His sudden affirmation made me squeal, “Get out! Get out! There’s something wrong!” I knew I was supposed to leave the diaphragm in for hours afterward, but I reached inside me and tore it out to relieve the pain. Sean pulled the string on the lightbulb so he could examine himself in the glare. His penis was covered in aqua goo. I held the diaphragm in my hand. It oozed the same aqua color. My vagina burned the way iodine burns on a cut. “God, what is it, Molly?” Sean beseeched me.
“Crest,” I said, “Crest toothpaste. I grabbed the wrong tube in the dark.”
“Jesus Christ, I’ve got to get this shit off me!” Sean ran toward the kitchen and started dousing himself with water, splattering the whole kitchen floor. I followed, wondering how I could flush the toothpaste out of me. I splashed ineffectively, needing some way to direct the water into me, but the only thing I could think of was a turkey baster. There one was, in a drawer, but the ancient rubber bulb of the baster was cracked, thank heaven, because I hadn’t wanted even to think about the dried crusts of old gravies inside the thing. I was lying on the floor and Sean was pouring glasses of water into me, then going to the pump and pumping another bucketful. Of course Polly was wide awake. We’d turned on the kitchen lights and her doorway was nearby. And we’d begun to laugh. After the first couple of glasses of water the burning softened and I began to heave with relief. Now Sean and I were naked in a flood of water holding our sides from laughing and Polly’s gravelly voice was asking, “What’s happening out there? Can’t you kids keep quiet? What are you pumping that water for?”
“Well,” I began to blurt out the truth, “I put, I put,” then collapsed into gales of laughter with Sean, acutely aware that my great scheme for affirming my adulthood had turned into the most adolescent flaunting of my sexuality, and with a redhead, to boot. I had not succeeded in rescuing myself from regression. I was still five years old. I was caught, and I told the truth. “I put toothpaste in my diaphragm, Mom! And it burned like hell, so Sean and I have to get it out of me!” All I could picture was a child racing across the living room naked in front of company, being chased after by an adult holding tiny pajamas.
“Make sure you clean up that kitchen floor, Molly. It sounds like Noah’s flood out there.” Sean held out his hand and pulled me to my feet. I got the mop and cleaned up. It was 4 A.M. on Christmas Eve, and Sean and I went to sleep. We did not make love again at La Grange, punished by our red, raw genitals.
Late that afternoon Gail arrived with homemade potholders and aprons, muffins and breads, a St. Bernard named Brandy and the grizzled Ed. He must have been Ted’s age! But he didn’t look like our father at all. For one thing, he had shoulder-length white hair.
“I’m growin’ all our own food in Ed’s spare lot, Mol,” Gail chirped, “and livin’ in his cabin with him and Brandy!” She pointed to the St. Bernard. “Ed’s my old man now. Mol and Mommy, meet Ed. He saved me from the Fillmore!”
“ ’Lo, everyone,” Ed said, hauling out his guitar and singing, quite sweetly, a French folk song, telling us between verses that though he had the same given name as my father, he was called Ed, not Ted, and that was a world of difference, he assured us, since he was the exact opposite politically and socially. Then, before he revved up his Woody Guthrie, he crooned a ballad he’d made up about how he dragooned Gail from the Fillmore and hauled her to Woodstock to dry out.
And saved me, I thought, from always thinking I should save her. Gail had made clear sense when she had talked to me on the phone from Ed’s. Usually when she called from the Fillmore pay phone she was incomprehensible. Her new life and my new life with Sean and Polly’s new life after Ruth and Howie’s new life after Aunt Roberta had given me the idea for Christmas together, and now here we all were. Red welts of allergic reaction spread across my face and wrists. My eyes watered. My nose was too stuffed to sneeze.
Gail always kept herself busy in Polly’s presence and immediately got down to making a pumpkin pie. Even Polly got into the spirit of cooking and the three of us chortled and grinned through our tasks while Howie fixed the TV and Sean and Ed talked politics between songs. Suddenly I sneezed, loud as a tiny clap of thunder.
“It’s that goddamn Christmas tree. Get that thing out of here!” Polly said when she looked up at me. “You’re going to be sick as a dog, Molly. My Lord, you’re sick already. You’re sick in the head to bring that thing in here.”
“Forget it, Mom,” I said, holding the Kleenex box to my chest as if it were my pet. My sister and I were orchestrating Christmas. Polly had no say. We were having a great dinner and a terrific tree.
“When are we going to open our presents?” Sean asked. He was terribly proud of the box for me that he had wrapped by himself in an un-Christmas-like hyacinth pink.
Of the two types of Christmas present opening families—the Christmas Eve openers and the Christmas morning openers—ours was a morning family. My father had been sober in the A.M. “Let’s open ’em up tonight!” my sister gleefully suggested. “Let’s change everything around!”
“Great! Let’s change everything!” I agreed, though Polly had remained unchanged. She had declared no gifts and she had stuck to it. There was nothing from her to anyone under the allergy-provoking pine.
Gail and I had planned a Christmas Eve supper and a Christmas dinner. There were squashes and cranberries and walnuts and dates and tangerines and mincemeat and shrimp and turkey. The bought things were bought by me, the garden things brought by Gail, or bartered for by Gail and Ed since they’d had to stop every hour to let their car cool down and walk the St. Bernard, and in the process they would meet people and exchange a squash for a zucchini nut bread, or some potholders for a bottle of wine. Howie brought over apples and pears from my uncle’s orchards.
We had our Christmas Eve feast and Ed and Howie cleaned up the kitchen for Christmas Day while Sean shoveled snow. It was snowing and snowing. It would be a country fairyland outside on Christmas morning. Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. Midnight. “OK, everybody, we’re opening the presents!” Sean crowed.
Polly seemed genuinely pleased with the braided rug and even more pleased with the electric broom. Gail loved her store-bought sweater from me, and for the next ten years I tried occasionally to wear the vest she knitted for me thinking that surely what looked so good on the hanger would look good on my body, but it never really fit, and that, of course, is the story of this Christmas. For Sean I had carefully selected poetry books exactly to his taste, and in turn he gave me the present he was so proud of: a stuffed rabbit.
“Doesn’t it have silky ears!” he crowed. He had given me a toy. He had not given me perfume or earrings or poetry, but a carefully selected stuffed animal he would have loved himself, a present he might have given his mom when he was ten. The rabbit looked at me with reproachful eyes. I was desolate and knew it was my own fault. I had corralled everyone to come for Christmas at La Grange when they were all better off in their own worlds. No one but Polly belonged here. But what would I have done? Found Ted in a bar in Florida?
Well, I could have stayed home alone and bought a dozen red roses to congratulate myself, but that wouldn’t occur to me until the following December. Humiliated, ashamed, thwarted in my fantasies and empty of what I really wanted, I reached for the Kleenex box and began to sneeze. My eyes ran, great gobs of mucus welled up in my sinuses. If only I could have broken down and cried. But I was stuck in the bud, wanting what I would not get, and just beginning to be deeply sad. Soon I would learn to create other families out of friends whom I tried to see for who they were, and who tried to see me in return, but now I was awash in unconscious tears, that I would eventually snort into being. And so I sneezed until the sadness rolled allergically from my eyes, until my face was as red as an infant’s from squalling, and I couldn’t stop. I had gone through a quarter of a box of tissues and Sean was patting me on the back as if he was trying to burp me. Polly was saying again and again, “It’s that goddamn tree you brou
ght into this house! Every Christmas since you were a little girl, Molly, you have had an allergic attack around Christmas trees! You should have brought an artificial one. Get the damn tree out of here!”
I couldn’t catch my breath. I heaved and heaved, reddened to such an alarming color that Howie and Gail and Ed and Sean became frightened and started agreeing with my mother.
“Maybe we really should get rid of this tree, Molly,” Sean said.
“I am not allergic to pine,” I insisted, blowing my nose.
“Let her have the freakin’ tree, man,” my sister said. “Look, blow a nice joint of maryjane and chill out, Mol.”
“Gail, your mother’s right,” Ed pronounced. To hear this pronouncement from a perfect stranger swung the room in my mother’s favor. Even the St. Bernard barked in assent.
“Mol,” Howie began, “I think we better get out the ornament boxes.”
I sneezed.
“Give in, Molly,” my sister yelped. “Come on, I’ll roll ya a joint.”
“Oh no you won’t!” Polly insisted on no drugs in the house. She was afraid of the law. “There’s a nice bottle of scotch in the kitchen. Have a little of that.”
I sneezed.
“Come on, Mol,” Sean said gently.
My cousin handed me an empty ornament box. I reached up and pulled off the top star, then everybody rose to help dismantle the Christmas tree that had been up all of twenty-two hours. By one A.M. the tree was shoved point down in the mound of snow built up from Sean’s shoveling. I almost got in the car and drove back to Baltimore that night, but was overwhelmed with exhaustion and simply went to bed.
Church was long over by the time I got up the next morning, having slept the sleep of the dead, and dead I was, tired of my desires and empty as a cardboard box. Polly and Gail had taken Christmas dinner into their hands. Polly preempted the turkey and stuffing; Gail was working on the sweet potatoes. Sean was setting the table per Polly’s orders, and Ed was outside directing Howie in a big truck with a snow-plow. They were plowing out the cars. The sky was as blue as a tourmaline. The snow shone in glazed white drifts of grainy crystals, like dunes. The upturned stump of the Christmas tree flailed, as if it had, in embarrassment, stuck its head in the sand.
I was a child again, defeated. No sex. No present. No tree. Now, cowed and only sniffling, the big sneezes over, I would get a mother being a mother. She was dressed and had her makeup on. I couldn’t even brush my hair. I sat in my bathrobe and watched Sean set the table with my great-grandmother’s china and silverware. Gail handed me a cup of coffee and a slice of coffee cake.
“Merry Christmas!” she chortled.
The kitchen was occupied, so I took a pitcher of water and soap into the cold, unheated garage and washed in privacy. I stomped back to my room and dressed. Forget the week, Sean and I would leave the next day when Gail and Ed did. Reduced to silence, I accepted my assignment from Polly: fruit salad. Since I had first learned to use a utensil, I’d always made the fruit salad. Then I whipped the cream for dessert. Two o’clock came and a huge Christmas meal was laid at the table. Mother’s food. We ate it and it was delicious.
After second helpings, after dessert, after several of us had volunteered to clear the dishes, then sunk back into a post-dinner stupor, after Polly and Gail and Ed lit their cigarettes and the post-Christmas lethargy stretched lion-like across the gravy-beaded plates jeweled with bits of cranberry sauce and orange squash, and Howie lazily stuck his finger into the whipped cream bowl for a prolonging fillip of cream, a slow, steady, insistent, invasive banging began on the front door. Outside the snow was high and crusty, the kind of snow that buoyed up the walker, making it slippery because of the ice on the crust. And here a person was knocking on the door, and the person must have come on foot, for no car had driven up. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. It would be dark by five-thirty, but the late afternoon had an extra brightness to it because of the glare off the snow.
“There’s a strange man at the door, Ma,” I said. I could see a wizened little face like Rumpelstiltskin through the large window.
“My God, it’s Fergus,” Polly said, leaning herself around to look. “Well, open the door and see what he wants.”
There on the stoop stood Fergus Buxton, a short, slender, ancient man with an Irish cap and a tweed jacket over two gray sweaters. A frayed gray wool scarf was wrapped around his neck and the bottom half of his face below his red, broken-veined nose and brightly rheumy blue eyes.
“I knew your grandfather!” he chirped. “I’m Fergus Buxton from down the road! Ain’t you gonna let me in?” He half terrified me. I was in an Irish fairy tale and the little man on the stoop wanted in. Was this where, if you wished the wrong wish, you were turned into a salmon for the rest of your days? If I let him in, would we all get the gold or would we eat the cake of sin? I just stood there, looking at him. He had on baggy woollen pants and cracked leather shoes and a pair of moss-colored wool gloves with the fingers out. No boots. No winter jacket or overcoat. “Well it’s cold out here, girlie! I knew your grandma and your grandpa. I’ve lived down the road there all my life.” It must have been way, way down the road, because I knew every farmhouse in the vicinity. It must have been miles down the road.
“Here you go, Fergus.” Polly was behind me at the door. “Come on in the house and get your Christmas dinner. Walk all the way down, did you?”
“I came out for a little nip, I did!” Fergus exclaimed.
“Now, Fergus, you sit down at the table and have some food before your nip,” my mother firmly suggested to him.
“Come here, Fergus, sit down and warm up next to us.” It was Sean, pulling up a chair for the ancient, bowlegged man as he wobbled toward the table. Gail made him up a plate of food from what was left on the stove.
“Hey, Fergus, so you knew my Grandpa Gillie, did ya?”
“Now you’re a pretty thing!” Fergus looked longingly at my blonde sister.
“Just keep your hands on the plate, Fergus,” my sister teased him, and the old man burbled with laughter, the way a wise salmon in a tale might laugh.
He seemed a magic man with secret powers in his frail, tweedy, doll-like torso and arms and legs. Sean was fascinated. An artifact had walked through the door. Sean began asking him questions and Fergus started telling how he escaped his niece. Fergus and his wife had had no children of their own, and after his wife died he’d had to surrender himself to his brother’s daughter. His niece and her husband and their children were keeping him, and not that they weren’t grand to him but nobody had a little nip for Christmas there, they were all born-again teetotallers, but Fergus felt Christmas wasn’t Christmas without whiskey, so he had fled the place and walked to La Grange Garage.
My mother edified us all by explaining which house it was that Fergus had walked from. It was on a back lane nearly four miles away by road, but closer across the fields. He had trekked across the fields on the crusty snow for over two miles without boots or a coat. He was shiny as a coin from his exertion. He dug into the turkey my mother had insisted my sister cut into little bits. Fergus didn’t seem to have his teeth with him. “You’ve got to have some proper Christmas cheer,” he announced for the twelfth or fifteenth time.
A bottle of Cutty Sark scotch had been sitting on the sideboard until my mother briskly removed it when Ed guided Fergus to his seat. “Now, Fergus, I’m truly sorry, but there isn’t a drop in this house,” Polly lied.
“Oh and I thought sure your dear father had some right here for the holiday. He always did before.”
“Well, now Gillie’s dead,” Polly began.
“I know that, my mind’s not gone!” Fergus snapped. “Bless his soul.”
“But we don’t want you to go without your holiday cheer, Fergus,” my mother suddenly said, “so we’ll take you to the Tavern in Perry!” The Tavern in Perry? This was how Polly would get Fergus out of the house. The Tavern opened on Christmas night for a cup of wassail for the communi
ty. Howie looked horrified. Only drunks and Catholics went there.
“Polly Wright, you were always a good girl and your father, bless his soul, always loved you!” Fergus declared.
“We’ll take you for a Christmas nip on my father, Fergus, we’ll buy you a nice drink, but only one and then we’ll take you home to your niece. She’s going to be worried about you, Fergus, so a little cheer and then home and tucked into bed.”
“Hey, everybody, get your coats on, we’re going for an adventure!” Gail shouted.
“Well, now I’m all ready,” Fergus declared. He hadn’t even taken off his scarf.
“Hey, Fergus,” Sean said, “where’s your coat and boots?”
“I’m fine as I am,” Fergus stated. “I’m ready to go.”
“Sean, go out in the garage and find my father’s rubber boots. We’ll give them to Fergus,” my mother commanded. “And, Ed, you go out there too and find Gillie’s plaid jacket. That’ll be good for Fergus, too.”
Polly was mobilized. Fergus was a friend because he was a buddy to her father. But he was an enemy because he wanted a drink. Yet she was going to get him a drink, just as she had provided her husband with drinks, in a motherly appeasement. Fergus stood before her bundled in my grandfather’s outer clothes, ready for his Christmas nip. By now it was almost dark.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 12