The roads on the drive to the liquor store glittered with fresh snow once again. The streetlamps were wrapped in ribbon and holly, store window displays were festive, pretty. Along the sidewalks people hustled, dressed up in hats and plaid wool coats and boots and mittens. The hems of women’s skirts skimmed the shelves of snow along the sidewalks. People balanced stacks of brightly colored packages in their arms, piling them in the trunks of their cars. There was almost music in the air. Children built snowmen in their front lawns, played in the yard of the public library. I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me. I rolled my window down.
“It’s cold,” said my father. I hadn’t ever told him about the exhaust problem.
“The air in here is stale,” I said. In fact it still smelled of vomit in there, but my father couldn’t detect it. The gin reeking through his skin and on his breath obliterated all other smells around him, I assumed.
“Stale? Who cares about stale?” He reached over my lap, brushing my thighs, then stuck an elbow haphazardly between my knees as he rolled the window back up. I just looked ahead calmly. He had no respect for my comfort or privacy. When I was younger and just beginning to develop, he sometimes sat at the kitchen table at night drinking with my mother and called me over to assess my progress, to pinch and measure.
“Not so good, Eileen,” he would say. “You’ve got to try harder.”
“Come on now,” Mom said, laughing. “Don’t be cruel.” And then once she said instead, “She’s too old for you to touch now, Charlie,” and clucked her tongue.
It could have been much worse, of course. Other girls got rubbed and grabbed and violated. I just got poked and ridiculed. Still, it hurt and angered me, and made me lash out later in life when I felt I was being measured and judged. A man I lived with for a time suggested I secretly wished I’d been big breasted, that I felt bad because I’d disappointed my father with my “small rack. Every girl wants daddy’s hands on her tits,” that man had said. What an idiot. He was just a mediocre musician from a wealthy family. I put up with him for a while because I thought maybe he was pointing to some dark truth about myself, and I suppose he was. I was a fool to be with a man like him. I was a fool about men in general. I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I live alone.
“Where in hell are you going?” my father hissed, going stiff and sliding down across his seat as I turned a corner. He wasn’t quite right in the head, as I’ve said. He was scared of his own shadow. I think that’s clear by now. “This is not the way. There are bad people here, and goddammit, Eileen, I didn’t bring my gun.”
“We can throw snowballs,” I laughed. The gun was in my purse, of course. My father seemed to prefer to believe he’d just misplaced it. I didn’t care. Nothing could disrupt my good mood. Finally, with Rebecca to celebrate it, I would have a Christmas I could enjoy. My father could strip me nude and pelt me with shards of glass, for all I cared. Nothing was going to get to me that day. Soon I’d be at Rebecca’s house where I’d be treated like a queen.
“Get me out of here,” he whined as he pulled the collar of his coat up over his head. Stopped at a light, he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder. “Hoodlums,” he whispered, eyes cloudy with fear. I just chuckled, coasted through the city streets, past the cemetery, past the police station, then back around, looping through the elementary school parking lot. I guess I was trying to torture him. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “Are they following us? Did they see me? Act natural. Don’t speak. Just drive. And roll down the windows, yeah, that’s a good idea. That way if they shoot at us the glass won’t shatter.”
I rolled down my window gladly. I enjoyed my father’s madness that day. He was a comic figure, slapstick almost. When we got to Lardner’s he spoke in hushed tones to Mr. Lewis behind the counter, ordered up a case of gin and pulled a few bags of potato chips off the shelf. I bought a bottle of wine for my evening at Rebecca’s. Dad didn’t ask questions. On the ride home he lay across the backseat, shaking and sweating. And when I pulled into our driveway he crawled out of the car, swam through the snow to the front porch, begging for me to “come faster, open the door, let me in. It’s not safe out here.” I calmly carried the box of booze up the front walk to the porch, but he was impatient, scrambled through the living room window, chiding me for leaving it unlocked—“Are you crazy?” When he opened the door from the inside, he ripped the top off the box of gin and pulled out two bottles, slung one under each armpit. “I’ve raised a fool,” he said. I watched him scuttle inside, kick off his shoes. “Two days old!” he yelled, and cleared his throat, settling into his easy chair with the newspaper he’d found frozen on the porch. I was too concerned with my own plans to bother to lock his shoes back up in the trunk right away.
Upstairs, I found my mother’s pills and put them in my purse but didn’t take any. I wanted to save them. If I had to spend Christmas Day at home with my father after he got back from Mass, I wanted to spend it in deep twilight sleep. I went back to my cot and returned to my fantasies of my evening at Rebecca’s. I imagined her saying things like, “I’ve never met anybody like you before.” And also, “I’ve never felt this close to someone before. We have so much in common. You’re perfect.” And I pictured hours of rapt conversation, delicious wine, a warm fire, Rebecca saying, “You’re my best friend. I love you,” and kissing my hand the way you’d kiss the hand of an oracle or a priest. I pulled my hand out from under me, red and cramped, and kissed it reverently. “I love you, too,” I said to it, and laughed at my own silliness, pulling the covers over my head. I waited for Rebecca’s phone call. Somehow I slept. I don’t remember those dreams, the last dreams I’d ever have in that house. I wish I could. I hope they were good ones.
I do remember my father’s wailing later that afternoon from the foot of the attic stairs.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” I yelled, bolting out of bed.
“The phone rang,” he said. “Some woman looking for you. Maybe a lady cop, I don’t know.”
“What did you tell her?”
I stomped my foot waiting for his reply.
“Nothing,” he threw up his arms. “I know nothing and said nothing. Mum from me.” I flew down the stairs, found the phone in the kitchen dangling off the hook, receiver thudding against the wooden cabinet.
“Well, hello, Christmas angel,” is how Rebecca answered when I picked it up.
It’s important to keep in mind, given what I’m about to relay, which is everything I remember from that evening, that I had truly never had a real friend before. Growing up I’d only had Joanie, who disliked me, and a girlfriend or two here and there in grade school, usually the other class reject. I remember a girl with braces on her legs in junior high, and an obese girl in high school who barely spoke. There was an Oriental girl whose parents owned the one Chinese restaurant in X-ville, but even she discarded me when she made the cheerleading squad. Those were not real friends. Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other’s happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca. I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love, you know this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.