CHRISTMAS EVE
My mother never packed lunches for me to take to school when I was growing up. I’d sit and stare down at my knees while the other children ate their sandwiches, my stomach empty and rumbling. As soon as I’d get home in the afternoon, I filled my belly with bread and butter, all that I could find to eat in my mother’s messy kitchen. When I was a child, Dunlop dinners around the kitchen table were hardly nourishing. Mealtimes were brief and uncomfortable. My parents only ever fought in front of Joanie and me, as though they’d needed our audience to discuss their private matters. Our mother would whine and our father would groan, throw his fork across the table, eye his Smith & Wesson, which lay next to his plate. If Joanie or I fussed, Mom would whip a rag at the floor to make a popping sound, sudden and loud, like lightning, like a firecracker. I don’t remember what they were always arguing about. I’d just chew my food fast and bring my plate to the sink and run up the stairs. Furthermore, the meals my mother cooked were awful. I didn’t eat good food until my second husband. He explained that steak was not a leathery flap of sinew burned in a frying pan, but a thick, fragrant, lovely thing, the best of which could be eaten with a dull spoon. I gained ten pounds, I think, the first month we were together. Back in X-ville, Dunlop dinners had been, at best, dry chicken, mashed potatoes from a box, canned beans, limp bacon. Christmas was little different. A store-bought sponge cake was all I remember enjoying year to year. The Dunlops were never big eaters.
But the booze always flowed freely over the holidays. Of course it did. Imagine the festivities: Mom getting the cocktail shaker down—“Let’s do this properly!”—to make drinks she called Diplomats and Stormy Weathers. Those old drinks had great names. Maggie Mays, Old Fashioneds. She made hers and Dad had me make his, Blue Blazers and highballs, with the good stuff he’d get every Christmas from his so-called friends on the force. We had a little book with different recipes. I took sips no doubt, chewed up half the bottle of maraschino cherries on my way back and forth to the kitchen, where I mixed Lee Burns, Mamie Taylors, Manhattans. Whiskey Milk Punch was my favorite since it tasted like a milkshake. I remember another one, the Morning Glory, had me cracking eggs like some kind of short order cook. Those are fun memories: records playing, fire roaring, me, offstage and dutiful, slurping the foam off a cocktail in the kitchen and still expecting something good for Christmas — a microscope, a set of paints — and Joanie entertaining in the living room, twisting her limbs in time to Elvis.
Christmas was one of the few times a year my parents had guests over. My aunt Ruth, my only aunt, took little interest in Joanie and me as children — something I’ve never understood or forgiven — and drank only gin martinis. There was gin running through the Dunlop bloodline for generations, I’m sure. Perhaps Aunt Ruth just got down to her destiny sooner than my father did. Those martinis never seemed to do her much good. She was always frowning, skin so waxy, her face so flat it almost looked wet, shiny as a puddle. Bitterly is the best way to describe the manner in which she displayed her affections. For Christmas she’d bring over something like a canned ham or a jar of peanuts, cheap scotch for Dad, maybe some chocolates for my mother. She was childless and bossy and the only one to insist we pray before we ate. My mother, drunk already, would roll her eyes, pinch me under the table, make me laugh. Mom wasn’t so bad, it seemed, at Christmas. My hopes were always high as I got into bed, drunk and full of sponge cake. Inevitably, Christmas mornings Dad would give Joanie and me each a dollar bill, wadded up and stuffed with lint from the pants pocket of his uniform. A few times our mother gave us new socks or pencils. That was all.
My father and I had silently agreed to do away with Christmas when my mother died. Only one year I did give him a gift — something cruel in its uselessness, given his predicament — a tie. Joanie would send a card if she thought of it. She’d have Christmas parties of her own, I knew, but she never invited me. I don’t hold it against her. I wasn’t much fun.
• • •
When I woke up on that fateful Christmas Eve, the last one of my life in X-ville, I had six hundred forty-seven dollars stashed in my jewelry box. That was quite a sum of money at the time. My life’s savings. And I had a gun. Pulling it out from under my pillow, I really felt quite cool. Its strange provenance did not elude me. My father had used it first as a prop of power in the line of duty, and then as a threat to the invisible criminals only he could see. Those phantasms, he claimed, understood he would shoot to kill. One begins to think in terms of grandiose self-conceit when there’s a gun in one’s hand, that is true. I shall use the gun to clear my path to freedom, I thought that morning, aiming at invisible obstacles. I’m embarrassed remembering how easily that thing filled me with confidence and seemed to open up a world of possibility. I thought about showing it to Rebecca that evening. Perhaps I would suggest we go out to the woods and shoot at trees. Or we could go out to the frozen lake and stand and shoot at the moon. Or to the beach, lie on our backs, make angels in the snow, shoot at the stars. Such were my romantic ideas for the evening with my new best friend.
Lying there on my cot, I agonized over what to wear. I imagined Rebecca would be dressed comfortably — no elaborate gown or expensive jewelry, it was her house after all — but beautifully, perhaps in a thick cashmere sweater and fitted trousers, like Jackie Kennedy on a ski vacation. As for Rebecca’s house, I pictured dark rolling Oriental carpets, sumptuous couches with velvet pillows, a bearskin rug. Or maybe it was more modern and austere, dark wood floors, cold glass coffee table, burgundy drapes, fresh-cut roses. I was excited. I dozed, mentally taking stock of the garments in my mother’s wardrobe and piecing together what I would wear that evening. I knew every item of clothing inside out. Nothing fit me right, as I’ve said, so I often wore layers of sweaters or long underwear just to fill things out. Lying there, I had a bad habit of drumming my fists on my stomach and pinching the negligible amount of fat on my thighs. I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. Perhaps it was for this reason that I wore my mother’s clothes — to be vigilant in my mission never to reach even her minor proportions. As I’ve said, her life, the life of a woman, seemed utterly detestable to me. There was nothing I wanted less back then than to be somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Of course, I’d already become just that for my father by the tender age of twenty-four.
“Eileen!” my father yelled, stomping up the attic stairs sometime later that morning. “The store’s open already. Come on, get down!” When I opened the door, he was dressed, had his hands on his hips. “Isn’t it Christmas Eve?” he asked.
“No, Dad,” I lied. “You missed Christmas. Christmas was yesterday.”
“Smart ass,” he said. “I’ll spare you my hell if you get down now, quick.”
“All right,” I said. “But who’s driving?”
“You’re driving. Now get in the car and let’s go. I’m coming with you.”
It was rare that my father dared to make an appearance outside the house like a normal person, but he was adamant about it that morning. Perhaps he sensed somehow that I was going to abandon him. More likely he was afraid of shops closing over the holidays and didn’t trust me to buy him enough booze to get him through. He never explained his choice to move from the kitchen chair to the bed upstairs. It might have been a strategic move. Without his gun, he was defenseless against the hoodlums and was better off hiding. My mother’s deathbed was just as good a place as any to die, he may have thought. Not that he had surrendered, that was clear. He seemed just as on guard as ever. “Hurry now!” he yelled, busting open the front door to the bright, sparkling morning. “Before they sell out. It’s Christmas Eve. Wine for wolves. Get out there. You got the keys? Lock up. People are crazy this time of year. Crime spikes. It’s a proven fact, Eileen. Jesus Christ.” I went and got his shoes, threw them up on the porch. He kept talking. “Everybody out, probably leaving their doors wide open. Stupid. Idiots. Don’t they know this town is full of thieves?” He slid into the shoes and shuffled out to the car, wincing in the sunlight like a man crawling out of a cave, arms held feebly above his head, shielding his eyes. On the passenger seat beside me he lifted his feet one by one, had me lean over and tie his shoelaces.