Lee's new book, 
Christmas Memories
Do we ever get beyond the images of childhood? The way we first hear language, for instance (old woman on a porch, talking on and on as it gets dark). Or how mama smells (loose powder, cigarette, Chanel No. 5).
|
It seemed like everybody in the whole world dropped by to sit a spell and to see what she was up to. And sure enough, there was Mama, wearing a pretty apron over a pretty dress (she was the kind of woman who dressed up every day) turning out batch after batch of her famous fudge. She'd already made the fruitcakes, of course, and now they sat in the cold corner, drenched in rum. (Does anybody really like fruitcake? I doubt it. But I grew up believing that fruitcake at Christmas was the law.) Carrot cakes, sherry poundcakes and pecan pies got wrapped in tinfoil, then tied up in bows.
If the back doorbell rang, it would be a man named George or a man named Arnold, drunk and wanting money, which I got to give them if my mama had her hands in something, which she usually did.
My parents gave lots of presents; Daddy was always worried about giving everybody "enough." Besides their many friends, we were literally surrounded by relatives--they lived on either side of us and up the road from our house in the Levisa River bottom, and all over town. Delivering the gifts took three days because, of course, Mama and I had to sit and talk for a while at every house we went to.
Daddy used to order oysters at Christmastime, especially for Mama who'd been born and raised on Chincoteague Island, all the way across Virginia. We had them in the shell, fried, in fritters, scalloped . . . Like the fruitcakes, they were mainly something to put up with, in my opinion. What I liked was the ambrosia and the floating island for dessert on Christmas Day.
We ate at least one holiday meal at the big round table in the dining room at my grandparents' house, with my grandmother presiding blue-haired and ethereal above the snowy linen. I used to drop my napkin on purpose just to lean down and look at the huge dark claws on the pedestal base of the table--cruel, strong, and evil, evil. I'd come up flushed and thrilled.
Christmas was a time for cousins, who'd arrive next door from southside Virginia with such long names that it'd take their mother forever to call them in out of the snow--"Martha Fletcher Bruce! Anne Vicars Bruce!" And it was a time for visiting the neighbors, such as the sophisticated Trivetts who owned the pool where I'd learned to swim, and who might be found eating unimaginable foreign things, or the Yates or the Belchers or the Bevins, or my best friend, Martha Sue, who lived right up the road in a brick ranch house where her mother made the best cream gravy in the world and her father played the guitar. I thought I owned that neighborhood; an only child, loved and indulged, I thought I owned the world.
My relationship with my pretty redheaded first cousins Randy and Melissa was more complicated. I liked them, but mainly I wanted to be them--to belt out "I Enjoy Being a Girl" the way Melissa did in that Rotary Talent Show, to be as smart and exemplary as Randy. I knew that Jesus liked her better than me.
I aspired to sainthood in those days. I might have settled for a little miracle, or a vision, or at least a sign. I remember one Christmas Eve staring fixedly at Missy, my Pekingese, for hours, because an old granny-woman had told me that God speaks through animals on Christmas Eve. He didn't say a word through Missy.
But nevermind, I was all eaten up with holiness anyway, excited by the holly in the church, the candles, the carols and the Christmas pageant that we acted out at the altar again and again, wearing our bathrobes, until we were too old to be in it.
There were not enough boys in that little church, so I had to be a Wise Man, while Randy and Melissa and Frances Williams got to be angels. I wanted to be an angel so bad. But would I ever fit through the eye of the needle? Didn't I have too much stuff?
At school we drew names, and I gave gifts to kids from up in the hollers, saving my allowance to buy them the nicest things--Evening in Paris perfume, Avon dusting powder, a pen and pencil set in a clear plastic case. In return I got a hooked potholder once, and once a red plastic barrette.
On snowy nights around Christmas, I used to sit out by myself for hours, hearing the wild dogs bark way up in the mountains, listening hard for the high sweet song of angels. I never heard them either. But finally I'd go in the house when my daddy came home from the dime store.
We never left on Christmas Eve until the store was closed, cash counted and put in the safe, the last layaway doll picked up--and if you couldn't pay, which happened often enough when the mines weren't working, he'd give it away.
In early October, I got to go with him to the Ben Franklin Toy Fair in Baltimore, where we'd order the toys for Christmas. I was the doll consultant. All the kids in town thought I could get stuff in the dime store free--whatever I wanted--but this wasn't true. I couldn't even get a handful of nonpareils free from Mildred at the candy counter. "You pay for everything in this world," my daddy said.
In those days, in that town, it was a sin to sell on the Sabbath; but from Thanksgiving until Christmas, every Sunday, I got to go downtown to "work" in the dime store, helping Daddy and the "girls" fix things up for the week ahead. My job was the dolls. I got to dust them and fluff up their dresses and stand them up just so . . . I particularly liked to raise their arms a bit, so they'd be ready to hug any little girl they got on Christmas morning.
I gave them all names and biographies (dire, complicated lives they'd led before they ended up in this Ben Franklin Store in Grundy, Va.) and made up long, long stories about what would happen to them once they'd left my care. When I learned to write, I worte these stories down.
Weren't these Christmases idyllic? Wasn't my childhood wonderful? Yes and no. It's like that awful claw beneath the festive table at my grandmother's house. For there were terrible resentments and old unhealed wounds right beneath the surface in that family, as in all families. Somebody was always going off to "take a cure," while others were always referred to as "kindly nervous." In the parlance of today, my daddy was a workaholic.
Our family was dysfunctional . . . Is any family not?
I would never become an angel, or even a saint. Instead I would grow up wild and marry young and settle down. We'd do the best we could. Then we'd divorce, and I'd feel "kindly nervous" myself. I'd remarry. I'd try like crazy. (We all do, don't we? We try like crazy.)
My beloved new husband and I would form our own new blended dysfunctional family. And even now that we've been married for 10 years, I realize how hard divorce always is for kids, no matter what all those self-help books say. Though the kids are all grown up now, they lost some big bright pieces out of their childhoods, out of their lives.
For I could never give them what I had: my daddy in a red bow tie standing forever in front of his store; my mother forever in the kitchen wearing Fire and Ice lipstick and high heels; the cousins next door and across the street; Jesus right up the road in the little stone Methodist Church.
My mother died in 1988, and the church is a parking lot now. My father had a stroke on the last day of his going-out-of-business sale in 1992 and died a few days later. The dime store is still boarded up. I'm 50, an age that has brought no wisdom. I don't understand anything anymore, though I'm still in there. Still trying like crazy.
For we do the best we can; we go on forming our own traditions. Just this past Thanksgiving, for instance, we held our 10th annual Wild Turkey Classic Softball Game, for children of all ages, dogs and relatives. In the first inning, my husband practically had his glove on a line drive when it was scooped up by a black Lab. This game is a lot of fun. It's also become a reunion.
For Christmas, I've made sour cream poundcake, fudge, party mix and roasted pecans. I have the Christmas turkey and oysters. But sometime today--around the tree or at the table--there will come a moment when the conversation spontaneously ceases while we pause, and remember . . . one of those little silences that sometimes fall upon us all, angels passing.