The Christmas Letters (11 page)

Daddy was trying to get Joe to enlist, believing that this would give him “more choice” than if he waited around to get drafted. Sandy immediately agreed (I believe this is the very minute that Daddy decided he was okay) and recommended the Marines. Joe sat there like a rock looking so miserable that at last I took pity on him and said, “Why not the Navy? I think their uniforms are the cutest,” which
made everybody laugh, it was such a silly remark in the middle of this serious conversation. (Here is another thing that I have always been good at, playing a little dumb in order to make everyone laugh, to relax a room.) Joe grinned at me but remained uncharacteristically silent in the center of that conversation which whirled and eddied all about him, a rock in the midst of the current. Sandy ate three or four pieces of chicken and praised it extravagantly. He and Daddy were deep into a discussion about what the government ought to do about draft dodgers when Joe slipped away.

It was the first time I ever remember him slipping away like that, and it was the last time Sandy and I were to see him before I had my baby and Joe was drafted.

Only of course we didn’t know any of that then. I just thought, Oh well, Joe’s gone over to the shop to work on a car and listen to music (his favorite occupation). I didn’t really think anything about it at the time. I was just happy that Daddy was finally talking to Sandy (I always
knew
they would get along if they’d give each other a chance) and that Mama seemed glad to see me.

And in fact, the worst was over. Right as we were getting in the car to leave, she gave me a whole set of dishes that she’d gotten for me with Green Stamps, saying, “Well now, just go ahead and take these with you. I was going to give them to you for Christmas, but I can’t wait.” Which was typical of Mama!

Daddy knew it, too. “Aw, shoot, Birdie. Now you’ll just have to get her another damn Christmas present,” he said from the dark front porch. All I could see of him was the red tip end of his cigarette in the dark. “You all be careful now,” he yelled as we drove off.

So Mama blamed herself for what happened to Joe. She couldn’t blame Daddy, as he was dead, and anyway she had sanctified him in her memory as he never was in life, where he had been a stubborn opinionated hard-working man like most others of his time and place, no better and no worse. Oh, how I had loved him myself, for his faults as well as his virtues! (I guess it is easier to love a father than a husband in this way.) In any case, Mama never got over it, just as Joe never got over it. “If only I had stood up to your Daddy!” she’d say later. Or, “If only Joe had gone to college!” etc. But it was too late. (Sometimes it can be too late, sometimes things are irrevocable.)

And you know what I think Mama was looking for, that very last time I saw her? I think she was still looking for some clue as to what had become of Joe, searching in the only places she could search, the little familiar nooks and crannies of the life he once had shared with them but then could share no longer. Or perhaps Mama was remembering all those endless detective games which Joe and I had played as children, especially the Hardy Boys games, when I was Frank and he was Joe, of course.

And now I am Mary Pickett again, having resumed my maiden name. I did this yesterday, at the courthouse downtown. It’s a very simple procedure. I’m not sure exactly why I chose to do this, since I am still “holding on” to all those things in my storage unit. But clearly, the name change has something to do with reading through these old Christmas letters. For one thing, I was fascinated to note how many different ways I’d signed my name over the years —there are all these different names at the ends of the letters. So I have decided to have only one name from now on:
Mary Pickett,
though I suspect I will always see the “Copeland” there too in my mind’s eye, my ghost name, just as Nov. 2nd will always be my ghost anniversary.

Another fascinating thing about the Christmas letters is all the recipes —I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crêpes phase, and now it’s these salsa years. I have spent my entire life cooking and (Lord help me!) putting the leftovers into smaller and smaller containers.

That brings up the Gourmet Club, so I guess I’d better get the business of Dovie Birmingham over with right now.

As far as I was concerned, it all began at Dovie and John’s anniversary party in the summer of 1988. It was billed as a “pool party,” designed to inaugurate their new swimming pool as well as celebrate their twenty years of
marriage. I didn’t even take a bathing suit, of course, as I had no intention of showing my body to everybody in town, especially to all those people you see in other contexts, such as your dentist or pediatrician, for instance. And sure enough, it was a
huge
party. All the members of the Gourmet Club were present, of course, plus lots of other neighbors from Stonebridge Estates, members of John Birmingham’s law firm, and their many other friends. The Birminghams had a wide circle of acquaintance due to his civic interests and her vivaciousness. (This was the word everybody used whenever Dovie Birmingham’s name came up: “vivacious.”) In fact, Dovie was a small energetic woman with too-large breasts that almost seemed to tip her over, like Dolly Parton, short thin fluffy white-blond hair and pale eyes that always darted around a room, assessing the situation, seeing how she was doing. I don’t mean to be too hard on her here. In fact I always liked Dovie Birmingham just fine until that very night, the night of her anniversary party where I was only trying to be helpful, in a neighborly way, by volunteering to go out to their new pool house and get some ice from the deep freeze since they were running low at the bar inside and at that moment our hosts were nowhere to be seen.

Have I mentioned that the Birminghams’ party featured a Hawaiian motif? It also featured blue drinks that looked like Windex, with little umbrellas in them, and leis
for the ladies, though so many ladies had come that they’d run out of leis early on. I had not gotten one. I wore a long loose flowered dress which looked vaguely Hawaiian, I hoped, though I’d bought it in the lingerie section of Dillard’s that afternoon. Getting into the spirit of the party, I’d taken off my shoes at the door, and I can still recall exactly how the damp grainy pebbled concrete of the patio felt to my bare feet as I walked out to the pool house, examining the Birminghams’ new pool which I found almost ostentatious, actually, since it was so big and the country club was practically next door anyway. It was an irregularly shaped pool with that pebbly concrete (plus lots of plants and fake “rocks”) laid out in such a way as to make it all look “natural,” though it was not natural, of course, no more natural than the plastic lily pads floating on the water. A little artificial waterfall trickled endlessly into the pool, making ripples. No one was swimming yet.

The pool house was supposed to look like a pagoda. I went around the back and pulled the door open and there was my own husband Sandy kissing Dovie Birmingham who immediately began to squeal like a stuck pig. She was holding one foot up in the air like a teenager in one of those old
Beach Blanket Bingo
movies. In fact they
both
looked like people caught in a still shot from a Grade B movie, standing there beneath the humming fluorescent lights of the pool house.

“Mary?” Sandy said.

“Oh shit,” Dovie Birmingham said. She had a smudge of red lipstick all over one of her big front teeth.

“Excuse me,” I said, shutting the door. I was terribly embarrassed, and felt somehow guilty, as if it were all my fault. I walked back around the pool carefully, noticing the interesting dark blotchy shadows on the bottom created by those plastic lily pads. The pool
was
ostentatious, I decided. Still barefooted, I walked straight through the party and out the front door of the Birminghams’ house and two blocks through the neighborhood to my own house, where I surprised Melanie and two of her friends smoking marijuana in the portico. Normally this would have “thrown me for a loop.” But I didn’t even mention it. I merely said I had a headache and went upstairs and lay down, soon to be followed by my ashen and contrite Sandy, carrying my shoes in his hand, full of apology and explanation. He said it had never happened before, that he didn’t know what had come over him, or
them,
actually—he didn’t know what had gotten into them, though he blamed himself, of course. Dovie Birmingham was not in any way to blame. Sandy had had too much to drink, that’s all. It would never happen again, that was for damn sure! Damn sure!

“Now come over here, honey,” he said, “and forgive this bad old man.”

Well, I did.

And if you are surprised by that, then you don’t have a
clue
about who I was during all those years. Of course I forgave him. I was dying to forgive him, feeling, as I said, that it was my fault anyhow. I decided I had gotten too wrapped up in the kids, had neglected the marriage. (Now I believe that whenever you start thinking about “the marriage” like it’s a needy third person, you’re in trouble anyway.)

So Sandy and I “made up.” We “worked it out.”

This lasted for about ten days, until John Birmingham paid a call on us one evening right after supper. I remember that he telephoned first. Sandy and I went to the front door and watched him walk straight across our yard, right through our underground sprinkler system like he didn’t even notice all the sprinklers going at once, and I don’t believe he did notice them. Clearly, here was a man with something on his mind. Once inside, John Birmingham refused to sit down, and got right to the point.

“Sandy,” he said, “Dovie tells me that you and she are in love, and that you plan to get married. She says this has been going on for over a year.”

John Birmingham is an aging preppie who went to Carolina for both his undergraduate and law degrees, and looks like it. This was not supposed to happen in his life. He did not even so much as glance at me. Nor did my husband.

“Mary,” Sandy said, “why don’t you go check on the children, honey?”

Which was exactly what I had been thinking. But they were all gone at that moment—mercifully, thankfully— James playing tennis at the club, the girls off Lord know where, and Andrew away at school, of course. After I made sure that the house was empty, I came back down the stairs to find the entrance hall empty too, except for a little puddle of water where John Birmingham had been standing. The door to the study was closed, and remained closed for over an hour. I waited there uncertainly for a while, and then went back to the kitchen and washed the dishes and listened to NPR. (This is what we do, isn’t it? We listen to NPR while the whole world crashes down around our ears, it’s the only thing we can think of to do.) Finally I heard the front door close, and then Sandy came into the kitchen and stood behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.

“John was mistaken,” he said.

“But Sandy—” I started crying.

“John was mistaken,” Sandy said again, “and that’s the end of it.”

Only it wasn’t, of course. Dovie Birmingham immediately moved back to Dallas, where she was from, taking their only child, a little girl (“one of those puny late-life babies,” Mama had said once, about this child), with her. John moved into an apartment and put their house on the
market. At first it was priced too high, and didn’t sell. I kept tabs on this, for some reason, driving past it at least twice a day. Once, during this period, I stopped my car on impulse, got out and entered the Birminghams’ back yard through the side gate, and went out to stand by the pool. It was September, but hot. I had been to a bridal luncheon at the club. All of a sudden I stripped down to my underwear and jumped into the pool. It felt great! I swam a number of laps and then treaded water for a long time, enjoying the musical sound of the little fountain. The ends of my fingers had gotten all wrinkled up by the time I got out and went home.

You know most of the rest of the story.

A year later, Mama died and I went back to college. Then Sandy had the heart operation. Now I believe that “the marriage” never recovered from this operation. It was as if “the marriage” had had its own heart attack, and died on the spot. Sandy and I were still alive, of course, never more fit and healthy due to that follow-up program at the Life Center. This is also when we first went to the marriage counselor (never go to a “marriage counselor,” just get a divorce!).

Our marriage counselor, whom I hate, is named Peter Waterford, a mellow little guy with a goatee he loves to finger. (I saw him just the other day, in traffic, driving a new Lexus. I know we paid for that Lexus, so I certainly
hope he’s enjoying it!) Anyway, at the marriage counselor’s urging, we went to Scotland, a nice trip which staved off the inevitable. Sandy played golf, I read. We both enjoyed ourselves. (It was somewhat like “parallel play,” which I mentioned in one of my very first Christmas letters when Andrew was a baby.) We avoided all serious discussions, all dangerous topics, as if they were water hazards on one of those gorgeous Scottish golf courses. Then we came back from Scotland and threw ourselves into our work: I, into my senior thesis; Sandy, into “Plantation,” his development down on the coast.

Though we were necessarily apart a good bit that year, I remained hopeful. In fact we both remained hopeful, I believe, and endlessly solicitous of each other, conducting nightly telephone conversations whenever we were apart (“How was your day?”—“Fine, dear, how was
your
day?” etc.) like nurses who keep on giving artificial respiration to a patient who has died.

This phase lasted until that girl’s mother called from down at the coast, looking for her. Her grandfather had had a stroke, and she should come home immediately. “She’s not here,” I kept saying, though the woman insisted, politely, that she was. “Isn’t that funny?” she said before she hung up. “I’ve got the name written down right here.”

I hung up and telephoned Sandy in Wilmington, where I got his answering machine. I could have stopped right
there, never mentioning the incident to Sandy, but I did not. I could not. This time I had to push forward, to know. It gets pretty trite and sordid from here on out. I confronted him; he lied to me; I just couldn’t believe him, though I wanted to—oh, how I wanted to!