A Little Fruitcake Read online

  Just a week removed from the applause that greeted our show’s finale, I found the stillness of mom’s apartment—and the lack of her greeting—hard to take. I needed to get out, if only for a few hours. But first I’d replace my old sneakers with my cool Capezio lace-ups from school; making the switch instantly made me feel better, more like the self I wanted to be and not the small-town kid of my past. Pulling on my jacket, I left Mom’s quiet apartment behind.

  December nights in Maine are not warm. Though the temperature might peak at a whopping twenty degrees in the full light of day, the mercury often drops below zero after dark, and the wind chill can plummet into the negative double digits. When I set out on the quartermile walk to Grammy’s neighborhood, it became immediately clear that a Members Only jacket offered only slightly more protection from the elements than a Bounty paper towel. My wafer-thin shoes were worse: the soles were so slippery that I was at serious risk of breaking an ankle on the ice; even if my bones survived the trip, I might well lose a toe or two to frostbite.

  My destination was my old church, which sat directly across the street from my grandparents’ house. Neither site promised much excitement, but I figured someone would at least be around to greet me. Just a few days before Christmas, it was the night before Grammy’s annual cantata, and I knew she’d be at church putting her tired choir members through their paces one last time. When I reached the street, Grammy’s house was dark, except for a porch lamp and the colored lights of the Christmas tree in the living room window. But the church stood fully aglow across the way.

  When I slipped into the back row of the sanctuary, the men of the choir were dragging out their big number, and Grammy was desperately pounding out the rhythm on her wooden lectern in a valiant attempt to speed them up. She shot me a look as if to say, “Don’t distract my choir!” and kept goading the men along.

  Despite having sung this cantata with the choir in previous years, I wasn’t expected to join them in their pews up front. Grammy had already warned me over the phone that if I couldn’t come to all the practices, it would throw everything off to have me jump in so late. Instead, she suggested I sing a solo, saying she’d fit my number in just before the finale. Because that prime slot was usually filled by my aunt Marion, who had the best voice in the whole church, this might have been a kind of honor, but it was not in Grammy’s nature to say such a thing. She simply admonished, “You make sure you practice before you get home.”

  She needn’t have worried on that score. My academy was full of girls who played piano, and I’d pressed most of them into service as I rehearsed my piece over and over. I had chosen a Christian pop song with the deceptively reverent-sounding title “Emmanuel.” When I had announced my selection over the phone, Grammy paused a moment and asked if I meant an old carol with a similar name. “Sort of,” I said, knowing full well that the austere minor-key hymn she was thinking of bore no resemblance to my song. She let this go, and though I knew I was setting myself up for a conflict, I did too.

  Though “Emmanuel” begins gently enough, it gets rocking by the third line. Forget the waltzing ditties of the cantata, the solo I was planning involved my belting out my best impression of Peter Cetera vocals over a galloping keyboard line worthy of Mannheim Steamroller. In retrospect, this music was only slightly more edgy than Muzak, yet this was the kind of number that wowed the crowd every time at the academy.

  On the long ride home, I had considered how my solo would go over in Norridgewock. Mom would like anything I sang, and I was banking on the school-aged kids’ being into it as well. Some of my classmates’ families were pretty progressive, and I even figured a few other churchgoers might find it a welcome relief from thirty years of the same shopworn tunes. But I knew that Grammy wouldn’t like it one bit.

  Why do a number I was so sure she’d disapprove of? Why does a seventeen-year-old do anything? Independence. I figured if I had already left home and was put- ting myself through school, I could do whatever I wanted. It would be the new me singing my heart out during the Christmas service, and Grammy could like it or lump it.

  Something in me was picking a fight.

  When rehearsal ended and the choir members drifted off to see if their very cold cars and trucks would still start, Grammy asked if I wanted to come over to the house for a bit. She held my arm as we crossed the icy road, and I was struck by how tiny she felt, a mere ghost of the imposing woman who had raised me.

  As she tiptoed into her room to get her housecoat, I stayed out on the enclosed porch to stoke the fire in her woodstove. Watching embers pop and fade, I almost held my breath—being around Grammy always made me defensive. On the one hand, she had done much of the heavy lifting in raising me, and her prompting—Do your homework! Practice your music!—allowed me to excel at the academy. On the other hand, she had never been one of those soft, touchy-feely grannies; she was instinctively prone to criticism, not praise.

  The first time I got all A’s, her only response was to note that one grade was actually an A–. I tried to shrug that off like she hadn’t scored a blow, but she had. In fact, I spent so much time convincing myself I wasn’t trying to please her that I couldn’t admit to feeling hurt when she inevitably failed to express pride in my achievements.

  I pulled up a chair at the card table below the picture window my brother had once crashed through on a sled. The table was covered with church bulletins for the next day’s service—but thankfully no bills. Every time I came home to visit now, Grammy would make a tableau of all her utility bills and wonder aloud, in barely rhetorical form, how she was going to keep up. To her way of thinking, anyone who could afford boarding school must be able to help out the family as well. Seeing as I was by this point $1,000 behind on my tuition payments, I disagreed.

  Grammy padded out onto the porch now and said, in deeply uncharacteristic fashion, “How about you give your grandmother a hug?” She raised her cheek for a kiss.

  For Grammy to initiate an embrace instead of just accept one meant something was up. She raised the anxiety level by asking me to turn off the overhead light, saying it felt too bright. A small lamp next to the card table would have to do, its glow forming a small circle around us. Once she was settled into her rocker and I in my chair, she let me in on the deal.

  “Your mother hasn’t told you, but she’s very sick.”

  My first thought was that Mom was always sick. She had been hospitalized three times in the previous two years, always collapsing from a vague mix of chest pain, fatigue, and body aches. Even when she wasn’t in the hospital, she tired easily and was often depressed, so I had never thought of her as well in the first place. But the word “very” in Grammy’s description caught me short.

  Systemic lupus erythematosus, according to Mom’s doctor. The lupus was making Mom’s whole immune system go into overdrive, wearing itself out as it fought off invisible threats. The problems that had long defined my mother—an inability to be in the sun too long, a predisposition to the blues, poor memory, a constancy of physical aches and pains—were the hallmarks of her disease.

  I was shamed to discover that Mom hadn’t gone to bed early that night because she didn’t love me; her heavy new medications made it impossible for her to stay awake much past sundown. The more detail I heard, the less I wanted to take in. Though the toll of lupus could be as simple as unpleasant rashes, it could also be as dramatic as kidney failure. Or worse.

  It is a useless thing to accuse the bearer of bad news of not bearing it soon enough, but I did anyway.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  Grammy raised her chin and it was immediately clear that she was seeing me as the callous teenager I was.

  “Your Mom thought you should know, but I wouldn’t let her call,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. “You were away at school and couldn’t have done anything about it, so there was no point in making you sick with worry.”

  I was primed to argue with this logic like a little kid—hard
ly the behavior of a young man of the world.

  But she spoke first. “We knew that being in that musical thing was a big deal for you, and we didn’t want to spoil it.” I shut my mouth. “I said to your mother, ‘Let him have his night. There’s plenty of time to tell him later.’”

  She had, rightly, understood that my knowing would have been a burden, and not knowing was the only relief. But now the spell had been broken, so we simply sat together for a while, both of us looking out the window at all we couldn’t see.

  In the morning, Mom was up before me, and the first thing she said was how badly she felt about having been asleep when I came in. (I was pretty sure I felt worse for having held it against her, not that I could say so.) Her face was pale, her eyes watery, and she sat at the kitchen table, one arm resting heavily on the Formica top for support. I could see that she was worried about how to tell me what Grammy already had, and I let her off the hook. She seemed worried that my atypical quietness meant I was taking the news hard. She flailed about for the right words to make it sound better and landed on this excellent summary of illness in general: “I just need to feel good again, and then it’ll be fine.”

  As I got ready for church, I decided I didn’t want to wear the flashy jacket and the narrow leather tie I had packed after all. The solemnity of events called for something a little more old-school. In my room at home, I had kept only a couple of dingy-looking dress shirts and some very wide ties of 1970s vintage. I had no choice but to dress like someone on MTV and hope that I didn’t look too cavalier as a result.

  Mom seemed to approve.

  “I saw on TV that skinny ties had come back. They remind me of when I met your father. Everyone had them.” She smoothed mine down and shook her head. “Though they weren’t made of leather then. How on earth do you tie this thing?”

  I was so relieved that my outfit spawned nostalgia and not shock that I even let her button the collar on my shirt and pull up the knot of the tie, though this would have instantly marked me as a nerd anywhere else.

  “You’ll look good for your solo.”

  My solo. I had forgotten about it entirely. There was no way in this world that I could get up in front of my ill mother and start a feud with Grammy that would surely sour the day with tension, adding to Mom’s woes. Beyond that, I was seeing Grammy in a different light than I had just days before. All the time I had been gearing up to prove to her that I was my own man, she had been protecting me from afar so that I could be just that.

  I needed to change course, but I couldn’t tell Grammy, who would naturally ask why. When Mom and I arrived at the church, I pulled the pianist aside and said I wasn’t going to perform the song for which I’d given her the sheet music just the night before. When she asked what I was going to sing instead, I didn’t have a good answer.

  “I’ll just sing something a cappella,” I stammered.

  Her eyes widened at the word “something,” and I improvised, impulsively naming an old spiritual Mom liked that I knew all the words to. I pretended it was no big deal, but the pianist didn’t seem convinced. I wasn’t either.

  Just as Grammy led her choir from their front pews to the pulpit, Mom and I crowded in next to Grampy on the very last pew in the back corner of the sanctuary, where his annual tape recording of the holiday service would not distract anyone. The cantata that followed was a crash course in emotional reckoning, though it was the memories, not the melodies, that worked on me. One song made me think of the year my voice broke and I finally got to sing with the men; another brought to mind the time I had been cast as one of the three kings only to flee when I flubbed my verse. When it was time for the ladies’ trio number, somebody new was singing the part my mother had always sung before. Now, Mom was sitting next to me. I put my arm around her to reassure myself that she was still there.

  When it was time for my song, I climbed the carpeted steps to the pulpit and took a deep breath. “Sweet little Jesus boy,” I began and found myself on the verge of tears. I focused my eyes on the old church clock high on the back wall, fearful that making eye contact with anyone would cost me my composure. How many Christmases had my family played this carol on the record player without my ever feeling the sting of the lyric “Our eyes was blind, we couldn’t see”? Like any kid, I had simply assumed my family’s presence to be permanent; they were something to shuck off when I was ready, sure that they would still be there whenever I liked. Now I was beginning to understand that this just wasn’t true.

  It hadn’t been sheer impulse alone that led me to pick a song so ripe with remorse; my heart knew that what I really wanted to do was apologize. The song was all I could offer, and I gave it everything I had.

  When I finished, the last note hung in the air a bit, before a chorus of hearty amens. I looked to where I’d been sitting and saw that Mom had tears in her eyes; I looked to the front pew of the choir rows and saw that Grammy was snuffling softly into a tissue. She didn’t look up at me, and I didn’t try to catch her eye. As I returned to my seat, the pianist sounded the notes of the final number, and Grammy motioned for the choir to rise. Just then, a loud plastic click announced that Grampy’s tape recorder had just stopped, before the cantata was actually over, for the third year in a row.

  “Sugar tit,” he muttered under his breath, using his strange favorite epithet. Only Mom and I could hear him swearing, and we tried not to laugh.

  After the service, we ate dinner together as a family at Grammy’s house. (Grammy insisted we call the noon meal “dinner,” not “lunch,” which she thought of as something carried in a bag.) We all took our customary seats. Grampy sat at the head of the table, and Mom at the foot, with Grammy and me next to each other on one side. My brother’s chair across the table sat empty, and I suppose I could have moved over there to balance things out, but that would’ve felt wrong, like an erasure of Ignacio’s place. Doubtful we’d ever assemble this way again, I didn’t want to cede more ground to the march of time that was already changing the shape of our family.

  Grampy fiddled with his tape recorder until he had the cassette rewound to the beginning of the cantata. This, too, was ritual, letting Grammy hear the results of her efforts from start to finish without the pressure of performance. Some parts we listened to closely, and others we talked over, passing the crock of baked beans and the hunks of homemade bread that we had eaten after church every week for years. The effort of sitting through the morning’s service, then staying for the family meal, began to tire Mom. I knew we’d have to head back to the apartment soon, carrying slices of pie on paper plates wrapped in foil.

  When the tape got to my solo, Grammy put down her fork and then waved as if to shush us all. She closed her eyes to listen, with her chin up and one hand covering her mouth. I can’t say how I sounded on the tape for I was focused entirely on my grandmother. Her face, which had once seemed so severe to me, had softened into a cascade of deep lines. Her fingers, once dreaded for the fierce pinch they could inflict on a boy’s ear, looked thin now, and trembled a little against her pale lips. Conversation had stopped entirely, and all eyes were glued on Grammy’s rapture. I could hear her breathing. We all could.

  When the song ended, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “That was the best you’ve ever done.” And then she said something I had waited to hear ever since I had come to live with her at age four.

  “I’m so proud of you.”

  Everyone understood that this was a moment. Mom brightened a little, and Grampy said, “Well, good enough!”

  I had no words, so I threw my arms around Grammy to hug her fiercely. And she let me.

  Through the door to the living room, I could see the glowing Christmas tree. Knowing Grammy as I did, I was pretty sure a wrapped pair of socks waited under the tree for me, and maybe a little something else. But it didn’t really matter. We had already exchanged our gifts.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Memory is a funny thing—you can think of an event a certain way you
r entire life only to discover you are conflating details or mixing up stories. To keep a volume of tales from decades ago as truthful as possible, I pressed my loved ones into service as human lie detectors. My brother read chapter after chapter and helped me keep the details sharp and on the money, while also providing a new lens for seeing old things; we may have bonded more over this book about our childhood than we actually bonded while living its events. Thanks also to Mom, whose memory is spotty but whose tending to the family photo albums has been flawless, which gave me a repository of helpful evidence. My cousins Glenice and Adrienne each vetted my recollections of the Ambrosia chapter, and I thank them for taking that trip down memory lane.

  Writing a book about childhood highlighted for me how many grown-ups made a difference in my life through their expressions of love, encouragement of my talents, and acceptance of my quirks. Some of them are referred to in the book and some are not, but I must pause to thank them: Martha Howard, Betsy McGrath, Leroy Jones, Renee Perry, John Carter, Dick and Roxie Wallace, Betty and Richard Luther, Brenda Closson, Carol Otis, Geri and Charles Zacharias, and Orinetta Spooner (who never knew she saved my life). Grammy, a colorful character in life—and a dear one—is no longer with us, but this book would never have been written without her influence on me.

  Continual thanks to Wendy, Kate, and the whole gang at Da Capo, who know how to make a writer feel not just supported but lifted up; every author should be so lucky. Lastly, the completion of this volume was made possible because I have the world’s best husband, who made many trips to farms and play-spaces with our beloved daughter while I wrote. The two of them are the best gifts anyone could ask for.