Domestic Affairs (18 page)

She came over one night around dinnertime, a few days before she was due to start working for us, and mentioned how much she loved hamburgers, so naturally we asked her to join us. She began telling us stories about her former employer—how he cursed at her, that he knew jujitsu and could kill you with his little finger. She told about a woman whose children she cared for once, out in Ohio, who drank too much, and (when the children were out of earshot) a man she knew who sexually abused his stepdaughter. During dinner, I noticed, Charlie kept trying to say something, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Same with Willy. There was something about Lydia that simply filled up every inch of space in the room. After she left, no one said anything except Audrey, who remarked, “Boy, it’s really going to be different around here.”

Later, once we had the children asleep and the kitchen cleaned up, Steve and I lay silent in bed for a long time: both of us staring at the ceiling, both (I knew) thinking the same thing. “We’ve made a mistake,” I told Steve. “Let’s not do anything hasty,” he said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

But in the morning, he had to go off to work early, and then Lydia was on the phone to me again. She’d seen an ad in the paper for a jungle gym someone in a town just forty miles south of us was giving away to the first person who’d claim it. Maybe we should drive over there and get it? Meanwhile, she had another carload of stuff to bring over. Her former employer’s girlfriend was moving into her old room, at her present house, and it was really uncomfortable being there. The employer was cursing at Lydia. The girlfriend didn’t like Lydia’s corned beef and cabbage. “She’s not a very nice woman,” Lydia whispered into the phone. “And I think the two of them are in trouble with the IRS.”

A friend of mine had been over, visiting, when Lydia called. After I hung up, I told her what was going on. How I had begun to feel as though Lydia was not simply moving into our house, she was taking over our lives. That instead of freeing up my energy and concentration for my family, Lydia had me more frazzled and preoccupied than before. My privacy was gone. My home no longer felt entirely my own.

“I’ll watch the children for you,” said my friend. “Drive over and tell her it won’t work, before you weaken.”

So that’s what I did. And Lydia, to her credit, was neither angry nor hostile. Only very very sad—and so, of course, was I. By the time I got home again, the phone was already ringing: Lydia again, holding the receiver up, so I could hear her former employer’s girlfriend yelling in the background: “Don’t you bring your damn junk back here. You’re not sleeping here tonight.”

We spent the next three days moving Lydia’s funny, lovable, sad accumulation of possessions out, to the home of a friend who said he’d take her in until she found another job. And while, a week and a half before, it had been all I could do to manage my own household and my problems, now I lay awake, trying to think of where Lydia might go, how we might help her find another job. In the end she called to say she’d found one, housekeeping again, for an old lady in another state. She came by yesterday to pick up the last of her stuff. We hired a new babysitter—a lovely young woman named Joanie, who will not live here with us and can’t start for a few weeks because she’s getting married. And will probably leave us before very long, as good babysitters nearly always do, to start a family of her own.

One other thing: The day after I told Lydia she didn’t have the job after all, the starter motor on our Plymouth Valiant died, just as she’d predicted it would. Of course, she’d also predicted—joking—that we’d never get rid of her. And I guess it was the fear that she might be right about that one too that led us both (two women, almost equally needy, in very different ways) to where we both are now.

I
LOVE HOLIDAYS, AND
Christmas most of all. I am always reminding Steve of that. Usually I’m in tears as I tell him. It’s December 23. Two
A.M.
I am standing in the middle of our kitchen, surrounded by bits of wrapping paper and three-quarters-finished doll clothes. I am forming marzipan fruits. I have my fifth batch of cookies in the oven. I have been writing notes inside Christmas cards featuring a cheerful family group photo. I have just exploded: That Steve doesn’t help me enough. That the children never pick up their messes. That I haven’t sat down all day. Steve (who has been sleeping, and got up to suggest that I call it a night) says, “Next year, promise me we’ll have a simple Christmas. Maybe we should just take off to some warm island. You know how you get about the holidays.” But I love holidays, I wail. And Christmas most of all.

It’s just that Christmas encourages excess, and even in an off month like March or August, I am prone to excess. I want so much for the holiday to be perfect (same goes for my children’s birthdays, and to a lesser degree, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter). And the strain of pulling off that much happiness, on schedule, sometimes drives me right over the brink.

So, though we have had some wonderful holidays around here, we have also had some awful nights before and days after. Fights, tears, accusations, recriminations. I am determined to bake not only a pumpkin pie but also apple and pecan, and also a Buche de Noel. I drive a hundred miles to buy Steve the gift of a Caribbean steel drum. Then come home tired, angry because he hasn’t emptied the dishwasher.

I learned my tendency toward Christmas hysteria early: from my Jewish mother (who, having been deprived of Christmas for twenty-five years, celebrated with a secular frenzy) and from my lapsed Protestant father, who chose the month of December to sink into an annual melancholy over his childhood, his vanished religion, and the mockery that we were making of that religion under our roof. Then as now the tree became the focus of our unease. Never able to find one quite perfect enough for our living room, our perfect Christmases, my father and I used to gather branches discarded from other trees and graft them onto ours to fill in gaps no one else would have noticed. The first Christmas after my parents’ divorce, when for the first time in my eighteen years I bought our family tree alone, I ended up coming home not with a single tree but with four. “We’ll make a Christmas forest,” I told my sister. Hours later—the trees mounted at last, and filling most of our living room—we stood there and surveyed the interior landscape that was meant to elevate us from our gloom (and of course didn’t). “A Christmas hedge,” said my sister dourly. And naturally, once again I cried.

When our parents divorced and my mother gave up Christmas, I was the one who inherited the family’s huge collection of ornaments. (My sister lived too far away to transport them, but also, I think, she wanted no part of the tradition they represented.) So now, every December, with a family of my own, I unpack the familiar balls and angels, elves and Santas and birds with spun-glass tails, and I try to see them in part as reminders of seasonal hazards. The children get excited, of course, but the one most apt to lose control over the holidays is not any of them.

These days, I cry less over Christmas, my birthday, and the four-week period, from the end of February to the end of March, when all three children celebrate their birthdays. I think I realized a while back that during all holidays I’m in danger of being like the runner who wins the race but expires at the finish line. I can’t say that I have my holiday madness under control, but I’m learning.

The first crisis of our holiday season occurs the day we get our tree. Steve wants to go out on our land and cut one down. In principle, so do I. I love the thought of our expedition into the woods. Steve carrying the hatchet, and our snowsuited offspring trailing alongside. I believe in the lessons such an expedition teaches them—about self-sufficiency, the value of things money can’t buy, cultivating a watchful eye in the woods, appreciating the infinite variety of ways an evergreen can grow. … I even like the difficulty, after the tree is cut, of carrying it back up the long hill to our house, and the way that walk reminds our children that some of the best things in life are not easily come by. In fact, there is just one thing I don’t like about procuring our Christmas tree by what Audrey calls the olden-days method. And that’s the tree itself.

As anyone who’s ever cut uncultivated trees in a forest can tell you, they tend to be scrawny, and the grafting operation necessary to remedy the situation would involve so much drilling into the trunk as to leave very little trunk at all. Even the best of olden-days trees, when viewed in a stand in the living room, generally end up looking pretty forlorn. Also (with their fewer branches and numerous gaps), they never hold enough ornaments or lights. There’s no concealing the wires, and no opportunity to hide a single mysterious blue blinker deep within the greenery, because the greenery just isn’t there to hide it with. I speak from experience: Our household has gone the natural route for six of the last seven Christmases.

Here’s how it goes. The day (usually a Saturday) dawns bright and full of promise. The sun is shining. There is a cover of snow on the ground—enough to put us all in the holiday mood, but not so much as to become a downright nuisance. By now the children have probably been clamoring to get a tree (everyone else has theirs) for so long that when Steve announces today’s the day no one even complains about missing cartoons.

Steve sharpens his hatchet, I stuff my pockets with emergency animal crackers and set out the popcorn and cocoa for our return. After first determining that everyone has indeed paid a visit to the bathroom, we dress our two younger children in long johns, flannel shirts, sweaters, and snowpants, leaving Audrey to get suited up on her own. Steve is likely, then, to put a hand on my shoulder or stroke the tense muscles at the back of my neck and ask (in the calming voice of a yogi) whether I’m ready for this. “It’s only a tree,” I recite. “Right,” he says. “Only a tree. Only a tree.” And then we venture forth.

Of course, it always ends up that halfway down the path to our woods someone announces that he or she needs to go to the bathroom. But I have taught myself the trick of pretending, at moments like these, that Dr. Spock is standing directly behind me, judging entrants for the Mother of the Year Award. So I simply smile, reach for whatever small person is now dancing wildly in the snow beside me, and carry him (usually the person is male) back up the hill and into the house. We peel off the layers, pay a visit to the toilet, and begin our odyssey all over again. Still smiling, and maybe singing Christmas carols. But underneath my own layers of wool and flannel, my nerves, and my calm resolve, have already begun the irreversible process of first fraying and then unraveling altogether.

We reach the woods. Charlie (who has refused to put on his mittens because if he did he couldn’t suck his thumb) is now complaining of cold hands. Willy is hungry—but I’m ready for that one. He doesn’t like hippopotamus animal crackers, he tells me, and when I am finally able (on the fourth try) to produce a tiger, it turns out that one of the legs has broken off. We have a brief showdown. (I threaten to toss out the entire stock of cookies. Audrey and Charlie plead with their brother to take the broken cookie. Steve wisely disappears down the path.) Willy accepts his cookie. Charlie puts on his mitten. Dr. Spock gives me a silent, admiring pat on the back (asking me if I’d like to help him with the chapter on two-year-olds, for his next edition).

Steve calls to us, “I think I’ve found one.” We hurry to look. It’s a thicker tree than the usual forest-grown variety, to be sure, but short. I shake my head firmly. “But this one would be perfect for my room,” says Audrey, who promises to carry the tree back to the house, all by herself, if we’ll just let her have it. Steve chops it down for her. “Look, Char,” says Audrey to her brothers, “I get my very own tree.” It’s not hard to guess what happens next. We have two small trees cut now (Willy and Charlie having been persuaded to share theirs). But the big tree, the tree of my dreams, is still hidden somewhere within these fifty snowy acres, if only we knew where.

We trudge around a good deal, looking. Steve nominates half a dozen candidates. As gently as possible, I veto every one. Now the edge is in Steve’s voice. Pointing to a thirty-foot-high pine, with a beautiful thick top, he asks me whether I’d like him to cut that one down for us. After a moment’s consideration, I say yes, I think that one might just do. It turns out Steve was kidding.

Meanwhile the children are getting cold. They have made their snow angels. They’ve examined deer footprints. They’ve polished off the animal crackers, and a few icicles to boot. “Where’s our house?” demands Willy—and I know that question means things are about to go downhill fast.

So I allow myself to believe that the next pine Steve nominates for this year’s tree is a reasonably good one. As he’s chopping it down, he mutters something about turning this side toward the wall. But we’re all singing, Audrey’s making plans for our gingerbread house, Charlie’s giving Willy his refresher course on Santa and the elves, and I am feeling—despite the temperature outside—warm and good, and something else. Mature. Able to put childish things behind me. In touch, at last, with the true meaning of Christmas.

We haul the tree, and our children’s trees, and our children, up the long hill to our house. We lean the tree outside for a few hours, to shake off the snow, while the children and I carry the boxes of ornaments (many of them ones I can remember from when I was Audrey’s age) down from our attic. Steve saws a few inches off the bottom and snips some branches. He carries the tree inside and stands it up in the customary place. We step back to admire it. (Willy, too young to remember much of this from last year, is simply dumbfounded to see a tree in our house. The vision seems to bring on a general questioning of all the rules he had, up till now, imagined were unbreakable. Suddenly he’s jumping off the sofa, throwing popcorn in the air. Announcing he’d like to bring in some dirt, too. Charlie has fallen asleep, meanwhile. And Audrey just wants to start putting on the tinsel.)