A Little Fruitcake Read online

  Of course, the days of fun ahead were premised on the snowfall actually stopping. On the second day of the storm, with no letup in sight, Grampy and Grammy bundled themselves into stiff winter coats and thick wool hats to dig a path from our front door to the street. This was no easy task as they first had to get the door open with two feet of heavy snow packed against it. Across the street, old Mrs. Hamilton was chipping away at her own knee-high wall of white. I sat on our staircase, taking in the scene through the living room window: grown-ups in front of every house shoveling as fast as they could in hopes of returning their driveways to view, even as the snow continued to fall and the storm-thick skies stayed dark. It was an epic task, one that the shovelers seemed to conduct wordlessly, while I kept cozy inside and listened to a stack of Grant’s Christmas albums.

  The next morning, the sun peered down at us through a thick gauze curtain, revealing yet another foot of accumulation, obscuring the previous day’s labors. Three feet of snow is a lot, but when added on top of nearly a foot of existing snow, then pushed to even greater heights by the snowplows that passed up and down our street, the result was transformative. The houses on the block suddenly looked smaller and closer together. The first holiday lawn ornaments of the season had disappeared entirely under snow cover, as had the last remaining bikes of the most stubborn kids. The shrubs and tree stumps that marked the topography of our neighborhood had been reduced to mere contours. Best of all, the windows were covered up to the halfway point by the new drifts.

  This was not an unusual occurrence in those years. For several winters running, we had received enough snowfall to encase the entire first floor of each house on the block for a few days at a time. Most years, though, we didn’t approach that benchmark until Feb- ruary. To get three feet of snow toward that goal all at once, not only before the New Year but before Christmas, was an incredible boon for us kids.

  If kids in Maine know anything, it’s how to play in snow. Once the snow was more than a couple of feet deep, we would dig tunnels from house to house, a workout surpassing anything that summer required of us. Using just our mittens and maybe a small hand shovel, we burrowed through hard-packed snow, carving out round pathways just nominally bigger than ourselves. The paths were almost all horizontal, so we could wriggle and snake our way forward from destination to destination, often tumbling out the exit hole on the other side in a heap. Occasionally, we’d make forts big enough to stand up in, but mostly we focused on a serpentine network of tunnels entirely invisible from above. What must it have been like for our parents to look out their windows and see nothing but unbroken whiteness and think to themselves, Well, they must be in there somewhere.

  The down side to tunnels was obvious: collapse. I hated being halfway to the exit hole at the next house only to have the snow pile in on me. Getting a mouthful of snow wasn’t the worst trauma ever, but if it was unexpected, it made me panic a little bit; I’d wriggle backwards as fast as I could to escape and not, as I could picture all too well, end up buried till spring.

  We didn’t play on top of the snow around our house much, seeing as that would have risked our stepping on a tunneling friend’s head just below the surface. If we wanted to cross over the snow, instead of burrow through it, we were likely to do so in the field running behind all the backyards on our street. Because the field was wind scoured, the snow was never as deep. The few kids who had snowshoes used them there; several of us strapped on tennis rackets for the same effect, and we swore it was just as good. (It wasn’t.)

  But there was no better way to approach snow than from above. By “above,” I mean from the rooftops of our houses, where we kids were allowed to play when the snow was especially deep. Grammy had even set rules for it: we could play on the rooftops, but if even a sliver of light peeked through the big window on our porch, it was game over. Ignacio and I considered ourselves lucky because the guy who plowed our driveway usually banked the snow by the porch, helping to cover the wide picture window sooner than nature alone would allow. The banked snow made it a breeze to climb up to the top, where we’d wander around proudly at perilous heights. That year, with so much snow so soon, was going to be an exceptional one for playing on the roof.

  But we couldn’t start immediately. One blizzard hadn’t been quite enough to block the window completely, and things cleared up for Thanksgiving Day.

  While the rest of the world dug out from the blizzard, that weekend Grammy and Mom had decided to take Ignacio and me snowsuit shopping in the nearby “city” of Waterville. A college town of twelve thousand with a dozen restaurants and not one, but two, shopping plazas, we thought it a true metropolis, For one thing, compared to Norridgewock, Waterville was on the cutting edge of Christmas light technology, with house after house outlined in brightly colored bulbs, many set to automated flashing patterns. My favorite display had crossed candy canes blinking on the lawn, tall snowmen flanking the home’s front steps, and a set of reindeer, lit from inside, that appeared to be lifting off for flight. Heading into Waterville so soon after the big snowstorm, we found the reindeer and bulbs alike buried, their lights shining through the crust of snow the way glaciers glow from within.

  At Rich’s Department Store, Mom and Grammy scouted the racks in search of snowsuits, while I openly gawked at “the city folk.” Look—a woman with Christmas tree earrings and green eye-shadow! Over there—a guy with hair as long as a Breck girl’s and tiny little eyeglasses! Grammy admonished me to stop staring at strangers and pay attention to the suits she had found: mine burgundy and Ignacio’s navy. We didn’t even take the time to try them on; we just stood still in place while Mom held them up in front of us to see if they fit. It was decided that we would get the same size, despite the fact that Ignacio was eighteen months older and two inches taller than I was. Having looked at the smaller snowsuit for me that Mom held up first, Grammy bit her lip before announcing, “He’ll never fit into that thing. No toothpick, that one.”

  To her way of thinking, the extra material intended for length would be pulled upward to accommodate my noticeable width, and that would balance things out. She was pretty close to right. I didn’t care because this was a marvel of engineering: the entire thing was one piece, its single zipper running from foot to neck, with a hood and gloves that snapped on at thick rivets, encasing the wearer in a storm-fighting bundle of impenetrable fabric.

  I couldn’t wait to get home, despite the fact that it was too late to play in the snow. I just wanted to try on my snowsuit, which I did, only to encounter a side effect of the fierce fabric. It was loud. The material was so stiff that it would not be enough to say that it crinkled when I walked. It was more like the sound you’d make when vigorously sanding old paint off metal. It gave me the shivers, so I pulled the hood up over my ears to mute the noise. That helped, and my happiness with my new purchase was restored. The rich red color also distracted from my miserable winter boots; while the other kids had cool snowmobile boots with jazzy stripes of color, Ignacio and I wore the same felt-lined rubber boots that Grampy and ancient Eldon Lee from church wore. Our new hi-tech playsuits more than made up for our embarrassing footwear.

  Every snowfall over the next few weeks got us closer to the goal of roof time, and soon enough we were scrambling up over the eaves. By Christmas, a halfdozen kids were perched on our rooftop for their first jump of the year. You see, it wasn’t really the rooftop that was the ultimate goal: it was snow-jumping off the rooftop. Jumping is a core ingredient of childhood, after all. In the spring, we jumped into puddles barefoot, making the biggest splash possible. In the summer, we jumped out of trees and into ponds. In the fall, we made enormous leaf piles to jump into after a running start. But nothing matched snow-jumping for the pure rush. The distance from roof to snowbank wasn’t typically enormous, but the view from up high made it feel more dangerous, and my heart raced during the brief fall to the snow below.

  Most of the kids’ roofs were sharply pitched peaks lined with corrugated aluminum
, a New England architectural detail intended to keep buildings from collapsing under the weight of accumulated snow. The combination of steep angle and slippery surface made it almost scarier to ascend the roof than to leap off it. Compared to most houses, our porch roof was angled at a gentle pitch, and the snowbanks were piled so close to the eaves that the whole experience was perfect for my comfort level. I could live a little dangerously, but only a little. I didn’t have to be a true daredevil to take the plunge.

  After Christmas, though, the stakes were raised as the drifts grew even deeper. People began taking photographs of the drifts to send to relatives out of state as proof that we weren’t exaggerating about the snow. Christmas trees set out for removal poked out of drifts so far off the ground that they appeared to float above the street. By the week of New Year’s, our little roof was no longer excitement enough, and someone suggested we jump from the tallest house on the street instead.

  At three full stories, the Gardiner house seemed to tower on its lot. Of all the neighborhood kids, only I had ever been inside; Peter Gardiner and I were the youngest kids on the street, so we ended up playing together a lot. It was up to me, then, to ask his family if we could go up on their roof. It wasn’t a task I relished.

  I shuffled noisily up their stairs in my snowsuit—scrape, scrape, scrape—dreading whom I would find. Luckily, Peter’s Grandpa, who was generally uninterested in kids’ nonsense, answered the door. I bravely made my request. I think his exact words were, “I don’t care what you kids get up to as long you don’t make a lot of ruckus.”

  So it was that we kids, not having alerted any parents to our plans, found ourselves in the attic of the Gardiner house, stepping out onto the roof, one at a time, for the snow jump of all snow jumps. Because the sun sets so early in the winter in Maine, it was already getting dark by the time we started jumping. Ignacio’s best friend, Darren, went first, and he slipped a little on the roof. He said the F-word, as I called it, which both scandalized me and made me nervous. I was beginning to regret this choice of venue, so much higher than what I was used to, but everyone else seemed excited. When Darren leapt, he yelled “Geronimooo” to much cheering and applause; Ignacio followed suit with a cry of “General Custer!” I realized I needed to quickly come up with not only the nerve to make a leap but some signature action on top of it.

  I decided to do my Nixon wave.

  It had been a big deal in our house on the late summer day a few months before when Nixon left office. On a perfectly sunny afternoon, everyone had come inside and stood in the living room, silently glued to the images on the screen of Nixon walking away from the White House. When I asked what was going on, Mom explained that the president was giving his job to the other guy on the screen. When Nixon climbed the steps of the helicopter, I asked where he was going, and Grammy simply said, “Away, I hope.”

  The meaning of the moment was lost on me, but the way it had stopped everyone cold in his tracks made its magnitude clear. When the guy who had just given away his presidency waved farewell, his wave was so big, so over the top, he was like a cartoon character saying goodbye. I fell in love with that gesture—it was so outsized and dramatic. One arm covered half his face as the wave began and then he swung wide, ending with a two-hand salute, which I thought looked like the peace symbol that I’d seen hippies flash on the news. Arms wide over his stiff body, Nixon was a grinning, human letter Y. He might have been losing his job and going away, but he sure didn’t look sad about it.

  I had practiced that wave countless times since, and it always cracked adults up. I didn’t know why exactly, but I loved earning a big laugh, so I kept it up. That wave was to be my big dismount from the third-story rooftop at the Gardiner’s house, except that as soon as I stepped onto the pitch, I lost my footing and fell over. (This was a move more Ford than Nixon, not that I or anyone else yet knew it.) Somehow, I ended up on my back, head down, and that is the position I remained in as I slid along one of the aluminum grooves and shot off the rooftop into the cold air. Two stories is a long way to fall, especially if you are upside-down, and I screamed the whole way. I must have made quite a picture: a fat red bullet plummeting toward the snowbank as my friends scattered to avoid being crushed.

  Ignacio ran over and stood above me, his breath frozen into long plumes as he asked if I was all right.

  “Of course, I’m not,” I said, furious, and painfully rolled myself down the snowbank to run home. I registered in the back of my mind that no one was pursuing me, that despite my obvious near-death experience, those damn fools were heading back inside to jump some more.

  When I burst into the house, crying about my fall, Grammy and Mom were in the middle of preparing dinner. They could hardly make sense of what I was saying, but it seemed to me that they got the gravity of the situation right away as they both paled visibly. For a moment, I could see them looking at each other for help, as if conspiring about how to solve a problem that seemed to have something to do with my snowsuit. It took a moment before I had any idea what they were looking at; I blame this lag in my recognition of the true situation on the fact that I was numb with cold from playing outside all afternoon. But as the warmth of our woodstove brought feeling back to my limbs, I discovered what they had seen immediately upon my entry: the fancy new snowsuit had been no match for the hearty corrugated roofing. The raised groove that had guided my downward trajectory had also slit open my snowsuit from butt cheek to heel. And as soon as the blood had returned to my frozen limbs, it pushed outward through the new cut, tracing the line where the snowsuit had split. The screaming mess I had been when I walked through the door was nothing next to the banshee I became when I could finally feel the three-foot-long boo-boo on my backside.

  That winter Grammy added a new rule to the snowgame restrictions: no one was ever allowed to play on the Gardiner’s roof again. I didn’t need the rule. Think of it as the first New Year’s resolution of my life: I wasn’t going to snow-jump ever again. Period. I would still play outdoors all winter, but I’d confine my adventures to harmless snow tunnels. Granted, I couldn’t show off my Nixon wave in the narrow icy burrows, but since I also never emerged wounded from a snow tunnel, I considered the trade-off a blessing.

  4

  Jealous of Baby Jesus

  The same year as the big snowfall, many Christmas stories competed for my attention, most of them television specials with singing and dancing clay figures. A wise second-grader, I knew these were silly made-up stories, but I found little kernels of reality in some of them. The Year Without a Santa Claus might as well have been a version of my family photo: plump, melodramatic Heat Miser standing in for me; skinny, aggrieved Cold Miser for Ignacio; and Mother Nature, sweet on the surface but controlling all nature with her iron fist, for Grammy. Even better was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeerin which a deer who is bad at sports and a little elf who has great hair run off together to find out where they belong.

  Yet, no matter how deep my love of these stories, nor how thoroughly I had memorized their folksy musical numbers, not one of them remotely approached the narrative power for me of what Christians call the Nativity story. I was a little bothered by the word “nativity”—what on earth did it mean? Something about natives?—but I found the tale itself thrilling. When I thought of poor Mary, my mind went straight to this one expectant mother in my church, her belly big in front of her, who groaned softly every time she settled onto one of the hard century-old pews. If sitting on those pews was uncomfortable, what must it have been like for Mary to ride on a bony donkey? And worse, since the story was always told in December, I projected a Maine winter onto the streets of Bethlehem; I could just see Joseph leaning into the wind of a winter’s night, realizing he could no longer feel his cheeks.

  At last, so the story went, one sort-of-kind soul took pity on the exhausted couple, offering up a stall for them to camp out in. I lived in rural Maine, and I could picture this all too well. On Jack Hicks’s farm, the stalls were coated with a
mixture of dirty straw and cow poo, and they smelled. Christmas carols all ignored this icky reality and instead focused on the word “manger,” which sounded kind of nice. At age seven, I had never heard “manger” used in any other context but the Nativity, so when I finally realized that it meant “trough,” I felt a little nauseous. Mary and Joseph not only had to make their camp in poo, the only place for their baby was a stinky box that cows stuck their dripping noses into.

  Yet all that dreariness was the perfect set up for the big finish: the Nativity drama came with a happy ending in which a huge starburst announced the baby’s arrival, angels sang, shepherds ditched their dim livestock to see what the fuss was about, and even kings dropped whatever royal-type things they were doing and rode camels all the way to Bethlehem for the baby shower. Cosmic eruptions, heavenly choirs, and expensive presents—Baby Jesus had it made.

  For a hammy kid intent on crowd pleasing, this really was the greatest story ever told: the night that a little boy made the whole world watch. Secretly, shamefully, I had to admit that I was jealous of Baby Jesus. I knew it was crazy to wish that I could be the star of such a scene, when the Cute Kid to end all Cute Kids had already been born two thousand years before I arrived ready for my close-up. Yet I just couldn’t help wonder what it would feel like to have all eyes on me like that.

  The closest approximation of such adoration that I’d seen firsthand had been in Miami—and it wasn’t for me. In Miami, my brother enjoyed the role of Firstborn Son. In Cuban culture, this made him a rock star; relatives fawned over Ignacito, “little Ignacio,” whose existence was the proudest accomplishment of big Ignacio, our father. While people praised and flattered my brother, I was a mere redundancy, just the chubby other son. If I wanted any sort of residual afterglow from the light shining on Ignacio, I had to tag around after him, something he rarely allowed me to do.