Alfred: no set amount
Chip, Denise: $100 each, plus grapefruit
Gary, Caroline: $60 each, maximum, plus grapefruit
Aaron, Caleb: $30 each, maximum
Jonah (this year only): no set amount
Having paid $55 for the bathrobe, she needed $45 worth of additional gifts for Chip. She rummaged in the dresser drawers. She rejected the vases in shopworn boxes from Hong Kong, the many matching bridge decks and score pads, the many thematic cocktail napkins, the really neat and really useless pen-and-pencil sets, the many travel alarm clocks that folded up or beeped in unusual ways, the shoehorn with a telescoping handle, the inexplicably dull Korean steak knives, the cork-bottomed bronze coasters with locomotives engraved on their faces, the ceramic 5×7 picture frame with the word “Memories” in glazed lavender script, the onyx turtle figurines from Mexico, and the cleverly boxed kit of ribbon and wrapping paper called The Gift of Giving. She weighed the suitability of the pewter candle snuffer and the Lucite saltshaker cum pepper grinder. Recalling the paucity of Chip’s home furnishings, she decided that the snuffer and the shaker/grinder would do just fine.
In the season of joy and miracles, while she wrapped, she forgot about the urine-smelling laboratory and its noxious crickets. She was able not to care that Alfred had put up the Christmas tree at a twenty-degree tilt. She could believe that Jonah was feeling just as healthy this morning as she was.
By the time she’d finished her wrapping, the light in the gull-plumage winter sky had a midday angle and intensity. She went down to the basement, where she found the Ping-Pong table buried under green strings of lights, like a chassis engulfed by kudzu, and Alfred seated on the floor with electrician’s tape, pliers, and extension cords.
“Damn these lights!” he said.
“Al, what are you doing on the floor?”
“These goddamned cheap new lights!”
“Don’t worry about them. Just leave them. Let Gary and Jonah do that. Come upstairs and have lunch.”
The flight from Philadelphia was due in at one-thirty. Gary was going to rent a car and be at the house by three, and Enid intended to let Alfred sleep in the meantime, because tonight she would have reinforcements. Tonight, if he got up and wandered, she wouldn’t be the only one on duty.
The quiet in the house after lunch was of such density that it nearly stopped the clocks. These final hours of waiting ought to have been the perfect time to write some Christmas cards, a win-win occasion in which either the minutes would fly by or she would get a lot of work done; but time could not be cheated in this way. Beginning a Short Note, she felt as if she were pushing her pen through molasses. She lost track of her words, wrote took an unexpected “swim” in an unexpected “swim,” and had to throw the card away. She stood up to check the kitchen clock and found that five minutes had passed since she’d last checked. She arranged an assortment of cookies on a lacquered wooden holiday plate. She set a knife and a huge pear on a cutting board. She shook a carton of eggnog. She loaded the coffeemaker in case Gary wanted coffee. She sat down to write a Short Note and saw in the blank whiteness of the card a reflection of her mind. She went to the window and peered out at the bleached zoysia lawn. The mailman, struggling with holiday volumes, was coming up the walk with a mighty bundle that he pushed through the slot in three batches. She pounced on the mail and sorted wheat from chaff, but she was too distracted to open the cards. She went down to the blue chair in the basement.
“Al,” she shouted, “I think you should get up.”
He sat up haystack-haired and empty-eyed. “Are they here?”
“Any minute. Maybe you want to freshen up.”
“Who’s coming?”
“Gary and Jonah, unless Jonah’s too sick.”
“Gary,” Alfred said. “And Jonah.”
“Why don’t you take a shower?”
He shook his head. “No showers.”
“If you want to be stuck in that tub when they get here—”
“I think I’m entitled to a bath, after the work I’ve done.”
There was a nice shower stall in the downstairs bathroom, but Alfred had never liked to stand while bathing. Since Enid now refused to help him get out of the upstairs tub, he sometimes sat there for an hour, the water cold and soap-gray at his haunches, before he contrived to extricate himself, because he was so stubborn.
He had bathwater running in the upstairs bathroom when the long-awaited knock finally came.
Enid rushed to the front door and opened it to the vision of her handsome elder son alone on the front stoop. He was wearing his calfskin jacket and holding a carry-on suitcase and a paper shopping bag. Sunlight, low and polarized, had found a way around the clouds, as it often did near the end of a winter day. Flooding the street was the preposterous golden indoor light with which a minor painter might illuminate the parting of the Red Sea. The bricks of the Persons’ house, the blue and purple winter clouds, and the dark green resinous shrubs were all so falsely vivid as to be not even pretty but alien, foreboding.
“Where’s Jonah?” Enid cried.
Gary came inside and set his bags down. “He still has a fever.”
Enid accepted a kiss. Needing a moment to collect herself, she told Gary to bring his other suitcase in while he was at it.
“This is my only suitcase,” he informed her in a courtroom kind of voice.
She stared at the tiny bag. “That’s all you brought?”
“Look, I know you’re disappointed about Jonah—”
“How high was his fever?”
“A hundred this morning.”
“A hundred is not a high fever!”
Gary sighed and looked away, tilting his head to align it with the axis of the listing Christmas tree. “Look,” he said. “Jonah’s disappointed. I’m disappointed. You’re disappointed. Can we leave it at that? We’re all disappointed.”
“It’s just that I’m all ready for him,” Enid said. “I made his favorite dinner—”
“I specifically warned you—”
“I got tickets for Waindell Park tonight!”
Gary shook his head and walked toward the kitchen. “So we’ll go to the park,” he said. “And then tomorrow Denise is here.”
“Chip too!”
Gary laughed. “What, from Lithuania?”
“He called this morning.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Gary said.
The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she’d tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered — that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old. But she was doing her best to adjust to the new reality. She was suddenly very excited that Chip was coming. And since Jonah’s wrapped gifts would now be going to Philadelphia with Gary, she needed to wrap some travel alarm clocks and pen-and-pencil sets for Caleb and Aaron to reduce the contrast in her giving. She could do this while she waited for Denise and Chip.
“I have so many cookies,” she told Gary, who was washing his hands fastidiously at the kitchen sink. “I have a pear that I can slice, and some of that dark coffee that you kids like.”
Gary sniffed her dish towel before he dried his hands with it.