How many dollars, over the years, had Holly stuffed into that machine so that Tatty could try to snag a miniature teddy bear or pink cat? Something cheap and synthetic, probably made in China, stuffed with some kind of formaldehyde-soaked substance that had been outlawed in this country for years? It had been remarkable, really, how many times Tatty, as a little girl, had snagged one of those prizes with the machine’s mechanical claw. The cashiers used to comment on it, saying they’d never seen anyone outsmart that game as often as Tatty had.
At the car Tatty had helped her unload the groceries into the trunk from the cart, steering clear of the roast in the plastic bag, which Holly tossed into the backseat (was she trying to rile her daughter?), where it landed with a ridiculous, decapitated thunk. Tatty sat beside her in silence as Holly maneuvered them out of the parking lot, but when they were in the road and had reached the speed limit, Tatty said, “Before plastic bags there must have been ways to keep meat from bleeding all over the refrigerator, Mom.” She said bleeding in such a way that Holly anticipated that soon Tatiana would be announcing her vegetarianism.
“That’s right,” Holly had said. “I bet there were, but I bet they didn’t work as well as a plastic bag,” and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. She turned it down so the voices were just a whispering background and tried to engage Tatiana in a bit of conversation by asking her if she knew who the musician was, but Tatty just said, “No.” And then, as if to pound a nail in Holly’s coffin, they passed the town’s largest tree—a white pine that towered over the church next to which it grew, even over its steeple—and, snagged practically at the very top like a mocking Christmas star, a white plastic bag fluttered around in the wind.
HOLLY LIFTED THE meat out of the refrigerator with both hands, as if it were a sleeping baby, and put it, in its white plastic bag, down on the kitchen counter.
As she’d known she would, she found the bottom of the plastic bag pooled with blood, but she resisted the urge to call Tatty over to show her what the point was of that evil plastic bagging. She wondered about those many public school teachers who’d driven home their lessons about sustainability and biodegradability and migrating birds with their feet tangled in plastic grocery bags over the years—what did they bring their meat home in? A little rivulet of blood made its way down the side of the granite countertop and onto the tiles near her stocking feet.
Holly glanced at it, and chose to ignore it. She’d clean it up later. The tiles were red, and the blood—dark as menstrual blood or cherry syrup—was camouflaged there. No one would know it was there but her. She opened the plastic bag, slit open the cellophane wrapper around the meat, lifted the roast off the Styrofoam it rested on, and peeled off the Kotex-like bandage from the bottom. She then lifted and placed the meat gently (again a sleeping baby came to mind) in the roasting pan she’d left on the counter the night before.
It looked, of course, unappetizing. It looked like an accident, Holly thought. It looked like what it was—an animal, uncovered, like what any one of them would look like, she supposed, stripped of all exteriors. Some mushrooms, onions, and potatoes would help, and pepper, and as Holly began to grind the pepper mill over the top of the meat she called over her shoulder to Tatty, “Could you get the mushrooms out of the crisper and wash them?”
There was no response. Holly turned and looked at her daughter, sharply, to which Tatty responded with an expression of such infinite weariness that it made Holly want to laugh.
This was the expression Tatty gave the world whenever she was asked to do some chore she didn’t want to do—a sad deflation, the expression that might be worn by a princess slave as she was being taken in chains to the dungeons.
Holly remembered, then, her own teenage years, and a few friends she’d had like this. Girls who rolled their eyes so languidly and so often it seemed their eyeballs could have permanently disappeared somewhere above their brows. She recalled lying on the floor of Cindy Martin’s bedroom, listening to Billy Joel on a transistor radio propped up between them, and the way Cindy had parted her lips at the ceiling in a kind of silent scream, squeezing her eyes shut and letting her shoulders sink deeper into the white shag carpeting when her mother called from below, “Cindy? You need to feed the dog!”
Holly herself had been envious. The mother. The chore. The dog. These normal trappings of a normal childhood. She herself was never asked to do anything at home, because she had two older sisters, each of whom had made it her goal in life to let Holly have a “normal childhood” despite their mother’s death and their father’s “secret” alcoholism. It was why Holly did not chastise Tatty for her resentful reactions to being asked to empty the dishwasher or take out the garbage. These were luxuries, these small burdens. It was a luxury to be able to dole out such burdens. As Tatiana made her way to the refrigerator, to the crisper, Holly said, cheerfully, “Thanks, Tat,” trying to let her daughter know that she recognized that this was an effort for her, this indignity, but also that it was ridiculous, and charming, that it was such an effort.
Outside, a snowplow growled by, and Holly heard the sound of its blades scraping against the pavement. It really was a blizzard, then, wasn’t it? These days it seemed that the snowplows only came out during emergencies. Cutbacks. And this was Christmas! Imagine the overtime the city had to pay a snowplow driver on Christmas Day. Like the U.S. Postal Service, snowplowing had been a service Holly used to take for granted. There was a time (only ten years ago?) when the snowplows came out just, it seemed, for the show of it:
Give us a flurry, a dusting, a glaze, it had seemed, and we’ll make it rue the day!
But those days seemed like longer ago than a decade now—like those old-fashioned days when they used to serve you dinner on airplanes, or pump your gas for you, or carry your groceries out to the car. And now, of course, they were talking about shutting the post office down.
How much snow must have fallen for them to be willing to pay overtime to the snowplowers on Christmas Day?
Holly glanced over at Tatty, who was staring at the carton of mushrooms in her hands as if completely baffled by them.
“Did you hear that?” Holly asked.
“Hear what?” Tatty said, under her breath, still looking down at the mushrooms.
That profile:
The lowered eyes. The fixed stare. An ancient beauty carved by someone whose identity was lost to time. And the ancient message of it, which seemed to be, Gaze upon me, I’m here and also not here, of you and apart from you.
Tatiana’s cold marble profile unnerved Holly. She said, “Just put those down, Tatiana. I’ll do it.”
Tatiana continued to stare into the carton of mushrooms.
Holly said, too loudly, “Did you hear me?”
Tatiana seemed, then, to hear her, but it was as if she’d picked Holly’s voice up on a walkie-talkie from miles away. She shook her head a little, placed the carton of mushrooms carefully in the sink, looked over at Holly—and then Holly realized that the attitude she’d taken to be Tatiana’s annoyance at having been asked to do a chore was not that.
Tatiana had been crying!
“Honey!” Holly said, turning from the meat to her daughter, wiping her bloody hands on her dress—because who cared? There were more important things, and the dress was so busily floral a bit of blood would simply look like part of the ridiculous pattern. “Oh my God, what’s wrong?”