“C’mon in here,” his father said. “This is supposed to be your party.”
The presents had been moved to the back porch to make way for the liquor, coffee, and cake. His father sipped some anisette. “You made out like a bandit.”
“He gets two Christmases this year,” his mother said.
Cindy gestured toward the table. “You never had a piece of cake.”
“You never got our present either,” his mother said. She handed forward a small wrapped package. While they cut him a piece of cake, he opened it. It was a silver digital watch with a large face. The face reflected the lights on the ceiling.
“Seiko,” his mother said.
He lifted it from its box and snapped it around his wrist, and it slid around and down his arm, too big.
“It’s great,” he said. “Thanks.”
Ronnie raised a glass. “Here’s to the birthday boy,” he said. “Eustace Lee Siebert.”
“Eustace Lee,” Dom said.
“Eustace Lee.” They raised their glasses.
“Thirteen today,” his mother said.
“God help us,” Ginnie said. They drank.
He wandered into the den. “I think we choked him up,” he heard his father say.
Louis was dozing, his head to one side. The party hat was on the floor near his feet. Biddy sat down and pulled his legs up onto the chair, holding the book on aircraft in one hand and the Seiko watch in the other.
A commercial ended and Charlie Brown appeared. His head was down and he walked off the screen, leaving a tiny tree bent in half by an oversized ornament hung from its top. The rest of the Peanuts cast walked on and decided it wasn’t such a bad tree after all. They surrounded it, and when they backed off it was sumptuously decorated and no longer scrawny. Charlie Brown came back on screen and they all faced him, spread out behind the tree. Biddy wrapped his arms around his legs and held on, watch clacking on the book cover.
They all shouted: “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!” And started to sing: “Hark! the herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King.’” Charlie Brown joined in, and after a chorus, so did Biddy, his eyes watering and his knees pulled in tight against his chest, mouthing the words as the screen filled with falling snow and credits.
Obtaining Clearance
Everyone asks about my brother and no one asks about me. I bent my finger all the way back a while ago and showed them, and they told me if it hurt the next day we’d go to the doctor. They didn’t ask me about it the next day. It still hurts and I don’t care and they don’t care.
The Sisters never yell at him. They said to me once I wasn’t as good as he was. They try to hurt me but they can’t. They all try, but they can’t. They can make me stand in front of the class and apologize or sit in the office alone. They can tell my parents things. I don’t care. When I get old, I’m going to Long Island or England, and I’m never going to see anyone again.
I’m tired of talking about him. He’s a baby sometimes. He never cries or yells but he gets his way anyway, and it doesn’t matter what I do. When I do anything I’m just bad, but everyone treats him like Louis, and that’s not fair, because Louis is retarded.
Biddy lifted a stack of boxes from the bottom, raising himself slowly to his full height and pausing to make sure everything was balanced. The ornaments shook and rattled in the boxes like bones.
“Dad, you want all of these?” he called.
“Bring ’em all.”
He stepped gingerly into the hallway and took the stairs one at a time, the boxes shifting slightly every so often. He was leaning backward as far as he dared so that they would all rest gently against his chest. His head was turned aside for the top box, which lay against his cheek.
At the bottom step he stopped, unsure how best to execute the turn around the foyer into the living room.
“Oh, look at this,” his mother said. “Walt, look at this.”
He stood teetering, face to the wall and cool cardboard on his cheek.
The top box was lifted away and he could see his parents again. “Sometimes I don’t know about you, kid,” his father said. “All we needed was for you to trip coming down those stairs.”
More boxes were taken from him, and the two he was left with seemed weightless. He imagined the unlucky step near the top, his foot catching, knee bending sharply and unexpectedly, boxes spilling out in a lazy arc, the fragile flat sound of shattering Christmas ornaments, his wrists and elbows and knees landing on the boxes and stairs.
“C’mon here,” his father said. “Start unwrapping.”
His mother had their trim-the-tree music on the stereo, The Voices of Christmas, a hodgepodge of different artists’ versions of Christmas carols. Mahalia Jackson was singing “Silent Night.”
His father had picked out the perfect tree, and they’d sawed a good two feet from the top in the garage to fit it to the living room. Then they’d wrestled it onto the tripod base, where it had swayed unsettlingly, a full fifteen degrees off the perpendicular, and they’d sawed at the trunk once again at an angle and jammed chips of wood into the cylinder that held it in the tripod to straighten it. At present it stood, with reasonable steadiness, in front of the picture window. It really was a beautiful tree, although a bit full at the ceiling, and the living room was beginning to smell of pine.
Open boxes of ornaments were laid out on the couch side to side. He lingered over his favorite, a rose-colored, grapefruit-sized sphere with hand-painted red and silver bands. It had been part of a pair, and Lady had broken the other years ago as a puppy. His mother claimed they had belonged to her grandmother — they were that old — and if anything happened to this one she’d throw herself under a truck.
His father finished the lights and Biddy crawled underneath the lowest branches and plugged them in. He remained there, gazing up through the tangle at the artfully spaced colors. His parents circled the tree critically, replacing dead bulbs and exchanging a red for a green here or there to balance out the colors. He lay on his back on the rug, with pine needles poking his neck and tree-sap and wood smell filling the air. Danny Kaye was singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” His eyes followed the trunk of the tree from branch to branch and from color to color. So many of his most cherished moments he forgot from year to year, he realized.
His father pulled on his foot. “Hey. Let’s go. You pass away under there? Ornaments.”
They circled the tree slowly, ornaments swaying from each hand and catching the lights on their curved surfaces. Space them out, his father told him. Look for the gaps in the branches.
He found himself considering Cindy and her lie in the sporting-goods store. The image of her at the moment of the lie nagged at him.
His sister came into the living room and turned the stereo down. “I can’t hear my show,” she said.
“We still have to get something for Michael and Sandy,” his mother said. “And Cindy. What should we get for Cindy, Biddy?” She was concentrating on a clear ornament with a skiing scene inside.
“We can get her a gold chain or something,” his father said. “We’ll find something tomorrow.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with those two.”
“Who?” Biddy asked.
“It doesn’t concern you,” his mother said.
“Cindy and Ronnie?”
“If you don’t start hanging ornaments, we’re going to put a lantern in your hand and stick you in the front yard,” his father said.