Had Daintry noticed the stains? “Did you get those bulbs planted?” she’d asked. Casually or pointedly? I tried to remember.
Love. “She’s cool,” Ellen had said of Daintry. “I love her.”
Love. “But it was different from you and Daintry,” Ceel had said. “I loved Geoff.”
Love. “You’ve always loved those PKs,” she’d said.
Love. “That’s not love,” I’d said to Ellen, “that’s. . . ”
One night years ago as I read to a five-year-old Mark, he’d pointed to a word and without fanfare simply uttered “ball.” I’d gasped at the wonder of it, the absolute unexpectedness. At breakfast the page had been unintelligible squiggles of ink, by nighttime it was ball. “Mark’s reading!” I’d exclaimed to his kindergarten teacher. “How did you do it? When did you start teaching them to read?”
She’d smiled at me, responded mildly. “No one knows how people learn to read. If we did, there’d never be anyone who was illiterate.”
Wasn’t it the same with love? If we knew what it was that attracted us to other people, there would never be any infidelities. Or love. People speculate, “What does he see in her?” and vice versa. There’s no formula for attraction. Nothing as simple as moons and suns, aortas and atriums. Sometimes it isn’t the way someone looks, that they’re funny, or prodding, or hopeful, or intense.
I put my husband’s pants in the laundry hamper, as I’d done a thousand times. “You’re so married,” Daintry had said. Sometimes it’s as simple as this: He’s not what you already have.
From Hannah’s quote book:
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments picked apparently at random, shine?
—John Updike
Chapter 10
It’s the gin,” Mother said.
“I used vodka,” Ceel said.
“Did you buy any extra ornament hooks?” Mother asked me, and secured the final word in the debate over which liquor, added to tap water, produced the more rigid, topple-proof stems when forcing bulbs: “Gin works much better.”
I stepped into a familiar role of diplomat. “What does it matter as long as they’re standing?” Ceel’s narcissi were triumphs: frothy white crowns on foot-high stalks springing from rocks and water. And gin. Or vodka. “Thanks for saving one bowl for me.”
“I ran out of moss,” Ceel said. “But I figured you’d know where to find more.”
Hal grunted from behind the tree where he was attaching lights. “All done. Have at it while I have at vodka and gin. Ben?” he called to the kitchen. “Whatever you’re fixing, do it double.”
“Wait!” Ellen said. “We need music before we start hanging ornaments. And where’s the White Christmas video? Everything has to be just right.” Like a count-down to launching, Ellen had been crossing off the days to this Friday night of vacation’s beginning. The night the tree was put up and the house decorated was on a par with Christmas Eve in Ellen’s holiday scheduling. It wasn’t Christmas proper until the house was cozied with red and green clutter. She’d arrived home from the half day of school giddy with freedom and festivity. But her smile sagged with disappointment when she saw the den, unchanged since breakfast.
“Where are the boxes? I thought you’d have everything ready. You haven’t even brought out the ornaments and stockings?”
I understood expectations and their debilitating effects. The first Sunday in December Hal had expressed similar dismay at supper. “You haven’t gotten an Advent wreath for the table?” It seemed less a question than a statement of my inadequacy. So I’d fashioned a circlet of greenery from tree lot trimmings and scavenged the attic for the four leftover purple candles, only to find them melted into a waxy clump.
Even Mark had directed a Christmas complaint in my direction. “You’re trimming the tree on a night I have to work?” He’d gotten a vacation job in the kitchen of Honey Hams.
“But you told me it didn’t matter to you when we decorated, Mark.” It took an act of Congress to coordinate the evening around holiday hubbub, selecting the tree, making certain Mother, Ceel, Ben, Ellen, and Hal were available and included. Mark had shown no interest in participating. “You said to do it whenever we wanted.”
“I can’t believe you’d do it without me,” he’d insisted. “At least get some icicles. Everybody but me thinks icicles are tacky.”
“There’s a big blank spot on the right,” Mother said now. She walked over to examine the black hole. “Four bulbs are out. You should have checked the strand before they went on the tree, Hannah, and bought extras.”
I sighed. It was hard to say what induced the greatest guilt: children, husbands, mothers, or Christmas itself. I thought I was prepared—shopped and wrapped and packed and delivered and mailed—covering every base in that blitz of activity and readiness. Making time to enjoy the short days beforehand.
“Did you put that soup on?” Mother was saying.
“Mark brought some ham from work and I thought we’d just have sandwiches.”
“No, we need something warm. It’s my homemade. It’ll be more filling.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hal agreed with her. I put down a fragile hand-blown globe and went into the kitchen. Obeying. Capitulating. Again.
“Church is at ten,” Mother said.
I reached across the platter of eggs and bacon for Hal’s hand. It was early in our romance, and we were visiting Cullen. “Let’s be lawless. Stay home together and read the paper, take a walk.” I sensed my mother’s frown and ignored it, silently challenging her to interfere.
“I’d like to go to church,” Hal said. “Really.”
“We’ll need to leave right afterward to get back to school. Don’t you want to laze around here, the two of us?” Hal smiled, indulging my wheedle.
But after breakfast Mother followed me to my room, closing the door for privacy. “Hal obviously wants to go to church with us, Hannah. You ought to be glad about it. And if you can’t be glad, at least let him do what he wants to do.”
“He can go with you, then,” I said tersely, in the tight grip of defiance. “I’m staying home.”
Her double reflected in the full-length mirror, she stood at the door and delivered her parting shot: “Fine. That’s between you and your God.”
And I had gone, of course. The good daughter. The good girlfriend. Dutiful. Faithful in several senses of the word.
“I want to do the angel at the top,” Ellen was saying. “Daddy says if he and Mom ever fight, the angels will cry.”
Ceel looked at me curiously, but Ellen pulled on her. “Did you hear me in the Academy show, Ceelie? I sang aingells, not aingulls, just like you taught us in choir.”
“I can’t believe Peter Whicker substituted a come-asyou-are afternoon service for the Christmas Eve pageant,” Hal said. “He’s made more decrees than Caesar Augustus.”
I bit back a defense for Peter’s idea and teased Ellen, “Remember when you used to say, ‘Christ the sailor is born’?”
Ben shuffled CD cases. “What about carols instead of this?” A jazzy version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—Ellen’s selection—was blaring from the speakers.
“Hey,” I said, more diplomacy for the sake of Ellen’s ritual. “I need a tall man. Put this crystal snowflake somewhere safe and high, will you?”
“Is that your favorite ornament, Mom? Everybody has to have a favorite,” Ellen said. The conversation fell to favorites, and I relaxed as the tree filled with finery. I knelt at the ornament box and carefully extracted a crumpled construction paper wreath whose unevenly scissored center held a photograph of a five-year-old Mark. Once the wreath had been adorned with macaroni curls painted red. Attic mice had nibbled away the pasta, paper, and even the clotted glue, so that only a mangled paper circle remained. But Mark’s beaming kindergarten grin was intact. “Oh, look. This needs a special place.”
Mother peered over my shoulder. “That reminds me. I brought your baby book.
I cleaned closets and thought you might like to have it.”
Her easy indifference surprised me. “You don’t want it anymore?”
“Where is it, where?” Ellen asked. “I want to see how Mommy looked.”
“In your room with my things,” Mother said. “I’ll check on the soup. Who’s hungry?”
“I think we’re about finished here,” Ben said.
“Don’t plug in the lights or put the presents out until I get back,” Ellen said.
“. . . is my two front teeth,” a kiddie voice croaked and lisped from the speaker.
“Was that the doorbell?” Ceel asked.
“I’ll get it,” Hal said. But he didn’t need to. Our door opened with no more introduction or hesitation than it had three decades earlier. You and me are going to be best friends.
“Anybody home?” Daintry said.
“All of us,” Hal said. “Come in. We’ve just finished decorating the tree. Let me have your coat.”
“I just wanted to drop off a Christmas present for you and Hannah.” She unwrapped a fringed black shawl, revealing the red tin bucket filled with heart-pine fatwood she held. “I can’t stay.”
“Thank you,” I said, summoning gratitude to cover my embarrassment. Because though I’d debated buying a gift for Peter and Daintry, I worried the gesture would look odd, suspicious. Now the lack of reciprocity seemed worse. “You shouldn’t have.”
But with her next sentence, Daintry eliminated any pretense of personal selection. “Peter likes to give presents to parishioners.” She set the bucket on the hearth. “So many people have gas logs these days. I knew somehow you’d be purists.”
Hal was delighted with her prescience. “We always need kindling.”
Daintry looked carefully around the room. “But you don’t have a fire tonight.”
The observation struck a chord with Ellen. “Yeah, Mom,” she said, a new refrain of reproach. “And you didn’t make popcorn for us to string.”
“It’s been so warm. . . ,” I began.
“Thanks so much for the narcissus, Ceel,” Daintry said. “I usually burn a gardenia candle in our bedroom at night, but don’t need to with that divine fragrance.”
“Do you like our tree?” Ellen asked.
“It’s wonderful. Maybe you could come help decorate mine and Peter’s. We always wait until Christmas Eve to put it up.”
I knew that. Knew he’d already picked it out himself. He’d asked me which tree lot had the freshest trees, the lowest prices. I’d met him in the church courtyard as I was making one of several trips back and forth from the columbarium to my car, loading tools—buckets, rakes, shovels, clippers—no longer needed. He’d been shopping in Asheville, fruitlessly.
“Can I be you and you be me?” he asked, cramming a wicker basket in the corner of my trunk. “If you’ll buy my presents, I’ll clean your columbarium. The only gift I came home with was an idea for a sermon. A cosmetics clerk asked me if I’d like a whiff of ‘Eternity.’ I think I can do something with that.”
“No ‘Gift of the Magi’?” I said, helplessly thinking of his pocket watch and Daintry’s possible gift to him. Hating my vulnerability.
“Overdone.”
“Peter,” I said from the dim recesses of the trunk, where he couldn’t see my face, “I was kidding.”
He was silent, and then I felt a tug on the hem of my sweater. I straightened slowly, so as not to bump my head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of myself.”
“No, no, it’s my fault. It’s that—” I thought of the Christmas cheer raging away everywhere else, canned carols and artificial garlands and festooned storefronts. “I put everything to bed today.”
“What?”
“For the winter. Heaped mulch around every little shrub and perennial. It made me, I don’t know, melancholy. That’s all.”
He looked at me, and for a moment I thought— feared, hoped—he might take my chin in his hand. “Hey,” he said quietly, “There’s a sermon there, too. A better one. You’ve given me a Christmas present.”
“No, no, you can’t—”
“Hannah,” he stopped me softly, “I know.”
“Soup’s on,” Mother called from the kitchen. “Come now while it’s—” Framed in the doorway, she stopped as if tethered when she saw Daintry. A single drip from the ladle she held fell soundlessly to the floor.
“Hello, Jean,” Daintry said. My mother’s first name from Daintry’s lips was shocking. As if they were equals. As if Daintry were challenging her to correct the presumed informality.
“Daintry,” Mother said. Then again, softly: “Daintry.”
“You didn’t know I was living in Rural Ridge?” There was something knowing in Daintry’s tone and smile. Triumph? “Hannah didn’t tell you?”
Whatever it was that had halted my mother vanished. She straightened. “I believe she did, come to think of it. I simply wasn’t expecting to see you.”
Daintry nodded, granting her that. “No doubt. I just stopped by with a gift.”
“How nice,” Mother said, Emily Post herself. “Why don’t you stay and have dinner with us? I’d love to hear about. . . your family.”
Daintry twirled an earring. “I’m sure Hannah can tell you.” Neither woman moved to shorten the ten feet between them where I stood, the midpoint between two poles in my life—and polar opposites—pulling and pushing and molding me. In the charged air I smelled fear and antagonism and secrets withheld.
“Tell me,” I begged. “Tell me how.” Twelve magazines lay on the carpet in three rows of four, a stepping-stone square in the middle of the O’Connor living room. We were playing Black Magic, a reasonless, ruleless game I didn’t understand.
“You have to be in cahoots,” Daintry said, “then you know the secret.” The secret was driving me wild. She stood, arms across her chest, impassive and immovable. I stared at Reader’s Digest, Southern Living, Life, Good Housekeeping, Heather’s Seventeen, Time: politician and celebrity faces, an ocean liner, a soldier in uniform, a steaming casserole.
“You can do it, you’re smart,” Daintry said with that tone of encouragement and challenge and absolute authority. “Figure it out.” She stepped on a magazine. “This one has it, but this one doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t have what?”
“It. Black Magic.”
“But what’s ‘it’?” I nearly shrieked with frustration and exclusion. Daintry’s expression was serene. “Somebody had to tell you the secret!”
“No,” she contradicted calmly. “I figured it out.” She kicked a Highlights, my contribution. “This one doesn’t.”
“This is boring. I quit.”
“Boring because you don’t know the secret. You don’t know how to play.”
“It’s not even a game unless you have someone who doesn’t know how,” I said. I’d witnessed enough of these matches to figure out that much. “I’m leaving.”
“Go on then, baby.”
“. . . kissing Santa Claus!” a chorus of juvenile voices screeched from the speakers.
Mother winced. “Isn’t that side over yet?”
“I like this music,” Ellen objected.
“You know, Ellen, your granny used to object to me and your mommy playing just that kind of Christmas music,” Daintry said. Your granny. Had the words not seemed so purposely cutting, I’d have laughed. It was there again, that striking assumption of intimacy and connection. “I was admiring your handiwork on the tree,” Daintry said. Would she never leave?
“Ellen loaded the midsection with her favorites,” Hal said.
“Daddy! Besides, after I go to bed Mommy J changes all of them.” Daintry smiled as if unsurprised.
Ellen pawed through the box of ornaments. “Nothing’s left but the duds.”
“The rejects,” Daintry said.
“Yeah,” Ellen agreed.
Daintry bent over the box. “Who cares about shiny balls, right?”
“Right. Bo-ring.”
Like an anthropologist observing mankind of another era, a mummy being unfurled, I watched with objective fascination as Daintry turned the full force of her charm on my daughter. Then she plucked something small and dark from the castoffs and the ignored; extracted something from the jumble of armless Santas and wingless angels. “But here’s one.”
Ellen waved it away. “That ugly thing. It’s Mom’s.” “Yes,” Daintry said, “I know.” She held out the ornament, dangling by thin sewing thread from her index finger. It was a crèche, chipped and cheap and plastic. Mary and Joseph were poorly painted vertical blobs, the manger was a veed cradle on spindly X legs, the shed’s slanted roof was grooved to look like wood. Derided or ignored, the ornament was nonetheless priceless to me. It had been a gift to St. Francis Junior Choir members, and I’d preserved it since girlhood.
“How did you know?” Ellen asked.
Daintry walked to the tree and carefully hung the crèche on an upper branch. “Because I had one exactly like it.”
“Plug in the lights,” Hal said. “Let’s see how the finished product looks.”
The tree snapped with sudden illumination, a polka-dotted burst of bright red bulbs.
Daintry clapped, laughed. “Surprise!” Ellen crowed at her reaction. “I bet you don’t know anyone else in the whole wide world who uses all red lights.”
“You’d lose the bet,” Daintry said. She swept her shawl about her shoulders, then paused. “But aren’t you going to turn out the rest of the lights in the room? See how it looks with just that red red?”
Ellen gaped. “That’s what I do before I go to bed. How did you know?”
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