Mr. Leery sold them a tiny live tree, small enough to sit in the corner of Grandma’s living room between the silent radio and the front door. As they were leaving the store, he knelt beside Sarah. He smelled creamy, like one of his soaps, the brand that came in a black cardboard box with loopy pink lettering on the front. Into her palm he pressed a piece of apple taffy. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
At home, late that afternoon, Grandma, Sarah, and her mother tossed tinsel onto the tree and strung the lights. The tree smelled like earthworm-dirt, just after a late-in-the-day thunderstorm. In Lubbock, where Sarah lived, there weren’t any trees, just tumble-weeds and scrabbly old mesquite bushes. People hung ornaments on the bushes at Christmas and found it funny, but Sarah thought it was pathetic. Here in southern Oklahoma, mistletoe, sprouting naturally, spreading wild, hung low in the oaks. The air smelled of pine needles, loam, stems and leaves.
When Sarah was smaller, her father would pick her up and lift her into a roadside tree so she could grab a handful of mistletoe. They’d bring the mistletoe back to Grandma’s and hang it in the kitchen doorway. Now, as Sarah stretched to place some tinsel on a limb, she could almost feel her father’s hands, tight around her waist as he raised her into low, snaky branches where the mistletoe grew.
As the ladies fussed with the Christmas tree, Sarah’s mother was weepy but smiling. She liked the word cease-fire. She said it several times. Sarah thought the day might turn out fine, but then her cousins arrived. All afternoon she’d managed not to think about them: the bratty boys from Baton Rouge, the snotty Kansas kid. They were a few years younger than she was. Thank goodness, or they might want to kiss her under the mistletoe (earlier this week, Grandma had bought a pale bunch at a nursery). Sarah liked her uncles and aunts, but this year she felt skittish around them. Mad? Yes, that too. She remembered her mother telling Grandma, right after Daddy left, that the uncles could have helped Daddy more when he was struggling with his drilling business. The uncles were well-to-do oil men. They thought a man should stand on his own. Now, Sarah’s cousins were surrounded by their families, while her daddy was gone. It was good the house was small. They’d all have to stay in a motel out by the rodeo grounds.
On Christmas eve, the trees in the park puffed and rocked with the wind. The sky was snow-thick, but no flakes fell. Sarah’s cousins ran around the park, aiming their fingers at each other, shooting each other dead. Her uncles and aunts carved hams and turkeys in the kitchen, while her mother helped her grandma bake apple pies. Sarah had set out the flour, the eggs, and the butter, but then Grandma shooed her away. She sat at the table staring at the clock above the stove. It was shaped like a spoon, a spoon about the size of a ukulele. The hands were a knife and fork. Her mother had told her that, when she was just a little girl here in her grandmother’s kitchen, Sarah had confused the word clock with spoon. Sarah didn’t remember this (though food and time were always linked in her mind, the way her father was linked to her mother). All she remembered was sitting on the gritty red tiles in the middle of the floor, watching the clock, rubbing her face in Blackie’s fur. Blackie’s heart had stopped one day in the kitchen. He’d fallen to the floor — a thud like a bowling ball hitting a rubber backdrop. He’d always been ancient, ever since Sarah had known him. He was her pal when her cousins were too little for games and she couldn’t pry her daddy away from his brothers: they’d stand in the yard for hours arguing about money.
All day today, Sarah’s cousins had trembled with excitement, waiting for Santa. Each year, in Grandma’s neighborhood, Santa walked door to door on Christmas eve carrying a fat bag full of candy. Sarah was pretty sure she didn’t believe in him anymore. Her school friends said he was someone’s father in a costume. Sarah thought of a fat old man, like the one who read the gas meters in her mobile home park and left behind a trail of tobacco juice in the dirt.
A man on her grandma’s transistor radio, the purple one in the bathroom, had said they’d be tracking Santa’s movements all day and would provide hourly updates. He’d also said the cease-fire in Korea wasn’t holding. Bing Crosby came on, singing “White Christmas.” Sarah’s mother had spent most of the day in her bathrobe, quiet, drinking coffee, smoking.
Clock, spoon, fear itself.
That night, after everyone had wolfed down two helpings of pie with plenty of whipped cream and strawberries pulled from the freezer, they settled into the living room. On the wall above the couch, framed pictures hung in a row: Grandma and Pop, Pop painting a DOAN’S ELIXIR sign on the rodeo arena. There were wedding photos of Sarah’s folks and the weddings of her uncles and aunts. The uncles tried to cheer up Sarah’s mom: “What a pretty young bride you were.”
Earlier in the day, through the front room window, Sarah had overhead the uncles in the yard talk about how foolish their brother had been to marry so young.
“Bo never had a speck of sense,” said Sarah’s youngest uncle.
“Ma spoiled him, that’s why,” said the older man. “Didn’t have to work after school. Remember? Ma’d shut him in to do his spelling and his math. Thought he’s going to make something of himself. Meanwhile, I’m out in the fields laying pipe for old man Clinton. What the hell was Ma thinking? She knew she didn’t have money to send him to college.”
“A few more seasons in that trailer, we’ll see how spoiled he is.”
The eldest brother said, “I told that knucklehead he should have put off his wedding a little longer — he might have firmed-up a business. Maybe he wouldn’t have left a daughter behind when the army called him to war.”
Traditionally, the family didn’t exchange gifts until Christmas Day, but Sarah’s mother looked so miserable, Sarah thought it would lift her spirits to open her present. She handed the package she’d wrapped so carefully in green and gold paper to her mother, who was sitting off by herself in one corner of the living room. The red and blue lights of the tree reflected off the music box. “Oh!” said Sarah’s mother. “It’s lovely!” She closed her eyes and swayed to the whispery tune. Her lip quivered. Sarah knew her mother was thinking of Sarah’s dad. Her mother rose, sniffled, kissed the top of Sarah’s head, and set the music box on top of the Crosley. She disappeared into her bedroom. One of the aunts started to follow her, but Grandma touched her sleeve and shook her head. The adults coughed, smiled, spoke in strained, eager voices of Christmases past.
“Remember the year we taught the kids to bob for apples?” said one of the uncles. “Brought out Ma’s old washtub and nearly drowned poor Bo, holding his head underwater.”
The uncles laughed.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Grandma said.
“Ah, Ma, we were just having fun. Bo didn’t mind.”
“Those were wonderful times, wonderful times,” the aunts and uncles murmured.
Sarah’s cousins grabbed their coats. “Call us when Santa comes!” They bounded out the back door, into the alley next to the yard.
Sarah crept close to her mother’s bedroom door. “Let’s leave her alone for a while, sweetie. She’ll be all right,” Grandma said. Sarah plucked the music box off the radio and set it under the tree. She slipped on her coat and walked out front.