Liz’s parents were crazy for Christmas trees.
They never had just one tree, but filled the house with little backup, secondary-theme trees in each room. They might decorate a Christmas tree by color (silver, royal blue, sun gold), by creature (circus animals, Noah’s Ark), by musical instruments (drum, trumpet, harp), or by heavenly delights (angels, stars, crescent moons).
Christmas was a major event for the Kitchell family.
Liz’s father thought about Christmas as an innkeeper: in terms of houseguests. Dad wanted every relative, every old friend (for that matter, every stranger met on a cruise), to stay over. He thought in terms of food: the right drink for the right person, the largest turkey. Liz was pretty sure Dad never thought of another innkeeper, two thousand years ago, who hadn’t had a place big enough.
The Kitchells’ elegant Victorian house was definitely big enough. Size was important: at Christmas you wanted enough mantelpieces, enough stair landings and window ledges to strew your wreaths, your manger scenes, and your card collections. Age was important: their house was over a hundred years old, and everybody knew that people in the 1880s and the 1890s had done Christmas the best; in that century, they even used real candles on their trees.
But in real estate, it’s location that matters, and the Kitchells had location: their fine lawn with its huge old maples and oaks joined the small park that surrounded a beautiful old Colonial church. The church was white clapboard, spare and lean, with tall sparkling windows and a high thin spire that narrowed like a gold exclamation point to God.
The Kitchells had never gone to church, nor considered it. They did, however, send Christmas cards with Vermont-style snow and steeples framed against a blue sky.
When Liz and her sister, Allison, were little, they’d made tree decorations in art: sheep from cotton balls, tree chains from colored paper, stars from felt and glitter. Their mother never put these up. They were imperfect, and Mrs. Kitchell believed in the perfection of a Christmas tree.
Liz and Allison’s mother and father had bought a new Christmas tree holder to try out this year on the truly big tree in the formal living room. Usually you had to go to war with your tree, hefting it in the air, trying to lower it straight down into the holder, getting sap and needles in your eyes, while everybody else hollered that you had it crooked. With the new kind, you fastened the tree trunk in the cup while the tree was still lying down, and then you turned the tree upright, and it adjusted itself.
“One of the century’s finer inventions,” their father had said.
Liz sat in her English class and looked out the window, a trick everybody used when trying to think, as if the sky gave out ideas. It was snowing, the first snow of the year. December snow was slow and toasty, like thick blankets.
Mrs. Wrenn had not bothered to prepare a lesson plan. This was a daily occurrence. She’d just fill the time with creative writing, which exempted her from effort. Mrs. Wrenn had long hard scarlet fingernails, which she spent much of the class period admiring. Now she clicked them on her desktop, in the rhythm of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“Today for our creative writing exercise,” said Mrs. Wrenn, “your goal is one perfect paragraph.” She liked paragraphs because there was less to correct. The class didn’t mind. They liked paragraphs because there was less to write. “I’m setting the timer for ten minutes,” she added.
Translation: the remaining thirty minutes of the period would be spent reading the stuff out loud.
At least it wasn’t the VCR and a film clip.
Liz thought of yesterday’s creative writing topic: “What was the most upsetting thing I witnessed this week?”
It was actually a pretty good assignment, and Liz had a pretty good first thought: The most upsetting thing I witnessed this week was my parents watching television.
Every night on the local newscast, needy people had their dreadful stories of loss and suffering and poverty taped and dissected. “At Christmas,” said the reporter, “we must Remember the Neediest.”
The camera work was brilliant. Slowly scanning a city block, it turned joyful Christmas into pain. You could tell that the hearts of the neediest were dried and split like old vinyl.
Liz had the loveliest home that money could create, and thirty seconds of the neediest made her feel homeless.
But Liz’s parents were not interested in the neediest.
“Why should we have to look at that?” her father had said irritably. “Why can’t they stick to reporting and stop laying guilt trips and demanding money?” He hit the Mute button.
The television continued to report, but without sound or effect.
“Let me show you what I bought today!” cried Liz’s mother, who shopped at stores where the bags themselves were worth framing. She was a world-class, Olympic-level shopper. “The most beautiful beaded gold and green Christmas balls!” said her mother, taking them one by one from their wrapping of sparkly tissue. “They’re from Spain.”
“I love them!” her father said, holding each ball like a treasure. “Which tree shall we put them on?”
It was the first week in December, so the trees were up, but bare; still in the planning stage.
“Do you ever think about what Christmas means, Dad?” asked Liz. She kept her voice casual and quiet. “Do you ever think about that baby, and how—”
But in the Kitchell family, the word baby was not a good one.
“Liz,” said her father, “I suppose we’re Christian if we fill out forms and don’t want to check off Islam, but other than that, it’s crap.”
Liz hated that word. It was ugly and flat. She did not want anything in her life to be listed as crap. She sank back in her chair, not sure which baby she had been talking about, anyway.
Liz never saw a Christmas tree go up without wonderment. There was a strangeness to the whole thing that gave her prickles. Could there really be a God?
And when the star was carefully placed on top—naturally the Kitchells had a wide star selection; no tradition except the tradition of acquiring more—but when the new star was fastened to the top of the tree, brushing the ceiling, Liz had to close her eyes against a rush of thought.
I have to believe in stars and heavens and God, thought Liz, because if I don’t—What about the baby?
The silent TV displayed an elderly woman living in fear and loneliness.
“I think these Spanish balls belong on the main tree in the living room,” said her mother, juggling them gently.
So for the Most Upsetting Thing, Liz could have written that her family thought other people’s suffering was a bore.
Liz didn’t want to know that, never mind let her friends in on it. So she’d made a joke out of yesterday’s assignment.
“The most upsetting thing I witnessed this week,” wrote Liz, “was the dreaded moment when my mother ran out of conditioner. It was a terrible thing to see—Mom draped over the sink, hair dripping wet, and no way to improve the texture.”
She got an A: Liz always got an A. But she wanted one teacher, just once, to scrawl on the page: “What’s with this flippant sarcasm? I’m sick of it. Write truth.”
Liz was pretty confident that nobody ever considered writing the truth. The moment you set a pencil to a paper, or typed a word on a keyboard, the thought was outside your mind. In the brightness of day, or the sharpness of white paper, it got too intense. Better to keep truth to yourself, unvoiced and unwritten.
“Here is the topic for today,” said Mrs. Wrenn. “What do you want for Christmas?”
I want to do something good, thought Liz, and she was hit by horror that, instead, she and her parents would do something bad.
“No! Wait! I’ve changed my mind!” said Mrs. Wrenn, who loved to do this; she felt she was being exciting and creative when she changed the assignment seconds after giving it. She smiled a sly greedy smile. “No, instead the question will be: How do you get what you want for Christmas?”
Liz felt clammy and heavy, like a sinking dory, full of murky salt water, and no oars.
Mrs. Wrenn liked teams in creative writing. “Tack Jamie Matt Liz,” she said, as if Liz were a banana on a shopping list.
The high school had no desks, since no kid had ever used the desk storage area for anything but trouble. Long ago, tables for two had been substituted. This worked fine if you liked your table partner, but meant a really long year if you didn’t.
Tack and Jamie shared a table, and had not moved, and were not going to move, so Matt and Liz dragged their chairs to Tack’s table, where they crowded shoulder to shoulder.
Liz’s friend Rachel winked at her, because it was a nice ratio, three boys to one girl, and Liz adored Tack Knight. She had looked up that word adore. The definition included “worship.”
Liz was at that phase in a crush when it might cease to be a secret and instead, without permission, fill your mind and face and body, and even the classroom. What if Mrs. Wrenn saw her crush on Tack and commented cruelly? What if Tack saw … and didn’t want it?
Through the depth and heat and nonsense of this crush (nonsense because Tack had never exhibited the slightest interest in her whatsoever), Liz could barely manage a normal conversation with Tack.
Tack’s dad owned a restaurant where the Kitchells often dined, River Wind Inn, and it looked so cozy: your own beloved family running a business together, morning, noon, and night. At the restaurant, Tack was an adult, not a high-school kid. Liz was slightly uncomfortable watching him at the restaurant, as if he had grown up and she had failed to. Or as if his family worked and hers did not.
Oh! she hated being a traitor toward her parents.
But she wanted them to be different.
For Mom, there were no holidays, just decorations.
The last time Liz had ever tried to get Mom to think seriously had been Memorial Day, after the parade. The high-school band marched a full mile in their beautiful scarlet-and-white uniforms, and Liz played the clarinet, and they stopped at the old cemetery where the Civil War dead lay under the grass, and the American Legion had put flags beside each gray stone. Tack Knight played Taps on his trumpet, while Julie Millman, far away at the other side of the cemetery, played a lingering, desperately sad echo. They had studied the Civil War in preparation for this: talked about the death of more than six hundred thousand men, and the eighty-two teenagers in the marching band, at least, stared at the graves.
Liz’s mother saw only photo opportunities. She darted here and there, while the rest of the parents had good manners, and stood still, and the men rested their caps against their hearts.
So Liz, who wanted to talk about death most of all, and babies second of all, let her mother go, and her mother went straight toward the next holiday, the Fourth of July, a terrific holiday, because of all those flags, the perfect graphic, with fine strong contrast of red, white, and blue.
Liz had dawdled, full of thought, and instead of getting to sit next to Tack, she ended up between Jamie and Matt.
Jamie was so bored by school that he in turn was totally boring to anybody else, and Matt was worthless. This meant nothing would distract her from Tack.
“Everybody ready?” said Mrs. Wrenn, as if she planned to name out loud anybody too dumb to be ready. “I’ll start the timer.”
I’m not ready, thought Liz. Christmas is coming, and I don’t know why.