Ambiguous pronoun reference, his mother piped up from the back, her first critical observation of the new day. Is she talking about the weather or the windshield?
“That’s not what the Weather Channel’s calling for,” Griffin said.
Marguerite leaned over and kissed his cheek. “It’s what I’m calling for.”
Oh, honestly, his mother said.
Griffin turned on the radio, which sometimes silenced her, just as a car careened into the drive and rocked to a halt in front of the B and B. Jared and Jason, oblivious to the downpour, leapt out and began chanting up at the second-floor windows, “Suh-nee, Suh-nee, Suh-nee!”
Griffin put the car in gear before they were noticed.
“Can you see?” Marguerite said.
“Well enough,” he told her.
Go! his mother urged him, as if they’d just robbed a bank and he was driving the getaway car. Go, go, go!
He turned up the radio.
His mother chattered to the rhythm of the wipers all the way to New Hampshire, where the rain stopped as abruptly as if a spigot had just been turned off. Twenty minutes later, when they crossed into Massachusetts, the skies cleared. “Voilà,” said Marguerite, as if she’d just performed a nifty parlor trick.
Oh, my, Griffin ’s mother said, she’s bilingual.
Having fled the twins earlier, he now almost wished they were around. Maybe he could get one of them to punch him in the head again and knock his mother out. And if he had to be knocked out himself, so be it.
Marguerite switched off the radio. “Okay,” she said, “tell me about your mother,” as if she’d also been listening to her running commentary all the way down the coast and decided it was high time to acknowledge the bitch. “I want to know all about your father, too.”
What she had in mind was to create personality profiles for each of them, so she’d know the right spot on the Cape when she saw it-a silly idea, Griffin thought, but he indulged her. After all, it wasn’t like he was wedded to a plan of his own. Moreover, when she’d proposed the idea the trunk fell silent, as if his mother (maybe his father, too?) was curious what he’d have to say about them. So, Marguerite began. What was her favorite color? Green. His? Blue. Where were they born? Buffalo (Dad). Rochester (Mom). And their favorite foods? Him, king crab legs; her, double-cut broiled lamb chops. Any hobbies? He collected P. G. Wodehouse first editions, vintage campaign buttons and Victorian pornography; she, after retiring from teaching, did thousand-piece monochromatic jigsaw puzzles and swore colorfully at the television whenever George W Bush appeared.
Marguerite’s curiosity was so benign and well meaning that Griffin gradually became more expansive. What were their favorite times of the day? Well, his father had been a morning person, he told her, up hours before he and his mother, especially on their vacations. He liked to go out for pastries and the newspaper. “You missed a great sunrise,” he’d inform his wife when she finally shuffled out onto the deck, midmorning, for a breakfast with Al Fresco. (“Al Fresco? Who was he?”) “Like hell I did,” she always replied. His mother’s favorite time of day was cocktail hour. She loved the sound of ice cubes in glasses, of jazz and gin-induced laughter, of lots of people talking all at once. So much better, to her way of thinking, than eavesdropping on smaller conversations where you could actually hear whatever stupid opinions people held. He told Marguerite about his father’s propensity for sudden, violent, rear-end collisions in parking lots, about his mother’s speech at her retirement dinner, even a little about the Morphine Narrative. And when she asked him, apropos of nothing, for a Christmas memory, he told her about their search, each December, for the perfect tree.
Though they professed to hate the season for its hypocrisy, for all that trumped-up seasonal “goodwill toward men” crap, his parents demanded big, full Christmas trees. Finding one that passed muster took days, sometimes weeks. They had to visit every lot within a ten-mile radius and carefully examine all trees over seven feet. The lot attendants went from smiling and helpful to frowning and exasperated and homicidal. Other tree shoppers queued up and then gave up while every tall tree on the lot was hauled out, stood up, vigorously shaken and twirled for a full inspection. Sometimes, just as it seemed a sale was imminent, Griffin ’s mother would sigh and say, “No, there’s a hole,” and his father would ask where, and she’d point and he’d cock his head and say, “Oh, right.” Most attendants, not knowing his parents, would sensibly suggest that the “hole” she saw might face in toward the wall, whereupon she’d sigh again and say, “Let’s keep looking.” Griffin remembered one old guy who said, after his parents had rejected a dozen trees, “Lady, maybe there’s something you don’t understand. Those holes you keep seeing’s the space between the goddamn branches. Wasn’t for the spaces, the tree would be solid fuckin’ wood.” He made a sweeping gesture that included the entire lot. “Every one of these trees got holes. It’s the holes that makes ’ em trees. Now, you want one or not?”
Other attendants, equally tired and frustrated, tried reason. “What kinda ceiling we looking at here?” Griffin remembered one asking, hoping at least to narrow the search. Of course his parents had no idea. A high ceiling was one of their requirements every year when they rented a new house or apartment, but as professional humanists it wouldn’t have occurred to them to actually measure. “Doesn’t matter,” his father would say. “We can cut a little off the top if we need to.” To which the man responded, “Look kind of funny, wouldn’t it?” At which point his mother might take the tip of a branch between her thumb and forefinger, give it a good tug and, if needles came off, complain, “When was this tree cut? Last August?”
Griffin came to understand that the perfect Christmas tree was a lot like the perfect house on the Cape, first because it didn’t exist in the real world, and second because all the imperfect trees fell into two categories. The first was the all-too-familiar Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift, and the second applied to just one tree: Well, I Guess It’ll Have to Do. He couldn’t remember ever voicing an opinion about the tree his parents finally agreed would have to do. The search over at last, his father would hand the lucky attendant a length of gray, weathered clothesline so the tree could be hoisted onto the roof of their car and secured through its open windows. Sometimes the clothesline would snap when they rounded a corner, sending the tree into the gutter. One year they didn’t even make it out of the lot. Griffin’s father, leaning forward so he could keep an eye on the tree strapped to the roof, backed into a parked pickup, and their tree leapt as if by wizardry into its bed.
Back home, they invariably discovered, by trying to stand the tree up, that it was indeed too tall, and with a curse his father would lay it back down on the floor. Some years the tree lay there in the middle of the living room for days while he canvassed his English department colleagues for a saw he could borrow. What he actually meant, they understood all too well, was a saw he could have, since he never once returned a tool. (The saw he’d borrowed the previous Christmas was no doubt hanging from a nail in the garage of last year’s rental.) Eventually, though, someone would come through, and that was when the real magic began.
The first cut never took quite enough off-here again, no measuring for the Griffins-and the second usually didn’t, either. The third would be off by a mere half inch, close enough if you forced matters (they always did), and the freshly cut top of the tree would leave a moist, six-inch, greenish-brown streak on the white ceiling, which no doubt puzzled the owners when they returned home from their sabbatical. The broken toaster oven, the missing eighth chair from the dining room set, the red wine stains on the shag carpet-these things could happen, but how on earth had the Griffins managed to scar the fucking ceiling? And of course the tree did look funny with its top sawed off. Their Christmas trees always looked to Griffin like they’d grown right through the ceiling, as if what you were looking at was just the bottom two-thirds, and if you went upstairs, the top third would be growing right out of the hardwood floor.