“Merry, merry Christmas,” Marilyn said, raising a crystal glass of champagne above her head. We raised our glasses, too—my parents’ wedding crystal—and they caught the light from the ceiling and flashed it around the table as small, sharp pieces of air and water in our faces. When a bit of champagne spilled over the rim of Mrs. Hillman’s glass into my father’s mashed potatoes, Phil rolled his eyes.
“Brock, you eat some more roast,” Marilyn said to my father, her son. But, next to me, my father looked pale before the mounds of food, which were hidden under pot lids and plastic wrap. He looked like a man at a feast for the dead—afraid of the food, surrounded by the ghosts of Christmas past: hazy females shaking fists at him, or a host of Virgin Marys in their blue robes, tapping their toes impatiently, visibly annoyed to be waiting in a manger, somewhere else to go.
There’s always been a bit of the scrooge in my father anyway—the miser, the worrier. He’s always been the kind of man who’d try to haggle the price of a Christmas tree down from twenty dollars to ten, standing outside the trailer that was set up in the supermarket parking lot, puffing at the tree salesman, who was unshaven in a flannel work shirt, shaking his head no, no, no in the piney cold, the smell of sap, as my mother and I waited for my father back in the car, windows rolled up, heat blower stuffing our throats with dried-up air.
My father would come back to the car red-faced, without a tree, and say, “Let’s go somewhere else.” My mother would look down at her leather gloves then, the muscle in her jaw pulsing.
“But, Daddy,” I might have said, “that one was perfect.’”
And it had been: full-branched, smelling green and genial.
It didn’t matter.
We’d come home with a ten-dollar tree. The sickly twin of the one my father refused to buy.
Of course, someone being generous might have called my father practical. After all, we weren’t rich, really. He made a fine salary, but my mother didn’t work. And the mortgage on our house in Garden Heights was no small price to pay for a quiet suburb and a big garage. We paid a price to be surrounded by quiet, as if it were a jagged wall of diamonds.
So, someone generous might have pointed out that my father was looking out for us—socking it away for my college education, making sure we had nice clothes and sturdy furniture. He was a man who knew what waste was—how it accumulated in the emptiness you made for it: heaps of gnawed bones, empty tin cans, used paper plates, overpriced trees you only kept around for two weeks before hauling them to the dump—and he hated waste.
But my mother never saw him, never described him, in a flattering light. She used to call my father her wet blanket—
“How much did the new curtains cost?” my father would ask, standing open-mouthed before them after she’d spent the whole day hanging blinds, ruffles, rods.
As he left the room, she’d watch his back. “My wet blanket,” she’d say, and I pictured my father flattened by a steamroller, like a cartoon character—a drenched square of pale flesh with just his face still sticking up.
My father the bearskin rug.
At the dinner table this year, my father wore his familiar Christmas grimace, as if the expense of it had whittled his teeth down to painful nubs.
He’d given his mother and mother-in-law matching clock radios, and I’d gotten one, too, along with a little change purse with some cash crammed into it. “Buy yourself something you want,” he said while the tree blinked in his eyes. I didn’t count the bills.
“Have more, more,” one of the grandmothers said, pushing the roast toward him.
My father fished around the platter of beef with a fork, but took only one gray knuckle of hard fat, and then he cut it into two gelatinous halves, which he put in his mouth, sucking on each one for a while before he swallowed.
“SO,” MICKEY SAYS, “IF YOU FIND THE DETECTIVE THAT attractive, why don’t you go to his office and seduce him?”
We’re smoking menthol cigarettes in my mother’s station wagon in the high school parking lot. A minty scarf of smoke floats above us like something my mother might have worn home from her dentist’s office on a spring day.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. “He’s at least forty years old. Even if I could seduce him, couldn’t he go to jail for making it with a high school girl?”
“No,” Mickey says, considering this seriously. She looks like an accountant going over some numbers in the distance of the windshield. She’s wearing her cheerleading outfit, and her legs are bare and mottled with cold under the green-and-gold pleated skirt. Her short white socks are regulation, just above the ankle, and her leather coat is zipped up over a big green R. It’s basketball season again, those long months of muggy gyms, the smell of sweaty jockstraps, the rumbling thunder of bleachers and screaming muffled by cinder blocks.
Because Mickey is a cheerleader, if I wanted to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, she’d urge me on, she’d convince me I could do it without a problem: Am I seriously considering her advice?
She advises, “I don’t think so. I think the age of consent in Ohio is sixteen. Besides, Kat, he’s a fucking detective. Surely he could figure out some way to avoid getting caught.”
“What about Phil?” I ask her.
“What about Phil?” she asks me back, and we both start to laugh.
Laughing, she says, “Give Phil the old heave-ho, like the one your mother gave your father.”
I stop laughing. I think about my mother.
“Kat,” Mickey says. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t I have said that?”
“WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR MOTHER IS?” ZEENA ASKED me as we cleared the Christmas feast from the table and slipped the greasy dishes into gray sink water.
“Grandma,” I said, sounding impatient, “I have no idea.”
“Your father looks awful,” she said, licking a little gravy from the ladle before rinsing it off. “I left two husbands, God knows, but never like this. I told them where I was going.”
Marilyn appeared behind us then. She said, “But that wouldn’t be Evie’s style.” She shook her head sadly. “Evie would want to just disappear, to just poof”—and she made a starburst with her fingers, as if she were sprinkling the air with magic dust—“be gone.”
Zeena took a dishcloth out of a drawer, and smelled it, then looked at me. She said, “Wager a guess, Kat,” holding the checkered rag in one hand, wagging it cheerfully, “about your mother. Just a guess—where could she be?”
Always the gambler, Zeena.
Okay, I thought. Okay. Why not?
Wager a guess—
I was game to try.
I narrowed my eyes and thought hard for a while as my grandmothers looked at me, but the only thing that came to mind was the message on a billboard we used to pass on the highway on the way to the mall. It said, in stern black letters, THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
I just shook my head. I said, “Sorry, Grandma, I can’t even guess.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
The next day, their planes left for opposite ends of the country at the exact same time, the grandmothers 40,000 feet above the earth in identical tin cans with wings, unzipping the clouds and the precipitation and the gray Midwestern sky between them.
Phil and I drove them to the airport through a miniature blizzard on a Tuesday afternoon. He and I sat in front, Phil driving, while the grandmothers held each other’s hands in the backseat. Zeena was wearing a denim dress and boots. Marilyn had her rabbit jacket zipped up, hood over her red hair, and, in it, she looked like a pet, which, when you brought it home from the pet store, you hadn’t expected to grow. You’d gone and bought something small and cuddly for your kid, but it kept getting bigger. And wilder. Maybe even a little mean. The highway scrolled its sooty cold ahead of us.