by Tabitha King
Pat leaned close to Liv and whispered, “Remember last year at that mall in Lewiston? The Santa Claus that was molesting the kids? I hope they checked this guy out.”
She looked quickly at Travis. He was pale and nervous, too distracted to have heard. She put her fingers to lips to shush Pat.
The woman behind them, having eavesdropped on the story, was still all ears. Her eyes narrowed, and she stared suspiciously at Santa Claus.
It was Travis’ turn. He rooted himself for a second, then Liv nudged him forward. Staring back at her anxiously, he moved like a zombie up the path and through the doorway.
“Who’s this?” boomed Santa Claus, and reached down to lift him up.
Travis’ eyes sought Liv and Pat, and then fearfully, looked up at Santa.
“What’s your name, honey?” Santa asked.
Travis’ chin sank onto his chest and he muttered into his jacket zipper.
“What?” asked Santa, cocking his ear.
“Travis,” whispered Travis.
Santa frowned. “Travis?”
Travis shook his head in quick confirmation.
“Well, Travis,” Santa said, “have you been a good boy?”
Again Travis nodded.
“Ho Ho Ho,” boomed Santa. “Ho Ho Ho.”
Travis’ twitching hands went to his stomach.
“Well, Travis,” Santa asked, “what do you want for Christmas?”
Travis swallowed hard. “Wil’ Bill,” he muttered.
Santa looked puzzled.
“G.I. Joes,” Travis said. “Wil’ Bill’s a new guy.”
“Oh,” said Santa. “Sure. I’ve heard of G.I. Joes. Anything else?”
Santa reached into the box of candy canes at his side.
“Ah,” said Travis, and vomited explosively over Santa’s beard and lap. The vomitus was bright orange and contained identifiable bits of hot dog.
“Jesus Christ!” Santa Claus screamed, jumping up and dumping Travis onto the floor. “He puked on me, the little fucker puked all over me!”
Behind them, there was a sharp click of glass teeth from the elderly woman, a horrified intake of breath. Pat’s reaction time was better than Liv’s: He reached Travis first. Travis screamed and bawled in equal volume with Santa Claus.
The Mall security force converged on Santa’s house.
The grown-ups in the line hissed and glared at Santa, who was frantically scraping vomit off his suit and picking it out of his beard. His bellowing faded to muttered oaths and whimpers. The children giggled and covered their mouths and clung to their parents and grandparents.
Travis, sobbing more with humiliation and fright than any pain, for in fact his stomachache was nicely cured, buried his head in his father’s chest. “Are you all right, honey?” Liv asked, her hands on Pat’s arm, around Travis.
“He needs air,” Pat said, and began to push their way out of the crowd. A small woman in the uniform of the Mall security force worked her way to them.
“Is the kid okay?” she asked.
Pat nodded.
Outside, where they could hear themselves, Pat stopped and shifted Travis in his arms.
“You’d better go back and find Sarah,” he said.
Liv patted Travis’ head. “Okay,” she said.
“We’ll be in the car.”
Sarah and Heidi were waiting near the Santa Claus house, clutching an assortment of small paper bags. A sign over the doorway said SANTA ON BREAK. Underneath the letters was a cardboard clockface numbered for sixty minutes, with the hands set at ten minutes.
“What happened?” Sarah asked. “We heard some kid got sick.”
“Travis did,” Liv said shortly, and hustled them out to the car.
“Oh, gross,” Sarah said several times.
Heidi did, too.
They both said it again getting into the station wagon. Pat had taken the front passenger seat, still holding Travis. He was patiently mopping the front of Travis’ snowsuit with tissues. Travis glared red-faced and red-eyed over his shoulder at the two girls.
Liv slipped behind the wheel.
“I’m so embarrassed,” said Sarah. “God this car stinks. I think I’m going to throw up.”
Giggling, the two girls rolled down the window in the back.
Liv started the car.
“Sarah,” she said, “shut up.”
“I’ll second that,” Pat said.
There was injured silence in the backseat.
“I have indelible olfactory memories,” Pat said, “of taking you to visit my mother when you were eight months old. It was August. We were a mile from ma’s house, and your mother was saying what a great traveler you were, when you were spectacularly carsick. That car still stank of sour milk puke when we sold it in October. That’s why we sold it. Your mother’s Saab that she’d had since she was seventeen.”
“Jeezus,” Sarah said.
Pat looked around sharply and caught her eye. She flinched.
“I was just a baby,” she muttered.
“Travis isn’t quite old enough to vote yet,” Liv said. “Maybe we could allow him a little leeway.”
“I wasn’t done shopping either,” Sarah said.
“You never are,” Pat said.
That was something Sarah and Heidi could giggle over. They fell to examining each other’s purchases.
Pat felt a wash of cold air. Liv had surreptitiously opened her own window a little.
She shot a hasty glance at Travis and seemed relieved. She leaned forward over the wheel and blinked rapidly. She bit her lower lip. Her chest heaved once or twice suspiciously. She peeked at Pat out of the corner of her eye, and he knew she was trying not to laugh.
“Gross,” he mouthed at her.
And her mouth worked, but she fixed her eyes firmly on the road ahead. “Plug in a tape,” she suggested.
So he rummaged in the glove box among the assorted tapes and found Travis’ “Born to Add,” a Sesame Street parody of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”
“Oh God,” Sarah said at the first sound of Bruce Stringbean’s quavering nasal voice, but Travis cheered up immeasurably.
The stink was gross, and Pat had to open his window, too, and lean against the cold glass with his nose as close to the crack as he could get without being obvious, and his diaphragm tightened and his throat closed, and as soon as they were home, he rushed into the downstairs bathroom and vomited a sour, acidic aspirin-tasting vomit, until he shivered with the chills.
He stripped to his undershorts and crawled back into bed and fell asleep and when he woke up, late in the afternoon, Travis, in his undershorts, too, was snuggled up against him.
Chapter 7
Midweek there was snow, and flurries on Christmas Eve. Doe and Marguerite held open house then, as always, and everyone was there to exchange presents, except Pat, who arrived from the West Coast in time to hang his stocking under the mantel and tuck Travis into bed.
Christmas was gray and bone-gnawing cold, and it was Pat and Liv’s turn to receive the relatives. The parade—four sisters: Jane, the oldest at forty, Natalie, Josephine, and Emily; three brothers: Arthur, Noel, and Charles, the baby at twenty; their spouses or shack-ups; their get; and Marguerite’s mother, Nana Martin, a rawboned country woman near ninety who had seemed for two decades to be fading away, like an old general or the Cheshire Cat, rather than failing, until she was mostly a creaking skeleton poorly clothed in a tissue of flesh—began at eight o’clock with Marguerite scolding Doe at the back door not to drop the cardboard carton of pies. Like visiting kings, they all brought something, some token part of the feast, until the refrigerator was crammed and there was no place to put anything down on the kitchen counters. The meal was necessarily buffet, the offspring of Liv’s visiting sibs alone numbering fifteen, plus a couple of steps acquired in marital rearrangements.
As if everyone were rising consciously to the occasion, the holiday passed more quickly and more smoothly than it usually did. There wa
s always a sister—usually Josephine, wise-cracking and grabbing a cigarette from an ashtray for a quick restoring puff with soapy fingers that wet the cigarette paper and made it transparent, because she was a nervy, fast-talking woman who had to be doing something with her hands—at the kitchen sink, washing up and reloading the dishwasher, Marguerite making more coffee, a sister-in-law collecting ashtrays and used and abandoned dishes, a brother emptying the trash or opening the refrigerator to put in or take out beer or ice. Sudden swells of male guffawing or outrage erupted from in front of the televised football game. Women bent heads together and whispered, sank wearily into kitchen chairs with yet another cup of coffee, and told and retold family stories that often ended in gentle explosions of lascivious giggling. The teenagers had Sarah’s stereo pumping on the second floor. A flock of toddlers twisted around ankles and table legs chasing The Poor until Liv put the cat in the cellar as a mercy. It was noisy, frequently raucous, overcrowded, chaotic, stuffy with too many people’s body heat and cigarette smoke, and in the middle of it all, Nana Martin managed to fall asleep in the rocking chair in the kitchen.
Taking the serving dishes from Pat in the kitchen, Liv suddenly saw his mother in his face. A quiet misery, a tension shadowed in his eyes and collapsed his upper lip like the roofline of a decaying barn. She wished fiercely that Ellen Russell was still alive. It must be hard on him to be immersed in her overwhelming family for the second time since Thanksgiving and to be received with suspicion, unspoken accusation, wariness.
The back door became a bottleneck as sisters and brothers collected their families to leave. There was more noise, more talk, a ritual tithing of leftover food in tin foil and plastic wrap and Tupperware carried away. By four, she and Jane and Marguerite and Nana Martin, refreshed from her nap, remained in the kitchen to finish the washing up.
When she peeked into the living room, only Web still stared at the tube with unseeing eyes, logey with drink and food and more drink. Doe had fallen asleep on the couch. Pat and Travis had fallen asleep together in the blue leather recliner. The lights of the Christmas tree in the corner blinked on and off like warning lights. Nana Martin shuffled up behind her, took her by the elbow, and snorted a dismissive old woman snort.
Liv returned to the kitchen to continue making cream of turkey soup. After extracting the bones from the broth, she strained and clarified it, then threw in the gravy; the mashed potatoes and the pureed squash for thickening; the boiled, creamed onions; stewed tomatoes; chunked turnip; and sautéed mushrooms. Leftover peas and carrots she held back until near serving time when she would also add the cream. About the only things that didn’t go into the soup were the condiments—of which the cranberry jelly could have—the jello salad and the desserts: the apple, mince and lemon pies, coffee jello, and the Indian pudding and whipped cream—Doe’s jokey little contribution. What was left of those had been dispensed to the exiting relatives, less small portions for the Russells. Even so, the refrigerator still seemed hopelessly crammed. By then, streetlights were on in the thickening twilight outside the kitchen window.
Marguerite and Jane and Nana Martin closed the family albums that had been spread out on the kitchen table and rousted Doe and Web from in front of the tube. There was an awkward, heavy silence when everyone was gone and the Russells occupied the living room together. The house felt suddenly small and stuffy and dusty, as if its walls were closing in on them. Liv bent over and flicked off the TV set.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
The rush of harsh cold air shook them all out of their postbinge dullness. The sky was unstarred and unmooned. Dense, impenetrable snow cloud weakly reflected the lights of the city and the jetport lights that arced like the hands of a watch across it, hinting at the dimpled underside, the enormous empty blimp of air and crystallized water riding over them, like a huge soft roof, that implied a cozy fire and piny smells indoors, the very opposite of the humbling, open blackness of a clear winter night. Outside, they were all alone. Everyone else in the world was walled up inside the old houses lining the streets. The blue light of TVs shone in one or more windows of each house like some magic campfire. They passed down a tunnel of wide old trunks of century-old elms, most of them stricken and dying, a skeletal arch of branches overhead, through which the streetlights shone to make their shadows grotesque on the brick-paved sidewalks.
Liv wondered what different words they would each use to describe the mood the moment evoked. Sarah had a dreamy look on her face; she must be finding the night romantic. Travis was wide-eyed; he was not often out after dark so it was exotic, of course, and exciting, perhaps even a little frightening. Pat squeezed her hand; she sensed he was comforted by the tradition and continuity of family life the old Victorian structures housed, the blue-lit windows signaled, the holiday itself marked. She felt some of that herself. But she also felt the change in the air, the cold in the night, winter seizing hold, like an ice chip in the heart. And that none of this was really safe at all. There was no comfort, no continuity. Not even the seasons were reliable. Only the winter could be counted on, and that was always coming, even as it grudged spring, and summer stood still in green fields, it was always waiting to reclaim its hegemony.
The clean cold air was energy to Travis; hands in his pockets for warmth, he skipped and danced and sang tunelessly to himself a little ahead of them. Sarah, lagging behind Pat and Liv, jogged passed them, and caught up with Travis. His formless song ground down, and he looked up at her.
“Race you to the corner,” she said.
Travis shot away from her at full speed. She only had to jog to catch up with him just before he reached the corner.
“Tie,” she said.
“You didn’t even try,” Travis said.
Sarah shrugged.
He stumped away in the lead again. Just around the corner, he stopped and shook one foot, then scraped it over the pavement.
“Is this a game?” Liv asked, and Travis grinned at her over his shoulder.
“Follow the leader,” Travis said.
He hopped forward, then backward.
Liv did the same, then locked her wrists behind her head like a prisoner and began to twist from side to side while hopping. Pat followed her, then Sarah, then Travis, watching them carefully, giggling, then imitating them with extravagant precision. Sarah made up her own bizarre goosestep, which they all followed down the block. Then Pat turned around and skipped backward, which is how they all arrived home, hilarious and out of breath.
The house was warm and welcoming now, just the right size again, home again.
“That was a very good idea,” Liv told Travis as she helped him out of his jacket.
“What was?” Travis asked.
“Follow the leader,” Liv said.
“Oh,” he said. He sat down and unlaced his boots. “I had dogshit on my boot, Liv.”
Pat made a strangled noise. Liv met his eyes over Travis’ bent head. Pat hooked her around the waist and dragged her into the kitchen. They laughed until they were teary. Then she felt him tightening with tension and the joy went out of her.
“I have to go back tomorrow.”
She turned in his arms, twisting away from him, but he held her wrists tightly to stop her escape. “I’m sorry, babe. I have to.”
She would not look at him. “How long this time?” She bit the words off as if she were tearing raw red meat.
“A week. No more.”
That meant ten days.
“And after that?”
“I’m home free. I promise.”
She kept her face turned away. “All right.”
He let go of her hands and traced the line of her jaw with his knuckle. She turned her face reluctantly to him. His face was pale. Hangdog, whipped, guilty, desperate. “Don’t kick me anymore,” it said. “I won’t snatch any more steaks off the table.”
“I want to show you something. Come on. I want the kids in on this.” He was pleading.
She followed
him stiff-necked into the living room, stopping at the bottom of the stairs to summon Travis and Sarah back from their bedrooms.
He had a new cassette.
She flopped onto the couch. “More movie,” she guessed, expecting another segment, another one of the pieces of the movie he had been giving them like a jigsaw puzzle as it was cut.
“Nope,” he said, and pushed Play and sat down next to her and put his arm around her without looking her straight in the eye. He was nearly trembling.
Sarah collapsed onto the floor. Travis climbed back into the blue recliner. He spilled little men out of his pockets and began to arrange them on the arms of the chair.
The cassette turned blankly on the spindles of the VCR and then they were looking at a striking woman in expensive West Coast middle age. At once Liv felt like a drab.
The woman introduced herself. “I’m Vera Danzig,” she said, in the professionally confidant way that separates ordinary unfilmed and untelevised mortals from TV newscasters, “and I’d like to show you a Vera Danzig exclusive listing.”
“Wow,” said Sarah.
It was something to see. Vera Danzig led the camera through too many rooms to count or remember (except Liv counted and remembered them all) of a stunning contemporary house hung on a northern California coastal cliff. The tour went on for half an hour and included an inspection of a separate studio on the property. The tape came to an end without Vera Danzig ever mentioning a price, but Liv guessed what that house, had it ever been built, would cost on the East Coast. Double plus half again, she estimated, for California.
Pat jumped to punch the Rewind button. “What do you think?”
“I love it,” Sarah said. “Are we going to buy it?”