On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought: Thirty-six hours. Four hours later she got up thinking: Thirty-two hours. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett’s, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who’d been looking forward all year to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts’ downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.
Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she’d undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:
Loved our cruise to see the autumn color in New England and maritime Canada. Al took an unexpected “swim” in the Gulf of St. Lawrence but is feeling “ship-shape” again! Denise’s super-deluxe new restaurant in Phila. was written up in the NY Times. Chip continued work at his NYC law firm and pursued investments in Eastern Europe. We enjoyed a wonderful visit from Gary and our “precocious” youngest grandson Jonah. Hoping the whole family will be in St. Jude for Christmas — a heavenly treat for me! Love to you all—
It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.
“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.
“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”
This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.
“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”
“Mother.”
“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”
“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”
“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”
“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”
“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”
It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.
Early the next morning she was awakened—rewarded—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.
For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket — a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier — and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.
“It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.
Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.
“Chip will be here tomorrow,” Enid repeated. “Isn’t that wonderful news? Aren’t you happy?”
Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. “Well,” he said. “If he comes.”
“He said he’d be here tomorrow afternoon,” Enid said. “Maybe, if he’s not too tired, he can go to The Nutcracker with us. I still have six tickets.”
“I am dubious,” Alfred said.
That his comments actually pertained to her questions — that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation — made up for the sourness in his face.
Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were “addicted” to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck’s anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid frantic by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.
Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn’t welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.
Outside the kitchen window, snowflakes from an eerily blue-clouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah’s and were on the menu for tonight.
For months she’d imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.
Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary’s where she kept gifts and party favors. She’d finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she’d bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook, Foods of Morocco, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was: