She swore she could hear the click before she hung up. She made me listen.
"Do you hear it?" she asked, her dark eyes glittering.
"Maybe," I said, not wanting her to be all alone in her night. "I can't really tell."
IN OCTOBER the heat gave way to the blue afternoon haze of true autumn, hand-shaped leaves of the sycamores showed orange against the dusty white trunks, and a red-gold blush lay on the hills. One day I came home from school and found Claire staring at herself in her round vanity mirror in her room, her silver brush forgotten in her hand. "My face is uneven, have you noticed? My nose is off-center." She turned her head to the side, examined the profile, puffed out her cheeks and pushed her imagined off-center nose to the right, mashed the tip down. "I hate pointed noses. Your mother has Garbo's nose, did you ever notice that? If I had mine done, I'd want one like that."
She wasn't talking about noses. Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings. There was something missing, but it wasn't what she thought. She fretted that her hairline was receding, that she was going to end up looking like Edgar Allan Poe. Her fearful gaze magnified the incomplete tops of her ears, shrank her small lips.
"Small teeth mean bad luck," she said, showing them to me in the mirror. "Short life." Her teeth were barley beads, pearllike and gleaming. But her eyes had grown increasingly deep. I could hardly see the lids anymore, and her sharp bones once again made bridges in her face, a Rodin sculptured bronze head, merciless in its paring down.
As we got into December, Claire cheered up. She loved the holidays. She was reading magazines with pictures of Christmas in England, in Paris, in Taos, New Mexico. She wanted to do everything. "Let's have a perfect Christmas," she said.
We wired a wreath in eucalyptus and pomegranates we dipped into melted wax. She bought boxes of Christmas cards, soft handmade paper with lace and golden stars. Swan Lake played on the classical station. We sewed garlands of tiny chili peppers, stuck cloves into tangerines, tied them with velvet the color of brandy. She bought me a red velvet dress with a white lace collar and cuffs at Jessica McClintock in Beverly Hills. Perfect, she said.
It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.
RON CAME HOME until after New Year's. She waited for him, so we could all buy the tree together, like a real family. In the car, she described just what she wanted. Symmetrical, soft-needled, six feet at least. The tree man tried to help but gave up after pulling out and untwining dozens of trees.
"I don't get any of this," Ron said, watching Claire's desperate search. "Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. High desert. We should be buying an olive, a date palm. A frigging Jerusalem artichoke."
I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange. Someone would buy it as a joke, a belated Halloween, to decorate with plastic skulls and tiny guillotines. Or it would become someone's Yuletide political statement. Or someone would take it just for the pleasure of making their kids cry.
The smell of the trees was like Oregon. If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the wood-stove. I joined Claire, where she was agonizing over a tree that was almost right, except for a bit of a gap in the branches on one side. She pointed it out with anxious hands. I assured her she could keep it to the wall, nobody would ever notice it.
"That's not the point," she said. "If something is wrong, you can't just turn it to the wall."
I knew what she meant, but convinced her to take it anyway.
At home, Claire instructed Ron in the hanging of lights. Originally she wanted candles, but Ron drew the line there. We wound strings of chilies and popcorn round and around, while Ron watched a big soccer game on TV. Mexico playing Argentina. He wouldn't turn it off so Claire could have Christmas carols. A mans world. He could barely pull himself away long enough to put the gold angel on top.
Claire turned out the room lights and we sat and watched the tree in the dark, while Mexico overran South America.
THE MORNING of Christmas Eve, Ron got a call about a vision of the Virgin Mary seen in Bayou St. Louis. He had to go film it. They had a big fight and Claire locked herself in their room. In the kitchen, I was polishing the silver, a job I'd learned to do very well. We were going to have dinner with crystal and linens. I had my new Christmas dress from Jessica McClintock. Claire had already stuffed the goose, and picked up a real English trifle from Chalet Gourmet. We had tickets for the midnight Messiah at the Hollywood Bowl.
We didn't go. I ate ham sandwiches and watched It's a Wonderful Life. Claire came out and threw the goose in the trash. She poured herself small glasses of sherry, one after the other, and watched TV with me, crying on and off in the plaid bathrobe Ron had given her as an early Christmas present. I had a glass or two of the sweet liquor to keep her company, it was no worse than cough syrup. She finally took a couple of sleeping pills and passed out on the couch. She snored like a mower in high grass.
She slept through most of Christmas morning, then woke with a terrible headache at noon. We didn't talk about Ron, but she wouldn't touch the presents he left for her. I got a real fisherman sweater, a new set of acrylic paints, a big book of Japanese woodcuts, and silk pajamas like something Myrna Loy would wear in a Thin Man movie.
My present was small compared with the ones Ron bought her. "Here, open something."
"I don't want anything," she said from under her washcloth soaked in vinegar.
"I made it for you."
She pushed aside the washcloth, and despite the pain in her temples, slipped off the raffia ties, and opened the marbled paper wrapping I had made myself. Inside was a portrait of her, in a round wooden frame. She started to cry, then ran to the bathroom and threw up. I could hear her gagging. I picked up the picture, in charcoal, traced her high rounded forehead, the slope of fine bones, the sharp chin, arched brows.
"Claire?" I said through the bathroom door.
I heard water running and tried the door. It wasn't locked. She sat on the edge of the tub in her red plaid bathrobe, pale as winter, hand over her mouth, eyes turned toward the windows. She was blinking back tears and wouldn't look at me. She seemed to be collapsing at the center, one arm wrapped around her waist, as if keeping herself from breaking in two.