A Little Fruitcake Read online

  Products of the “Me Decade,” kids of my generation were pegged as self-involved slugs who didn’t care about the world. But you’d never have known that from the two youth groups I belonged to.

  At my church, I was in Pathfinders, which is just like the Boy Scouts, except we included girls, our uniforms were the color of paste, and we had badges in things like “Witnessing.” On Sunday nights, though, I went to Youth Fellowship, the much more casual teen program at the one other church in our town. I loved that both of the youth groups each ran annual charity events, which timed out with perfect synchronicity for me. First, I helped the Pathfinders collect canned goods for the poor between Halloween and Thanksgiving; after that, I joined the other church’s Youth Fellowship first for a newspaper drive, then for tree decorating.

  That all my charity work for the year was accomplished in the same ten-week period did not strike me as unusual; in fact, it just meant I was acting like a grown-up.

  Of the three activities, my favorite was can collecting with the Pathfinders. Each year in the weeks surrounding Halloween, we Pathfinders were assigned mappedout neighborhoods, which we papered in advance with fliers explaining what to give and what not to give. (Jell-O pudding packets, though not canned, were fine; raw hamburger, not fine). Then, on the date announced on the flier, we would return in uniform to get the paper bags filled with canned goods. Givers who did not actually want to deal with kids could simply set their bags out on the porch, and we’d snag them without even ringing the doorbell. (This always made me worry that we might accidentally snag the personal groceries of people who had just set their bags down for a moment to run inside and pee, though no such complaints were ever received.)

  Though the food was collected around Halloween, it was not intended for distribution until Thanksgiving and Christmas. For that reason, clearly seasonal items like Pumpkin-shaped sprinkles and orange cupcake frosting were also discouraged. In the month before any poor person would be allowed to enjoy the bounty we’d harvested, the products sat in the church’s food pantry. During these weeks, we kids were busy arranging the collected items into elaborate tableaux: making a peace symbol out of cans or building a skyscraper of Rice-A-Roni boxes. When we had finished constructing our box-and-can dioramas, we donned our uniforms and posed with our handiwork for snapshots. Once our Great Pyramid of Campbell’s soup cans had been preserved for posterity, the displays would be disassembled bit by bit as church members packed up baskets of goods to deliver to townsfolk who had been identified as living below the poverty line or suffering from some terrible circumstance. It felt quite noble, even poignant, to be involved in such an undertaking.

  I was not, however, as enthusiastic about the Youth Fellowship newspaper drive. The stacks of newsprint were often dirty or wet and had to be tied with itchy twine, then hefted onto the back of a truck and driven off to be weighed at a recycling plant, which paid out what I remember as mere pennies per pound. This sequence offered all the things I didn’t like: hard work, grime, and no photo opportunity. Even so, I did my part, cheerfully as possible, because I looked up to Roxie and Dick, the Youth Fellowship leaders, and because it meant I could spend more time with the friends I only saw on Sundays. But when the last bundle had been weighed, I was happy as a clam to move on to something more my speed: decorating the town Christmas trees.

  Norridgewock was a small town. It had two intersections, but only one stoplight up at the top of the short main drag, which held a convenience store, a grocery market owned by the Libby family, and a beauty parlor next door owned by their flamboyant son Butch, a nickname roundly accepted as a joke. There were two churches, one public school, one church school, a little league field, two gas stations, a thimble-sized library, and an even smaller bank. Several doctors lived in Norridgewock, but only one practiced right in town, seeing clients in what had once been the parlor of her Victorian house. The sole employer of note was the shoe factory where Grammy had worked, and when its release whistle blew in the late afternoon, it yielded the only discernible traffic the town ever saw, which may be why there was also only one full-time cop. This was so not a town with a decorating budget.

  It was up to the good will of Youth Fellowship then to provide any holiday accessories. Depending on the year, that might mean decorating a big tree in the main intersection, or down by the bank, or both. The town wasn’t going to provide a generator to fuel any lights, and it wasn’t as if the neighbors were offering to let us run an electric cord into their homes. Thus, the town trees were lightless displays, meaning that any arrangement of bulbs and garland would be completely invisible in the dark hours.

  Then, someone came up with an idea that was both brilliant and a little trashy: cover the decorations in fluorescent paint so bright that the ornaments would seem to glow faintly in the dark at even the smallest graze of passing headlights.

  Since there was no budget for bulbs either, the decorations in question were actually just Styrofoam cups. It was easy: just turn over a cup, poke a hook through the bottom (now the top), spray-paint the outside in a cheery hue, and voilà—a Christmas bell, albeit a soundless one. The only flaw, for some viewers, was our use of fluorescent colors. There is no such thing as a fluorescent Christmas color. Forget crimson and pine, or even fire engine red and Kelly green; we preferred the hot shades of rock posters and graffiti. Vivid lime, Gatorade yellow, and Barbie-lipstick pink—these bells didn’t ring; they rocked.

  It was a windy day that year as we hung the cups. Dick, the youth leader, was driving a town utility truck and had sent Blaine and Darryl, the oldest boys in the crew, up in the bucket. While they rose to the highest parts of the tree, the rest of us milled about sticking DayGlo bells wherever we could. One of the boys around my age leaned over and said, “You must really love this tree.” The wind obscured the rest of his words. “What?” I asked, trying to lean out of his spit zone.

  “Your people love bright colors,” he sprayed.

  My people? It took me a minute to realize what he was saying. He didn’t mean the people in my church, with whom no one was likely to associate fluorescent anything. He meant Cubans. And I could tell it was supposed to be a dig.

  It was not a fun year to be half Cuban in rural Maine. The arrival of the Marielito refugees on the shores of Florida had set off a wave of reflexive anti-immigrant sentiment that had shocked me. I was in York’s Market one afternoon when the woman behind the counter said she’d seen “that spic kid” hanging out with his buddies on the corner. (The location of this corner didn’t need specification: the town had only one.) It wasn’t till she noticed me standing there and turned red that I even realized she was talking about my brother. Ignacio was a spic? Since when? I’d heard the term before, but I’d always thought it meant Puerto Ricans, which we weren’t. And if Ignacio was, that meant I was, too. I didn’t like the idea that I could be defined against my will in such a way.

  Bizarre Cuban stereotypes had crept up everywhere. “You all like ‘hot’ food, right?” asked one of my classmates’ parents, though the black beans and rice I loved in Miami weren’t spicy at all. Another friend said, apropos of nothing, “You don’t have black hair like a real Cuban,” not that he knew any or had seen any of my cousins, most of whom were as fair as I was. Whereas just the year before it had seemed as if no one understood that I had a life outside the one in Maine, now people were curious about that part of me for all the wrong reasons. My actual relatives—Tia Fina and Tio Luis, middle-class homeowners sending their kids to college—were no match for the version my Maine neighbors collectively imagined them to be: loud-clothes-wearing, loud-music-listening hotbloods living off food stamps and the indulgence of Uncle Sam.

  It didn’t help that Ignacio and I were now living out part of that stereotype. Mom (who was not Cuban at all) got us by on food stamps and part-time work, having recently moved us out of Grammy’s house and into a HUD apartment a half-mile away. The town drunk lived one door down in our building; he was prone to doing fac
e-plants in the driveway, where he would lie asleep until the buzz wore off. In another unit, young marrieds were doing serious drugs to celebrate their new life as parents. The apartment complex wasn’t a pretty place, but I didn’t give much thought to it one way or the other; with so many activities at the two churches, I was rarely home. It had never occurred to me that our situation, based as it was on class and the limited opportunities of a depressed region, might play into anyone’s notions of my race or heritage.

  I considered how to reply to my fellow tree decorator. I could have pointed out that if he wanted to insult me by linking ethnicity to bright colors, he might first want to put down the hot pink bell in his hand. I could have said that this crazy tree, whose psychedelic hues were bold enough to scar your retinas, was the brainchild of Mainers, not Cubans. But I kept quiet. I just made a show of not answering.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said, ducking around the tree.

  He called out, but I shouted over him. “I said, I can’t hear you!” He could think what he wanted, but like most people, I preferred to define myself.

  As we hung the last bells, the passing cars honked at us, which we took to mean that we had done a fantastic job. With the finished tree resembling Christmas on acid, we went our separate ways. I wouldn’t see these kids for another week, as they would return to their public school. I’d see all my own church school classmates again starting the next morning.

  As it turns out, I didn’t have to wait that long.

  I was in the kitchen of our apartment putting away dishes when there was a knock at the door. This was a fairly rare occurrence as I didn’t ever invite my friends to this dark place, with its low ceilings and windowless living room. The landlord, who was now dating my mother and noisily eating dinner with us every night, never really knocked so much as poked his head in to announce himself. Grammy didn’t come over at all, figuring we could come to her.

  The knock at the door was a surprise then, and I turned to look with an instinct that it would be bad news. In a way, it was. For when I opened the door, I found two of my church school classmates standing there. One held in her arms a big box, which I recog- nized immediately as a holiday basket. Of groceries. For the poor.

  I didn’t get out a word as my classmate spoke the very same line I had said to complete strangers in previous years.

  “We just wanted to give you something to help make this holiday season a little easier.”

  A lot of things went through my head. The times I’d delivered the charity baskets—and make no mistake, that is what they were—I had noted the sagging state of the recipients’ trailers or the forlorn appearances of their run-down farms, and I had felt kindly and beneficent, which is to say superior, the purview of the one bringing the groceries. I had not equated those homes, those people, with us. Yes, we lived on food stamps in a HUD apartment and wore a lot of secondhand clothes. But I had bought into the notion of poor people as shown on television: greasy, foul-mouthed smokers whose back porches were cluttered with beer cans. That didn’t apply to us. Not even close.

  But the evidence was before me. In my friend’s grasp were the groceries I myself had collected expressly for the poor. If I accepted the box, I accepted the term. And I knew, without even looking, how empty the cupboards behind me were. I had no choice but to thank the girl and open my arms for this painful gift.

  I shut the door shut behind her as she hurried back to her parents’ car, ready to make more deliveries. I peered into the box, my mind quiet as the empty kitchen. Macaroni and cheese. Boxes of pudding. Stovetop Stuffing. We would eat these things, all of them, no question. Maybe we’d even forget their provenance.

  It was work to stay cheerful. I hummed a tune that I considered inspirational: Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas,” in which she lists possible ways to deal with a blue holiday. First, she suggests just dying her hair, but then she ramps it up, pondering moving so far away that people would lose track of her. The drab kitchen faded away as I imagined getting away from this apartment, this town, the boy who called me “Porker,” and people who said “spic.” I saw myself somewhere else, somewhere better—a city maybe, a place where I could be whomever I chose because nobody knew any different. And why not? If a hot pink bell that didn’t ring could be a Christmas ornament, anything was possible.

  When Mom woke up from her afternoon nap and stepped into the kitchen, she found me completely lost in thought, the box still unpacked.

  “What’s all this?” she asked.

  “Christmas came early this year,” I answered.

  I reached into the carton and produced two packages of chocolate pudding mix. I knew they were her favorite.

  11

  Country of the Wicked Pointy Firs

  “Scotty,” I yelled, but he was so far above me, clinging to a forty-foot spruce, that he didn’t hear. The December wind ate my words, but I tried again. “Scotty!” I shouted, my voice getting hoarse. “You have to stop!”

  He looked down over his shoulder at me, raising his eyebrows questioningly. I saw the look on his face just about the time he understood what was going to happen next.

  Some families make a tradition of going out to get their Christmas tree together. I knew a set of sisters in my school who always tromped out into the woods—and this being Maine, there were woods everywhere—to help their parents make the perfect selection. This sounded romantic to me, and I pictured a woodland scene right out of Disney, with sunlight shining off of icicles and perhaps a smattering of chipmunks and cardinals. But the eldest daughter confided to me that she thought the whole thing was a drag: her mom and dad would bicker about the sizes and shapes of the trees around them until their bored daughters were so cold that they had to stomp their feet to keep the blood moving.

  Whether a tree comes fresh from the woods or is plucked from among the offerings at a local Boy Scout’s Christmas tree stand, is there really any way to make the whole experience idyllic? If you’ve ever wrestled a wobbling spruce onto your car, trying to secure knots with frostbitten fingers, you know what I mean. Once you get it home, there’s the issue of screwing the trunk onto the tree stand of choice without inadvertently fixing it into a tilted posture, thus having to start the whole process over again.

  Maybe it was because the whole experience was so fraught with perils—chief among them losing one’s holiday cheer—but my grandparents had never included Ignacio and me in any Christmas tree–gathering excursions. The first year after Mom moved us into our own apartment, we didn’t even have a tree because the landlord said it would be a fire hazard, and my Mom, who was dating him at the time, didn’t want to argue. But a year later, the landlord, who had by then dumped Mom and was trying to make nice, decided to let this rule slide for a season. This meant, for the first time ever, that I got to help pick out a Christmas tree.

  I had no intention of buying one off a lot somewhere. For I was now a high schooler and that came with privileges, one of which involved trees. Riverview wasn’t actually the local high school; instead, it was just a three-room church school that housed grades one to four in one classroom, grades six to eight in the next, and grades nine to ten in a third. (Juniors and seniors were out of luck; they had to look elsewhere for their education.) Once students made it into that ultimate classroom, they really ruled the roost, and that year, Scotty and I were among the elder statesmen. This meant we got to do the most exciting things, like digging around with our hands inside an enormous deceased cow from a nearby farm for biology. We also got to go on the most unusual field trips, such as our jaunt to a funeral home, where the mortician horrified us with his trocar, a big metal slushie straw for innards.

  The most seasonal of the perks for those of us at the top of the totem pole was that we got to cut class to hunt for our own Christmas trees. Actually, it wasn’t quite that naked, but it was true that the class day was shortened several times to allow us ninth and tenth graders the option of heading out into the school’s surrounding wood
s to find trees for our families. This was both a privilege of our age and a fund-raiser; if our families were happy with the trees we’d chosen, they’d pay for them. Our parents felt good about supporting the school, and we kids felt even better about getting out of class.

  Though Christmas trees were being farmed all around the school building, they were young, not to be harvested for years. The evergreens we could choose from stood in the woods far back on the school property, past the playground, beyond the fields, up above an unused sandpit. It would be a good fifteen-minute walk before we’d even reach the first stands that might offer up real possibilities. Being released from classes an hour early, then, made all the difference—not just in the hunt, but in the spirits of the would-be woodsmen.

  When Mr. Carter asked who wanted to get trees that December afternoon, my hand shot up. This was my golden chance to find a tree for the apartment that would dazzle Mom and make the tree in Grammy’s house look second-rate by comparison. Mr. Carter reminded us that we had to choose partners, no matter how many people wanted to go, because the school property extended for hundreds of acres. It was likely that even if we departed in a group, we would separate in the vastness at some point. The last thing the school needed was for some kid to get lost and never find his way back, freezing to death and totally ruining Christmas for all of us. Then, there was the possibility of an individual’s sawing off her own limb accidentally and not having a freaked-out classmate nearby to run screaming back to school for help. No, it was clear, we needed tree buddies for this task.

  That day, mine was Scotty. We’d been in school together for a decade, so long that it didn’t really matter that we didn’t have anything else in common. My actual best friends at the school were all girls—Debbie, Jenny, and Joy—but they tended to team up for tasks like this. The other two guys in the class were into ham radio and model rockets and science, which meant they might as well have been visitors from another planet. Scotty floated between these worlds on his own untroubled cloud of affability, a little goofy and a lot mellow. By age fifteen, when I’d known him for half my life already, my friendship with Scotty was like an old moccasin: so worn in, so comfortable, I was hardly aware of slipping into and out of it.