You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (2 page)

Sometimes, I would stand at my window at two in the morning and wave into the dark. “Come get me, Jesus, take me back up there with you to the toy farm,” I would whisper, making sure my lips were easy to read.

Despite all my confusion I managed to make two distinctions:
Santa
was the one who climbed around on peoples’ roofs then entered their private homes at night as they slept, while
Jesus
was the one that made surprise visits—mostly to crippled kids and people who were crying. I thought they both might wear a red suit from time to time.

At night when I prayed to Jesus, it was a jolly man in a red suit—with access to the world’s supply of presents—whom I imagined listening to my prayers and taking notes. And when I was afraid or needed serious assistance, I prayed to the skinny hippie Jesus coming down from the North Pole in maybe a VW Bus or on a broom where he could wave his hand over my head and make the problem go away.

When the Abominable Snowman had cornered Rudolph in the glittering ice cave, I watched in rapt silence. “Jesus, where are you?
Help them!
Get a gun, Jesus, get a gun!”

One sorry December my confusion reached a kind of tipping point and resulted in a brief hospitalization.

My grandparents, gruff Jack and glamorous Carolyn, were driving up north from Lawrenceville, Georgia, to spend Christmas with us. They owned a silver Cadillac Fleetwood with bloodred leather seats. The interior of that car smelled so wonderful that when I went down south to visit them in the summer, I’d spend the first hour sitting in the back of the car in the driveway, sniffing the rarefied air: cigarettes, my grandmother’s Guerlain perfume, butterscotch hard candies, Lavoris mouthwash, and the seat leather all resting atop a hushed, gamey base note of mink.

I loved mink. I would have worn it if allowed. In fact, I would have enjoyed a mink version of my one-piece hooded pajama set with attached feet. The idea of being covered in mink head-to-toe was thrilling.

My brother said mink was “a waste of perfectly good predators needed to keep the vole, shrew, mouse, and frog populations at reasonable levels.” He said they should make coats out of house cats instead. “Cats are plentiful,” were his exact words. The idea of wearing a tabby cat coat was also appealing. But mink reminded me of my grandmother, so I still loved it most.

All week it had been physically painful to wait for my grandparents’ arrival. It was impossible not to ask when they were coming, just like it was impossible not to look down the street in the direction of the bus when you were waiting for it. I had tried looking in the opposite direction but it itched my brain to an unbearable degree.

“How many more days now?” I whined to my mother, clutching at my stomach, which was distended with cheese popcorn.

She whined right back at me. “
Please
stop asking me that question, it’s only been an hour since you last asked and the answer has not changed.
They will be here in six more days
. And for God’s sake, stop licking my matches—
put those down right now
—they won’t strike if they’re wet.”

I pictured, with a sinking, bottomless feeling in my chest, the moon. There would be one tonight. It was
hours and hours
away from appearing; only
after
all the sun had finally burned out and rolled away to the far side of the sky where we couldn’t see it; only after the sky itself bruised pink and violet-black would the moon show up. And then it wouldn’t do anything but hang there like a stop sign to all the people on Earth who could see it. And I would have to wait for
six
moons to come and go.
Almost ten of them.
“They might as well never come,” I said, miserably.

“They will be here before you know it, you’ll see,” my mother said. Then she announced that she was opening a can of smoked oysters and would I like one?

“Are there any pearls in there?”

“I haven’t found one yet,” she said.

“Then, no.”

“But you remember what I told you about your granddaddy, my father, right?”

I glared at her. I hated when she talked about him because she made him seem so nice, like the best grandfather of all, and he was dead and had always been dead except when I was a baby and he held me, which didn’t count because I couldn’t remember. It was like she was holding out a candy bar before dropping it into the toilet.

“Remember how I told you he found a pearl in a can of oysters once?”

I remembered. After I opened the twenty-four cans of oysters my mother had purchased on sale at Stop & Shop, looking for pearls, she yelled at me for so many days it would have been impossible to forget. “Yeah, he found a pearl. But it was broken,” I said.

“It wasn’t broken,” she corrected. “It had been cooked. Along with the oysters in the can. But I still thought it was just the most magical thing I had ever seen. A pearl, right there in a can of oysters.”

I once thought I found a piece of scrap metal inside a Hostess cupcake but that wasn’t the same.

“Okay, now how long before they get here?” I asked.

Six moons later I was standing in the kitchen about to eat a breakfast of fresh cake batter when the doorbell rang. It was as if I were a lab rat and had received an electric shock. My body jerked, causing the wooden mixing spoon in my hand to sway violently off course and I ended up with raw cake batter all over my nose and chin, glops of it splattered down the front of my shirt. I tossed the spoon onto the kitchen counter, wiped a pot holder across my face, threw it onto the stovetop, and ran from the room.

When I opened the front door, my grandparents, Jack and Carolyn, were standing there on the landing, their arms linked. Beside my grandfather stood Jesus himself. He was almost as tall as my grandfather and he was dressed in his full regalia: red suit with white fur trim, black glossy boots. I could barely take it all in, let alone contain myself. If I had known the word for what had just descended, I certainly would have used it: the Rapture. I shrieked hysterically, “
Jesus! It’s Jesus! Jeeeeeeeeee
-zus!”

My mother had joined me at the front door and was about to open her mouth in greeting when I screamed. My grandmother flinched and her smile evaporated. My grandfather winced and covered his left ear, the one closest to my trap. “
What
the hell? Somebody knock that boy alongside the head,” he bellowed over my din.

My grandmother was distressed. She leaned forward and spoke over my shouts. “What are you saying about Jesus, honey?” Even when her voice was raised, her rich, melodic Southern accent made everything she said seem like ice cream scooped from a container—sweet, with gently rolled edges.

I stabbed my index finger at the life-size plush toy. “It’s Jesus!”

My grandmother stepped forward and lowered herself so that she was nearly at eye level with me. She smiled kindly. “This isn’t Jesus, sugar, it’s
Santa,
you see? He has a red suit and everything.” She turned her head and glanced over her shoulder at the stuffed Santa still standing beside her husband in the doorway. Then she looked back at me.

“It’s a sin to call Santa
Jesus
. ‘
Thou shalt have no other gods before thee.
’ That’s from the King James Bible, honey. Don’t you read your King James, a big boy like you, eight years old? Aren’t you doing well in your Bible study classes?”

For a fleeting instant, she had captured my attention.
“King?”
I said, picturing a diamond the size of a ham bone.

My mother said, “He doesn’t attend Bible study, Carolyn.” But she was taking so much Mellaril that when she spoke, it sounded like her tongue had swollen to the size of a hog’s and also like she’d been drinking since the day before yesterday. “And I am tho thorry for hith outburtht, pleath come in.” She motioned with her trembling arm, extending her unsteady welcome into the house.

As my grandparents walked guardedly past her, my grandfather hoisting Santa/Jesus around the waist and carrying him into the house sideways, it seemed my mother might fall over. Her face was frozen into an unfamiliar expression of almost plastic contentedness and calm, a small tight smile locked onto her lips. But I could see the panic in her eyes. She looked as if she had been hijacked by her face and was now trapped forever inside a pleasant, ordinary woman. She leaned her shoulder against the wall. “Woo you like a thuna sam-which?” she muttered, seemingly unaware that it was just after eight in the morning. I just stared at her and rolled my eyes.

My mother’s psychiatrist always had her on one pill or another. Sometimes, the effects could be quite entertaining. I liked best the pills that made her sleep. For days. It gave me the opportunity to paint her eyelids with blue chalk dust and apply a wide coating of lipstick, doubling the size of her lips. I saw my sleeping, made-up mother not as clownish but as beautiful.

Inspired by the “earthy” new generation of women like Carole King, who wore no makeup and looked like a farmhand, my mother had stopped wearing anything on her face.
Maybe
she would wear lip-colored lipstick, which only made her look as if she had just eaten a greasy drumstick and not wiped her mouth.

My mother pulled herself together and followed after my grandparents in her side-effect shuffle, wiping her hands on the hips of her black slacks. I noticed that her black turtleneck was on inside out, the white tag making her look like something that could still be returned to the store.

My grandfather was now standing in the center of the kitchen, turning around and around, Jesus/Santa still under his arm.

First, Santa’s head knocked against my cake batter bowl and sent it skittering to the edge of the counter, where my grandmother swooped forward and caught it just in time. Then Jesus’s glossy black boots smacked my grandmother in the back of her head as Jesus/Santa came around again. “Jesus, Santa old boy, I’d hate to see you after a few highballs!” my grandfather chuckled.

And I thought,
My
grandfather
calls him Jesus/Santa,
too. Now I was desperately confused.

“Damn it, Jack, stand in one place or you’ll destroy the whole kitchen!” my grandmother shouted, her hands fluttering around the back of her head, repairing her hairstyle.

“Aw, hell,” my grandfather finally said, “let’s set this ol’ boy down in the living room next to the tree.” And with that, he turned one last time and walked back out through the kitchen doorway, Carolyn scurrying after him with her arms already outstretched, ready to catch whatever it was that came crashing down.

Her internal clock obviously unwound, my mother commented, “Why, I’ve never
seen
such a thing. He’s nearly life-size. He sure does take over the kitchen!”

In a mean little voice I whispered,
“They’ve already left the room.”

But Jack had heard her with his basset hound ears. “He sure as hell does. And let me tell you, we had a hell of a time fitting the old boy in the car, but we finally just lay him on his side in the backseat and Carolyn here gave him a good shove and we shut the door. Made it up here in record time, too.”

When I stepped into the living room I couldn’t even breathe. He’d set Jesus/Santa down right beside the tree and it was an overwhelming sight.
Here he was, all for me.

I felt overjoyed, like one of the crippled wheelchair kids on TV when Jesus floats down and shines his light on them.

This year, our tree was so tall it nearly touched the central cedar beam of the cathedral ceiling. It was the tallest tree we’d ever had and my father almost didn’t get it. He was worried it wouldn’t fit on top of the car; then he was worried it wouldn’t fit inside the house. He threatened to get this stumpy, awful little tree that looked like an angry fat person, all crooked and lopsided. It reminded me of my mother before she went on Weight Watchers. When I mentioned this to my father—“Doesn’t it remind you of her? Especially from the side?”—he immediately turned away from the angry stump tree and said, “We’ll get the other one.”

I stepped forward and looked up at the glorious tree and my Jesus/Santa standing guard beside it.

Now, the garbage my mother had added to the tree no longer bothered me. It was as if Jesus/Santa had made all of her trash simply
vanish.

My mother placed her own “fragile and very special” ornaments on the top half of the tree, out of my reach.
Where I couldn’t smash them,
I knew she was thinking. But she flattered herself; I had no interest in her beige angels made from common barn straw or her Three Wise Men crafted entirely from Indian corn. And if she thought I had any interest in her precious little walnut-shell mouse, she truly was crazy and should be locked away.

Blech.

Why would anybody pollute a Christmas tree with such filth? Why stop at corncobs and straw and nutshells; why not just glue dirt and puff balls to the branches?

A Christmas tree should be wrapped around and around and around with a dazzling gold garland. And then tinsel should cling to every branch—in clumps, not stingy
strands.
And there should be lights, dozens of them. All blinking. And then gold and silver balls, some coated with sparkly glitter, the others with tiny mirrors. And maybe it would be okay to have a few other things, as long as they were either illuminated or gold-electroplated.