Family and Other Accidents (4 page)

cold without
snow

Jack asks Mona to move in the day the Ronco food dehydrator arrives in the mail. It makes sense—she sleeps over four or five nights a week, she's been dropping hints about her lease expiring for months, and her panties are overrunning his sock drawer. Then there's the disturbing discovery he made last fall when his brother left for college: Jack doesn't like being alone. The nights Mona doesn't stay, he can't sleep in the echoey house that had belonged to his parents, so he watches infomercials into obscene hours of the morning, showing up at the firm the next day with eggplant blotches under his eyes. The moment of clarity comes when he opens the food dehydrator box, the first of five $19.95 installments already charged to his American Express card, and looks absently at the machine in his kitchen where nothing but coffee was made even before his mother dropped dead three years ago. No good is coming from solitude.

So the weekend before Christmas Jack rents a cargo van to move Mona's clothes and books and CDs; they leave behind the semi-disposable furniture from Value City she got when she started at the
Plain Dealer
after college. While she's loading boxes, Mona's tennis shoes slide on water frozen in the gutters. Her fat red ponytail bouncing behind her, she's just so clean, like girls in douche commercials. And Jack feels good about her move-in until she suggests they get a Christmas tree while they have the van.

“I'm not really a tree kind of guy,” Jack says. “I'm more of a pretending-to-be-Jewish kind of guy.”

“Are you serious?”

“I'm an attorney, I live in Beachwood.” Jack smiles. “I've been getting Hanukkah cards from my neighbors for years.”

Amber eyes wide, Mona looks bewildered and adorable, much younger than twenty three, and he feels obliged to say more even though he has already explained that major holidays for him usually involve exchanging unwrapped gifts with his brother over Chinese takeout.

“I'm not Scrooge,” Jack sighs. “It's just bad timing; we've got work and my brother's in town.”

“I know, I'm sorry.” Mona apologizes because she apologizes for everything—the horrible alarm clock gong on mornings she has to wake up first, traffic jams on 271, paper cuts he gets at work. “But it hasn't snowed, and there's no tree, so it doesn't really feel like Christmas to me yet.”

Jack shakes his head; that drummer boy song is playing on the radio for the nine-billionth time, and every store window in the greater Cleveland area has a frosting of spray-can snow.

“We'll be at your parents' house in a few days.” He puts his hand on the knee of her jeans. “Won't they have a tree?”

“My parents have a great tree.” Mona lays an always-cold hand on top of his. “But, I don't know, I thought it might be nice to have one of our own.”

Suddenly Jack has a weird vision of what might happen if he let the van drift into the crowded right lane of the highway. It's so clear he can hear the glass and metal bust up all around Mona.

         

Two days later he's trying to push her off a balcony. His hands on her pale throat, her eyes wide and confused. Even as it happens, Jack is pretty sure it's a dream—he's not crazy about heights, the balcony looks suspiciously like the one from
Rear Window
, and he can't think of a reason he'd try to kill Mona. Still he jerks awake, heart knocking against his ribs. Her head is on his chest, arms draped across his stomach, throat seemingly unmarred.

Sliding out from under her, he goes downstairs to the living room and flips through channels—sitcom holiday episodes on Nick at Nite, soft-core porn on Cinemax,
Jaws
, which he has seen half a dozen times because it's always on TNT late-night—until he gets to paid programming. He's watching a show about a sit-up machine shaped like a miniature fighter jet when Connor gets back from his high school girlfriend's.

“Jenny says hi,” Connor says, black hair a mess, lipstick smudges on thin cheeks.

Jack nods and gestures to the television, where an enormous man, round muscles ready to pop through oiled skin, presses the fighter jet against his midsection and does crunches. “Think that thing actually works?”

“Aren't you going to work at some ungodly hour?” Connor tosses Jack the car keys. Still in his red ski jacket, he moves an overstuffed pillow and sits next to Jack on the couch. “Shouldn't you go to bed?”

“I was asleep, I had a nightmare.”

“About what?”

Mona's confused eyes, his blue shirt cuffs on her neck. “I don't remember.” Jack looks for a place to put his keys, but he's in his underwear, no pockets anywhere.

On TV there's a series of impossible before-and-after photos and a phone number. Slouching into the couch, Connor puts his feet on the coffee table, folds hands across his abdomen, looks at Jack like he wants to say something, but doesn't.

A new program starts; Ron Popeil, in his butcher's apron with the Ronco monogram across the front, shows a rapt audience the dehydrator.

“That's what you and I are giving Mona's parents for Christmas.” He points to the screen.

Connor rolls his eyes, and guilt tickles Jack's guts. He can't remember a single conversation his brother had with Mona in the past year, both of them becoming awkward and quiet, almost sullen, when in the same room. Still, Mona's parents had specifically invited Connor.

“If you don't want to go, you don't have to. If you'd rather go to Jenny's mom's or—”

“I don't have anything else to do.” Connor yawns. “Besides, I've always wondered what real people did for holidays. It's like research for a soc class or something.”

“Are you taking sociology?”

“My roommate is.”

It occurs to Jack that he doesn't even know this roommate's name, what he looks like. Doesn't know his brother's major, doesn't know who Connor fucks or watches Indians games with.

On the TV, Ron gives the blond cohost a piece of turkey jerky, and she discusses its virtues without irony—it's fresher and lower in fat than what you buy in stores. Having seen the program eight times, Jack knows Ron's lines by heart.

“So you're going to stay in Cleveland?” Connor asks.

“Where would I go?”

“I just kind of thought once I left for school you might go to D.C. or something. You used to talk about stuff like that.”

Jack does have vague memories of such talk, in the days before he took the associate position at the firm where his father had been managing partner, but now that seems part of another life, the one from the time before he ordered new living room furniture to replace the beige stuff his mother bought in the early eighties.

“You're going to stay with Jones Day?” Connor is asking.

“Yeah, I should make partner in a few years.”

“That's cool.” Connor nods, even though Jack knows he probably thinks that it is the absolute antithesis of cool. “I guess you've got your reasons.”

Ron and Blonde make trail mix from dried fruit, and Jack wants to explain that staying in Cleveland has nothing to do with Mona, that it doesn't mean he's going to get married or buy a dog, that it's simply practical.

“If you drive me to work, you can have my car tomorrow,” Jack says instead. Connor nods and yawns.

Maybe Jack senses the change in his brother's breathing or catches a glimpse of Connor's head, arched at an odd angle against the top of the couch, but he doesn't expect any answer when he asks, “Do you think it's weird we never had a Christmas tree?”

         

The tree in Mona's parents' house is huge. Even as he's pulling the car into the driveway, Jack sees it through the living room's full-length window, its star squashed against the ceiling. He visited her parents' place before and found it nice, if a bit quaint, with all the dark wood and heavy furniture. Now it's barely recognizable, every cubic foot of the wood and brick two-story blinking with colored bulbs, a life-size manger scene in the front yard and plastic Santa in a plastic sleigh with plastic reindeer mounted on the roof. Parking the car, he looks at Mona and waits for her to apologize for the house like she apologizes for everything else.

“Wouldn't it be great if it snowed tonight?” She smiles, pats his knee, and bounces out of the car.

Reaching into the back, he shakes his brother awake.

“Welcome to Jesusland,” Jack says.

Mona's parents, like their house, have undergone a bizarre holiday transformation. Her father, a professor of Civil War history at OU, is wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, while Mrs. Lockridge, thick through the hips and thighs, is in one of those seasonal sweaters—this one depicts the twelve days of Christmas with gold thread and sequins. Instantly Jack is uncomfortable in a way he hasn't been since sophomore year at Penn when a girl he was dating dragged him to a “Take Back the Night” rally.

“Good to see you, son.” Mona's father extends his hand, while her mother hugs Connor, whom she's never met.

Three years younger, Mona's sister Frankie shivers in the doorway, wearing a skintight T-shirt and lots of purple lipstick. Red curls cropped at her jawline, five silver studs dotting the curl of her right ear, body firm like only the bodies of twenty-year-old girls are firm—Frankie could be the ghost of Mona past.

“Thank God you guys are finally here,” she says, though she's looking exclusively at Connor, who's still wobbly with sleep like a newborn calf. “Mom's making us all crazy. Maybe now she'll chill.”

Mona's mother mock swats Frankie's shoulder, and the six of them carry three overnight bags and boxes of presents (including the food dehydrator, which Mona wrapped the night before) into the house, where holiday music oozes from every room. Upstairs, Mrs. Lockridge assigns bedrooms with exaggerated gestures. Jack and Connor can sleep in Frankie's room; Frankie can bunk with Mona's older sister, Melanie; Mona gets her childhood bedroom, aggressively pink, with bookcases of worn stuffed bears and dolls in costumes from around the world.

Setting Mona's duffel bag on the lacy bedspread, Jack tugs Mona's hand, pulls her back in the room when everyone else has left, and somewhere in the house Eartha Kitt is crooning that Santa Baby shouldn't keep her waiting.

“You told your parents you moved in with me, right?” he asks. “And they're okay with that?”

“Yes.” She laughs lightly. “You can sleep with me tonight. Mom just put you and Connor together for Frankie—it's one of those things my parents do. They pretend she's still a virgin.”

“She's not?” Jack smiles, raises eyebrows in fake astonishment. Frankie's jeans were tight and low enough on the hips to showcase two inches of pale, flat belly.

“No-oo.” Mona slips a hand between his dress shirt buttons; even through his undershirt, he can feel her hands are freezing. “Frankie's like a total sexual predator.”

“You're
sure
your parents are cool with you moving in?”

Mona looks up at him, pupils blotting out the color from her eyes.

“Sure,” she says. “My parents lived together before they were married.”

On her wrist sticking out of his shirt, Mona wears the tennis bracelet he gave her when they exchanged gifts last night. He got it the week before at a Chagrin Falls jewelry store owned by the father of his first girlfriend. Anna, the ex-girlfriend who had married an area doctor, was working behind the counter, stomach swollen with her first child. When he said he needed a gift for his girlfriend, she'd laughed deep and from the back of her throat. “A ring, perhaps?” she'd asked.

“No,” he had told Anna. “Anything but a ring.”

Jack hears himself saying something to Mona—maybe “Okay,” or “I just wanted to make sure they knew.”

“Don't worry.” She grabs his ass. “If you're a good boy, you'll get some tonight.”

But her room is so oppressively girlie with its dust ruffle and throw pillows, the collection of Sweet Valley High paperbacks stacked above the desk. It's the last place in the world he wants to have sex.

“Sure,” he says, brushing her long hairs out of his face.

         

Long red hair in thick braids, Melanie—the ghost of Mona future—is reading from a very fat book at the kitchen table, seemingly oblivious to trays of iced wreath- and present-shaped cookies drying around her.

Jack has never met Mona's older sister before, but knows she's getting a Ph.D. in Russian literature at Johns Hopkins, that she's slept with more than one married professor, and she'd made Mona feel stupid when they were kids, which Mona isn't over yet.

“You must be Jack and Jack's brother,” Melanie says without getting up. In her cat-eyed black glasses, she comes from central casting to play a role: embittered intellectual in her late twenties.