Suzanna Pullman was in her sixties when, to her great surprise, she became famous, in a smallish way. She had never painted as a career, because by the time she got to college, it was clear that the only way to get the approval of the art faculty was to paint things that nobody could understand.
And if there was one thing Zanna was determined never to do, it was to paint something that would prompt someone to ask, “What is it?”
So, ignoring the orthodoxy of the painting world, she created landscapes and portraits and still lifes and the kind of romantic art that she had come to love. She liked to tell people that she had learned painting from dead forgotten artists, and when they pressed her for a list, she would list her mentors: Chase, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Poynter. People would look at her blankly.
But she placed some of her canvases in a local gallery, and they all sold, sometimes within days, sometimes after a year or so, but someone would value her work and ask about her. And the money came in handy—they liked to say that Mom’s art put all her kids through college, though sometimes Hal would say that he’d rather have used the money to put in a pool.
Then, in her old age, the fashion suddenly changed and her list of mentors was on everyone’s lips and serious collectors began to take notice of paintings by Suzanna Pullman. The gallery put another zero on the end of their asking price.
People bought her work all the more quickly.
There was a write-up in an art magazine, and an interview on NPR, and then a piece of hers on the cover of Time. (But not her face—she absolutely insisted that her face had nothing to say, it was all in her art, and refused to let them point a camera at her no matter what excuse they fed her.)
There was money, then, and her grandchildren were surprised to find that Grandma was cool. She only wished her Hal had lived to see it; but he had been carried off by a cold that turned into pneumonia so quickly that he died in the emergency room, gasping for air. She grieved for him but also thought: So much better to go that way than to linger with some painful disease, or with Alzheimer’s, or crippled by age. Good old pneumonia. But of course that was self-deception, except that she wasn’t even fooled. She missed him every day.
Then it all settled down again and life was normal and Granny Zan was still Granny Zan, a tough-minded old lady who was always happy to have a visit as long as you didn’t make a sound outside her studio door between six and eleven A.M. “I have to make hay while the light is right,” she’d say.
Only a few of her grandchildren had any particular interest in the arts, and most of them were performers, some with music, one on stage. There was a boy who dabbled in sculpture. A girl who tried her hand at watercolors but lost interest when it was clear that she wouldn’t instantly become as famous as Granny Zan.
The arty ones weren’t her favorites anyway—they always seemed either self-centered or overly competitive and she found both attitudes boring.
Her favorites were the grandchildren who would spend the afternoon in the kitchen with her, baking. “Talk about lost arts,” she’d say. “My mother baked bread or something almost every day. I grew up surrounded by cookies and cake and homemade bread and biscuits and pan-fried scones, and no packaged mix ever crossed my mother’s threshold. I’d be ashamed to see the Pillsbury Doughboy’s squishy little butt inside my pantry, and as for Betty Crocker, she’s such a gossip and she has been known to use powdered eggs in her cakes.”
It was one of those favored grandchildren who stopped by her house at Christmastime, planning to make it just a quick visit as she drove on to her boyfriend’s parents’ house in another state in time for Christmas Eve. It was only coincidence that her name was Diana—she was named for her mother’s mother, and not for Zanna’s twin, as the missing n attested. She was clearly in love with the boy who had driven her here, a half-shaven starved-looking boy named Jake, which to Zanna sounded like what you’d call an outhouse when she was a girl. But he was kind and attentive to Diana, and for that reason Zanna gave him the benefit of the doubt.
She showed them through the house and then let them sample the cookies she was baking for the neighbors. “I tried making my mother’s date bread, but nobody knew what to do with them. Exotic baked fruits just can’t compete with Chee-tos and Fritos and Doritos and Tostitos, I guess. And I can see from your faces that you are both oh so grateful that you didn’t happen to come by on a date bread day, but you needn’t worry, I don’t force my treats on anybody, any more than I make anybody take my paintings who doesn’t want them.”
They answered her by rhapsodizing over the perfection of her cookies and they had spent the whole afternoon together before anyone looked out the window and realized that it was snowing heavily.
“Well, I don’t like that,” said Zanna. “Not a bit.”
“We’d better get going,” said Jake. “There’s a mountain range between us and home and it gets nasty in a storm.”
“Indeed it does,” said Zanna, “and now I want to ask you, Jake, which would your mother rather have? A living son who is a day late getting home for Christmas, or a dead son who proved his love by trying to go over the pass at night, in a snowstorm?”
Zanna held up a hand to silence her granddaughter. “I already know what your mother would prefer,” said Zanna, “and that you won’t pay the slightest attention to me once your mind is made up. But Jake here is much more sensible than you are—and he loves his mother more than you love yours, so you don’t even get a vote here. Well, Jake, what is it? Over the mountain, hurrying home, and your mother spends all the remaining Christmases of her life weeping over a grave? Or do the two of you stay here, have Christmas morning with me, and then go over the pass after the snow has stopped and they’ve had a chance to plow the roads?”
Jake looked at Diana, who was shaking her head grimly—determined to go on, of course, being the girl she was.
“I’m not going to pretend here,” said Zanna. “I’m old-fashioned and you two aren’t married, so if you stay with me it’ll be separate rooms.”
Diana blushed and Jake protested. “We aren’t sleeping together.”
“Not everybody does that, you know, Granny Zan!”
“Well, good, so that’s one less reason for you to try to get out of my house before Christmas.”
In the end, they stayed, and Zanna liked the way Jake teased Diana into not being mad about having things not go her way. Yes, this boy could marry Diana without having her run him around on the end of a stick, and that meant they’d both have a chance for happiness. Don’t let go of this one, you stubborn girl. Even if he doesn’t have the tiniest shred of a hope of a career, at least so far.
Zanna was untroubled by the fact that she hadn’t bought them anything for Christmas. She dug out some old Christmas stockings and safety-pinned their names to them and hung them beside hers over the fireplace.
“All I ever get is coal,” she said, “and after I bullied you into staying here Christmas Eve, it’s bound to be anthracite for me again this year.”
She left them watching television and went to bed before them. At three A.M., just like clockwork, she woke up with her bladder ready to burst and so thirsty she could hardly swallow. Of all an old woman’s bodily functions, why did her kidneys have to get more efficient as she got older?
But once she had gone to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen to sip a little cranberry juice, she walked around the house. Being human, she had to check on the children, and was pleased to see that they had not only gone to bed in separate rooms, they had left the doors ajar so she could see for herself.
What she was really doing, though, was searching for gifts to put in their stockings. She was old enough that she had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of possessions, and now it was time to start parting with some of them, when the right person came along. Indeed, long before he died, she and Hal had started giving nothing but food as gifts. “No reason to clutter up people’s houses with things they can’t get rid of for fear you’ll come to visit and notice they didn’t keep it,” they said to anyone who asked. People got the idea, and stopped giving them things—though few were brave enough to bake for them, and so what they got were bookstore gift certificates or donations to some cause in their name.
Still, that didn’t mean she didn’t have a house full of knickknacks in true grandma fashion—it just guaranteed that all of them were old.
For Jake, she chose a porcelain of a haughty-looking woman in a Marie-Antoinette dress, all lace and very intricately painted. She would tell him it was to remind him that when a woman got too proud, there was always someone ready to cut off her head.
And for Diana, she took her ancient copy of The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport and inscribed it, “This book was at the heart of my childhood. Keep it for a child of yours someday, and if you don’t have one, then read it yourself and think of Granny Zan.”
Then she filled several plastic sandwich bags with cookies and biscuits for the road, and of course a couple of apples because that had been an inevitable part of Christmas stockings when she was a girl.
When she came into the living room to fill their stockings, she was surprised to see that there was something in her own—and when she felt through the sock, she could tell it wasn’t coal after all.
Well, of course, they wouldn’t have come empty-handed to visit her, so when they had to stay over on Christmas Eve, they decided to slip it into her stocking. It felt like a book, and that would be nice, a book was like food, you could consume it and pass it along. She’d open it tomorrow. She was a big girl now. She could wait to find out what Santa had brought.
Then she got out an old crayon picture in a frame and set it on the mantel. “Not long now, Ernie,” she said. “If you still remember who I am.”
In the morning, she was awakened by their whispering and pan-banging in the kitchen. Just like we used to wake Mom and Dad by our noisy efforts to be quiet, she thought.
Sure enough, Diana had been bold enough to try to make flapjacks in Granny Zan’s kitchen—and to Zanna’s pleasant surprise, they were very good. They had a wonderful time over breakfast, chatting about Jake’s family and his memories of Christmas and how all three of them had grown up in families with completely different Christmas traditions.
“But everybody has stockings,” said Zanna, and they agreed. Which was the cue to go into the living room.
They were delighted to see that their stockings were stuffed so full they had had to be removed from the mantel and laid on the couch, and of course Jake thanked her and Diana teasingly cursed her for supplying them with enough calories to relieve a famine. Only when they got to the bottom of the stockings and found their real presents did they get serious.
“This is a family heirloom,” said Jake, but Zanna answered him with the speech she had prepared, which made him laugh and Diana growl until she laughed, and Jake said, “I’ll keep this, then, to remember what it’s like to love a proud woman.”
When Diana read the inscription inside The Bobbsey Twins, though, a couple of tears spilled down her cheeks. “Uncle Bug told me once that he used to read this to you when you were little. He didn’t think this copy still existed.”
“Still does,” said Zanna. “I hope it always will—but that it will be used, too.”
“It will,” said Diana, saying it like the most solemn of covenants.
Then Jake reached down under the tree and picked up a brightly wrapped box and handed it to her. “Diana didn’t know what we could bring you,” he said, “because you have everything and besides, you can’t buy art for Picasso, so we couldn’t get you anything edible or decorative.”
Zanna took the wrapping paper off meticulously, a habit she had begun in order to annoy her brothers during the present-opening ceremony, but which now she did because it simply felt like the right way to open a gift.
Inside it was a CD, but one with no cover and nothing written on it. “We recorded it ourselves,” explained Jake. “On the computer. You do have a CD player, don’t you?”
“I know all about CDs, and about ripping songs off the internet,” said Granny Zan. “You aren’t going to go to federal prison for making this for me, are you?”
“We didn’t rip it,” said Diana. “It’s us. Singing. We sang every Christmas carol we know. We’re not very good, but then if you picture us standing out in the snow shivering while we sing it, your standards will get lower and you’ll like it better.”
She hugged them both. “I will listen to it a dozen times today.”
“No you won’t,” said Jake.
“We have a bet that you can’t even get through it once,” said Diana. “We’re not professionals. We shouldn’t have tried this at home.”
“I am a musician,” said Jake, “but not a singer.”
“And I’m not a musician of any kind,” said Diana.
By this point, Zanna was at her stocking, feeling where there had been a present in it last night. There was nothing there.
“Sorry,” said Jake. “We didn’t think of filling your stocking. The CD might have fit, if I’d thought about it.”
Zanna looked at Diana, who blushed.
“Second thoughts?” asked Zanna.
Diana nodded.
“Any chance of third thoughts?”
Diana reached into her purse and took out a slim book and handed it to Zanna.
Jake was impressed. “Man, you put that in her stocking?”
“What I am,” said Diana, “is a very bad poet with delusions of grandeur.”
“What she is,” said Jake, “is the greatest living American poet, and she still won’t let me set any of her poems to music. My goal is to someday be good enough that she’ll let me.”
“But if this is the book where you keep your poems,” said Zanna.
“No,” said Diana. “It’s a copy. I copied them out for you, so you could read it.”
“And I bet you left out the really sexy ones.”
Diana gasped and Jake laughed and Zanna was delighted that she had struck home. Meanwhile, she had the book open and was thumbing through, looking at the titles.
“I like to think I write poems the way you paint,” said Diana. “Clearly. So people can understand what I’m talking about.”
And then Zanna came to a certain page and stopped. The title of the poem was, “Zanna’s Gift for Ernie.”
“Father told me about the drawing that you always had out for every Christmas,” said Diana. “He always said that you told him it was a drawing that a little girl once made for her brother as a Christmas present. I got Uncle Bug to tell me the whole story last summer.”
Diana walked to the mantel. “Is this it? The original?”
“Yes,” said Zanna. “Not much sign of talent in it, is there?” Then she looked back down at the poem and resumed reading while Diana and Jake studied the picture.
When they turned to face each other again, both Zanna and Diana had tears in their eyes. “Oh, my darling,” said Zanna, “how could you understand this, when you’ve never had any children of your own?”
“I was a child,” Diana answered. “And I have an imagination. And besides, I’ve known you my whole life. As Uncle Bug says, you haven’t changed a bit since you were little.”
“Well, you have just given me the best present I can remember,” said Zanna. “I’m so proud of you.” She looked at her proudly. “Just think. You’re kin of mine!”
“Well that’s how I feel about you,” said Diana, and they hugged and laughed. “I thought that maybe you’d like them. But I almost didn’t include that one poem, because it was so presumptuous of me.”
Zanna assured her that it wasn’t a bit presumptuous, and then, to Diana’s embarrassment, she read the poem aloud. It was the story of the little girl who had a present for her brother but no way to give it to him. The language was simple, the rhyming subtle, the flow of it like music.
“You see why I want to set it to music,” said Jake. “But then, music would be redundant, wouldn’t it?”
“Diana, you really need to marry a man who knows how to flatter you like that. I married one who let me continue my very time-consuming hobby during all the years when nobody wanted to hear about the kind of painting that I did. But you, I don’t think you’ll have to wait so long for the world to see your talent. And then all kinds of rock stars and movie actors will want to marry you, and I can promise you, this Jake fellow is better than any of them.”
It was nice to see that Jake could blush. By noon they were on their way, a phone call to the highway patrol having ascertained that the pass was indeed clear and traffic was unobstructed. They ate cookies and biscuits all the way to Jake’s mother’s house, where the family—including three teenage siblings—had waited Christmas for them.
And as they drove that long road, Zanna, baking again in her kitchen, listened to their CD four times over, singing along on most of the songs.