A Little Fruitcake Read online

  A Little Fruitcake

  A Little Fruitcake

  A Childhood in Holidays

  DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

  Copyright © 2007 by David Valdes Greenwood

  Definition on page ix © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Reproduced by permission from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

  Some of the elements of the chapter “Ambrosia” appeared in different form in the pages of the Boston Phoenix.

  One name has been changed for the comfort of someone I love, at her suggestion.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Designed by Timm Bryson

  Set in 10.75 point New Baskerville by The Perseus Books Group

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2007

  ISBN-10: 0-7382-1122-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7382-1122-0

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  http://www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 255-1514 or e-mail [email protected].

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  For my brother, Ignacio, who endured me

  fruit•cake (froot kak) n. 1. A heavy, spiced cake containing nuts and candied or dried fruits. 2. Slang. A crazy or an eccentric person: “a fruitcake under the delusion that he was Saint Nicholas.” ( John Strahinich)

  —from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition

  1

  The Powder Keg Under the Tree

  As I held the foil-wrapped shoebox in my hands, I could hardly breathe. I was five years old, possessed by a question of life-or-death importance: would my present cry or wouldn’t it?

  The package in my hands was the culmination of my life’s work, or so it seemed in 1972. I had put in my request in November—not of that year, mind you, but a month before the previous Christmas. The fact that my request had already gone unfulfilled for one holiday is telling. Even at five, I knew that if the box in my hands contained what I dreamed of, then I had accomplished a feat even grander than talking my grandmother into letting me stay up late to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas.

  November 1971 marked the first holiday season since my mother had left my Cuban émigré father in Miami and returned home to rural Maine, where she’d been raised. After apartment life in Boston and then the Little Havana section of Miami, we found ourselves living in a real house like nothing my brother, Ignacio, and I had seen before.

  Over two hundred years old, my grandparents’ house was constructed in New England farmhouse colonial style: a shed attached to a building that housed the porch and kitchen, which was then attached to a two-story structure housing the bedrooms, dining room, and living room. It looked like many of the houses in Norridgewock, Maine, which is to say, like a fat white caterpillar whose segments were punctuated with doors and windows. There was an earthen cellar below, where Grammy kept all her canning, and a newspaper-lined attic over the shed that we used as a garage. We had two deep wells for water and an enormous garden outlining the backyard in an L-shape. About the only thing reminiscent of Miami was the clothesline strung from the shed to an ancient maple, the shirts and sheets flapping in the wind just as they had on the lines in Little Havana.

  When Mom moved back into her parents’ home with my older brother and me, she was forcibly returning Grammy and Grampy—both shoe shop workers on the brink of retirement—to a life they were sure they had left behind: child raising. But they managed to adapt with equanimity, turning the spare room into a bedroom for two boys and setting an elderly swing set on the once-unspoiled front lawn.

  One of my earliest memories at Grammy’s house is of that first Thanksgiving. All the grown-ups had gathered in the living room late in the afternoon, and “Uncle” Howard asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Uncle Howard was one of many not-really-related-to-us aunts and uncles in our lives. On Thanksgiving, with the few adult-sized chairs taken, he sat on an ottoman made by Sister Lee from church. This nifty footstool was really just three metal milk cans covered in colorful fabric and dressed up with pom-pom fringe, a very low post that put him much closer to my height than the other adults. I could look him in the eye as I answered eagerly: I wanted a baby doll.

  Who knows where that came from? My playmates were all other boys. I can’t picture taking anyone else’s baby doll for a spin only to decide I needed one of my own. Maybe I saw a newborn baby somewhere, and thought, Surely there must be a plastic version out there for little boys like me.

  It’s a better bet that I saw a doll while watching television. Despite being devoutly religious, our family nonetheless watched a lot of television. The afternoons were a smorgasbord of what Grammy called “my stories.” It is odd that soaps were so beloved by a woman who objected to her grandsons’ seeing Batman reruns (too violent) and, a few years later, Wonder Woman (outfits too skimpy). Day in and day out, once Grammy finished her chores, she and Mom took up their stations in the living room, juggling Days of Our Lives, All My Children, One Life to Live, Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow, and General Hospital, a feat that required missing half an hour of one soap to catch the last half-hour of another. Perhaps sandwiched between the antics of evil Phoebe Cane or nice Nurse Jesse, I saw an ad for a baby doll.

  All I know is that my desire was clear and my answer so primed that it burst out without hesitation, silencing a roomful of grown-ups who had been enjoying the tryptophan stupor of their Thanksgiving feast. Did they laugh? Did they ask me if they had heard correctly? I remember a hiccup of silence and a vague awareness of some disapproval—not surprising since every person in that room went to our church. We were fundamentalists who (despite our obsession with television) eschewed a host of sinful activities from drinking to dancing to playing cards. The tenets of our faith most certainly did not include encouraging boys to play with dolls, but if anyone said so that afternoon, I don’t recall it. My clearest impression is of having made my request.

  As far as I knew, it was a done deal. I didn’t doubt for a second that I would get a doll that Christmas because, from the moment my brother and I had come home to Maine from Miami, relatives and friends had fawned over us as if we had just splashed down safely after a mission to the moon. In my innocence, I believed that only a matter of weeks stood between me and the baby doll of my dreams.

  I was mistaken in this regard. My brother and I each got the exact same five gifts: a blow-up octopus, the powdery smell of which still lingers in my memory; a metal train; a plastic snowmobile; a helicopter; and a mechanical dog that barked. In a photo of that Christmas, Ignacio and I sit on my bed, side by side, with our matching bowl cuts and new toys gathered around us. There is no doll.

  Had I known then that this would be one of my family’s most flush holidays, and thus this trove of gifts was the grandest it would ever be, I probably would have appreciated my new toys more. True, I enjoyed them well enough, considering that they were merely diverting second-choice gifts. I especially liked the dog, which I played with so often that it eventually began to lose its battery-operated bark, emitting only a slurred mewling noise. But a dog was no doll—and
this was a problem.

  I dug in. That March, when my fifth birthday—St. Patrick’s Day—approached, I announced to anyone who would listen that I wanted a baby doll. Instead, I got a green cake and a toy truck, which I eyed suspiciously. When my mother’s birthday came around in July, I asked her what she wanted, though only as a pretense to tell her that if I were in her shoes, I’d want a doll.

  One late summer afternoon, after an excursion to Frederick’s Dar-I-Whip, I sat in the backseat of my mother’s 1969 AMC Rebel, sucking down a milkshake and only half listening to her conversation with a friend sitting in the passenger seat. My ears started to burn when I heard the friend say, “So give him the doll.”

  I’d missed whatever my mother had said first, but I wanted to jump up and down as the friend continued. “It’s the seventies. Lots of boys play with dolls now. It’s not going to make him—” And here she trailed off, only belatedly considering the little pitcher with big ears. I saw her looking in the rearview mirror, and she saw me seeing, then dutifully told my mother that I might have caught the gist of this exchange. My mother muttered, “Shoot,” with the resignation of one who knows she is up against the stubborn will of a child with a one-track mind.

  I wasn’t all that concerned with the words left unspoken by my mother’s friend. Whatever a doll would or wouldn’t make me, I cared only that someone had registered a vote for my wish. Now my countdown to days of glorious pretend burping and feeding could begin in true earnest.

  Grammy, it turns out, was less keen on this progressive “go with the times” logic and had said so. But Mom went ahead that December and bought a baby doll anyway, then waited until the last minute to admit it. Ever a woman unafraid of expressing her very firm opinions, Grammy was furious. Her anger was not something to be taken lightly. Though just a few inches over five feet, she was a large woman in those days, her body thick and almost squared off, like a Russian farmworker in a textbook. This was in the years of roller curls, before perms became the fashion, and her hair—a white halo as fixed and unmovable as she was—simply added to the effect of her power. Her eyes, a nonthreatening gray-blue most of the time, seemed to darken visibly when she was mad, narrowing into glittering slits of anger, as they must have at my mother’s pronouncement.

  How could my mother possibly pull such a stunt right under her nose? How could Mom just ignore Grammy’s values while yet basking in the glow of her charity? What did she want her son to become, for heaven’s sake?

  I overheard this exchange from my perch at the top of the living room stairs. Our house had its share of quirky details. The stairs to the unheated upper bedrooms were attached to one wall of the living room, built with no divider and only much later hemmed in by a wooden railing to keep family members from plummeting parlorward. The couch with the best view of the television was backed up against these stairs, so that if its occupants were sufficiently engrossed in their program, a little boy could huddle on the top step unseen when he was supposed to be asleep in bed. Bracing myself against the wall like someone trying not to fall off a ledge, I watched many programs I wasn’t supposed to. After months of practice, I could be deathly quiet and hold this pose for a good half-hour without tumbling into view.

  The Sonny & Cher show was on that night. Let me count the ways I loved Cher. I loved her hair, which was shinier than any I’d ever seen, even our neighbor Barbie’s, whose hair was pretty good by the standards of the real world. I also loved Cher’s laugh, which was husky and deep, like a smoker’s (but without the yellow teeth). I loved how she got all the good lines, and Sonny just had to stand there hiding behind his mustache. Considering that their show never aired before my bedtime, I shouldn’t have even known Cher existed, but my grandfather loved variety shows and had made Sonny & Cher a fixture on his viewing schedule. I had the top step all to myself when Grammy found out what I was getting for Christmas—and erupted.

  My mother’s defense was weak ideologically and grand strategically: the present was already wrapped.

  Grammy was not impressed. “I guess I can just about figure out how to solve that!”

  But my mom persevered. “He’s already seen it. What if he’s picked it up? What if we switch it, and he knows?”

  What if, indeed. I had picked it up, and I would know if they switched it. Just a few nights before, while Mom was out of the house and Grammy was cooking dinner, I had waited until Grampy was “resting his eyes” during the evening news, then crept over to the tree. There were four or so gifts with my name on them, one of them so soft it couldn’t be my baby, and another, too small. I knew that one of the remaining boxes was from Miami, where my father lived, and let me be clear: there was no way a Cuban papi in 1972 was giving his son a doll. That left a present the shape and size of a shoebox.

  When I picked up the box for examination, it made a little sound: a half-cry, cut short when I dropped the box, sure that the noise would rouse Grampy. I backed away from the tree as fast as I could, exultant in my discovery. Not only had they gotten me a baby doll, but they’d gotten one that cried. The luxury!

  I was understandably horrified, then, to discover that this might not actually be the present I was to receive. If Grammy put her foot down, seeing as she was the ultimate grown-up among grown-ups, able to make all manner of relatives bend to her will, who knew what I might find in that box come Christmas morning. A ball? Another truck? A squirt gun? Sonny & Cher was no consolation that night as I realized my dilemma: little boys who aren’t supposed to know what they’re getting for Christmas can’t exactly protest the unfairness of not getting something they haven’t yet not gotten.

  What was the big deal? This question plagued me in the days leading up to Christmas. It clearly had something to do with my being a boy, but I didn’t know what. I asked my brother if he would play with a doll, and he just made a face that said, “I can’t believe you asked that. You are so five.” Part of me didn’t want to want something that would meet with such overt disapproval from both my brother and Grammy, but that reluctance was no match for my desire. I wanted that doll, and I didn’t want to have to wait another year for it.

  I turned this over and over in my head as I played “Icicle Show,” a new game I had invented. I would steal lengths of silver tinsel from our tree and lay on the floor next to the forced-air heating grate, waiting for the furnace to kick in. I’d hold a shiny strand over the grate, and every time a blast of air came up, I’d let go of the tinsel to see how far the hot air could lift it. There was an element of performance art to this. The grate was directly in front of a mirror, which meant that the Christmas tree behind me was also reflected in front of me, yielding an effect in which I felt completely immersed in the glow of colored bulbs. If I tossed a whole handful of silvery strands into the airstream at once, they would spread all over me as they slowly fell to earth. If you looked in the mirror at that precise moment, it was like a scene in a holiday snow globe, and I was the chubby little figurine enjoying the glittery storm.

  With hindsight, I can only imagine how that looked to Grammy. If I could turn heating equipment into a fabulous showcase for theatrical play, well, then just imagine where a baby doll might lead. Later, when I was old enough to understand how people perceived and treated effeminate boys, I would understand Grammy’s anxiety better. But that year, I was simply a five-year-old innocently pondering his baby doll while listening to Cher. And Grammy wasn’t having it.

  Christmas morning, then, was a powder keg. Had she pulled off a switcheroo while I slept? Would I have to fake being happy with whatever nonbaby thing was in that box? Or would I find a doll in there after all? Would I spontaneously combust while waiting to find out?

  In those years, we still opened presents in the morning. The Christian world is thus divided: there are those who want their loot before bed and those who want to wake up to it the next day. Despite the fact that Grampy and Grammy both would have preferred to be Christmas Eve people, we waited until the morning of the twenty-fifth be
cause of someone’s errant notion that this is what children expect. Though we would’ve been thrilled to open the gifts at the first possible opportunity, we dutifully went to bed present-free so we could wake up to discover whatever delights awaited.

  That morning, Grampy was nursing the first stages of a chocolate migraine. Despite the fact that chocolate gave him blinding headaches that sent him to bed for half a holiday at a time, he received boxes of bon bons by the sleighful every Christmas—not because anyone wished him skull-rattling pain and near blindness, but because chocolate was the gift he himself asked for every year. His grown children, fellow churchgoers, and coworkers obliged, figuring that if he wanted the candy, its effects couldn’t be that bad. They were wrong, but only those of us who lived in his house were exposed to his increasing levels of grumpiness and irritation, followed by his moans, and then his absence for hours. As always, not feeling obliged to wait for Santa, Grampy had already opened a Whitman’s sampler the night before, and thus began Christmas day in his chair with jaw clenched and eyes half closed.

  Ignoring his pain, Mom put a Grants department store holiday album on the record player to get us in the mood. We boys knelt by the fake cardboard fireplace Grammy set out for Christmas every year, and as we waited for her to pass out the presents, I tried to remain calm. Grammy’s eyes were narrowed, and her lips were set in a tight line as she handed out the first gifts. Perhaps just to be done with the whole drama—to which only my brother was oblivious—she gave me the shoebox straight away. She didn’t say a word, and I swear there was a hush in the room.

  Gift in my grasp at last, I could have ripped the wrapping paper off instantly, but I knew that would only have revealed a box underneath still to be opened. That wasn’t fast enough for me: the quickest way to know what was inside was to just flip the box over and see if it still cried.