A Christmas Blizzard (5 page)

“Oh darling, I love you so much and I love our beautiful apartment and it is such a busy time of year, what with
Hansel and Gretel
at the Lyric and
A Child’s Christmas In Wales
and the Bach Christmas Oratorio and I just wonder if we couldn’t stay right here for Christmas. I could put on a muu-muu and make you a puu-puu platter with fresh pineapple and turn the heat up and play Hawaiian music and save on using all that aviation fuel that is so hard on the ozone layer and maybe invite some needy person such as your sister Elaine in Fort Wayne to come and share the bounty with us.”

“Darling,” said James. “You and I have always had such wonderful times in Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau. And an overheated apartment in Chicago is no equivalent. And Elaine is a mess. Let’s not spend the holiday doing intervention therapy.”

“We had beautiful times there,” she said. “I’ll remember them always. But this virus has affected me in strange ways and I feel a need to stay in the city and be with friends here. I don’t know anybody in Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau.”

“We could bring your friends with us. The plane can carry eight.”

“Oh darling—my friends have jobs. They can’t just pick up for a couple weeks and go to Hawaii. What’s wrong with Chicago, sweetie?”

He thought,
Maybe I need to tell her about the pump handle thing. What a huge thing it’s become in my life.

On the other hand, she might say, “Why didn’t you tell me that a long time ago?

“I will do anything if you’ll come to Kuhikuhikapapa’-u’maumau.”

She smiled. “Anything?”

“Anything. You name it.”

“Will you have a baby with me?”

Oh dear. The old subject that had come up so often in the past six years. The Mommy Moment.

He did not know anybody with children who was as happy as he was and that was the plain truth. Children meant the death of romance. The end of freedom, the beginning of indentured servitude. The stink, the noise, the sheer
immaturity
of children. Mrs. Sparrow wanted a baby and Mr. Sparrow wanted a good life.

He said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Kuhikuhikapapa’-u’maumau isn’t the greatest idea. We can do Christmas in Chicago if you like. Go to shows and stuff.”

“Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau is paradise. Sometimes I dream that I’m sleeping there with you and the windows are open and the white curtains are rippling and I can hear the surf. And then I get out of bed and there’s a baby in a crib, a baby with dark hair like mine and ocean breezes blowing over her.”

Let’s you and I spend Christmas out there. We can talk about children when we get there. Let’s pack a bag and call up the plane and go. It was a bad day the other day. So what? Everybody has a bad day. Forget it. We belong together.
That’s what he wanted to say.
We had some great Christmases out there. Remember? We’re good together.

She was giving him her intense loving look. “It’s Christmas. I wish we had a child to share it with.”

“I know you do.”

“I woke up last night and started crying, just thinking about it.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Of course you will. It’s just that time of month.”

She shot him a sharp look. “It’s not about that at all. Believe me.”

“So what should we tell all the employees waiting for us at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau?”

“The people at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau would be overjoyed if we had a baby.”

 

The Baby Problem came up the week before during the PMS argument about Mrs. Sparrow’s mother Marge who lived in Wauwatosa and called her daughter twice a day and with Christmas coming on she was good and weepy and remembering her late husband Mutt and how he loved his outdoor Christmas lights. He put them up around Halloween. Zipper lights, Santa dancing a hula with Frosty, Rudolph leading the Wise Men. A sign on the roof flashing
Hal
and then
le
and
lu
and
yeah
. Marge sat in her kitchen in the dark, the lights flashing outside, and drank a little Bailey’s Irish Cream and wept for the old days.

Fine. James liked Marge okay.

He assumed it was PMS. It had a PMSsy feel to it. PMS hit Joyce harder than it did most women. She lay in the dark weeping and listening to music and in the throes of hormone poisoning, she worked herself up into a state and thought (or thought she thought) that James thought her mother’s Christmas lights were stupid and garish. He had no such opinion! He had been careful not to form an opinion. The lights simply were what they were. He knew that in times of deep toxic PMS, he should show endless patience and kindness, and that particular night she emerged red-eyed from her office and said, “I’ve decided that we don’t need to invite my mother here for the holidays. She’s weird and depressing and you get depressed enough by Christmas without my mother adding to the problem.” He knew he should have said:
I love your mother and I enjoy seeing her—at Christmas or any other time. She is a dear and good woman. Let’s not talk about it now, darling. Let’s go to bed and I’ll hold you in my arms and kiss your neck.

What he actually said was, “If that’s what you’d like, fine. Maybe she has other plans.”

She said, “Well, that’s what you’d like, isn’t it?”

“If that’s what you want, darling,” he said.

She said, “I remember how irritated you got with her last year when she talked about how she couldn’t understand people objecting to Christmas trees in schools. You sat there, grinding your teeth.”

“I didn’t grind my teeth, I simply disagreed with her on constitutional grounds.”

“She has gone through so much and now she has her gluten problem . . .”

“I know—”

“To live your life knowing that if you should sit down next to someone who baked that morning, your throat will swell up and you have to find the emergency kit and before you can find it, maybe you’re on the floor, clutching at your throat and making strangled animal sounds and people are stepping around you and averting their eyes—”

“Darling, invite your mother here if you want her to come.”

And she broke down sobbing that she didn’t want her mother to come where she wasn’t wanted. He tried to reason with her. She said that she was not about to throw away her flesh and blood as if they were garbage. “My mother is seventy-eight, and I’m supposed to—what? throw her in the ditch? Because she’s an inconvenience? She’s my mom. And someday she’s not going to be there anymore and I’m gonna miss her so much. And I’m going to feel terrible that I never gave her a grandchild.” She blew her nose,
Breaughhhh.
“Oh James, is that why you refuse to give me a baby? The fear of heredity? That a baby would look like my mother?”

And she ran sobbing into the bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom and when he tapped on the door and begged her to come out, she said she needed to be alone right now. And she emerged an hour later in her white bathrobe and apologized in a chill tone of voice and took a sleeping pill and went to sleep at 9 o’clock. It sort of put a damper on the week. But now that was over and they’d moved on, he thought, to post-PMS, and he was ready to go. The plane was ready. The bags were packed and lined up by the service elevator. The staff at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau was awaiting their arrival. The sun was shining there. The mangoes and pineapple were picked.
They should have been happy!

He wanted to tell her,
This pump handle obsession has got me by the throat, babes. I am dying inside. I’d be sunk without you. Whether I were in Chicago or Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau.
But he was afraid of losing her. If she knew how bunged-up he was and crippled by dread and shame, maybe she’d decide he wasn’t worth sticking around for. Dump him and get a nice divorce settlement and be a matron of the arts.

 

 

H
is phone rang. It was his cousin Liz in Looseleaf.

“Do you have a minute?” she said.

“What is it?”

“You’re in a rush. I can hear it. Listen, I’ll send you a text message.”

“Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s nothing important so don’t get all het up.”

“About what?”

“Listen—Jimmy, I can tell I’ve upset you. I’ll call back when you settle down.”

“What’s going on?”

“So you didn’t hear about Daddy?”

“What about Uncle Earl?”

“I shouldn’t even say. He didn’t want you to know.”

“Know what?”

“It’s nothing. He’s old. Everything comes to an end. There are no guarantees. We’ll deal with it. You’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Tell me what’s going on, Liz.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. He had to go into the hospital on Tuesday.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Daddy told me not to call you because he knew you’d be upset. I’m sorry I opened my big mouth.”

James took the phone in his right hand and whacked the table with it four, five, six times, and then said, “Liz, if you don’t stop beating around the bush, I’m going to fly up there and give you a Dutch rub. Remember the Dutch rub, Liz? It stings. I can make you cry.”

Mrs. Sparrow got up from the table and whispered, “I have to go throw up now.”

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Are you sitting down?” said Liz.

“It’s my stomach flu,” said Mrs. Sparrow.

“I think you should consult a doctor,” he said.

“He already did,” said Liz. “Three of them.”

The thought of pump handles crossed his mind. Maybe Uncle Earl had wandered out in a daze and put his tongue on frozen iron and then yanked and the whole organ had been uprooted and he lay there bleeding, the snow around his head turning bright red, until a newsboy found him and now he was in a coma.

“His left eyeball fell out,” said Liz.

“His eyeball fell out????”

Mrs. Sparrow put her hand to her mouth and gagged.

“It was only the left one. He was watching the Lawrence Welk Christmas special on TV and Bobby and Betty did a beautiful tap dance to ‘O Holy Night’ and Daddy got weepy and rubbed his eye and it just fell out. It was hanging by the optic. He has skin cancer and it spread to his eyes. But they popped it right back in. He’s fine. No problem. He didn’t want me to call you and bother you.”

“Oh my god.”

“Anyway, could you call him and cheer him up a little? You know he thinks the sun rises and sets on you, and he still talks about the time you flew out here for his birthday—when was that? Ten years ago? Anyway, you mean the world to him, and frankly—I shouldn’t say this, but . . . I don’t know as he’ll make it to Christmas.” And then she broke down and cried and hung up. Not like Liz to fall apart like that, she being a member of the National Rifle Association and all.

And he called Buzz at the plane and said, “I’ve gotta fly up to Looseleaf. It’s not far from Bismarck. They built that regional airport there.”

He turned to Mrs. Sparrow. “My uncle Earl is dying. He has skin cancer and his left eyeball fell out. They think it’s in the last stage.”

“The happy uncle? The one who always made you laugh when you were growing up?”

“Yes. I’m flying up there today. I wish you’d come but I suppose you can’t.”

The question hung in the air—
Would you come with me?—
but then she felt very ill and headed for the bathroom. She came back a few minutes later looking wan and depleted. She was sorry. She would come to Hawaii if she could, it all depended on how she felt, and right now she felt like death on toast.

 

 

U
ncle Earl was the brightest penny in a handful of loose change. He was the happiest man in Looseleaf, who every day did all he could to put a sunny smile on the gloomy faces around him. He loved electricity. He was the superintendent of the county hydroelectric station, a spotless brick building alongside the Stanley River, and he believed in hydroelectric as God’s gift to man and the cheapest and most reliable source of power and if somebody’s lights went out in the middle of the night, Earl climbed into the truck and went off cheerfully to repair the problem. He was a fixer-upper and a friend to all and he was James’s salvation as a boy growing up in a desolate dusty town in an eternity of wheat and soybeans. He took James fishing summer mornings early when the mists hung over the water of Lake Winnesissebigosh and recited Poe and Longfellow and Edgar Guest.

He was a cheerful optimist in a family of cranks and grumblers and mournful men and sour women with hound-dog faces all aggrieved about money and cars and worried about kids poking their eyes out with sharp sticks and having to learn Braille and go around with a dog on a leash or the baby eating fistfuls of toilet bowl cleanser, or communists taking over, or a small plane crashing into the house, or the Christmas decorations strung above Main Street coming loose in a wind and fifty-pound angels falling down and killing someone. And of course the danger of Christmas tree fires. And there in this sinkhole of anxiety stood Uncle Earl, smiling, bowtied, neat moustache, hair parted in the middle, and a carnation in his lapel, and if a priest walked by, or a blond, or someone from Minnesota, Earl had a joke for you, or two if you showed interest—and fresh ones, not the tired old jokes you’d heard before. Out of sheer good will, he was apt to break into “Kathleen Mavourneen” or “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” He carried ginger snaps with him that had a real snap to them because ginger stimulates clear thinking. He’d make ginger ale punch and put on a record of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing: