The Christmas Letters (10 page)

Thursday, Dec. 12, 1993

Two days have passed since I began this letter. Two extraordinary days in which I drove over to Village Self Storage and got out the copies I kept of all my Christmas letters from former years. It was so dark in the storage unit that I could scarcely see, and despaired of ever finding anything, but luckily they were right there at the entrance in Mama’s old hope chest from West Virginia, next to a box of Andrew’s drawings and another box labeled “Trophy Collection”— God knows what all is in that storage unit! Now I begin to wonder if this is healthy or unhealthy, under the circumstances, to save so much. Oh who knows?! I have had it with shrinks and marriage counselors, of which more later.

At any rate, I found the letters easily. I brought the chest back here (along with two boxes marked
CHRISTMAS ORN
., I figure I might as well make a little effort this year, though I certainly don’t have “the Christmas spirit”), made a big pot of tea for myself, and started back at the beginning, reading. 1967 through 1991. Twenty-four Christmas letters, 24 years of family life stuffed into these envelopes and stuck away just as easily as Sandy has stuck me back into “the past” already, that dark box into which he has consigned so much: his childhood, his family. . . . Well,
I
just can’t do it! I’ll have to haul everything out eventually, I’ll have to go through it all again, “healthy” or not—

Several things have struck me, reading back through all the years.

We really were “in love,” Sandy and me. We really were a family. It was all true. No matter what Sandy says now or what he said in the midst of his mid-life crisis following the heart surgery, or what he said later during our so-called “marriage counseling” (ha!) sessions, we really were
together
in every way, for many years. Those years count too. The story told in my Christmas letters is a true story. It is the story of our marriage.

Of course there are other stories too, stories
not
told in those letters, and they are equally true. Back in Greenacres Park, for instance, there was the story of how scared I was, alone with a new baby all day long, how he had colic and
would not quit crying and would not quit crying until I thought I would go crazy, until one day I started shaking his crib I got so mad, and then I sank down on the floor and started crying, scared to death, afraid I had hurt my baby. Which I had not. But that story is true too, as true as the story of how much I loved him, and loved taking care of him and Sandy in those early days. See what I just wrote?
Taking care. Taking care of Andrew, taking care of Sandy.
Isn’t that interesting? A person reading back through these letters might decide that my life has been largely a function of other people’s lives, and that would be true too, or at least it would not be untrue. There is one letter in which I almost came to this conclusion myself, back in 1975, but I could not stand to know it then, and pulled back from the realization. Well, why not? Though true, it wasn’t the whole story either.

During my recent “shrinkage” I have learned all about “denial” of course, but really it seems to me that denial is often a good and useful thing, keeping us going, allowing us to do what has to be done in the world.

Another story I didn’t write at Greenacres Park was the story of Gerald Ruffin, that charming brilliant alcoholic Gerald Ruffin who loved me (and he really
did
love me, probably as much as Sandy and more than anybody else ever will love me again), and how we used to sit out on those crummy lawn chairs talking and talking all night
long sometimes while I patted Andrew’s back as he lay facedown on my lap and mewed like a cat from colic, while the bugs flew around and the
BIG AL’S TIRE
sign shone all night long just beyond the blooming honeysuckle that covered the stockade fence enclosing us from the “bad neighborhood” which surrounded us on every side. Oh, how sweet that honeysuckle smelled—I will never forget it. And Gerald Ruffin’s profile, outlined against the sign’s red glow . . . well, he was simply the handsomest man I have ever seen. He looked (oh, I don’t know)
English,
I thought, with that fine aquiline nose, the chiseled chin, nothing weak about it though he
was
weak, poor thing, he couldn’t bear his vision of the world. Oh, Gerald Ruffin had a story too, of course, and it was a tragic one, involving a brother’s betrayal and a child’s death by drowning and his young wife’s suicide, years before. Gerald Ruffin was 41 years old when I met him. I was 22. I thought he was ancient, of course, but now that I’m older than he was then, I realize he wasn’t ancient at all, and I can understand how a person such as he might take to drink.

Gerald Ruffin had been living in Greenacres Park for several years when we moved there, and I believe I was the only person he had ever really talked to in all that time. Once a week, a dignified black man wearing a porkpie hat would arrive at Gerald’s trailer, sent by his brother, and deposit two paper bags full of groceries on the stoop by
the door, tip his hat to me if I was outside with Andrew or standing in my own doorway, and then disappear, and sometime during that day the groceries would disappear too. Not that Gerald Ruffin ever ate much, growing thinner and thinner before my eyes.

In fact I never saw him eat
anything,
and I never saw him without a drink in his hand. He drank from a silver julep cup, a remnant of better days. He drank vodka and vodka only—Stolichnaya—he called it his “one extravagance.” Whenever he ran out of vodka, he’d call a cab (he’d lost his driver’s license years before) and jump right into it, sometimes still wearing his bathrobe, and have the cabbie drive him to the liquor store and then go in to make his purchase for him, while Gerald sat in the cab magisterially surveying the world outside Greenacres Park “which certainly does not have much to offer,” he’d announce grandly upon his return.

Did I ever sleep with him? No. Did I ever kiss him? Oh yes, Lord yes, many many times in the dead of night with the overpowering smell of that honeysuckle all around us and my own hard-working Sandy asleep inside the trailer. I kissed him in the daytime too, and people saw it—I know Mrs. Pike saw us at least once, but she never said a word about it, I guess she was old enough and wise enough to know what was important and what was not.

I was a good wife. And I was a good mom, too. I got the hang of it. I was also a desperately lonely unhappy girl who might not have made it through those first two years of my marriage without Gerald Ruffin’s conversation (“palaver,” he called it, a word I have never heard anybody else use) or those sweet, sweet vodka-flavored kisses, all the sweeter for their hopelessness. This is why I don’t drink vodka now, by the way. I have never been able to taste the stuff since without the memory of Gerald Ruffin springing straight to mind, which always makes me cry. I am crying now. They say that vodka has no taste, but this isn’t true. You can taste it. I can taste his kisses still, all those years ago.

Which is one reason I got so upset when that marriage therapist urged us to “put all our cards out on the table” and talk about “any infidelities.” Sandy came up with plenty, of course. Over a dozen. Over a dozen women (“girls,” he called them) he’d slept with while he was married to me! But they were “not important,” he said. Just girls he ran into while “out of town” or “at conventions,” or “sales meetings,” where he was “lonely,” so it “didn’t count.” (Dovie Birmingham
did
count—more on that!) Anyway, the point is that Sandy had all these affairs to put out on the table, so to speak, while I had not one infidelity to report, not one.

I could have kicked myself for not sleeping with
Gerald Ruffin, who loved me, I know he did. Perhaps I could have rehabilitated him, saved him, married him . . . certainly, I would have learned a thing or two!

Oh, but that would be another story, wouldn’t it? Another story altogether. Gerald Ruffin died of cirrhosis of the liver in the VA Hospital in Durham in 1979, while we were living at Hummingbird Estates. I kept up with him all that time, calling every week, visiting every month. He weighed 85 pounds when he died. I never mentioned these visits to Sandy, who probably wouldn’t have remembered Gerald anyway. It was another story.

As is the story of my brother Joe, a real tragedy. Joe never should have gone to Vietnam. He never should have gone to
any
war, he was not cut out for it.
I
could have gone to Vietnam more easily than Joe. I have always been able to pull myself together to do what needs to be done, but this was not true of Joe. Joe was so sensitive, so imaginative,
fragile
really, though he kept this side of himself successfully hidden from most people. The fact that he was good at working on cars and engines made him seem like he was stronger and tougher than he was —you know the connotations, the connections we all make between cars and men, between men and war.

Well, Joe was not even really a man, not yet—he was just a boy, and not even a very tough boy. (In later years, I would see so much of Joe in my own Andrew, though of
course Joe was not gay. Or: I don’t think Joe was gay. But who knows? He didn’t have a chance to be much of anything, I guess, before we lost him.)

And we
did
lose him in that war, as surely as if he had been killed.

This was the awful tragedy of it, Joe-who-was-not-Joe coming back, Joe who looked exactly like the old Joe (the curly black hair, the one-sided grin, the snaggletooth) and laughed like the old Joe, and walked like the old Joe, that easy shamble, but was all hollow around the gray eyes which had gone flat and distant somehow, eyes which could no longer quite focus on whoever he was with. And he couldn’t pay attention either. He’d be talking to you, and then he’d simply stop talking, and stand staring at a point somewhere just beyond your face. And then he’d walk away.

This is what happened when Sandy tried to give him a job at the construction company. The first day on the job, Joe’d be great, firm handshakes all around, joking with the guys. And he’d outwork them all—he could build anything, put anything together. He’d be whistling, Sandy said. Enjoying himself. Joe was always a great whistler. Then the second day, or maybe the third or the fourth, he’d just walk off the job. Leave for lunch and never come back. Take a cigarette break and bye-bye.

He’d be gone for a day or two, then show up at Mama’s
or back at our house, all smiles, whistling, glad to see everybody. So then Sandy would try to talk to him, and give him another job with another crew, and before you knew it, the same thing would happen all over again. Sandy knocked himself out to no avail. I have never seen him so frustrated. Sandy always
liked
Joe (well, Joe was so likable, wasn’t he?) even though he never really knew him until after Vietnam. And I think perhaps Sandy felt guilty himself because
he
never had to go, because we had a baby. But Mama felt guiltier than anybody, and talked about it constantly, assuming all the blame, which was wrong, of course. If anybody was to blame it was Daddy, who never could see more than one side to anything. Right or wrong, black or white. Mama was fond of saying that Daddy had “the courage of his convictions.” But is this strength of character, or is it stupidity? Now I wonder.

I remember that time Daddy hit Joe when we were kids, the day of the flood, when he was whipping Ruthie, and Joe tried to stop him. (Isn’t it funny how some things will stick in your mind forever while others, more important or so you’d imagine, simply disappear?) I remember that Joe had on a green International Harvester cap, that he nearly fell down the front steps, that his feet made a sucking noise in the mud as he stumbled away.

I also remember, as if it were yesterday, one of those discussions they had (Mama, Daddy, and Joe) about what
Joe would do if he got drafted. Sandy and I had driven over from Raleigh shortly after our marriage. I was in the first trimester of my pregnancy, and couldn’t keep anything on my stomach. So in addition to being sick, I was really nervous, for I knew that my elopement had broken their hearts, no matter what a brave front Mama was trying to display at the time. It was already cold, sometime after Halloween. I remember how the dead stalks of corn stood up in the fields, how the sky was all red and silver. I have always liked winter sunsets the best. Sandy had to pull over twice to let me throw up. But then finally we were there, driving slowly through town just as the streetlights came on, past the dime store (closed, it was Sunday).

We pulled up in front of the house. Sandy opened my door and took my hand and kissed me once, hard, before I turned the glass doorknob and stepped inside. This was the third time I had been home since my marriage. The first time was awful —Mama cried, Daddy stalked upstairs, and Joe tried in vain to hide his disappointment. The second visit had been strained but cordial. Joe was not at home.

So I was praying that this visit might be better—we had come to pick up a loveseat and a rocking chair that Mama had offered us in a gesture of what I hoped was reconciliation.

And as soon as we walked into the kitchen, I knew it would be all right. For I was no longer the problem.

Joe was the problem now. He and Daddy sat facing each other across the old white enameled kitchen table where Mama did all her cooking (this table I have now in my own kitchen in my own little house). Both of them were smoking. Cigarette smoke hung blue in the air above the white table, beneath the hanging globe of the lamp. Mama was at the sink, back turned, tension evident in the way she stood. Daddy and Joe were staring at each other. They looked exactly alike: handsome, angular men with long faces and those wide expressive mouths.

“No son of mine . . .” Daddy began.

“Hi, everybody,” I said, and Mama whirled around to hug me with her hands still wet, the first real hug I’d had from her since our marriage, and I was so glad to get it.

“Honey!” she exclaimed. “How are you feeling? Did you all get any dinner?” she asked Sandy, who allowed as how we had not, since I hadn’t felt up to eating, and then Mama was feeding us cold fried chicken, and they were telling us everything.