A Little Fruitcake Read online

  “Now you do,” she muttered past the fudge and turned her attention back to people who appreciated her.

  I had no time to savor the sudden equity, for Ignacio was furious.

  “That was mine!” His face was instantly red, almost visibly swelling.

  “It wasn’t fair that you—” I started, but he was already reaching into my tin.

  “She took mine, so I get one of yours!”

  At once, he had a piece of my fudge in hand. I slammed the lid on his fingers, effectively making him drop the desired bon bon.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  “Grammy!” he cried.

  And just like that, we got sent to bed.

  Mad as we were, sleep was not in the cards for us anytime soon. My brother, hot to teach me a lesson, came up with a clever strategy while we lay in our beds.

  “You want everything so equal? Let’s divide everything up now, and then you’ll never touch my things again, and I’ll never touch yours.”

  I agreed on the spot, and we each listed toys the other was never to play with. This was followed by his eminently reasonable suggestion that we should extend this logic to the room itself, dividing it right down the middle.

  “You’re so lucky,” he led me on. “The closet is in your half. I won’t even be able to get my clothes out.”

  Smug, I feigned indifference to my good fortune and his suffering to come.

  “We agreed to the rules,” I sighed. “It’s not my fault I get the closet.” When I crawled into bed, I felt deeply superior to an older brother who couldn’t figure out until too late that he had screwed up his own deal. Fool. But when I got up the next morning, he demonstrated the strategic wisdom of his advanced age of ten. Before my feet hit the cold floor, he was triumphant.

  “Might as well stay in bed because you can’t go anywhere. The door is on my side!”

  I was trapped. I had made such a big show of believing the rules to be sacrosanct that I could hardly complain now.

  “I’m gonna go have breakfast,” he taunted and stepped, just barely, out of the room. I could hear him waiting at the top of the stairs to see if I would break the new rules. I refused to give him that satisfaction, and after a moment or two, he descended, no doubt surprised that I really was obeying.

  I sat there fuming at my own stupidity and trying to figure out a solution. My pride would not allow me to actually cross the line, so the only option was to jump from my side of the line through the doorway and not let my feet touch down until I was safely in the hallway neutral zone. But to achieve this meant I would need to jump about three feet on a diagonal and hope I passed through the doorposts instead of, say, smacking into them. I briefly considered standing on my bed, a few feet further away, and diving into the hall, but something told me that would not go well. I had no choice but to swing my arms in the biggest possible arcs, hoping for the kind of momentum that propels a desperate person across the finish line of a really competitive sack race.

  Miracle of all miracles, my feet landed in the hallway, just as I hoped. But, like a pole-vaulter with no pole, my body lagged behind my legs, and my butt landed on the other side of the doorframe inside the room, while my head smacked the foot of my brother’s bed for good measure. I was not a small boy, and my landing shook the house. From below, Grammy barked, “Whatever you’re doing up there, stop it!”

  My brother pushed past her up the stairs.

  “You’re on my half! You’re on my half!”

  I couldn’t come up with a snappy reply, as I was busy figuring out whether my teeth and my vertebrae were all still where they were supposed to be. When Grammy figured out what had transpired—okay, I might have helped her fill in those blanks just a little—she put an end to room division that very morning. But she couldn’t put an end to the resulting competition that would now come to define our childhood. From this point on, if we could fight over something, we did, from who had the best toy to who sat where in the car, and onward to bickering infinity.

  While, for us, the eruption over the holiday tins was only the beginning of a long battle, it may well have been the last straw for Grammy. Two weeks later, when we gathered around the Christmas tree, we got our comeuppance. With Grampy now retired and Grammy close to it and with Mom still working on her nurses aide training, things were tighter than they had been, and the big pile of presents that had greeted us in the first holidays had dwindled considerably. Under this tree, Ignacio and I each had three packages: two soft bundles and one firm box. We opened the soft ones first, figuring the good stuff would be boxed. The first bundle for each of us: two pairs of underwear. Ugh. The second bundle: thick white tube socks. Double ugh.

  We hesitated before opening our last boxes. I made a show of starting to open my present, thinking Ignacio would follow suit and open his; then, when his gift was already unwrapped, I’d still have mine to open, which would drive him insane as I would have the final moment of Christmas glory. But he was wise to me and opened his with meticulous care, waiting me out. Seeing that he was going to beat me at my own game, I changed the rules: I opened mine with a flourish and shouted, “I got mine open first!”

  It was a short-lived triumph. My gift was a boxed pastel-colored shirt and vest set. So was his. If we wanted equal, well, we got it. If there is anything two warring siblings do not want, it is the chance to wear matching outfits. There was a difference in color—my set was powder blue and his was peach—but the varied hues hardly made the outfits look distinct from each other. Add two more brothers in lavender and mint, and we could have been an act on the Lawrence Welk Show.

  This was supposed to be a thrill? A Christmas in which we got only clothing, none of it fun, was supposed to wow us? It is remarkable to me in hindsight that Ignacio and I both managed to handle this moment with a display of gratefulness we entirely lacked the night we discovered the unequal tins. Maybe we had internalized the lessons of both the Bible and Dickens. Or maybe we just knew better than to piss Grammy off any more.

  “Thank you, Grammy,” I said.

  “Thank you, Grammy,” Ignacio said.

  And we carried our equally terrible gifts upstairs to our room, silent the whole way, the fudge long forgotten.

  6

  King for a Day

  There was a surreal quality to my playmate Darren’s living room at Christmastime, or so it seemed to me. His family’s tree, like ours, was covered with decorations to within an inch of its life, with all manner of bulbs, tinsel, garland, and lights doing their best to hide the green boughs beneath. I didn’t mind that at all. What set my head spinning was not on the tree but underneath it: more gifts than we’d ever seen in one place before. In fact, the presents didn’t fit under the green boughs, not by a long shot. They rose in a semicircular pile, further obscuring the branches, and some packages were so big that they simply stood off to one side, like furniture with bows. When Darren excitedly rattled off what might be in this or that box, the list went on for so long I lost the power of hearing and sank into a kind of jealous deafness.

  My brother and I simply couldn’t keep up with such a conversation. By this point, we knew our own tree would preside over no more than three presents each. And from previous Christmas experience, we expected two of these gifts to be deadly: socks and underwear. But it was the lure of the third gift, sometimes from Mom, sometimes from Aunt Jean and Uncle Fred, that enticed us. The year I was nine, we wanted skates. Actually, it wasn’t just us: it seemed like every kid on Upper Main Street and beyond wanted skates. Winter lasts forever in the mid-Maine region, and in those years, hockey was the game of choice. We played wherever we could—from dinky ponds in frozen fields to scraggly rinks made by flooding whatever flat surface was available, including the parking lot of the one bank in town. Just as “banana board” skateboards had been the neighborhood obsession all that summer, ice skates were the all-consuming subject that winter. And it became increasingly clear that figure skates were for girls, and hockey skates were for b
oys.

  Somehow I had managed to remain oblivious of the prevailing gender distinctions in skate preference. I wanted sleek, white, lace-up figure skates so I could be Dorothy Hamill. With her bobbed hair making her look like an adorable dancing mushroom, the tiny figure skater had won over the hearts of America with her Olympic gold-medal performance that year. I’d always looked forward to the figure skating competitions on Wide World of Sports even before her big win, but afterwards, I couldn’t get enough of the thrilling, glittery routines. Single axel! Double salchow! Triple toe loop! Even the language was intriguing, full of mysterious phrases that I couldn’t entirely parse, but memorized nonetheless as if they were Bible verses.

  Watching the skaters on television wasn’t nearly enough. Not yet owning a pair of skates, I would take to the frozen pond in the field behind our house and glide around on the soles of my shoes, mimicking all the tricks I’d seen. Again and again, I tried crouching into the sit spin known as the “Hamill camel,” growing ever more frustrated because I simply couldn’t get any decent spin without skates or speed. Jumps were a little easier, but I was most adept at just gliding around with my arms thrown behind and my chin stretched long before me, like a would-be medalist gaining speed in his long program. Over and over, I practiced my deep, humble bows to the stand of Indian sumacs that acted as my audience; the trees were silent, but I could hear the cheering crowds.

  Ignacio and I had not been shy about announcing that we wanted skates and that all the kids were going to get them. As Christmas approached, I chatted with our playmates about the skates we expected, and one boy asked if I wanted brown or black. I announced that I wanted white, which led him to snort, “Nobody makes white hockey skates.” Whether or not he was right about that, his dig had the effect of making me freeze with sudden fear: Did my family think I wanted hockey skates? Had I not mentioned that I wanted gleaming white boots atop razor-thin blades and not those fat-bladed brown blobs worn by bruisers who actually liked whacking people with sticks? When I pressed my brother on the subject, he just shook me off, muttering, “Hockey skates are the good skates.”

  For the second time in my young life, I woke to Christmas Day feeling awash with anxiety about what horror or delight might be under the tree for me. This time, I was just afraid that instead of ignoring my request, my family had indeed given me what I asked for—except that I hadn’t actually asked for the right thing. I knew that if I got hockey skates, it would be my own damn fault for having been so foolishly inexplicit, but the knowledge of my own complicity wasn’t going to change the depths of my disappointment. I’d heard the phrase “be careful what you wish for” many times, but no one had ever said, “Be careful how you word your wishes.”

  Unfortunately for my nerves, it would be hours before the issue could be resolved for good or ill. It was one of those rare years on which Christmas morning coincided with churchgoing, and Grammy was firm in her opinion that our presents could wait until afterwards. You can imagine how young boys, even awaiting only one good gift each, felt about this decision. But we knew better than to rile Grammy up by sharing our thoughts on the matter. And we could hardly beg her to let the family go late to the service: without Grammy, there would be no service at all.

  Since the late 1950s, Grammy had been the church choir director, and her annual Christmas program was the pinnacle of her efforts. Most years, her choir performed the same holiday cantata from the 1920s. It had what I considered a clunky name: His Natal Day. I recognized the word “natal” from soap operas because every baby born on television seemed to end up in something called the neonatal care unit. But even if this did make sense, it still sounded off to me because I kept hearing the word “navel” instead, which I had just learned was the name for both my belly button and the boxes of oranges we bought in the school fund-raiser every year.

  Despite how I felt about the title of the cantata, I loved it. It was ahead of even my favorite country albums, Dolly Parton’s Jolene and Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. I was drawn as much to the covers of these albums as to their content—on hers, Dolly wore a gleaming blonde wig that rose above her head like an enormous golden helmet, and on his, Marty was clad in a form-fitting black outfit, very Russian-spy-goes-Western. The cantata wasn’t anything like the music in those albums. It was full of melodies from another era, often sounding like what a pianist might play to advance the plot during a silent movie.

  To pull off her cantata each Christmas, Grammy pressed into service church members who otherwise did not do much performing the rest of the year. It was easiest to find women—even ones with full-time jobs, like nurse Diane and schoolteacher Patty—who were willing to add weeks of nighttime rehearsals to their schedules. Carol, June, Nancy, Wilma, Maryann, Frannie—there were always plenty of sopranos and altos to fill every solo, duet, and trio. But finding men was a lot harder. Yes, my brother and I volunteered, but as my voice had not yet broken, Grammy labeled me a second soprano, which didn’t exactly help with her count.

  The number of adult men she roped in each year sometimes fell as low as four: Grampy and a local social worker named Don sang first and second tenor, while wizened-looking Eldon Lee boomed out the bass part as if he had four lungs instead of a mere two. Aside from this trio of men who never missed a year, the cantata required Grammy to cajole at least one other man into carrying the baritone line for a season, typically all by himself. And because she could not abide the thought of doing her show with fewer than four men, she started pestering what she called her “fellas” right after Halloween, not taking no for an answer until she had the full complement. Sometimes, she was able to sweet-talk Frank, a burly bear of a man, into spending his nights singing phrases like “Hear the Christmas Joy- bells!” If she was lucky, she might also get Alfred, a local contractor, to park his equipment and pick up sheet music. In boom years, these two stalwarts might also be joined by Frank’s son Joe, a state trooper, and Reggie, who typically preferred country guitar to choir music.

  It must be noted that these were hardworking men in a depressed rural town, and they were not always keen to relinquish their free time to Grammy, but in our church, if there was a queen, it was Grammy, and at least once a year, her fellas agreed to be her loyal subjects.

  Once the choir was assembled, she handled the men and the women a little differently as groups. Perhaps because the women were more proficient musically, she criticized them more directly, warning her altos that they were flat and shaking her finger at sharp sopranos. To keep the women happy despite her arch tone with them, she doled out featured parts like the jewels I thought they were. Grammy’s sister Marion got all the good solos—she’d once sung in a radio talent contest, after all—but the duets and trios were sprinkled around among a changing cast of characters each year, their names written in Grammy’s manuscript in ink and then crossed out whenever she felt it was warranted. If she was a little snippy with the women at times, they came to sing nonetheless, rewarded by her beaming pleasure when the concert was over.

  With the men, she approached things more playfully, her complaints delivered as if by another person. The men cracked jokes at the expense of presidentelect Carter, who’d foolishly admitted to Playboy magazine that he had lusted in his heart, and despite the fact that Grammy had voted for Carter, she just clucked her tongue and told the fellas to behave. When the men blew their entrance on “We Come to Worship Him” for the tenth time, she’d say with almost a chuckle, “Now, you boys don’t forget to come in on cue, or I’ll have to come back there and sit with you!” Every number prominently featuring men had the note “Practice More” written in red ink on her copy of the sheet music, but she used gentle teasing most of the time so that no treasured male singer ever hopped back in his pickup truck and squealed away from the church for good. Though she often said at home that she had to “ride herd on those boys,” it was clear that they delighted her, and she adored them.

  Though the cantata had been a fixture for near
ly twenty years at that point, she only occasionally added a Christmas pageant to the mix, using local kids to play all the parts in a living nativity. She didn’t do this often because, as she put it, “I don’t have time for all that nonsense.” It wasn’t that picking players from Riverview, our church school, was hard. No, the “nonsense” was having to make sure the kids actually came to rehearsals, wore what they were supposed to wear, and didn’t flub their very few lines. While her cantata might have yielded the occasional squeaky note, and its pace may have sagged abominably more than once, she still had full control over the grown-ups and knew what to expect. With kids, however, all bets were off: someone was sure to giggle, a shepherd might faint, and she never knew when an angel might slip away to the outhouse attached to the church for a bathroom break. It simply wasn’t worth it.

  The year I was nine was only the second time in my life she had mustered the fortitude to add the pageant piece to her cantata. The previous time, the young players had acted out the story during the matching musical numbers. It worked like this: when Eldon Lee called out, “Make haste in the desert, a highway to our God,” for instance, three bathrobe-wearing Magi hurried up the aisle. Unfortunately, Grammy found the whole live-action business so distracting from the choir’s carefully rehearsed numbers that she vowed never to do it that way again. This time, the cantata would be completed before the pageant portion started, and the nativity scene would instead be accompanied by the junior choir singing traditional carols.

  I was dying for a part. There was no chance of Grammy ever spicing up the cantata enough to include me playing Scrooge—his was a worldly story, after all—so my only chance for a big number was to get a role in the pageant. With luck, I would get cast as a wise man, though Grammy said she thought I was too young. I would’ve even settled for an angel, though Grammy thought that I was too male (if just barely . . . ). I knew for sure I didn’t want to be Joseph, who would have to just stand there mute the whole time, and Grammy said there wasn’t really a little drummer boy in the true story, so I couldn’t be that either.