A Little Fruitcake Read online

  She nearly cast a brother and sister, Mark and Kimi, as Mary and Joseph, but my brother and I reacted so negatively—Ew! No one marries his sister!—that she reconsidered, instead shuffling Mark into one of the wise men roles. The other two slots were given to Ignacio and—oh happy day!—me. Yes, I would be the third wise man, doomed to bring up the rear, but that still meant I got to sing a solo verse myself, as well as wear a veil-draped crown. That vision made up for the fact that Mark and I were like oil and water: he was tall, thin and sporty, and I was short, chubby, and bookish. Mark never seemed the brightest bulb on the tree, but he could nonetheless discern exactly which insults would make me burn. He first tormented me by calling me a girl every time I played tetherball or four square, but then he switched gears and settled on the nickname he would call me for years: Porker.

  Bullies are brilliant. They can reduce a weaker kid into a completely defined package with a single word or phrase. “Porker” cemented my identity as the fat kid. Granted, I was the fat kid, but I had never realized that other people noticed or cared until I had a nickname to live up to. The first time he said it, I was red with anger. “Don’t call me Porker!”

  His reply: “Okay, Porker.”

  There was to be no let up, and I knew it. It didn’t matter that no one else ever used the nickname except, occasionally, one of his buddies. “Porker” continually stunk up the air every time I was around Mark, which just meant that I chose not to be around him often. Now, Grammy had thrown us together. And yet, I secretly relished the opportunity to be on a team of kings with Mark. Why? Because I could sing better. All those hours imitating Dolly Parton and Marty Robbins had made my young voice smooth and sweet. Mark could sing, but his voice was a little more nasal, and there was nothing especially lyrical about it. Let Mark be first king, I thought. I’d be the one whose solo everyone remembered.

  On Christmas morning, we gathered in our living room a half-hour before the church service was to start. We lived directly across the street from the church, which was convenient for many reasons, not the least of which being that we could run home to use the bathroom, instead of using the church’s centuryold two-seater outhouse. On this day, our proximity to the church meant that the kids in the pageant could get dressed and stay out of sight nearby until needed. Our house was abuzz with activity: there were garlandtrimmed angel wings to tie on, pillow cases to transform into shepherd-wear, and Magi to make royal.

  It had been decided that, instead of wearing bathrobes, we would wear baptismal robes that year as they were more regal looking. I was thrilled at how the hem of my black gown dragged along the floor like the train on a wedding dress. The crowns, however, presented a momentary crisis: only two of the stiff cardboard miters still had their flowing silk scarves stapled on. I’m not sure who decided that Magi should so resemble pastel versions of Greek Orthodox priests, but it was a look I thought was just marvelous—and I was afraid that I would get the plain crown because of my third-wise-man status. I was already contemplating rooting through Grammy’s dresser for the sheer pink scarf that she wore whenever she needed to protect a fresh set of big roller curls, but then Mark grabbed the one unadorned crown, happily crowing, “You’re a girl, Porker, so you have to take one with a scarf.” He said this like I was somehow losing out and not instantly improving the fabulousness of my costume. My brother did not seem to like the implications of this statement at all, seeing as he too had one of the crowns Mark had just gendered, but Ignacio didn’t dare remove the drapery and risk Grammy’s wrath.

  The gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold were to be represented by a music box, a glass perfume bottle, and a yellow metal compact, which Grammy clearly didn’t get from an Adventist, who would have no use for the blue and teal eye shadow which remained in- side. I wanted the “incense” because that meant I would get to carry the pretty music box, which was decorated with an intricate embossed filigree. What I did not want was the compact, which was just plain ugly and stupid—no one would believe that old thing was a bar of gold. To my delight, that was the gift Mark got since the gold verse was the first solo in the carol. When Grammy gave Ignacio the music box, I decided on the spot that incense was the wrong gift for me anyway; myrrh was a perfume and I liked perfume, so I gladly accepted the red glass bottle she handed me. Then, newly inspired, I asked Grammy if we could fill it with some of Mom’s “White Shoulders” eau de cologne, but Grammy said it was a nativity scene and the only smell in the real manger was something nobody wanted to bottle.

  We were told not to head over to the church until fifteen minutes after the cantata started, as it always did, precisely at 11 AM. Even then, we were to hang out in the foyer until the appropriate moment, making sure that our appearance wouldn’t distract anyone in the audience from focusing on the choir. Tiptoeing as much as elementary schoolchildren could, we entered the foyer just about the time my mother, Aunt Marion, and our friend June began my favorite song in the show. “Hark! What mean those holy voices,” they crooned, “sweetly sounding through the skies?” Mark started to whisper something, and I shushed him because I thought this trio made just about the sweetest harmony on earth; plus, they were coming to the good part, a glorious peak that all three women had to take a breath for. I didn’t want the spell to be broken, especially by Mark.

  Nine songs later, by the time the cantata ended, I was more than ready to make an entrance worthy of a king. First, though, I had to wait for Mary and Joseph to get up the aisle to put Baby Jesus away in His manger. Then, the angels had to hark their heralds. After that, the shepherds had to lay in their fields for the first Noel. Finally, it was time for my—I mean, our—entrance. “We three Kings of Orient are,” we sang in high unison, a little like the Jackson Five but without soul, as we stepped into the sanctuary. As we passed the tape recorder Grampy had set up in a back row to record the pageant, I made sure to sing especially loudly so my debut would be captured for posterity.

  “Born a king on Bethlehem’s plain,” Mark began shakily. I felt a little pity for him, poor guy standing there with a cheap yellow compact in hand, his crown completely underdressed for the occasion, and his voice wavering with nerves. After the chorus, Ignacio acquitted himself much better, getting up over the hurdle of the high note on “voices raising,” even though his own voice was starting to lower. One more chorus, and it would be my moment in the sun.

  The lyrics for my verse were perfect for a little drama queen in the making:

  Myrrh is mine

  its bitter perfume

  breathes a life of gathering gloom

  sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,

  sealed in the stone cold tomb.

  I suppose those lines are a wee bit dark for a festive occasion, but they were all the better for a would-be performer to emote. Raising my red vial aloft, I launched into the most passionate rendition possible, but my voice wasn’t cooperating. My throat felt tight, and my hands began to shake. I was somewhere between bleeding and dying when the words dropped out completely. There was a croak, followed by dead air, as I panicked and realized that I wasn’t making any sound. The pianist kept going, but I managed only to catch up in the last phrase, gargling out a deeply tortured version of “stone cold tomb.”

  Mark and Ignacio didn’t dare even glance at me as the junior choir moved right on to the final chorus. But Grammy fixed me with a look that could have wrinkled granite. I knew I had to stand there like a man and literally face the music, showing as much dignity as I could in the face of my abysmal failure. I did what any aspiring professional would: I fled. Leaving two stunned kings in my wake, I raced down the aisle, now truly aflutter, face as red as the bottle in my sweaty hand. Tears of anger filled my eyes as I hurried home, berating myself. Instead of dazzling the church with my grand performance, I had given Mark the victory. Worse, I had become that annual kid who caused Grammy to reconsider ever doing a pageant again.

  And yet, that is a Christmas I remember with some fondness. For that night, a
fter so much delay, we opened our presents, and I learned that sometimes you really do get what you want. Inside a shoebox, beneath a layer of tissue paper, I found a pair of white leather figure skates that just begged for ice-dancing routines and sequined costumes. Unlike the year of the doll, no one seemed to want me to give back my present, and Grammy, my morning performance now history, was in fine spirits as I gushed with happiness over the gift. Ignacio, sad to say, would not look back on that evening with similar joy. For he, too, had gotten a pair of white figure skates, not at all what he had in mind. I don’t know how the grown-ups had so obviously missed the gender distinctions that all the kids were focused on, and I feel badly for Ignacio in retrospect, having the sweater-vest Christmas followed up by the girly-skates Christmas. But for me, this gift completely erased the sting of “Porker” and the shame of fleeing my own debut.

  I held the skates to my chest the way a new Miss America clutches her roses: with joy and relief and visions of the glorious days ahead.

  7

  Ambrosia

  My grandmother’s photo albums were the antithesis of her house; rooms she kept neat as a pin, but her albums were a jumble of snapshots organized by whim and ease, if it all. A black-and-white photo of Grampy in a swimsuit in the 1940s might very well be taped down next to a color Polaroid of my brother and me dressed in our minutemen outfits for a bicentennial parade. Our school photos each got a whole page, but even they were out of order, so we got older for several pages in a row, then suddenly regressed.

  Beyond organization, the primary things missing from Grammy’s albums were Christmas pictures. For a woman who never failed to get a good snapshot of the aftermath of a snowstorm and who had immortalized several not-especially-impressive African violets on film, it was an unpredictable glitch that she kept no yuletide photos at all, aside from three color shots of the very first Christmas my brother and I lived in her house.

  In 1977, however, we had a stack of Christmas party photos to choose from. They were all taken from the same vantage point beyond the far end of the holiday dinner table at my Aunt Jean and Uncle Fred’s house and thus looked nearly identical. Yet I loved them for their rarity—not just because they were Christmas pictures but because they captured so much of our family together. These snapshots owed their existence to the fact that Mom had a new Kodak Instamatic camera with a built-in flash. Longer than a pack of cigarettes and only slightly thicker, it was a tiny piece of equipment, but it was big enough for her to hide behind. Behind that camera, Mom—never a big talker—found a buffer from the endless chatter.

  Aunt Jean and Uncle Fred lived just up the street from us, but their house was worlds away on every level. While our house was a two-hundred-year-old colonial with no heat on the top floor, theirs was a twentieth-century raised ranch with sliding doors leading to a deck upstairs and a finished basement below. I was fascinated by the exotic contents of the house, like a television the size of a dishwasher, ashtrays that appeared to be more than just decorative, and actual alcohol, unlike in our house where no one smoked or drank.

  Grammy was not crazy about certain elements of her eldest daughter’s lifestyle, but she was nonetheless proud of Jean, who had bravely endured the death of her first husband in his twenties; she was a widowed mother of three when she married Fred, with whom she had one more child. While Grampy and Grammy were blue collar, both working in shoe shops, Jean and Fred were solidly middle class. They owned a jewelry store in Waterville, which made them almost city folk. Even teenage Adrienne, their one child remaining at home, seemed otherworldly to Ignacio and me: She had black-light posters, rock albums, and an attitude, all of which made me feel like the country cousin, even though I lived a two-minute walk from her house.

  That year, Jean and Fred hosted a Christmas party in their “finished” basement, the crown jewel of which was Fred’s bar. Grammy hated even to look at the thing, seeing as its entire purpose was the serving up of one shot of sin after another, but we kids found it dazzling. The bar had a waist-high counter that doubled as a stereo, and when music was playing, the front lit up in a variety of colors that pulsed with the beat. In front of the bar, padded stools swiveled perfectly, and behind it were shelves lined with beer steins, hard liquor, and cocktail glasses. It was like a groovy pub with Fred as the mix-master, not that I knew exactly what he was mixing.

  Besides, I preferred Aunt Jean’s specialty: ambrosia. I only had this confection of whipped cream, coconut, mandarin oranges, and pineapple at Jean’s house, and only then at the holidays, and its rarity made it seem so special that I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Grammy used some of the same ingredients in her Jell-O-mold desserts from time to time, but those dishes were always brightly colored with the aid of strawberry or lime gelatin mix. Aunt Jean’s dessert was white, like mounds of snow, and it seemed to me the very essence of winter in a Chinette bowl. When Christmas dinner was ready that year, I offered to carry the ambrosia down the stairs, and I held it carefully like the treasure it was.

  The basement was abuzz, crowded with more than just the occupants of our two houses. Adrienne’s older sister Glenice had come up from Massachusetts with her husband, Dave, a rising insurance salesman. And Uncle Ronald, the only one of Grammy’s boys who lived nearby, was there with his cheery chatterbox of a wife, Aunt Marie. That brought the total to a dozen for dinner, which meant that there wasn’t space enough at the table for all the kids—and yet, there was room for me.

  I was such a determined little suck-up. I found grown-up conversations so enticing that I had to be a part of them. I made sure to listen attentively to every story, laugh at every joke I didn’t understand, and even add to the conversation, whether or not my contributions made any sense. While Adrienne and Ignacio seemed plenty happy just to roll their eyes at the adults, I longed for the grown-ups to find me charming, amusing, and smart. I wanted them to like me—no, I wanted them to like me best. Though I may have been included at the table because Adrienne and Ignacio could not have cared less where they ate, I was sure I had gotten a seat because everyone could see how much I would add to the proceedings. Ambrosia salad before me and adults on all sides, I reveled in the glory of my esteemed position.

  When Mom developed the party pictures a week later, I had incontrovertible evidence that I’d had exactly the Christmas I wanted. Still, at a glance the photos weren’t all that impressive; in not a single shot does everyone look at the camera all at once. We appear to be just another family caught with our mouths full in the middle of a holiday dinner. But, then again, what family really is “just another family”? The dramas that play out between people who love each other, the histories between the holidays, are specific. And when I revisited these photos years later, I realized the air that night had been full not only of cheery tunes blasting from a pulsing light-up bar, but thick, too, with grudges, hopes, sadness, and reconciliation. Mom never intended to capture those things at all, yet she had.

  Standing behind the dinner table in my favorite photo of that night, Uncle Fred appears in motion, his hand on his chest as if graciously asking our pardon. A survivor of Pearl Harbor and a host of battles in the South Pacific, he typically had little patience for kids who ran around slamming doors and making other sudden noises. But that Christmas Fred had gotten Ignacio a BB gun, a gift that must have seemed like a no-brainer to a military man like Fred, and he’d been unpleasantly surprised to find himself facing Grammy’s fury. She thought the present was too violent; he thought she should keep her opinions to herself.

  Closest to Fred are Dave and Glenice, sitting with their shoulders touching, though Dave is leaning forward to be better seen. As a child, I saw them in a golden light, the sophisticated visitors from the cosmopolitan land of Massachusetts. Glenice was a high school teacher, and Dave was running for local city office. Grammy and Grampy never quite settled on how they felt about him, with his lascivious jokes and alcohol ever in hand; I thought he was akin to a celebrity and was thrilled when he gave me a camp
aign button with his name on it. But his glow was already on the brink of fading as an unseemly personal transgression would cost him everything—political career and marriage—soon enough.

  Next to Glenice sits Aunt Jean. The tight expression on her unsmiling face reflects an absence that she no doubt was feeling keenly that day. Her only son had just been convicted of murder in the first degree, sentenced to life in prison for the death of his partner in a detective agency. The prevailing theory in our household was that a woman roundly regarded by the family as a temptress had killed the partner and pinned everything on Jean’s son. But the jury didn’t know him or her, and nobody asked us our opinions, so he was sent away for ninety-nine years without a chance of parole. Even as we praised her ambrosia and avoided talking about the missing son, Aunt Jean was off in another world. Far from her son and helpless to aid him, it must’ve been everything she could do to swallow.

  Next to her, Grampy raises his fork to his mouth for a bite of pie. He and Grammy sit kitty-corner from each other, not side by side. He looks tense and grumpy, and for good reason. His inner Romeo had gotten him into trouble again. He simply could not seem to keep his hands to himself when hugging the women at church, dear friends who were startled when a hug became an embrace of another sort. When a particular set of old friends separated, Grampy had written a letter to the newly alone wife to suggest methods of consolation that shocked her and, in turn, made Grammy so furious she could barely stand to share a room with him. Married fifty-one years that Christmas, he was in the doghouse again, which no one was supposed to bring up and we kids weren’t supposed to know (but did).