It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.
“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.
“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”
This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.
“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”
“Mother.”
“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”
“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”
“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”
“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”
“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”
It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.
Early the next morning she was awakened—rewarded—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.
For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket—a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier—and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.
“It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.
Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.
“Chip will be here tomorrow,” Enid repeated. “Isn’t that wonderful news? Aren’t you happy?”
Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. “Well,” he said. “If he comes.”
“He said he’d be here tomorrow afternoon,” Enid said. “Maybe, if he’s not too tired, he can go to The Nutcracker with us. I still have six tickets.”
“I am dubious,” Alfred said.
That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.
Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were “addicted” to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck’s anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid frantic by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.
Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn’t welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.
Outside the kitchen window, snowflakes from an eerily blue-clouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah’s and were on the menu for tonight.
For months she’d imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.
Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary’s where she kept gifts and party favors. She’d finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she’d bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook, Foods of Morocco, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was:
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 on
e-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.
Alfred began to bellow her name from upstairs.
“Uch, Gary,” she said, “he’s stuck in the tub again. You go help him. I won’t do it anymore.”
Gary dried his hands extremely thoroughly. “Why isn’t he using the shower like we talked about?”
“He says he likes to sit down.”
“Well, tough luck,” Gary said. “This is a man whose gospel is taking responsibility for yourself.”
Alfred bellowed her name again.
“Go, Gary, help him,” she said.
Gary, with ominous calm, smoothed and straightened the folded dish towel on its rack. “Here are the ground rules, Mother,” he said in the courtroom voice. “Are you listening? These are the ground rules. For the next three days, I will do anything you want me to do, except deal with Dad in situations he shouldn’t be in. If he wants to climb a ladder and fall off, I’m going to let him lie on the ground. If he bleeds to death, he bleeds to death. If he can’t get out of the bathtub without my help, he’ll be spending Christmas in the bathtub. Have I made myself clear? Apart from that, I will do anything you want me to do. And then, on Christmas morning, you and he and I are going to sit down and have a talk—”
“ENID.” Alfred’s voice was amazingly loud. “SOMEBODY’S AT THE DOOR!”
Enid sighed heavily and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Al, it’s Gary.”
“Can you help me?” came the cry.
“Gary, go see what he wants.”
Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”
Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to work a knot of pain out of her hip.
“Al,” she said, entering the bathroom, “I can’t help you out of the tub, you have to figure that out yourself.”
He was sitting in two inches of water with his arm extended and his fingers fluttering. “Get that,” he said.
“Get what?”
“That bottle.”
His bottle of Snowy Mane hair-whitening shampoo had fallen to the floor behind him. Enid knelt carefully on the bath mat, favoring her hip, and put the bottle in his hands. He massaged it vaguely, as though seeking purchase or struggling to remember how to open it. His legs were hairless, his hands spotted, but his shoulders were still strong.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning at the bottle.
Whatever heat the water had begun with had dissipated in the December-cool room. There was a smell of Dial soap and, more faintly, old age. Enid had knelt in this exact spot thousands of times to wash her children’s hair and rinse their heads with hot water fro
m a 1½-quart saucepan that she brought up from the kitchen for that purpose. She watched her husband turn the shampoo bottle over in his hands.
“Oh, Al,” she said, “what are we going to do?”
“Help me with this.”
“All right. I’ll help you.”
The doorbell rang.
“There it is again.”
“Gary,” Enid called, “see who that is.” She squeezed shampoo into her palm. “You’ve got to start taking showers instead.”
“Not steady enough on my feet.”
“Here, wet your hair.” She paddled a hand in the tepid water, to give Alfred the idea. He splashed some on his head. She could hear Gary talking to one of her friends, somebody female and chipper and St. Judean, Esther Root maybe.
“We can get a stool for the shower,” she said, lathering Alfred’s hair. “We can put a strong bar in there to hold on to, like Dr. Hedgpeth said we should. Maybe Gary can do that tomorrow.”
Alfred’s voice vibrated in his skull and on up through her fingers: “Gary and Jonah got in all right?”
“No, just Gary,” Enid said. “Jonah has a high, high fever and terrible vomiting. Poor kid, he’s much too sick to fly.”
Alfred winced in sympathy.
“Lean over now and I’ll rinse.”
If Alfred was trying to lean forward, it was evident only from a trembling in his legs, not from any change in his position.
“You need to do much more stretching,” Enid said. “Did you ever look at that sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth?”
Alfred shook his head. “Didn’t help.”
“Maybe Denise can teach you how to do those exercises. You might like that.”
She reached behind her for the water glass from the sink. She filled it and refilled it at the bathtub’s tap, pouring the hot water over her husband’s head. With his eyes squeezed shut he could have been a child.