Bread Alone (21 page)

I hesitate. “Thanks for calling me back. I’m sorry about hanging up last time I—”

“No, it’s okay. I was distracted. I’m sorry, too.”

“How’s the job going?”

“It’s a lot more challenging than working at Hubbell.”

“David used to say ‘challenging’ was a euphemism for pain in the ass.”

“Actually, I’m enjoying it. I’m learning so much. How’s the baker’s life?”

“I like it. Except the woman I have to work with is … challenging.” She laughs and then a silence plops down between us like a fat lady in the middle seat on a plane.

“What are your plans for Christmas?” I ask. “I only have one day off,
o I can’t go anywhere. I was sort of wondering if you might want to come up here. My place is small, but I think we could—”

“Oh, Wyn, I’d love to, but—I wish you’d asked me sooner. I’m going to Tahoe with some people from the office.”

“That’s okay. I just thought if you weren’t doing anything.”

“I’m sort of committed. We’ve made deposits.”

“It’s okay.” I don’t want to be pissed off, but I am. She’s only been working there since September, and they’re chummy enough to go spend Christmas together? She didn’t even bother to find out what I was doing.

“I could see if I can get a refund.”

“Mother, stop. It’s okay, really.”

“I hate for you to spend Christmas alone.”

“I’m not going to be alone. I’ve had two people from work invite me for dinner, and if CM’s here, I’ll be with her. Listen, I need to go eat something. And I’ve got stuff to do before work. So, I’ll talk to you.”

“Wyn, I’m sorry about Christmas.”

“I’ll come home this spring for a few days.”

It isn’t a total lie. Tyler and Ellen both invited me for Christmas Day dinner. But I envisioned myself making polite conversation with their families and sitting through endless explanations of family rituals and cute little stories about the year Uncle George set Muffy the cat on fire while lighting the candles, and then I declined as graciously as possible.

December 15—my thirty-second birthday. My mother has sent me a check and a card. She calls at 9 A.M., forgetting that I sleep in the morning, so she’s embarrassed and I’m grouchy. CM calls next, from her grant-writing seminar in Phoenix.

Last year—where was I? Oh, yes. My mother’s house. David had to be at a client meeting in Cancun or someplace. But two years ago, on my thirtieth, he took me to Paris for a long weekend. It was our first time away together in over a year, and it was like a second honeymoon. We stayed at the Ritz, sleeping late every morning, waking up to make love
and eat perfect croissants dunked in steaming
chocolat chaud.
Every afternoon we walked the boulevards in the winter darkness. The naked trees scratched at the steely sky and the city glowed like a giant lantern, lit from within. We rode the
bateau mouche
one night, bundled up against the icy wind, and my birthday dinner was at Taillevent. I felt like a princess. Is it possible that he’s forgotten the date?

I get up and take a Tylenol PM, unplug the phone, and float away into a dream.

First day in a new school. Unsure where to go, I wander down long halls with closed doors on both sides. The other students are all taller than I am, and they smile at each other over my head.

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 inside. 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?”