“I was at the counter while I was looking at it.”
“Fine, okay, sweetheart. You win. I’m sorry. We truly do not have time for this. I need to start cooking, or we won’t have anything to eat.”
“God, Mom. You should’ve started cooking two hours ago,” Tatty said. “Every year you start cooking at, like, eight o’clock in the morning.”
“Well this year I overslept! Okay? This year I slept in! Shoot me, Tatty! Just put me out of my misery! Please!” Holly turned, and forced a laugh out of her lungs to try to dilute the sound of her rage, and also to spare herself the indignity of having lost her temper, but her heart was pounding hard in the soft spot at the base of her neck, which made her feel like some sort of underwater creature. As if she had some panicky gill there. She could hardly swallow. She was about to instruct Tatty in what she could do to help hurry the Christmas dinner preparations along, instead of complaining, when, on the counter where it lay, her cell phone began to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Holly turned. Tatiana was looking at the phone without touching it. “Is it Daddy?” Holly asked.
“No. It’s Unavailable,” Tatty said.
“Well go ahead and answer it if you want to, sweetheart.”
But Tatiana just stood and stared into the phone. She’d sat down on the stool next to the kitchen island, so that now her feet dangled four inches from the floor in their little black slippers, exactly the way they used to when Tatty was three and a half feet tall and sat behind Holly in her car seat as Holly drove her to day care.
Christ. Holly felt so sad. She’d chastised her daughter, who was now afraid to touch her cell phone. And poor Tatty looked worried. Her eyebrows were arched so that they formed an upside-down V on her forehead. They were dark, a little bushy, Tatty’s eyebrows—but that was fashionable now, and Tatty’s facial features were so elegant that no eyebrows could have taken away from that. Still, someday Tatty would probably want to pluck them, and the idea of that also made Holly feel sad. Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world. Bob Dylan continued to rasp out the lyrics—And where have you been, my darling young one?—and her daughter just kept looking into the phone. Again, Tatiana’s face took on that awful hue—the silvery blue of a fish tossed up on a pier—and she made no move whatsoever to answer Holly’s phone.
“Oh, come on,” Holly said, and picked it up, hit the green answer bar with her thumb. “Hello?”
But the call had already gone to voice mail, and if there was a way to interrupt voice mail and answer the call at this point, Holly hadn’t learned it. She’d only learned how to use about half the features of this phone. It was like the brain, the way the experts claimed a human being only used about 10 percent of what was available up there. Steve Jobs, like God, had given her much more to work with than she would ever be able to make use of.
She put the phone on the counter again and cocked her head at Tatty, determining that she was not going to ask her why she hadn’t answered. It was, obviously, punishment for Holly’s having told her to put down the phone a few minutes earlier. Holly did not want to get into a defensive position again, especially since it had been irrational, which Tatiana knew full well and could call her on in a flash. Holly had asked her daughter to put down the phone because she didn’t like the color it was turning her daughter’s skin as she peered into it. There was certainly no explaining that.
“No one’s going to leave a message,” Tatty said. “They never do.”
“No,” Holly said. “They don’t. They never do. They’re robots who want to sell things to people. They don’t like to talk to other robots.”
Tatiana jumped down from the stool so quickly then that for a second Holly thought she’d fallen, so she hurried instinctively toward her daughter. But Tatiana held up a hand as if she had to hold her mother back, as if Holly had planned to strike her, not help her.
“You don’t know,” Tatty said, shaking her head. “You have no idea who’s calling.”
“I realize that,” Holly said. “I don’t know, because you didn’t answer. If you’d answered the phone, I would now know who it was who called.”
“You told me not to answer!”
Holly took a step back and threw her hands in the air. “I what?”
Tatiana muttered something.
“What? What are you talking about, Tatiana?”
Tatty’s dark eyes searched the space just to the right of Holly’s shoulder, not looking at her directly, but not looking away from her, either. Her profile looked like a marble sculpture. Pale and polished and a little cold.
“I’m not going to continue this absurd argument, Tatty,” Holly said. “You didn’t answer the cell phone to spite me. Either that or you didn’t want to be bothered to talk to the robot, either.”
Tatiana turned and began to walk from the kitchen island to the family room, to the Christmas tree in the corner—its branches drooping under the weight of all the ornaments and the strings of lights. The whole scene—the tree, the lights, her daughter in her Christmas dress—looked wan to Holly in the glare pouring through the picture window, which was now just a scrim of snow outdoors. Who knew how long it might take Eric to get back from the airport, or where his brothers and their families were by now as they attempted to converge on the house from the various hotels they’d spent their nights in? God help her if she had to entertain the Coxes very long without any help. At least Thuy and Pearl and Patty lived only a few miles away. Surely they would have no reason to be late, no matter how much snow was falling.
The Christmas lights drowned themselves in their own dull brilliance as Tatty peered into them, looking curious, the way she’d peered into Holly’s cell phone, as if something either wonderful or terrible might be hiding in there.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Let’s not fight. I love you so much. It’s Christmas, and we have a lot to do.”
She waited for her daughter to turn around. When she did, Holly thought, she would take Tatiana in her arms. She would hold her until she warmed and softened in her embrace. They would start the day again.
But Tatty didn’t turn around. Instead, she said something under her breath, which Holly chose to ignore, and as it became clear that she could stand there all day waiting, and Tatiana was not going to turn around, Holly herself turned around, went to the refrigerator, and opened the door.
The refrigerator was so crammed full from her shopping trip the day before that Holly had to step backward to see the contents fully. The roast was what she was looking for, but in order to get to it she would have to swim through eggnog and sparkling juice (Eric’s brother Tony didn’t drink) and champagne bottles (his wife most certainly did) and whipping cream and fruit salad. The roast was at the very back, still wrapped in the plastic bag in which she’d brought it home from the grocery store the day before.
As she always did, Tatty had grimaced at the plastic bag (“They aren’t biodegradable! They never leave the earth!”) as the bag boy slid the roast (sixty dollars’ worth of prime) into it.
But Holly had given her a look, and said, “We need it in plastic, Tatty. So it doesn’t bleed all over the refrigerator,” to which her daughter had made an even more dramatic expression of revulsion and then hurried away from the checkout line to stare into the glass cage of stuffed animals near the automatic doors: