Binnie Kirshenbaum
Some things to know: Yes, I am Jewish, and therefore it is fair to say that I have no business celebrating Christmas in the first place, but my mother’s counter to that comment was always “We celebrate Thanksgiving and we’re not Pilgrims.” And, as is often the way with converts and infidels, we celebrated Christmas with all the hoopla as if we were to the manger born. True, there was no mention, or display, of this being a religious holiday. It was about Santa Claus and elves and stockings hung by the fireplace and good cheer and a big dinner and sugar cookies and gifts, gifts, and more gifts.
As little ones, we visited Santa at Macy’s, to make our requests, and then wrote that very same Santa a letter reiterating our ferocious greed, just so he wouldn’t forget. When we got older, we skipped the visit to Macy’s, but we still wrote out our Wish Lists.
My mother had very definite ideas about Wish Lists, that the operative word was wish; that gifts, all gifts, not just those at Christmas but especially those at Christmas, were to be things you wished for. Gifts were things you would not, or could not, buy for yourself. They were to be luxuries. Special things. Treats. No one in my family ever got flannel pajamas for Christmas or anything from L.L.Bean.
This suited me just fine. I was, am, then and always, something of a girly-girl, and Christmas indulged me with jewelry, pretty scarves, baubles, perfume. That, coupled with the fact that I devour books as if they were bonbons (and for many years, hardcover books were as much of a luxury as silk underpants), I have always considered myself an easy person for whom to buy a gift.
It was going to be my first Christmas in my own apartment in New York, which was bound to be more magical than any other Christmas because I was living in New York, in my own apartment in Greenwich Village, and I was in love, and possibilities seemed endless, and life, I thought then, didn’t get much better than this.
As an aspiring writer but working waitress, I was without much money. It was the kind of poor that has nothing to do with poverty. Not real poverty. Ours, my friends’ and mine, was the sort of poverty that hopeful but as-yet-unsuccessful young artists and writers and actors embraced, because to us, it had, unlike real poverty, a decided aura of romance, a patina of hip. Also, we knew it was likely to be temporary. It was the kind of poor that had us shopping in thrift stores (which I probably would’ve done even if I’d had more money because it was the cool thing to do then). I did my laundry in the bathtub and hung my clothes to dry over the radiator. To get out stubborn wrinkles, I boiled water and held the fabric tautly over the steam. I cooked rice and beans and macaroni-and-cheese and my friends and I went to Chinatown for dinners out and we met up in dive bars where we could get a pint of beer for a dollar.
Flashback to the previous August: Michael, my actor/bike messenger boyfriend, and I were walking along Greenwich Avenue, where we paused at a leather goods store to admire the jacket in the window. Even without touching it, I knew it was the softest of leathers. It was black. It had style, a James Dean kind of style. “That’s nice,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But I have a leather jacket.”
His leather jacket was a brown bomber jacket, old and cracked, and it was okay, functional, but nothing like this.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go in and you can try it on. Just for fun.”
He did look pretty damn fabulous in it, and just as he was taking if off, I thought I saw a wistfulness cross his face, which made me think something that I quickly dismissed: He wasn’t going to make it as an actor. A couple more years as a bike messenger, his eight-by-ten glossy in his bag, going to auditions between runs, and then what? Sales? His father’s business, which had something to do with installing plumbing? I knew then that I was going to buy him this jacket. I made note of the size, and the next day I returned alone to the store and made arrangements for a layaway plan.
Every Wednesday, I dropped off the money I’d managed to save that week through insignificant sacrifices—nothing like cutting off my hair to sell it to buy him a watch fob only to have him pawn his watch to buy me combs for my hair—but sacrifices nonetheless: generic shampoo, no to breakfast out, using the library more than the bookstore. And every time I denied myself a little pleasure, I’d think about his face when he unwrapped the jacket, how happy he’d be.
The week before Christmas, I was all paid up. I took the jacket home and, just to be sure he’d be entirely surprised, I put it in a carton I had gotten from the liquor store. This way, he’d never guess what was inside.
Surely I will not say that in the joy of giving, I gave no thought to the joy of receiving. At the onset of the holiday season, when dusk came in the late afternoon, Michael and I, holding hands, would walk the narrow streets of Greenwich Village, which was nowhere near as posh then as it is now. Still there were plenty of cute shops, and we’d pause at window displays. There was one shop, antique jewelry, on Bleeker Street where I never saw anything I didn’t like. And I often said as much. I’d say, “There isn’t one thing in this store I don’t like.” I pointed out, in particular, a cameo brooch, a silver bracelet ornately engraved, a Victorian locket. My hints were anything but subtle. From mid-November until the week before Christmas, I must’ve pressed my nose to the glass of that shop twenty-five times, each time finding something that caused me to gasp.
Four or five days before the twenty-fifth, on a freezing night, our breath making puffs of cold, Michael and I, having decided we would have Christmas at my apartment as opposed to his uptown, walked to Hudson Street, near Jane. There we bought our tree from one of the tree farmers who come to the city each year, bringing the smell of pine with them, along with old-fashioned holiday spirit. We could not afford a big tree, a full tree, so we chose a scrawny one, sparsely limbed, half bald. As if a cutdown tree had feelings, we projected this one’s need to be wanted, as if going unsold would make it cry.
Half of the few needles it had to begin with were lost by the time we got it up the three flights of stairs to my place. We set the tree up by the window (minor arguments ensued about getting the damn thing to stay upright in the stand) and decorated it with found objects: ribbons tied into bows, bits of pretty paper, small toys, earrings that had lost their mates. It was so sweet as to be treacly, as it should have been.
The next day, I put the gaily wrapped carton under the tree.
On the twenty-fourth, we didn’t get a white Christmas, but a wet one. It rained, a cold rain mixed with sleet, and it went on all day while I prepared lasagne for our Christmas Eve dinner. I layered pasta, cheese, sauce, pasta, and so on, and it was still raining hard when I put the lasagne in the oven.
Michael showed up around five with a jug of Chianti—oenophiles we were not—a loaf of bread, his gift for me, which he put under the tree alongside mine for him, and an old album of Bing Crosby’s Christmas Carol Favorites. Pure camp, and we laughed ourselves sick over it until we put it on, and then it was just kind of nice.
My gift, that is, Michael’s gift to me, was in the shape of a large brick. Not books. And unless he was employing the same ruse I had, an outsize box, it wasn’t jewelry. Could it be that burgundy velvet scarf with the silk fringe I’d carried on about? That was my best guess.
So we drank Chianti, messed around a little, drank more Chianti, and while Bing was dreaming of a white Christmas for the fifth time or so, we decided we’d open our gifts before dinner. We were too excited to wait.
“You first.” I pushed the carton toward him as if it were really heavy. Slowly and deliberately, he unwrapped the paper—he should have taken that kind of time undressing me, but that wasn’t a generous thing to think on Christmas—and opened the carton.
He held up the jacket. His face was entirely devoid of expression, which wasn’t exactly the way I’d pictured his response, but I assumed he was stunned. He rested the jacket on his lap and finally he spoke. “You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. It was his tone. Not the “You shouldn’t have done this because it was so unbelievably nice of you, so generous, and what have I done to deserve you?” but rather it was the “You shouldn’t have done this” as in “You’ve made a mistake.”
“But you fell in love with that jacket,” I said. “You looked gorgeous in it. I wanted you to have it.”
“First,” he said. “I didn’t fall in love with it. You did. Even if it did look good, I didn’t want it.”
“I saved. Since August. I was saving. Every week.” I was hurt enough to be incoherent, hurt enough that I wasn’t even angry. Just really, really disappointed, and then all I could say was, “You can bring it back. I have the receipt.”
He nodded, tried to smooth things over by saying, “I appreciate the thought. Really. It was a very sweet thing for you to do. It’s just that, well, I won’t wear it.”
I scrutinized him in a way that before I had not: his ratty sweater; the ratty part I had no problem with, but it was ratty acrylic, and it wasn’t a cool sweater or anything. I held my tongue and put the bruised feelings aside as he passed his gift to me.
It wasn’t just shaped like a brick; it was as heavy as one, too. I shook it. Nothing.
And then I tore away the paper to reveal a box that read: Panasonic. Automatic Shut-Off. An iron. An iron for ironing clothes. “You got me an iron,” I said. Calmly, I said, “You got me an iron.”
“Not just any iron. This is like the Cadillac of irons.” He reached over and took the box from me. “A topmount temperature control,” he read from the box. “Extra-large water window and fabric guide. Nonstick coating. Cord reel. Steam or Dry.”
“You got me an iron?” I looked down at myself, at the beaded sweater I was wearing with the black velvet skirt. I was wearing stockings with a garter belt. I had on spike-heel pumps from the 1950s, a time when comfort did not take precedence over beauty. I had on faux pearl–and-rhinestone earrings. Rings on five out of ten fingers. And Chanel No. 5 perfume, a birthday gift from my mother, who knew a thing or two about what to give a girl. “You got me an iron?”
“Yeah. You’re always saying how you need one. Every time you stand there over a pot of boiling water, you say, ‘I really need to get myself an iron.’ So I got you one. You said you needed it. A hundred fucking times I heard that, how you needed one.”
“I need lots of things. Every month I need tampons. Periodically I need lightbulbs. I need toilet paper. I need shampoo.” In the background of our argument, Bing Crosby sang. Pa rum pum pum pum. Our finest gifts we bring. Pa rum pum pum pum. “I need toothpaste,” I went on. “I need a new dishtowel. I don’t want these things as Christmas gifts. Especially not from my boyfriend.”
I am a poor boy, too. Pa rum pum pum pum. I have no gift to bring. Ra rum pum pum pum.
“Yeah, well. At least you can use the iron. What am I supposed to do with that jacket?”
Shall I play for you? Pa rum pum pum pum. On my drum.
So he and I both should have felt like a pair of ingrates, spoiled little shits, but it wasn’t the iron exactly. “How could you so not get me, who I am?”
“The same way you didn’t get me,” he said. And then he muttered, “Some fucking greaseball jacket I wouldn’t wear if you paid me to.”
I stood up and kicked over the Christmas tree.
“What did you do that for? You whack job,” he said.
I had no answer really. I did it because I was hurt, because this Christmas was ruined, this one Christmas that was supposed to be magical and was awful instead. “Get out.” I stared at the floor.
“You know this is it? It’s over,” he said.
“I know.”
He put on his brown leather bomber jacket, and just as he was halfway out the door, I said, “Michael.”
“What?”
What? What was I going to say? I was going to say that the reason I bought him the very hip black leather jacket was because I knew; I knew he’d never make it as an actor; that there was nothing special about him and so I’d wanted to give him something special.
But I couldn’t say that. So I just said, “Merry fucking Christmas to you, too.”
I left the tree on its side. I left the balled-up wrapping paper, like a pair of red and green tumbleweeds, on the floor, and I poured myself another glass of wine. Hungry now, I took the lasagne from the oven. It had dried to the consistency of taco chips. I tore off a hunk of bread from the loaf, and I went and sat in a chair by the window.
It occurred to me that now might be a good time to cry, but I couldn’t quite get myself there. The city was quiet in a way I’d never heard before. The streets were deserted. The rain had stopped, but it had frozen. The trees were coated with ice as if they were made from glass. And I thought, I’m in my own apartment in New York and my life is before me and anything can happen and the trees look as if they are made from glass and this is so fucking great.
On Christmas Day, I did what a lot of Jews do: I ordered in Chinese food, which I ate in bed while reading The Magic Mountain. The following day, the twenty-sixth, I took the leather jacket back to the store and exchanged it for a jacket for myself. The twenty-seven dollars I got back along with my new jacket (mine being that much less expensive than his), I gave to the first homeless person I saw. For this I was chastised by a passerby, who said, “You shouldn’t give him money. He’s only going to buy liquor with it.”
“And why shouldn’t he?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t he get what he wants? Isn’t that what Christmas is about? Getting something that you want?”
I’d like to say that the reason I did not return the iron to Michael was because we never saw each other again, which we didn’t, but that wasn’t the reason. And I could even say I didn’t return it to the store because I didn’t know where he’d bought it, which is also true. But I kept it because I needed it.