cabin we used to rent. My father loved spending Christmas in the mountains. I think it reminded him of his New England childhood, and there was always the tantalizing possibility of snow. I lay in my loft bed every night of the holiday and prayed for a blizzard. I wanted to be stranded in our cabin, with my dad building huge blazes in the fireplace and my mother making hot chocolate with little marshmallows bobbing on top.
Every year, my mother complained about the cold, but she seemed to enjoy it once we were there. She would sit on the couch by the fire and read, absently munching popcorn, while my dad and I went walking in the afternoons. And at night, too, if there was a moon. Each year as I marched behind him, I noted the size of my footprints in his. The air was silent, cold and so crystalline you thought it would shatter and fall to the ground in icy fragments at the slightest noise. We never talked on those hikes. If he wanted to show me something, he would point to it. The only sounds were the puffs of our breath, the crackle of dry pine straw, or the squeak of new powder under our boots, and once, the glorious whoosh of a huge barn owl passing right above our heads.
We always had a little tree that we cut ourselves, and we made decorations from popcorn and cranberries and gingerbread and paper. That was my mother’s turf. She had learned origami from a Japanese friend of her father’s, and she fashioned birds and stars, cats and dogs, trees and angels. She would make tiny holes in both ends of an eggshell, blow the egg out, and then meticulously paint the shell. She could sit and work on those things for hours, like the sailors who carved scrimshaw by lantern light during long nights at sea.
It’s hard to accept that she could traipse off to Tahoe with a bunch of perfect strangers, when it was our place for Christmas with my dad. I wonder if she’s sitting around in front of the fire complaining of the cold like she did with us, or if she’s all bundled up out in the snow, being a good sport so everyone will say, “That Johanna! She’s up for anything, isn’t she?”
Christmas always turned David into an Armani-wearing, Mercedes-driving ten-year-old boy. Every night when he got home from work we had to sit down together and read all the cards that had come in the mail that day. And there were dozens, mostly from business acquaintances who were artists, designers, writers, so each one was a miniature work of art. We displayed them all over the house, along with miles of garland and shimmery silver ribbon. It was the only time of the year he could tolerate clutter.
We had to have a big tree—eight-, nine-, once a ten-footer. It had to be flocked, and it had to be decorated in white and silver balls, clear glass icicles, and tiny white lights. We always had a fire in the fireplace and mulled wine to drink. Those years when southern California spent December basking in eighty-degree temperatures we simply turned the A.C. on full blast and proceeded as usual.
He was an extravagant and imaginative Santa. And after the presents were opened, there was always one more, something special, hidden somewhere in the house. One Christmas Eve when we went upstairs to bed, an exquisite gown of pale yellow silk was draped over my pillow. Another year, a diamond tennis bracelet was casually fastened around my Christmas stocking like an anklet; another time, tickets for a cruise were rolled up inside a toy boat floating in the Jacuzzi.
This morning I can’t help wondering what he’s giving Kelley. What she’s giving him.
Hopefully, something that requires penicillin.
By nine-thirty the grayness that passes for winter morning light is spilling into the darkest corners of the room. I stand up, stretch, decide not to spend the day moping. I feed the fire, put on my stovetop espresso pot, and drag my two unopened presents out of the closet.
I open the one from CM first. It looks like two very large blue baked potatoes. On the end of the box, it says “Down Booties, size 10.” I smile. My ever practical friend remembers that my feet are perpetually freezing. I pull them on, walk around. They have inch-and-a-half-thick foam soles, and they make my feet look approximately the size of rowboats, but within five minutes my toes are warm.
My mother’s present is a hand-knit fisherman’s sweater, made from a rag yarn the color of oatmeal. I wonder which of her Christmas bazaars it came from. Underneath it in the box are two cotton turtlenecks, one purple, one teal, and a check for a hundred dollars.
Well. That was fun. I put the butter into the freezer to make it easier to cut into pieces, set the eggs out to come to room temperature. Collect the flour and the sugar and the food coloring together on the table. I suppose there are worse ways to spend Christmas Day than making cookies.
Out on the porch in my new down booties, I sip at my espresso, hardly feeling the dew that soaks into my sweatpants. Fog obscures the outline of the big house, and hemlock branches poke out of the mist like the arms of sleepwalkers. I’ve consumed about half my coffee when I notice my little Douglas fir tree sitting on the bottom step. In the mad whirl of my holiday social activities, I forgot to take Doug insi
de. He was probably happier out here, anyway. I pick up the pot and bury my nose in his soft green needles, sparkling with tiny droplets. The clean, aromatic scent is simultaneously piercing and calming. I’d thought I was all cried out, but apparently not.
Walking to work is cold, but so many houses have Christmas trees in the windows and those tiny white lights draped all over their shrubs that it’s like walking through fairyland. Even if you’re lonely, it’s nearly impossible to be sad in the face of this fantasy. And I’m beginning to feel the first rumblings of resentment at David for acting like I don’t exist. Kind of a good feeling.
Linda seems subdued tonight, not so much as a sneer about the cookies I brought her. That’s what Christmas does—brings out the vulnerability, even in people who are mostly immune to the ravages of sentiment. Of course, she doesn’t thank me either.
“What did you do today?” I ask as we’re loading the first batch of bread into the oven.
She shrugs. “Just another day, far as I’m concerned. Got up at four. Had some soup. A little company.” This last part is so quiet I almost miss it.
“Company? Your ex?”
“Huh. Not likely. He probably passed out about noon. My kids.”
#x201C;I didn’t know you had children,” I lie.
“Why would you?” She glowers. “Sometimes I don’t even know I have ‘em. They only show up on holidays. And only if they think there’s somethin’ in it for ‘em.”
“How many do you have?”
“Two.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Boy and a girl.”
I slide the last two loaves off the peel onto the baking tiles of the top deck. “What are their names?”
“What difference does it make to you, missy?”
“I was just curious.”
She looks over the tops of her glasses at me. “Didn’t you ever hear what bein’ curious done to the cat? Kilt him, that’s what.”
“Okay, forget it.” I open the notebook, start setting up ingredients for the cinnamon-raisin and cheddar-cheese breads.
“You been doin’ this for three months now. Haven’t you got those recipes memorized yet?”
“Nope.” I try to keep my voice cheerful.
“Kinda slow on the uptake, aren’t you?”
I snip the string on a bag of white flour and pull the threads till I find the one that unravels the closure. “I forget everything as soon as I walk out that door, and that’s a good thing. Because if I remembered every day that I had to come to work with you, I’d probably never come back.”
She snickers, reveling in her image as the Bad Ass Baker from Hell.
The bakery’s quiet since a lot of people aren’t going to work today. After Linda leaves, I make myself a decaf espresso and take a table in the front. Ellen comes over to sit with me.
“Post-holiday slump,” she mutters, dropping into the chair. She has circles under her dark eyes. “Had twenty people for dinner yesterday. And I’m Jewish, for Pete’s sake. Lloyd’s family. Those cookies of your grandmother’s were great, by the way. I think next year we’ll do those here.” She rolls her head around, rubs the back of her neck. “This is where I carry all my stress. What did you do? Weren’t you going to CM’s?”
“I was, but she ended up going to L.A.”
“So you were alone? I wish you’d called. I could have used the moral support.”
“That’s nice of you, but I wasn’t up to being with a bunch of people.”
She smiles. “Who said anything about being with people? I would have come over to your place and hid from them all.” She pushes up the sleeves of her black knit dress, leaving floury prints. “I should never wear black to work. Look at that.” Her eyes slide over to me. “Did you hear from Shithead?”
“No.” I blot my eyes with a napkin. “Didn’t really expect to, though.”
She puts her arm around my shoulders for a minute. “We never expect, but we always hope. That’s the bitch of it.”
Nine
I’ve never been a big celebrant of New Year’s Eve. I prefer going to sleep in the old year and waking up with the new one firmly in place and functioning. In grammar school and junior high, CM and I always took turns staying over at each other’s houses. If the adults were having a party, we skulked around watching everyone get drunker and sillier as midnight approached. We usually got a thimbleful of champagne at the appropriate time, and then we volunteered to help clean up so we could polish off the leftover drinks and food.
In high school and college, there were the usual drunken orgies, but I never enjoyed them, and I don’t think CM really did either, although she talked a good game. For us, the best part of any New Year was watching the Rose Parade on TV in the morning while we stuffed ourselves with leftover Christmas cookies or cold pizza from the night before.
This year, she shows up on my porch at five o’clock on New Year’s Eve, carrying bags of food from the Market. A wedge of Stilton, some Brie and Parmesan, vegetables to be made into soup, and three bottles of champagne from Pike & Western Wine Shop. And a small gold box containing six chocolate truffles, for medicinal purposes.
“What smells so good?” She takes off her coat, hangs it on one of the hooks I pounded into the wall by the door.
I set the bags on my new drop-leaf table. “You’re my guinea pig for a new bread. Yeasted orange poppyseed.”
“Always glad to oblige. Hey …” She does a 360. “This looks fabulous. I can’t believe it’s the same place.” She wanders into the bedroom, now my office/den, where I put the desk and the wing-back chair. “These colors are terrific. Where’d you get these botanical prints? I love it.” Back in the main salon, she admires the watercolor I paid Tyler twenty-five dollars for, the curtains and slipcovers made of plaid bedspreads. “Oh, I love paperwhites. They smell so good.” Her shrewd green eyes focus on me. “Quite a little nest you’ve made yourself. Or maybe I should say a cocoon.”
I laugh. “Yeah, it’s a cocoon. I’m going in as a butterfly and coming out as a caterpillar.”
“A reversal of fortune.” She smiles. “By the way, have you talked to Jerkoff?”
I shake my head. “I tried to call him last week and his assistant said he was out of the office for the holidays. He’s probably up at Aspen with Barbarella.”
“Barbarella? Let’s see. Would that be the love child of Barbie and Godzilla?”
I laugh again—twice in five minutes is pretty good. “Something like that. Here.” I hand her one of the bottles of champagne, stash the other two in the fridge. “Open that puppy. Let the party begin.”
She pours two glasses and we settle in to scrub and chop vegetables for our soup.
For a while we work in one of those silences that’s only possible between two people who know each other so well that conversation is superfluous. I’m thinking about times past and I know she is, too, probably the same ones. But when the champagne in our glasses reaches a certain level, she starts telling me about her work in progress, set to Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne.
“What’s it about?”
She smiles patiently. “There’s not much of a story. Canteloube was from the Auvergne and this work was sort of a hymn to the region. The music is gorgeous; it’s for orchestra and one soprano voice.” Her face takes on a rapt expression. “The choreography starts with a solo female dancer—namely, me—and then the others join her. All during the piece they’re moving together and apart, so the number of dancers visible is constantly shifting.” I sit there, nodding, not saying a word, until she looks up from the carrot she’s mutilating.
“Neal called me on Christmas Eve.”
“And?”
Her posture is a study in nonchalance. “He said he wants to see me. He’s in Palo Alto right now, but he’s coming up here for a seminar in February. He wants to have dinner. Or something.”
I smile and throw a handful of green beans into the pot. “It’s those ‘or something’s’ you have to watch. What did
you tell him?”
“I said I’d think about it.”
“I assume you’ve thought about it by now.” When I stir the onions that are slowly caramelizing in olive oil, their sweet, musky fragrance fills the room.
Heavy sigh. “I actually haven’t thought about much else in the last week.” She gives me a pleading look. “Help me out here. Tell me what to do.”
I hand her the church key. “For starters, open these.”
In spite of the fact that she’s never been shy about trashing David, I’ve always been reluctant to criticize Neal. I think it’s the old reverse psychology. Whenever my parents criticized some guy I was seeing, I became even more enamored of him. “You probably couldn’t find anyone less qualified to offer relationship advice.”
The chicken broth gurgles as she pours it on top of the vegetables. “No fair copping out. When you needed advice, I told you to get a job.”
“You already have a job. Do you want to see him?”
“I must, or why would I be agonizing over it?” She tosses the cans into my recycle bin.
“Problem solved.” I ransack my pantry, pulling out bay leaves and peppercorns, and add them to the pot.
When she shakes her head, her hair flows from side to side, catching the light in its red-gold depths, just like in the shampoo commercials. If she wasn’t my best friend, she’d be easy to hate. “You don’t think it’s a good idea, do you?” she says.
I rest my chin on my hands. “It doesn’t really matter what I think, if you want to see him again. Maybe it would be good. Maybe you’ve both learned something. If not, at least you won’t have to waste any more time wondering what might have happened.”
“Very sensible indeed.” She finishes chopping the last carrot and throws it into the pot. This is obviously what I was supposed to say.
I dump the sautéed onions into the pot and light the burner. She refills our glasses and puts out a bowl of picholines, the little green French olives that we both adore. We curl up on the futon in the warmth from the woodstove to listen to Motown’s Greatest Hits and watch the old year die.
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