I KNOW IT’S NOT VERY ORIGINAL TO say this, but Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. I love the twinkling lights on houses, the snow, that annoying Mariah Carey song that takes over the radio, the red velvet top that my mom wears to holiday parties that makes her look younger and happier, almost resembling the mom I used to know. I even love Christmas Eve mass—the dimly lit church, the altar lined with fragrant boughs of pine, the wooden crèche threaded with white lights, and the warm smell of incense that settles in your clothes and hair.
When we were younger, our family would make an annual excursion to see the giant tree in Daley Plaza. On the ride downtown, my dad couldn’t resist lecturing us about subway safety—how we should never sleep on the el or play with our phones; how, if someone wants to sit next to us we should always move to the aisle so they can’t pin us against the window and grope or rob us; how, if we have to look at the station map we should do so nonchalantly so nobody thinks we’re from out of town. Once we got off the el, though, he visibly relaxed. He would buy us hot cocoa at the Christkindlmarket, and at Macy’s, Stevie Junior and I each got to choose one gift that would then be wrapped up and presented to us on Christmas morning. Then we’d go for burgers at Monk’s, where my dad would order a tall beer and my mom would get a glass of red wine and they’d sit in the booth across from Stevie Junior and me, giggling like teenagers while Stevie and I made gagging sounds to each other, and we’d throw our peanut shells on the floor and watch all the office workers bustling up and down Lake Street, huddled in their winter coats and talking importantly into their cell phones. On Christmas Eve we’d go to the special policeman’s mass at the Mercy Home for Boys and ask for a blessing from Saint Michael, the patron saint of the police, to protect our father for another year as he worked the streets of Chicago’s west side.
Now all of that feels like a very long time ago. I’m older, wiser, and maybe a little more bitter, and the holiday has lost most of its magic. So this year, when my mom was offered a bonus to work the overnight Christmas Eve and Christmas Day shifts at the hospital, she ran it past me and I just shrugged.
“We could really use the money,” she said apologetically.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I can just hang out at home and catch up on Teen Mom 2.”
“Absolutely not. You’re not spending Christmas in front of the TV. It’s a day for family.”
“Well, let’s see,” I said, counting on my fingers. “Stevie Junior is in the South Pacific. Uncle Jimbo and Aunt Colleen are in Rockford. Dad’s in jail, Grandma’s dead, and you’re working. So what do you suggest I do about that?”
“You’re forgetting someone.”
I thought for a minute.
“Oh God,” I said.
“Yes.” My mom smiled broadly. “I already checked with Aunt Kathy, and she is absolutely thrilled to have you spend Christmas with her.”
“But she’s crazy! Dad always said so.”
“Well, that crazy woman has been footing the bill for your education for the last two years, young lady,” my mom said, finally admitting what I had long suspected. “You’re going to have a great time, I promise.”
My aunt Kathy is a food stylist who lives downtown in a fifteenth-floor exposed brick loft overlooking Millennium Park. We don’t see her all that often because she’s always doing things like backpacking through China or attending meditative retreats in New Mexico, and even when she’s living in Chicago, she sticks to the trendy areas. She considers the northwest side neighborhood where she grew up and where I now live a hellish backwater where you can’t even get paella or a decent deep tissue massage, and avoids coming here whenever possible. She used to make an exception and show up to our family parties every once in awhile, but even that stopped after the legendary political argument she got into with my dad at my First Communion party. I don’t know what they fought about—I was eight—but I do know that he called her a stupid liberal and she called him a fascist thug before throwing her white wine in his face and storming out of our house in a whirlwind of clacking jewelry and spicy perfume. In her free time, she goes ghost hunting.
“Go with an open mind,” my mom said, draping an arm around my shoulder. “You just might surprise yourself.”
So that was how I found myself, on a snowy Christmas Eve afternoon, dragging my duffel bag up the stairs of the Jackson Avenue blue-line station and scanning the snow-swirled street for my crazy aunt and her boyfriend, Simon. When she saw me she began waving furiously, the bangles on her wrists jingling like sleigh bells. While she gathered me up in a furious assault of embroidered scarves and gardenia perfume, Simon, his graying blond ponytail edged with falling snow, bowed deeply, like a butler or a Japanese karate master, and took my bag for me.
“Look at you, Wendy!” Kathy trilled, grasping my shoulders and looking with such pleasure into my face that I felt a little guilty for how badly I hadn’t wanted to spend Christmas with her. “You get more and more lovely each time I see you!”
Simon, holding my duffel bag over his shoulder like a woman’s purse, led us down Jackson toward Michigan Avenue.
“Now don’t tell your mother,” Kathy said, throwing her arm around me as well as someone wearing a large velvet cape can throw her arm around anything, “but we’re going to give Christmas mass a skip this year.”
I felt a twinge of disappointment, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell that to Aunt Kathy.
“Fine by me.” I shrugged.
We walked to a restaurant on the top floor of the Art Institute, with floor-to-ceiling views of Michigan Avenue. It had white walls, white tables, white chairs, and a white marble bar lined with opaque white containers of unlabeled liquor.
“How do they know which bottle is which?” I asked, pointing.
“Oh, honey, at this place, no one actually cares what the drinks taste like,” Kathy explained, scanning the menu above her rhinestone-bedazzled reading glasses. “It’s just the fact of being seen here.”
I looked at the drinks list and had to do a double take. Twenty-five bucks for a glass of wine? I thought of my mom and Aunt Colleen, sitting on our little balcony drinking their cheap bottle of chardonnay from the 7-Eleven down the street. They were going to love this story. Aunt Kathy’s food stylist business had taken off—who knew there was such a booming market for people who arranged french fries at just the right angle?—and she was rich, at least by our standards. One of my mom and Aunt Col’s favorite topics was discussing how their younger sister spent her money, usually with a mixture of envy and disapproval. After all, they had followed all the rules, while Aunt Kathy had skipped college and marriage, choosing, after high school, to hitchhike out to North Dakota to shack up with a landscape artist and work as a line cook on a cattle ranch. Now she made more money than her two sisters combined.
“So,” said Simon, after the waiter came over and I ordered a Dr Pepper, which was brought to me in a vintage green bottle along with a tall glass filled with a single ovular ice cube, “your aunt tells me that you’ve never been to the Art Institute before.”
“We’re not exactly an artsy family,” I explained.
“Nonsense!” Aunt Kathy slurped loudly from her French martini. “Art has no social class or creed. You either like it or you don’t. For me, it’s a better religious experience than going to a damn Christmas mass.”
“What’s so bad about the Catholic church anyway, Aunt Kathy?”
“Nothing,” she said, “except everything. Three hundred years ago, those God-fearing Christians would’ve called me a witch.”
“Because you ghost hunt?”
“No, because I’m not married. Because I’m not a conformist. Because I’m a strong, independent female.”
“She’s right on that score,” Simon said, squeezing her knee. “Your aunt Kathy, Wendy, is a woman who knows how to take control.” And he leaned over and started kissing her, and it was gross, and I had to clear my throat to remind them that they were in public.
Aunt Kathy paid our bill, and we spent the rest of the afternoon walking from gallery to gallery so they could show me their favorite pieces of art. Simon’s was a bronze sculpture of a boy’s head, one shoulder lifted, eyes closed, chest frail. It was called Suffering. Aunt Kathy’s was Woman Before an Aquarium by Matisse, who apparently is kind of a big deal painter considering she almost passed out when I told her I had never heard of him. The one I liked best was The Girl at the Window by Edvard Munch. Aunt Kathy suggested that sometimes the art that draws us in the most is the art in which we see ourselves reflected. Which made sense to me. In Munch’s painting, a figure stands hunched by a window in her nightgown, and she looks so afraid. Not afraid to go outside, but afraid of the act of even lifting the curtain. That’s me, I thought. Afraid of my friends and afraid of my life.
On our way out, Aunt Kathy stopped to study a Miró painting called The Policeman.
“Remind you of your father at all?” she asked as we stood in a row before the canvas.
“That doesn’t even look like a person,” I said. “It’s just, like, a bunch of shapes.”
“I don’t know.” She cocked her head. “See that thread of dark mustache? That’s entirely befitting. The assertive pose, leg forward, arm out, hands splayed? Powerful and conceited . . . that’s your father.”
“It’s quite impressive,” Simon agreed. “I love the way Miró plays with abstraction and representation.”
“That’s supposed to be a leg?” I squinted at the painting. “See, this is why I don’t like modern art.”
“Honey, you can’t dislike something until you’ve educated yourself about it,” Kathy said. “Great art is like great literature. Or music. Once you fall in love with it—fall in love not with your senses but with your soul, I mean—you’ll never be alone again.” At her words, an image bubbled up into my consciousness of Alexis’s face, resting, at peace in her music, just before Kenzie confronted her on the sidewalk. I shook the thought away.
We stepped down the marble staircase and into the darkening street, then entered the shiny lobby of Kathy’s building and rode the plushy carpeted elevator to the fifteenth floor. Simon brought my duffel bag into the spare bedroom while Aunt Kathy started dinner and I laid out a set of stylishly mismatched cobalt plates on the low table. There were no chairs, just puffy tasseled cushions that I guessed we were expected to sit on. Sitar music began to pipe through the surround-sound speakers. Kathy opened a bottle of champagne and poured me a glass in a crystal flute, handing it to me as if it was the most natural thing in the world to serve expensive alcohol to your sixteen-year-old niece. As I took a sip of the fizzy, crisp champagne, it made perfect sense why my dad, my chain-smoking, cursing, sports-obsessed cop dad, had never gotten along with Aunt Kathy. But I was beginning to think that there was no reason why I couldn’t get along with her.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Aunt Kathy called from the kitchen while I stood before a bookshelf, sipping my champagne and running my fingers along the titles—Pulling your Own Strings: A Guide to Self-Improvement, Sexual Empowerment in your Pre-Menopausal Years, Doing You: The Journey to Finding Your Authentic Self—“but Simon and I are on the Paleo Diet. That means dinner tonight will consist of only real, whole, unprocessed foods. The same foods that would have been available to our ancestors two hundred thousand years ago.”
“You mean to tell me that the cave men drank champagne?”
She smiled. Her cheeks were flushed from the cooking, and the windows overlooking the lights of Millennium Park had gone foggy. “For champagne,” she said, “we make an exception. This is a holiday, after all.”
I helped Kathy bring dish after dish of unidentifiable food to the table—prosciutto cups, salmon mousse on cucumber chips, carrot soufflé, and a giant, shining red lobster, arranged on a hammered copper tray and edged with lemon wedges. A line popped into my mind from our Honors Brit Lit class, a poem that we’d read just before break that I had secretly loved, even though I didn’t understand a word of what it meant: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” I must have said the line aloud—the champagne had made me feel babbly and dreamy, because Kathy and Simon looked at each other, impressed and pleased.
“They’re teaching T. S. Eliot at that stuffy old place?” Aunt Kathy wanted to know. “In my day, it was all religious texts and indoctrination.”
“Well, I have a cool teacher, Ms. Lee,” I said, embarrassed. “She teaches honors American and Brit Lit. And journalism.”
“Go figure.” Aunt Kathy shrugged, snapping a lobster leg in half and dragging the flakes of white meat through a smear of butter on her plate. “The place finds some enlightenment just in time to close for good.”
“So, is that what you’re into?” Simon asked, sipping his wine. “Poetry?”
“I’m not into anything. I mean, I’m into my schoolwork. Getting good grades. Getting a scholarship and getting the hell out of Chicago.”
“Here’s to that.” Aunt Kathy raised her glass.
I have to admit: the paleo food, though weird, was actually pretty good. There was music playing over the gleaming speakers, a fake fire burned in the slate-trimmed fireplace, and outside was the Bean and the Pritzker Pavilion, cold and steely in the snow, the blinking red march of cars down Lake Shore Drive, the gray line of water and then the dark nothingness of Lake Michigan’s horizon. It was hard to believe that this place of culture, of sophistication, of Miró and Matisse, was the same city I’d lived in all my life. Chicago was where I was born and raised, where my parents and grandparents were born and raised, where my great-grandfathers had slaughtered pigs in the stockyards a couple miles to the southwest. This was a city that beat inside me like blood, but in that moment, looking out at the park and the street and the water, I felt like I was seeing it for the first time.
After dinner, there was dessert: little peeled crescents of clementine oranges dipped in hardened dark chocolate. In the contented silence that followed our meal, Simon and Kathy drank sherry out of these blown-glass tumblers they’d bought during a trip to Venice, and I drank my Dr Pepper and thought about things. I thought about my mom and her antidepressants and antianxieties and sleeping pills. I thought about her monthly confrontation with the laptop as she paid our bills, her face lonely and lined in the computer’s glow, figuring numbers using my old graphing calculator from Algebra II class. Rent, electric, gas, cable, cell phones, car insurance, Chase, American Express. Groceries. Lawyer fees. And on and on. I thought about how she once told me that Aunt Kathy has such a sad life, because, I guess, she never married or had children. But what I couldn’t figure out was where the sadness was. Aunt Kathy had money and freedom and a ponytailed boyfriend who played the sitar and designed unisex clothing, who still kissed her in a way that older people, according to my theory, aren’t supposed to kiss. Maybe she’s just hiding it, this sadness, I thought. Because she doesn’t want me to see and because it’s Christmas. But no, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t hiding any sadness. It wasn’t there in the first place. It occurred to me, watching Aunt Kathy and Simon drinking their sherry on the couch with their feet intertwined beneath a striped chenille blanket, that there are so many more ways to live your life than I’d once thought.
“How’s that friend of yours your mom is always telling me about?” Aunt Kathy wiped a bit of chocolate from her lip with a black-painted fingernail. “Kenzie, right?”
I cleared my throat. I’d been having such a nice time because everything about Aunt Kathy and Simon felt so far away from my real life. I told them about how Kenzie had snuck Evan into the pool on a dare, about her probation, and about her five tattoos. But I didn’t tell them about Alexis’s violin. Mischief and rebellion were one thing: Simon and Kathy understood it and approved of it. Bullying was something different.
“A real wild child, huh?” Aunt Kathy smiled. “If I were in high school, Kenzie would be my best friend, too.”
“No,” Simon corrected her, “you would be Kenzie.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” I said a little too quickly. Aunt Kathy looked at me curiously for a moment.
“Except for the tattoo part,” Aunt Kathy said. “Needles aren’t my thing. It’s how I managed to avoid heroin all throughout the nineties.”
Kathy and Simon helped themselves to more sherry.
“What about boyfriends?” she asked. “Got any of those?”
I shook my head.
“Good for you, Wendy! I always felt sorry for the girls who anchored themselves down to boyfriends in high school. Like your mom. She married her high school boyfriend—your dad—and look how that turned out for her.”
I concentrated on peeling the chocolate away from my orange and didn’t say anything. I don’t know why it bothered me, her criticizing my dad. I mean, I hated him anyway. So what difference did it make?
Later that night, after I went to bed, I settled into the thick, cotton sheets that were so crisp I was sure they’d never been slept on, and was leafing through one of the architectural magazines I’d found in a stack on the nightstand when I heard a soft knock on my door.
“Yeah?”
Aunt Kathy, dressed in a satin kimono and matching embroidered slippers, stuck her head in the door. She was holding another tumbler of sherry and a self-help book entitled Dynamic You! Techniques for Living Your Best Life.
“Can I come in, honey?”
“Sure,” I said, putting the magazine on my lap.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, what I said about your dad. I’m just so damn angry at him.”
“It’s cool.” I shrugged.
“I just worry about your mom,” she said. “How’s she doing? She never talks to me. Not about important things, anyway. She thinks I’m flighty or something. That I wouldn’t get it. That I don’t care.”
“She doesn’t think that,” I said, though it was probably true. Aunt Kathy stood there quietly for a moment.
“Anyway,” she said, smiling, “I forgot to give you your Christmas present.” She reached into the pocket of her kimono and handed me a small black Bloomingdale’s box, wrapped in a thick red ribbon.
“Thanks, Aunt Kath!” I untied the ribbon and lifted the lid. It was a makeup set—lipstick in a gold tube, a blush compact shaped like a seashell, a tube of mascara, and a small vial of perfume.
“Now, I know you weren’t always much of a girly girl,” Aunt Kathy said as I lifted the items, turning them over in my hands, “but your mom tells me you’ve been wearing more makeup these days. And sometimes just knowing you have this stuff in your drawer makes you feel a little more sophisticated. Besides, every girl deserves a little Chanel.”
The makeup was so beautiful—the lipstick a rich, creamy nude tapered to a perfect point, the compact a pat of pale, shimmering pink stamped with two interlocking C’s—that I knew I would probably never use it. But still, I loved the gift. I could put it on the sink in our tiny bathroom with the mold etched between the cracked peach-colored tiles, next to the toilet with the yellow ring that would never come clean. I could let my mom borrow it, in the event that she ever got invited out for drinks with the other cop wives again.
“Well?” she asked, hovering nervously over the bed. “Do you like it?”
“I love it.” I smiled up at her. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad.” She watched as I uncapped the perfume and breathed in the expensive scent. “Hey, do you mind if I sit down for a minute, hon?”
“Sure.” I closed the perfume and scooted over in the bed to make room. She climbed in next to me, the cool silk of her kimono rustling against the sheets.
“How are you doing, anyway?” she asked, crossing her slippered feet and leaning against the headboard. “With ASH closing and everything?”
I shrugged.
“Fine, I guess.”
“If it had happened when I was in high school, it would have been a dream come true. I hated that place. But you, you’re different than I was.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Thank God.”
“What were you like?”
She thought for a moment.
“Well, I was exactly like I am now, only a natural blonde with an ass that didn’t sag.”
I laughed. I had to admit, it was nice, sitting side by side like this with my eccentric aunt. It had been so long since I’d had someone to talk to.
“But, I mean, like, who did you hang out with? What were your friends like?”
“Oh,” she waved a hand. “I was one of the misfits. You know. The type that sits in the back row reading The Bell Jar and piercing my ears with a safety pin.”
“So you didn’t ever have friends that, I don’t know, were sort of . . . bitchy?”
“Wendy.” She put her arm around me gently. “In this family, we believe in female empowerment. As a feminist, I would appreciate it if you didn’t use that word.”
I laughed. “You sound like Sister Dorothy.”
“I have to say, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been compared to a nun. I don’t know how I feel about this.”
“It’s a compliment, I guess.”
“How about ‘unkind’? That’s the meaning you’re getting at, but it’s gender neutral.”
“Well, I don’t think ‘unkind’ really cuts it for the type of friends I have, Kath.”
“Is this Kenzie we’re talking about here?”
“Yeah. And Emily and Sapphire, but yeah, mainly Kenzie.”
“Okay. Well, what has she done that you feel has been unkind?”
“Well, let’s see.” I sat up and began counting on my fingers. “She dared Sapphire to steal a case of Abraham Lincoln’s silverware from a party. She snuck her boyfriend into our gym class, which basically made him lose his football scholarship and got our PE teacher fired in the process. She throws Pop-Tarts at people. And, you remember the girl I was friends with in elementary school? Alexis Nichols?”
“Of course I do. What a sweetheart. How’s she doing, anyway?”
“Well, probably not great. Alexis snitched on Kenzie about the gym class thing. So Kenzie took Alexis’s violin and smashed it into, like, a thousand pieces.”
As I sat there, rehashing the events of the past school year, Aunt Kathy’s eyes grew wider and wider.
“Are you finished?” she finally asked.
I nodded.
“Well then, I’ve got a question for you, Miss Wendy Ann Boychuck. Why in the name of Christ are you friends with a bitch like that?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain.” I opened the compact and looked at the small oval of my face, pale and plain, in the little mirror.
“Try me.”
“It’s because . . .” I snapped the compact shut and looked down at the Christmas lights twinkling on the street below, trying to figure out how to explain it. “I don’t know. There’s something powerful about being popular, I guess.”
“Oh, come on, Wendy. Don’t tell me you’re one of these teenage girls who actually cares about being popular. Who’s always talking about how fat she is, or how fat other people are. I can’t stand those girls. They are so terribly boring.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not that.”
“Well, then what is it?”
“It’s like, popularity is this magic shield. It kind of protects me from my own last name. If I’m friends with Kenzie, no one can make fun of me or—or worse—just because I’m a Boychuck.”
“Ah. So that’s what this is about. Your dad.”
“Well, I guess so. In a way.”
She sat up straight, and examined me with her pale gray eyes.
“See, that’s what the neighborhood does to you,” she finally said, settling back into the pillow. “Makes you feel like it’s the whole world. Everybody so insular, so obsessed with each other’s business. It’s like living in a small town, but with rats and muggings.”
“It’s not that bad,” I laughed.
“Oh, it’s worse. Trust me—I grew up there, too! But now I live here. Downtown. Do you know what the best part about living in this building is? It’s that Simon and I don’t know anybody who lives in it. Nobody knows my business, and nobody cares!”
I could feel the soft thumping of her heart and the up-and-down movement of her throat as she sipped her sherry.
“You know, there are other forms of protection, Wendy. Self-esteem, for one. A jujitsu class. Hell, even a religious relic is probably going to protect you better than some snotty sixteen-year-old ‘friend,’ and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t really even believe in God.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s just so hard to walk away.”
“Well, what is it that you’re afraid of? So what if people say your dad did some awful stuff? Guess what, honey? He did do some awful stuff. And now you and your mom and your brother have to live with that. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. You can either let it crush you or you can let it make you tough. Your choice.”
“Aunt Kathy, you don’t remember what high school was like! It’s a freaking war zone, okay?”
“Wendy, look at me.” She took both my hands in hers, her long nails tickling my palms. “I wish I could make you understand just how young you are. But, as the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. So here’s what I’m going to tell you instead: the average life expectancy of an American woman is eighty years. And you’re in high school for exactly four of those years. That’s, what, five percent of your life that you spend in high school? And yet, everybody acts like it’s some big goddamn deal. Like what happens to you there, who you hang out with, what your grades are, should somehow define you for the other ninety-five percent of your life. Please. It’s all so silly. There are so many people you still need to meet, so many experiences you still have to live. Life is so fun, honey! It’s so wonderful! And it’s so big! It’s a road that just keeps getting wider and wider. So it’s just plain stupid to think that these are supposed to be the best years of your life.”
She put her sherry on the end table, leaned back against the headboard, and closed her eyes. Even at this time of night she was perfumed and pedicured, her face dewy with night cream. She was the picture of confidence and self-possession, a woman entirely satisfied with her own widening road.
“You’re going to do so many great things, Wendy,” she said, her eyes still closed. “You won’t believe how many great things you’re going to do. And once you get out there in the world? No one is going to give the littlest shit who your dad was.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so, honey. As someone who’s lived plenty and always has to learn things the hard way.”
We lay there, side by side in the bed, my head resting on the cool silk of her kimono. Kooky, my dad had called Aunt Kathy. Goofy. A flake. A wingnut. But who cared that she wore capes and kimonos and ate paleo and drank too much sherry on Christmas Eve? When you actually talked to her, she made a hell of a lot more sense than most of the other adults I knew. I’d never met someone who was so comfortable being exactly who she was. She made being true to yourself seem easy. No, more than that: she made it seem like a party.
For a minute, I thought she’d fallen asleep. I put the compact aside and lay there for a while, feeling her warmth and watching the snow and the cars zipping by in a blur of light down Lake Shore Drive. From where I sat everything was so frighteningly far away, fifteen floors down, except for the flakes of snow, which sifted against the window like little fingerprints, scratching to get into this warm, cozy space that smelled like flowers and cooking and Aunt Kathy’s peppermint foot cream.
Her eyes fluttered open, as if she was startled into waking, and she leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, leaving behind a smear of her rose-scented lip balm. “Merry Christmas, honey.”
“Merry Christmas, Aunt Kathy.”
Before she left the room, she stopped and turned back.
“Oh, and Wendy?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Get some rest. We’re going to be up early tomorrow—we’re going ghost hunting.”