His parents had threaded their way to the hibachis and were handling one, moving the grills to higher and lower slots. They decided to get it.
The line at the cashier was discouragingly long. The woman in front of them had twelve jars of apricots and a wrench set. His mother wandered off and after a few minutes his father did as well. Biddy stood holding the hibachi with both hands, seeing with perfect clarity his eventual confrontation with an impassive cashier, his parents still missing and the line behind him growing restive and angry.
He could faintly hear a Christmas carol piped in above him, lost in the great noisy space of a giant metal box filled with bargain hunters. His mother reappeared beside him. “Where’d your father go?” she asked. “We still have to get something for Cindy. Then we’re through. There’s Ginnie.”
Ginnie was waiting in a line two rows down. She waved and hesitated, then relinquished her place in line and came over. She said something about the last minute.
“It’s terrible,” his mother said. “Every year I say I’m going to finish early, and there’s always someone you forget.”
“I was looking for a vaporizer for Dom’s mother,” Ginnie said. “Of course they sold out. They probably had two.”
“How’s Cindy?”
Ginnie rearranged the packages in her arms. “They have some sort of bug up their ass. Every time I turn around, they’re not talking or one of them’s mad about something. They’re supposed to be getting married in a few months. You figure it.”
“Well, you get nervous. It’s a big step.”
“I don’t know. I thought you were supposed to fight after you got married, not before.”
He attempted to be as inconspicuous as possible, seemingly absorbed in the gums along the checkout counter, but they changed the subject. He hefted the hibachi higher, against his chest.
His father arrived after they’d checked through and said hello and goodbye to Ginnie, ushering them to the car. They drove to the Trumbull shopping mall. “So what are we going to get her?” his mother said.
“What about a chain?”
“She’s got a lot of chains,” Biddy said.
“How about a nice sweater?”
“She said she doesn’t need a sweater.” They both looked at him. “When we were looking for a sweater for Ronnie.”
“Okay.” His father fiddled with the radio. “You’re in charge then, if you’re the expert on Cindy. Check Read’s first and pick out something and show us. I want to show your mother something anyway.”
When they arrived, his father gestured vaguely at the front of the store, saying to meet them in Housewares, and to see if he could stay under twenty dollars.
He wandered through Ladies Lingerie, the For Her Shop, and Junior Miss, sure that in his ignorance he was bypassing perfect gift after perfect gift. He finally stopped at the perfume counter, drawn to the octagonal island terraced with colored bottles. He peered at the yellow Chanel bottles.
“Can I help you?” a woman said.
He found his parents twenty minutes later, eyeing a sink.
“What’d you come up with?” his father said. “Perfume?”
His mother took the red case in her hands. “Cinnabar? That’s nice.”
“You don’t give a girl perfume,” his father said. “That’s like something Ronnie would give her.”
“A sales slip,” his mother said. “You already bought this?”
“I had some money,” he said. His parents looked at each other, and his mother shrugged. “Well, we’ll pay you back, that’s all. Unless you want to give it to her all by yourself. Then we still have to get her something.”
“Perfume,” his father said. “We’ll give her something from Frederick’s of Hollywood next.”
“Oh, leave him alone,” his mother said. “I think it’s nice.”
When they got home, he finished putting tinsel on the tree, a job his parents always considered his and his alone, in some sort of effort, he sensed, to pretend he was capable of separate but equal responsibilities: Dad cuts the tree, lays in the wiring; Biddy hangs the tinsel. Still, he enjoyed it — he enjoyed any sort of work on the Christmas tree, except stripping it — and he stood beside it, hanging the thin, fluttering silver strips from branch to branch, the main body of tinsel he was drawing from draped over his arm like a maître d’s linen.
The sun was going down, the sky gray and blue with a bit of orange showing behind the houses to the west. His sister was out. His parents were in the den and the bedroom. More Christmas carols were on the stereo: Nat King Cole soothing his way through “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The dog lay sprawled on its side near the tree, rear legs twitching occasionally to the rhythms of a dream. And Biddy was luxuriating in the silence and the time it took to insure an even distribution of tinsel on a Christmas tree. By the time he was finished, he was standing in a thick gloom, the windows liquid with the twilight, and he paused to survey the tree in its lesser glory, shimmering feebly in the darkened room, before crouching low and plugging in its lights.
The effect was, as it was every year, breathtaking. The silver strips became filaments of chrome reflecting, refracting, quadrupling the orange, red, blue, and green lights. The tree was a masterpiece of decorative symmetry, of warmth, and of as much tradition as a thirteen-year-old could invest it with. He sat back on the sofa slowly, a celebrant, his eyes on the tree, its lights mirrored in the darkened glass of the picture window behind it. Stupid shook and drooled.
He listened to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” the notes of the melody ringing soft and clear on the stereo. He was happy, and knew enough by now not to question it. He realized with some surprise that the Vikings had made a run at the playoffs and fallen short almost without attracting his notice. He’d picked up the sketchy outline of what had happened here and there, and it hadn’t bothered him. They seemed very distant, as if, like the Orioles, they were out of season. At times during the days right before Christmas, the world didn’t seem to be pushing in on him as much, and such things as the Vikings were not as necessary or important.
The kind of respite the Christmas season afforded, he was beginning to realize, was something he counted on, and could count on every year. It was as important as ever this year, if not more so, since talismans as disparate as Cindy and Louis and the Vikings were threatening to lose their power, and the alternatives he would be left with frightened him. Sports would not be enough, he knew, even as he knew Christmas would not last forever. Beyond the end of his street he could imagine the lights of the airport, twinkling cold and clear in the darkness.
“Clean up some of the mess on the floor,” his father called from the bedroom. “The Carvers are coming over later.”
The silence hissed and crackled on the stereo. Mr. Carver was coming to answer all questions and keep the answers preeminent in his mind, to dog him through whatever hesitations or barriers he threw up, to penetrate the charmed circles of Advent and Christmas.
His books were upstairs, dog-eared and marked heavily with underlinings and marginalia. Mr. Carver was coming. Questions that had been problems would be dealt with. On his hands and knees he raked the loose tinsel from the rug, piling it with the unused portion, turned off the tree, and went upstairs to prepare.
Put the book away and come say hello to the Carvers, his father told him. And call his sister.
The Carvers were having a drink in front of the tree when he brought her down.
“It’s a beautiful tree,” Mrs. Carver said.
It had a nice shape to it, Mr. Carver agreed.
His father opened the interview for him. “Bill, you still taking the Cessna in to work, or what?”