“I hope Ruby doesn’t cut a finger off in her sleep,” Daniel said.
“It’s a jackknife. It’s all folded up. Would you say that if she were a boy?”
“No. Then I’d be sure there would be cut-off fingers. Don’t let my mother see the knife.”
“Didn’t you have a jackknife when you were a kid?”
“They said I could have a BB gun when I was twenty-one.”
“Typical.”
“I had a compass.”
* * *
It was too difficult to load Aaron into a taxi this year to go down to Daniel and Coco’s, so the family gathered for Christmas Day at the apartment uptown instead.
“Grandpa, look. I made a slingshot. And I’m whittling a new wooden handle for it, too. A slingshot uses kinetic energy.”
“That’s a dangerous weapon,” Aaron said, handling the stick. “My father would have murdered me if he knew I had a Christmas tree.”
“It only shoots marshmallows.”
“We always had a tree,” Molly said. “Grandpa Bergman didn’t mind.”
“Like hell.”
Ben had been sitting on the floor playing with the Spirograph he’d gotten the girls. Now he examined Ruby’s knife. He put it in his pocket.
“Thank you, Ruby. I’ve always wanted a pocketknife.”
She chased him around the apartment and Cora chased her. Joy watched them fondly. But the noise was pounding in her ears, the laughing and happy screaming. Wrapping paper flew around them, ribbons trailed from the girls’ shoes, stuck to the soles by tape. Cheerful children, she said to herself. A blessing. She repeated it silently several times to chase away the other things she was thinking, which were, Shut the hell up, Stop it, Why must you be so noisy, You are not on the street, You are driving me crazy.
Ben’s father, Doug, came with his wife, Lisa, a sweet youngish person with long, lank hair and a nervous laugh. Who would not laugh nervously, Joy thought, thrown into the bosom of your husband’s ex-wife’s family? She greeted the woman with as much warmth as she could muster. It wasn’t Lisa’s fault that Molly had left Doug, it wasn’t Lisa’s fault that modern mores compelled all these exes to gather together and exchange gifts, it wasn’t Lisa’s fault that Joy missed Doug and held Lisa responsible, even though it was not her fault, it was Molly’s, but of course Molly had the right to be happy, of course she did.
Molly threw her arms around Doug when she saw him. I love you, Doug Harkavy, she thought. I will always love you, you are Ben’s father and there was a time when we planned our future and our future died yet here we are, and I will always treasure those days and I’m so glad I’m no longer married to you and I bet you’re glad you’re no longer married to me.
“Whaddya get me?” she said to him. She realized she was a little drunk. Ben had made a cocktail with apple cider and bourbon.
“Where’s Freddie?” Lisa said politely.
“Home with her own dysfunctional family. Well, just her father, really. She couldn’t leave him. He’s been ill. Men-tal-lly ill.” Oh dear. She was truly drunk.
“Okay, Mom, sit yourself down right here and drink this big glass of water, that’s a good girl.”
Molly beamed at Ben. She beamed at Doug and Lisa. Good old Lisa. She beamed at her mother and her brother, at Coco and the two little girls. When her gaze got to her father, she stopped beaming. He was tugging at the colostomy bag.
“Daddy, don’t.”
He looked up at her. He shrugged.
“You should eat something,” Ben said, but Molly was no longer drunk, not even tipsy. She was sad, suddenly and thoroughly sad. She shook her head at Ben, afraid if she spoke she would cry.
“Marshmallows,” said Cora. “Eat marshmallows.”
“I don’t have marshmallows,” Joy said. “But I have Mallomars. Would anyone like a Mallomar?”
“Shoot a Mallomar, Ruby,” Cora said excitedly.
Ruby said, “I ain’t botherin’ with suchlike nonsense.”
“Ruby is channeling Tom Sawyer,” Coco said proudly.
“Sounds more like Slim Pickins,” Molly said.
“We used to say ‘“Ain’t” ain’t in the dictionary,’” Daniel said to Molly. “Remember? But it turns out it is.”
Joy started telling Ben her story of when she had polio as a child.
“They were all so hysterical,” she said. “My mother fainted, my grandmother had to tend to her, and for all I know, it wasn’t polio at all. Maybe my leg fell asleep.”
“But you were in the hospital, Grandma. They put you in the hospital. It must have been something.”
“Oh, who knows, they were all so hysterical.”
They ate Mallomars while Cora explained Boyle’s Law as she understood it, which Coco said was brilliant, until Cora began speculating on volume and pressure in the bowel, at which point Coco interrupted and said the bowel was not a closed system, and Molly involuntarily glanced at her father and thought of his system, definitely not a closed one. He had fallen asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest.
“Do you want to try the experiment, Grandma? You put marshmallows in a syringe.”
“Well, I don’t have any syringes on hand, sweetheart. Maybe another time. You’ll teach me.”
Aaron’s head jerked up and he said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“I bet you can,” Cora said. “Can we try? Can we get an old dog? From the ASPCA?”
“But what if it really won’t learn any new tricks and the saying is true?” said Daniel.
“And we’re stuck with an old dog with a low IQ?” said Coco.
“Well, at least it won’t live very long,” Ruby said. “If it’s so old.”
Cora started to cry.
“Ruby, really,” Coco said. “Was that necessary?”
“I’m very sensitive,” Cora said between sobs.
“Death is natural,” Ruby said. “No dog can live forever, especially an old one.”
Daniel rocked Cora on his lap. “Our dog can’t ever die, Cora sweetheart, because we don’t have a dog.”
But that made her cry harder.
On the walk home from the subway, Ruby kicked the snowdrift and waited for her parents and Cora to catch up. Cora was crying and dawdling because she was cold. If Cora would hurry up, she would be warmer, their mother explained, embarking on what Ruby thought was a clear and reasonable, though rather long, disquisition on the relationship between heat and energy. Ruby had tried hugging Cora from behind and duck-waddling along against her to provide some insulation, but there was no satisfying Cora when she was in this mood.
“Hurry up! I’m freezing!” Ruby called.
The snow that had piled up at the edge of the sidewalk was not really a drift. It had been pushed there by snowplows the night before, and it was already specked with black smuts of city dirt. Ruby scooped up a handful of dirty snow and packed it into a ball and took a few steps up the side of the mound of snow. She put the gray snowball in the leather pocket of the slingshot and let it fly, but it fell apart and disappeared into the dusk.
She shuffled her feet on the icy sidewalk. The wind blew and the sky was dark. Cora sniffled and shambled beside their mother. After two more blocks, she again refused to move, demanding a taxi. While her mother and father argued with her, Ruby pushed off and slid on the ice all the way to the next corner. There, the great berm of snow created by the plows took a right angle. She was boxed in by three-foot walls of snow. A narrow path of footprints ran up the snowbank. Over the course of the day it had cut into the bank like a mountain pass. It was frozen now, the bumpy pattern of boot soles shining in the street light. Ruby struggled to the top and surveyed her territory. “I’m the king of the world,” she hollered into the wind. Nobody heard her.
She bent down and pried loose a small rock that had been plowed up with the snow, then fitted it with frozen fingers into the slingshot.