The Christmas Letters (9 page)

What else? Here’s a quick rundown on the kids. Our budding poet Melanie loves the academic world and is planning for graduate school, while Claire is already an intern at Carolina Telecom, a company I have yet to understand the true nature of! Andrew continues to pursue his art career on the West Coast—he couldn’t make it for Christmas this year as he was “hanging a new show” in San Francisco and also moving from San Francisco to L.A., which sounds like a terrifying place to me, but which Andrew apparently loves. He has rented a little studio
house up in the hills near that
HOLLYWOOD
sign, you know the one I mean. Anyway, all the kids are fine, and I guess I am, too, though I had to take Incompletes in all my courses and now am killing myself trying to finish them up, plus take the two I had enrolled in for
this
semester. I may have to drop one of those, actually.

If I can just make it through the semester, we have a wonderful summer vacation planned (Sandy is being forced to take vacations now, hurrah!) to Scotland, where he will golf and go to fly-fishing school (a new hobby which is supposed to slow him down) while I curl up in some ancient place reading long English novels to my heart’s content.

Happy Valentine’s Day,
Mary Copeland

Appropriately enough, I send along our recipe for

ORANGE-MINT SHERBET

4 cups orange juice

¼ c. chopped mint

Blend and freeze in ice cream freezer.

Dec. 18, 1991

Merry Xmas! to Ruthie and good friends —

1992 will find all the Copelands busier than ever, heading off in a million different directions. Those hard years with Sandy and me working all day long, and then poring over the books together at night, seem almost like a dream to me now. And speaking of dreams, Sandy and I had a real “dream vacation” in Scotland, though I feel like I have scarcely seen him since, he has been so busy putting in “Plantation,” Copeland Construction’s new multi-million-dollar coastal “village” and golf complex. They are paying special attention to the environment, trying not to disturb the fragile ecology of the marsh or diminish the wild charm of the island itself. So Sandy has been down at the coast a lot, while I have been struggling with chemistry and
loving
Twentieth Century Lit., especially a seminar on “Images of Women” that I took this past semester. I plan to do my Senior Thesis on Virginia Woolf.

I also took an extremely interesting and challenging American Studies course this past semester. One day I was in the library doing research on “The Sixties” when another person from the same class, a young woman, turned to me and said, “Why, Mary, I’m surprised to find you here. You

were
right there
during the Sixties, weren’t you? I shouldn’t think you’d need to do research.”

“Listen,” I told her, the truth coming to me even as I spoke, “I was
alive,
if that’s what you mean. But I missed the Sixties entirely, as a matter of fact. I was just too busy having babies and Tupperware parties.”

She stared at me blankly for a moment before she shrugged and went back to her microfilm. She didn’t get it.

But
you
get it, right? You know what I meant.

I must admit that virtually all my assumptions have been seriously challenged in these past two years—I highly recommend going back to school for anyone who wants to have a more open mind! I have come to actually
like
Melanie’s tattoo now, for instance (a vine around her ankle)! And I’ve decided it’s definitely a good thing for young couples to live together before taking the (drastic) step of marriage—although I can just imagine what Mama would have had to say about that! We are very fond of Melanie’s friend Bruce, a musician, and (once we got used the age difference) of Claire’s young lawyer, who is raising his two children by himself, apparently. (Can you
imagine?
He seems to be doing a pretty good job, too.)

Everybody will be coming home for Christmas, including Andrew who is bringing a friend from California. And I’ve got to finish one late lab report before I can even begin to cook! Though we may be “ships that pass in the night,”
you have to admit we’re heading off in some interesting directions!

Love and Peace,
Mary

Tuesday, Dec. 10, 1993

To Ruthie and My Very Special Friends,

A
REAL
CHRISTMAS LETTER, THE FIRST EVER

First, my apologies for not writing a Christmas letter last year (for not returning calls, for not returning letters, etc.). The fact is, for a long time I couldn’t do anything. Not a damn thing. Nothing. I was shell-shocked, immobilized. This was followed by a period when I did
too many things.
Marybeth, who has been through it, wrote to me about this time, saying, “Don’t make any big decisions”—very good advice, and I wish I’d followed it. Instead, I agreed to a separation agreement, then to a quick no-fault divorce, then to Sandy’s plan of selling the house P.D.Q. I just wanted everything
over with
—the way you feel that sudden irresistible urge to clean out your closet sometimes.

Listen: if this ever happens to you, resist that urge.
Go slowly.
I didn’t even get a lawyer. Sandy and I used the
same lawyer, at his suggestion. Now I know how dumb I was! Well, I don’t intend to go into that part of it. But the point is, I actually trusted Sandy—and why not? I had trusted him all these years.

I kept smiling and smiling, and signing things. Everyone remarked upon how well I was “taking it.” I just kept on smiling. After smiling for three or four weeks I stepped on the scale one day and was amazed to see that I’d lost 20 pounds without even realizing it—that 20 pounds I’ve always been meaning to lose.

I was really in bad shape. Every month after Sandy left, in fact, I’d look back and think,
Oh, I didn’t even know what I was doing then. I was in such bad shape! Look how much better I am now.
But then another month would go by, and I’d look back at myself again and think,
Well, I really didn’t know how crazy I was a month ago! Lord, I was crazy then. But I’m so much better now.
And then another month would go by, and . . . well, you get the picture. It has taken me a long, long time. And I’m still not there. I’m still not “adjusted.” I don’t think I will ever be “adjusted”! I don’t even know what this means anymore. I remember thinking (as I cleaned out the house and stuck everything into Village Self Storage, fueled by that crazy manic energy that comes with divorce) that I wished I could just put myself in there as well, to emerge after 5 or 6 years like Rip Van Winkle, miraculously “adjusted,” having avoided all the pain which I am still going through.

I didn’t actually realize that the marriage was over, oddly enough (not when we signed the papers, not when we went to court —none of that really registered) until I walked through our empty house for the very last time right after the closing. As I left the lawyer’s office that afternoon and got in my car (Sandy got in
his
car, of course) I noticed that my house key was still on my key ring. Without stopping to think, I drove straight over there. I hadn’t been back for months, not since renting this nice little place in Oakwood.

Real estate agents don’t waste any time—they had already hung a
SOLD
banner across the
FOR SALE
sign. It was April, and my bulbs were in bloom—all the daffodils in back, the crocuses by the mailbox, the tulips in their raised beds along the terrace. I had grouped them by color, and they looked like a proud little army on parade. The windows shone like diamonds —I guess they’d just been cleaned, for the new owners. I didn’t know anything about the arrangements for selling the house. Sandy had taken care of all that, as he had always taken care of everything.
Why, he could have cheated me blind,
I realized, though of course I knew he
wouldn’t
—Sandy was always very scrupulous about money (as opposed to his private life, more later on
that!)

For the first time, I wondered why I hadn’t insisted on being more involved, why I had been so happy to have things done for me, decided for me—so happy to relinquish control. Anyway, the house looked great. The trim
had been touched up, the terraces had been pressure-washed, the lawn service had obviously just been there.

I unlocked the front door and opened it. It swung inward silently, giving onto the gleaming wood floor of the entrance hall,
like the shining path in the Wizard of Oz,
I thought briefly, crazily, and then I was walking the house, going into each room. It’s a huge house, of course, I’d forgotten how big it is. An afternoon hush had fallen everywhere, so that my heels clicked and echoed as I walked from room to room. The rooms are large and airy, beautifully proportioned. Sunlight streamed in the big windows and French doors, blinding me.

There was not even a trace of us left. None of the family snapshots stuck up on the refrigerator with magnets; none of the terra-cotta pots that had held my spice garden on the kitchen windowsill; none of James’s tennis rackets which used to hang on the wall of his room; none of Andrew’s endless collections of stamps, of bird books, flower books, constellations; none of the twins’ endless array of old coats and jackets in the hall closet where they’d been accumulating for years . . . all I could see was what had been. I walked through the whole house slowly, then returned to the gleaming foyer to stand for a moment just before I left for the last time, and that’s when it really hit me.

This is the end,
I thought.
This really is the end of us as a family, the end of my world as I have known it, the end of me as
the person I have been since I first met Sandy.
That’s when I started to cry. I cried and cried—loud, choking sobs, like a person who has lost everything, which I had. (But in another way I hadn’t, of course, though it would take even more time for me to know this.) I suppose it was only fitting that I should face the end of our marriage there, in the last of our houses, and I thought of them all—the trailer at Greenacres Park; that wonderful old place on Rosemary Street, with the tin roof; Hummingbird Heights, with the great yard and the fantastic jungle gym, always full of tumbling kids, all of them grown and gone now; and then finally this “castle,” as Melanie used to call it, Stonebridge Club Estates, the last one, the last shell ever to hold that family which we once were.

Well, I cried and cried.

But after about thirty minutes of this, a funny thing started happening. Imperceptibly, even in the midst of all the crying, I felt my spirits start to lift. This continued. I could actually feel energy coming into me, some essential energy that seemed oddly familiar, like an old friend you don’t quite recognize at first. Now, I believe—without dramatizing too much, I hope!—that this was the moment when my
self
came back, or when I came back to my own real self again.

I found some Kleenex in my purse, blew my nose, dropped my key on the floor in the middle of the hall, and opened the door. The lock clicked shut behind me, and that
was that. Sunlight was everywhere, so harsh against my eyes, but I didn’t care. I got back into my car and drove around the circle and down the long driveway, and did not look back. I have not looked back since.

Until today, I suppose, when I decided to write a Christmas letter again. Why not? I’ve got a lot to say. And the Christmas letter was always
my
thing, not Sandy’s, though for so many years of course I signed both names, and thought of us as one.