Scarves were boring.
Something meaningful, I kept telling myself.
Finally there were just five shopping days left until Christmas. Denise and I were frantic.
“What does Justin like?” I asked Denise for the eighty-seventh time.
“I’ve told you,” she said. “Ships and sailing. And old Beatles albums. … And I don’t know which old Beatles albums he already has,” she said when she realized I was about to suggest getting him one.
I sighed, said good night, and hung up the phone.
That night I thought of a truly great present for Marc. The idea came to me in a dream. The next morning, I called Denise before I’d even eaten breakfast. “I know what to get Marc!” I exclaimed. “Come shopping with me after school today, okay?”
When school let out, Denise and I picked up Hopie, who was brimming over with smiles and art projects. “Look!” she cried, running across her classroom to meet us. “A macaroni chain! It’s better than the old one, the one I made at my other school. This one has sparkles.” Hopie turned to smile adoringly at Miss Donnelly, the provider of the sparkles, and Miss Donnelly smiled at Hopie, then at me.
Hopie had been having one good day after another since we got the tool-kit business straightened out. And Miss Donnelly had been very nice when I apologized to her.
“Okay, Sissy, let’s go,” I said. “We have one little Christmas present to buy before we go home.”
With the help of Denise, Miss Donnelly, and me, Hopie got dressed in her sweater, parka, snow pants, hat, mittens, extra socks, and boots, and waddled out the door.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To Look Again.”
“Look Again?” repeated Denise. “The used-book store?”
“Yup.”
At Look Again, which was a cramped, musty-smelling place with wall after wall of old, dusty books, I headed right for the D shelf in the fiction section and found exactly what I wanted. In fact, I found three of them—old copies of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
“A Christmas Carol?” asked Denise.
“To remind him of the beginning of … us. Because the play was sort of the beginning. I mean, I already liked him, but he didn’t know me until then.”
I looked through the books. Because they were used, they were cheap, but they were old and interesting. I chose one that had slick color pictures inside, and then took Hopie to look at the children’s books.
She was leafing through a dog-eared copy of The Cat in the Hat when Denise suddenly shouted, “I’ve got it! I’ve found the present for Justin!”
She ran over to us carrying an old print of a sailing ship. The print was yellowed and curling, but the ship was magnificent with its masts and sails.
“I can mount it for him,” said Denise. “Then it will look better. He can hang it on his bedroom wall.”
So Denise bought the ship print for Justin, and I bought the Dickens book for Marc and The Cat in the Hat for Hopie, who was very close to being able to read it herself. Then we walked home, feeling elated.
Two days later, school was out. And two days after that was Christmas Eve. I had invited Marc over for dinner, but he couldn’t make it because his family was going out to eat. However, he was coming over at five-thirty so we could exchange gifts.
At four forty-five I was sitting alone in the living room, which was unusual in the new little house. Mom was doing something behind closed doors in the den, Carrie was helping Hope to wrap her Christmas presents in our bedroom, and Brent was at Ellen’s house.
The living room was warm and Christmasy and smelled good. The tree was still fresh, and we had put sprigs of holly and yew branches on the mantlepiece. A stout red bayberry candle was burning on the coffee table. The dark room glowed with firelight, candlelight, and the tree lights. I had turned all the lamps off.
Beneath the tree were a few presents from friends and neighbors, but our family presents were hidden away under beds and in the dark depths of closets. Hopie still believed in Santa Claus. That was the last year she was a believer. That night our family would put out cookies for Santa, and listen for sleigh bells or reindeer hooves on the roof, and check the sky for magical sights.
I curled up on one end of the couch and enjoyed the warmth and peacefulness of the room. The only sounds were the logs snapping and crackling in the fireplace and the distant strains of Christmas carols from the radio Mom had with her in the den. I closed my eyes and pretended I was at 25 Bayberry. I could almost transport myself back to other times.
I pretended Dad was sitting next to me. He was drinking a glass of eggnog and telling me about Christmas in New York City. When I opened my eyes again, I felt impossibly sad. That had been too real.
I began to cry. I put my hands over my eyes and sobbed silently. I cried and cried and couldn’t stop, and even though the crying hurt terribly, I could feel some of the misery draining away.
Then I started to worry about Marc. I didn’t want to look too hideous when he got here. I kept checking my watch. At twenty minutes after five, I stood up, wiped my eyes, and went into the bathroom to wash my face. Then I put on some makeup. I didn’t look too bad.
The doorbell rang as I was zipping up the makeup case. I ran to answer it. “Hi!” I said to Marc. “Come on inside.”
Marc stepped into the front hall, brushing at his jacket. A light snow had just begun to fall. He took off his jacket, and I saw that underneath he was wearing a gray suit. He looked very handsome.
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “Mom just dropped me off. She’s going to pick me up in half an hour.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Do you want anything to drink? Do you like eggnog?”
Marc made a face, so I got Cokes for us instead.
We sat in the living room. I hoped everyone would stay where they were so Marc and I could be alone together.
“Your tree is nice,” Marc said.
“Thanks. We always go out to Thompson’s to chop one down.”
“You do? So do we!”
I knelt to take a red and green package from under the tree. “Here. This is for you.”
“Thanks,” said Marc. He pulled a small silver box out of the pocket of his jacket. “And this is for you.”
We smiled nervously at one another. Suddenly, I felt shy. “Open yours first,” I said.
Marc tore away the wrapping. “A Christmas Carol! Thanks, Liza. This is great.” Marc grinned. “Now open yours.”
I held the silver box in my hands for a moment, just looking at it. I wanted to remember it. Then I carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a thin silver bracelet. A note was attached to it. I glanced at Marc, then opened the note, which was written on a folded piece of notebook paper, just like the kind he sent me in Ms. Pressman’s class. The note read:
Wear this and think of me.
Love, Marc.
“Oh, I will,” I said. “Here. Can you put it on my wrist?”
Marc fastened the bracelet. Then he leaned forward and kissed me gently.
A car horn sounded outside.
“That’s Mom,” said Marc. “I have to go.”
My lips were tingling. “Already?”
“Yeah. We have reservations. I’ll call you tomorrow. Merry Christmas!”
Later than evening, the O’Hara family gathered in the living room. The O’Hara family. I guessed we could still call ourselves that.
I was going to celebrate Christmas after all, but with a lot less enthusiasm than usual. At the time, Marc seemed more important than Christmas.
Christmas or not, I was feeling warm and cozy. The fire was going, our stockings were hung, and Hopie was holding The Night Before Christmas in her lap, but she had other, more important things on her mind.
“How can Santa come down the chimney if there’s a fire in the fireplace?” she asked.
Mom squirmed. “Because he’s magic, honey.”
“How does his pack fit down the chimney? And how can Santa fit
enough presents for all the children in the world in one pack?”
Hope had an awful lot of questions this year, and they were more logical than the ones she used to ask. It was the beginning of the end of believing.
Then Hope changed the subject. “Okay, let’s read.” She patted the book. “Who will read it?”
Good question. There was no more Dad.
“Who do you want to read it?” Mom asked her.
Hope looked pained. Then she giggled. “Fifi,” she said and stuck the book between Fifi’s huge paws.
Fifi sniffed at it.
We laughed.
Then Hope handed the book to me. “I want Liza to read it.”
“Me?” Oh, no. …
Hope crawled across Brent and plopped herself in my lap. I settled back, trying to relax, the scent of Hope’s freshly shampooed hair filling my nose. Next to me, wedged between my leg and the arm of the couch, Mouse dozed. On my other side were Brent and Fifi. Carrie sat at my feet playing with Dr. J. Across the room, Mom was curled up in an armchair.
I took a deep breath, then opened the book.
“’Twas the night before Christmas,” I began, “and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a …”
“Mouse!” Hopie supplied.
“The stockings were hung by the chimney with care …”
I heard my voice reading on, and for a second—just a second—I was positive that Dad was in the room with us, somewhere, enjoying our Christmas. It was a very comforting feeling.
Later, when we were going to bed, Mom leaned over to kiss me good night, and I said, “When are you going to the cemetery again?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, sweetheart. Why?”
“I think I’ll go with you.”
Epilogue
WE SURVIVED CHRISTMAS.
We survived winter.
And that spring, good things happened for all of us. Mom was accepted into a special program at the community college, where she could take business courses as well as her courses in educational administration. She said that in a couple of years she’d be qualified for a really top-flight job and could help out much more with college tuitions.
Brent took Ellen Myers to his senior prom. He graduated from Neuport High as the valedictorian of his class, and he was granted a full scholarship to Princeton University. I added an off-center picture of him in his cap and gown to the special photo album I kept under my phone.
Carrie suffered through Ms. Saunders and was promoted to the seventh grade. She got Mr. Landi for English class. More important, she developed her first crush on a boy—Joshua Sommerville, Justin’s younger brother.
Hopie lost her front tooth, taught herself to read, and made a best friend. By the end of the year, she was doing so well that Miss Donnelly sent her home with a special report card, suggesting that Hopie skip first grade. But Mom said no. Hope was smart, but she didn’t need any more changes, and she did need to be with children her own age.
And I wound up eighth grade with straight A’s and steeled myself to enter high school. Denise and Justin stopped hanging out together, but Marc took me to our graduation dance. We danced all evening and promised to see each other every single day of the long, hot summer ahead.
Two days after that, I visited the cemetery for the first time that summer. I threw out all the dead flowers around Dad’s grave and replaced them with stalks of gladioluses from our garden and a handful of dandelions from Hope. Then I sat by Dad’s stone and brought him up to date.
“It’s been more than a year now,” I reminded him. “I’m starting high school in September. Brent got into Princeton. I guess you know all that.”
I thought for a moment. “It was a long time before I could talk to you like this. I thought I’d never be able to do it. But now I can. When you were with us, I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be without you. And when you were first gone, it was so horrible I couldn’t deal with your grave or anything. But now that I can talk to you, I feel like you’re with us again. I wonder if I’ll always feel that. With you, without you. With you and without you. I don’t know the answer, Dad, but the love will always be there.”
A Personal History by Ann M. Martin
I was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. I grew up there with my parents and my sister, Jane, who was born two years later. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father was an artist, a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other magazines.
When I was younger, my parents created an imaginative atmosphere for my sister and me. My dad liked circuses and carnivals and magic, and as a teenager, he had been an amateur magician. My father would often work at home, and I would stand behind his chair and watch him draw. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed making greeting cards.
My parents were very interested in my sister’s and my artistic abilities, and our house was filled with art supplies—easels, paints, pastels, crayons, and stacks of paper. Coloring books were allowed, but only truly creative pursuits were encouraged, and I took lots of art classes.
Our house was as full of pets as it was of art supplies. We always had cats, and, except for the first two years of my life, we always had more than one. We also had fish, guinea pigs, and turtles, as well as mice and hamsters.
When I think about my childhood I think of pets and magic and painting and imaginary games with my sister. But there is another activity I remember just as clearly, and that’s reading. I loved to read. I woke up early so I could read in bed before I went to school. I went to bed early so I could read before I fell asleep. And from this love of books and reading came a love of writing.
In 1977 I graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. I taught elementary school for a year, which is what I had wanted to do, and used children’s literature in the classroom. I loved teaching, but by the end of the school year I had decided that what I really wanted to do was work on children’s books. So I moved to New York City, entered the publishing field, and at the same time, began writing seriously. In 1983, my first book, Bummer Summer, was published.
In 1985, after the release of my first three books—Bummer Summer, Inside Out, and Stage Fright—an editor at Scholastic asked if I’d be interested in writing a series about babysitting. She had a title in mind—the Baby-Sitters Club—and she was thinking of a miniseries consisting of four books. So I created four characters: Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, and planned to write one book featuring each girl. The series was supposed to start in 1986 and end in 1987. Instead, it ended fourteen years later in 2000, with over two hundred titles and four related series, including Dawn’s spinoff, California Diaries.
Saying good-bye to the Baby-Sitters Club was sad. It had been nice not to have to let go of the characters at the end of each book. But by 2000, I had found that I wanted more time to spend working on other kinds of stories (though I did return to the series to write a prequel, titled The Summer Before, in 2010).
I felt myself drawn to the 1960s, the most important decade of my childhood. I think this interest was due in large part to the fact that my mother’s diaries came into my possession, and I spent a good deal of time reading them, especially the ones that covered the 1960s. The next thing I knew, I had written three books set in that decade. The second, A Corner of the Universe, is the most personal of all the books I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my mother’s side of the family, and in a way, it started on a summer day in 1964 when I learned that my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, who had died shortly before my parents first met, had been mentally ill. Stephen was the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe. The book won a Newbery Honor in 2003.
The life I lead now is not terribly different from the one I led as a child, except that I no longer live in Princeton. I moved to the Catskill Mountains in New York a number of years ago. Animals are still very important to me. Influenced by the many stray cats I’ve known, and inspired by my parents, who used to do volunteer work for Princeton?
??s animal shelter, I became a foster caregiver for an animal rescue group in my community. I also still have cats of my own, and only recently said good-bye to my dog, Sadie, the sweetest dog ever. She was the inspiration for my book A Dog’s Life.
Although I grew up to become a writer, my interest in art never left, except that now I’m more interested in crafts, and especially in sewing and needlework. I like to knit, but I most enjoy sewing, especially making smocked or embroidered dresses. And of course, I continue to write. In 2014, the fourth Doll People book, The Doll People Set Sail, will be published, as well as Rain Reign, a novel about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome and her beloved dog, Rain.
Here I am as a newborn in the hospital in August 1955.
Me at age two at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957.
This is the house where I grew up on Dodds Lane in Princeton.
My family always had cats—and except for when I was in college, I’ve always had at least one. This is a photo of Kiki, Sweetheart, Tigger, and Fluffy from my childhood home (Kiki is a little hard to see).
Reading at bedtime with my mother (and cats Sweetheart and Honey) when I was about seven, circa 1962.
On the left is my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, with my grandfather and my uncle Rick. Stephen was mentally ill and the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe.
Graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1977.
Here I am at home in New York City in 1989, surrounded by fan mail.
This is my house in New York, around 1993. It recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday.
Wildlife plays a larger role in my life now than when I was young. I will often find deer, wild turkeys, and garden toads in my backyard. Here is a black bear investigating my hose!