On Christmas Eve, Jeremy offered what he could, which was distraction. He offered it when Alexandra’s aunt Irene said she missed Shel, the only of them who’d ever sung carols. And he offered it when Mrs. Chen said that Irene had been held back a grade and couldn’t understand why it had only been once.
When a song about rushing fools came on the radio, Mrs. Chen put down her cigarette. She caught Alexandra’s face in her hand as she slurred that Mr. Chen loved Elvis, and she wished they could see his hips go. Pelvis Elvis. Mr. Chen would do the Elvis Pelvis because he knew how to make her laugh.
“Alex,” she said to Jeremy, still gripping her daughter’s chin. “My beauty, always was, look at her. She has that good Oriental skin. Orientals always have that clean look. You can see it in her, can’t you? Just like Mr. Chen.”
“She is very beautiful.”
Mrs. Chen’s hand dropped. “He was baby-faced her age too, and then he was dead.”
Throughout the day, Alexandra whispered to Jeremy about what she couldn’t wait for, which was their departure, but as the evening settled, he told himself he would remember all the awful decorations, things cast poignant by their position in the home where she had been a girl. Irene and Mrs. Chen sat on the striped couch in their pilling bathrobes and graying slippers like old stuffed animals. They sucked striped candies, and beneath the tree, packages were still perfect. Something that Jeremy had never noticed: Alexandra’s hair was the type of black that expressed its environment, red in the Nevada sunlight, but bluish in the living room near the strung garlands. He was still discovering her angles, and yet, he was afraid it would be their last Christmas together, so he tried to encode it all in his memory. Tinsel. Holiday tissue box. She turned on a video of The Nutcracker.
Alexandra on the floor, chin resting on his thighs, there was quiet amongst them, and Jeremy could see the dancers abstracted on the screen of her face in pink and blue puddles of television light. This was not the Hoffmann Nutcracker with the fever dream of doppelgängers or doubles or deceptions. The dancers looked like pieces of jewelry animated by light, and there were the animals too and the nutcracker prince’s sword cuts arcing in long, benevolent, lovely lines. For some minutes, Jeremy thought maybe they could stay that way forever. Maybe they could always be watching ballerina rats and families articulated in tulle, Alexandra leaning her cheek into him. Then it was over.
“I haven’t enjoyed something so much without laughing at it in a long time,” Alexandra said as the video ejected.
The fact of her face was honest but soft. The night was ending. Jeremy fumbled with the lamp as she raised herself from the carpet, the puddle of a long skirt stretching up.
“You liked those sweets shaped like hamburgers at the gas station.”
Alexandra shrugged. “Ironic food doesn’t count.”
“Dancing-in-one’s-head sugar plums aren’t ironic food?” Jeremy said.
“There’s something you should know,” she said. He could not see her eyes. He wanted one more look within this moment, this night. “I accepted a job in New York.”
Jeremy stood then, as though it were an answer, though there had never been a question, some soft part of him vandalizing his own mouth. “It’s sudden,” he said finally.
“Everything is sudden,” she said.
Over, under—every turn of the weave of the blanket expressed itself in his hands. Jeremy set it down beside a heavy green dish of potpourri. He looked at Mrs. Chen with the breast of her shirt crumpled beneath her face. Irene reached for her, and Mrs. Chen slapped her sister’s hand away.
Nodding, she was nodding. Fingertips thrust white through her hair. “There’s no way around it,” Alexandra said. Alexandra said, “You understand you’ll have to marry me to come.”
Jeremy moved a stunned hand to his throat. On the sofa, her mother was choking on God, gasping rapid rhythms. There was a queer feeling in his foot as he stepped.
Alexandra did not blink, said, “Stay in my life.”