The Christmas Sweater (4 page)

“Mom,” I began carefully as I slid under the covers, “I’m twelve. Do you still have
to tuck me in?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“But I’m almost a man.” I suppose the words would have had more impact if I hadn’t
been saying them from under a Star Wars bedspread.

“I imagine the day will come when we both know it’s time for a change. I don’t ‘tuck
you in’ anymore, by the way, young
man.
I just sit with you for a few minutes and say goodnight. There’s a difference.”

“Okay.”

“Besides, I want to talk to you about the nursing home tonight. I know you heard the
song.”

Sleep and Christmas morning were so close. The last thing I wanted was another one
of my mom’s life lessons. “What song?”

She ignored my halfhearted attempt at pleading ignorance. “Your father first sang
that song to me at the end of our first date. ‘’Til we meet, ’til we meet, God be
with you ’til we meet again.’” She laughed. “He had a horrible voice. The sound of
it made me cringe, but I thought it was the sweetest thing ever. Of course, when I
told Grandma what he’d done, she melted. ‘He’s a keeper,’ she told me, as if singing
one church hymn could somehow make a man perfect. I didn’t have the heart to tell
her that Dad had probably heard that song on the radio, not at church.”

I did my best to show absolutely no emotion. I figured that if Mom was good at speaking
with her eyes, then she was probably pretty good at reading them too, and I didn’t
want to give her any encouragement to keep talking. But it didn’t work; she kept talking.

“I watched you out in the hallway as you listened to the song. I know it made you
miss Dad. I miss him too. More and more every single day. But he’s not really gone.
He’s here right now watching over you. His arms are around you.”

As usual, my mother was right. I did miss Dad. I missed him a lot. Maybe I had been
too young to realize what I’d had when he was alive, or maybe he’d just worked too
much, but now, in hindsight, what I had lost was perfectly clear. And it
really
hurt.

“But honey,” my mother continued, “you’re missing what that song is really all about.
You’re missing the most important part and the whole reason Dad loved to sing it so
much.” She began to quietly hum the words. “‘When life’s perils thick confound you,
put His arms unfailing round you.’” She paused for a few moments. “His arms are always
around you, Eddie. And they were always around Dad too. Whenever he had a tough day
at work, I sang those words to him and all would be well.”

By that point my attempts to remain emotionless failed. A tear escaped my left eye
and rolled down my cheek. I hoped my mother wouldn’t see it, but that was unlikely.

“Besides, if God wasn’t here with both of us right now,
then why would we have this beautiful night sky? Look at the clouds, Eddie. They’re
full of snow. And when God squeezes them from heaven tonight, we’re going to have
the kind of white Christmas your father always loved.” She smiled at me with extra
love in her doe-brown eyes and added, “So, goodnight. Try to sleep, and don’t get
up before daylight.” She winked. “Christmas morning doesn’t start until it’s
morning
.”

She turned out the light as she left the room, and my night-light lit up brightly,
reminding me that I wasn’t quite a man just yet.

I stared out the window, determined not to fall asleep until I saw the first snowflake.
The lines that my mother had gently hummed were stuck in my head.
When life’s perils thick confound you, put His arms unfailing round you.
She was probably right, but I still felt alone with my burdens. I was a twelve-year-old
kid with no father and no money.

As I continued gazing out the window, waiting for the storm to begin, I had no idea
that soon I would need His arms more than I ever thought possible.

The storm of my life was already forming.

T
he smell of Mom’s pancakes was so wonderfully strong that it actually woke me up.

I jumped out of bed and rushed to the window. There’s something magical about falling
asleep with the ground bare and dry and waking up to it covered in a fluffy white
blanket of snow.

But the magic would have to wait for some other day, because the front yard was still
covered with the same coarse, gray snow that had fallen days earlier. I looked up
toward the sky. The stubborn clouds still looked like they harbored snow, but so far
they’d been unwilling to part with it.

The worst part was that I knew Mom wouldn’t sympathize with my disappointment. She
was always one of those people who thought that snow was more of a hassle than anything
else. She liked the
idea
of snow, but she hated almost everything else about it. Shoveling it was a pain,
the car’s windshield took forever to defrost, and driving in even the smallest amount
of snow was virtually out of the question. I used to tell her that she was a snow-Grinch
until I became old enough to shovel and finally understood what she meant.

But if Mom was a Grinch, then Dad was the mayor of Whoville. No amount of snow was
ever enough. We would stay up late together waiting for a promised snowstorm to start,
drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio to see if they’d cancel school early.

On days like that Christmas morning, when the weathermen had obviously been so wrong,
I would get frustrated and ask Dad how, with all this technology, they couldn’t even
figure out if it would snow or not. It was a rhetorical question, but one time he
gave me an answer that I’ll never forget. “Eddie,” he said, “if I baked bread as
well as those morons predict the weather, our bakery would be bankrupt and we’d never
have a loaf of bread in the house.”

I tried hard not to laugh. It took Dad a moment before he realized what he’d just
said. He paused for a second, saw the smile on my face, then said, “Well, if that
were the case, then we still wouldn’t have any bread, but you also wouldn’t have any
nice boots to wear.” It was one of the few times I ever laughed at my bakery boots.

On the rare occasions when the weathermen actually got it right, Dad would wake me
up early in the morning, right after he’d come back from frying the doughnuts at the
bakery. All he would have to say was, “Eddie, look out the window!” and I would jump
out of bed and lean against the windowsill. Dad would put his hand on top of my head
and the two of us would just stand there in silence watching the snow fall.

There was one storm that I’ll never forget. It began early in the afternoon, and by
evening it was snowing so hard that school had already been canceled for the next
day. Mom the Grinch couldn’t believe it.
How can they can
cel school so early? The snow could stop at any second and then they’ll took foolish!
Dad and I tried our best to ignore her. We were like a mini snow-support group, and
we didn’t want her to spoil our party.

After dark we suited up and decided to take a completely unnecessary trip to the B
and H corner store, about three blocks away. We went out the side door into the garage,
where Dad’s big maroon 1972 Impala station wagon with fake wood paneling sat waiting.
Dad had bought the car “almost new” in 1974 and had been so proud when he’d first
brought it home.

Our Impala was the perfect car for a kid, because it was so “modern” and full of “technology.”
The tailgate didn’t swing out like everyone else’s station wagon because this one
was curved and electric. With just the push of a button the window magically disappeared
up into the roof and the tailgate slid into the floor. It even had a third row of
seats that faced backward. In retrospect, the tanklike Impala probably hadn’t been
the best car to buy at the height of the oil crisis, but maybe that’s why we’d been
able to afford it.

“We’re not taking the car,” Dad exclaimed as he saw me walking toward it. Then he
bent down, grabbed the metal garage door handle, and pulled it up. “We’re gonna walk.”

As the door creaked open, it was like we were staring out at a dream world. The snow
was still falling, but it was so light, so fluffy, that it hit the ground with just
a whisper. The air was crisp and fresh with just the slightest hint of smoke from
the wood fires keeping our neighbors warm.

The streetlights gave everything a surreal, peaceful glow. The snow seemed to be falling
much harder in the glow of the bulbs than anywhere else, but I knew it was just an
illusion.

Dad took my hand, and we walked down our short driveway toward the street. I instinctively
tried to make the turn to where the sidewalk would be, but Dad pulled me straight
ahead into the street. I didn’t say a word.

We walked down the middle of the road, hand in hand, without ever seeing a car. Each
time we’d pass under a streetlight I’d look up and see the yellowish glow light up
the thin layer of snow on Dad’s heavy wool jacket. We
both looked at each other and smiled—there was no Grinch around to spoil our fun.

It was all so perfect. Actually, it was all
too
perfect—I should’ve known that it wouldn’t last.

I felt so let down by the lack of snow that Christmas morning that I hadn’t even noticed
how cold the floor was. I put on my slippers—a present from Santa
last
year—and headed down the stairs. For the first time ever I was not going to be dragging
Mom out of bed on Christmas morning.

My grogginess gave way to anticipation, and my heart began to race. Visions of my
new bike consumed me. I knew that since I had made a promise to God to earn it, this
would be the year that I would finally get exactly what I deserved. I’d waited patiently
for so long, watching as every one of my friends had gotten the bike they’d asked
for. Now it was my turn. Mom was right, His arms were around me, and after all I’d
been through they were about to deliver the one present that could make me happy again.

Christmas music was playing on the big Magnavox console stereo in the living room.
It could hold eight different albums. When one was over, the tone arm would come up
and the next album would fall onto the turntable. That morning all the albums were
from the Firestone Christmas series. I think we got them one year when we bought our
tires.

As I rounded the corner into the living room, I heard Julie Andrews and my mom singing
together. “They know that Santa’s on his way, he’s loaded lots of toys and goodies
on his sleigh.”

“Merry Christmas, Eddie!” I’d been spotted. Mom danced around the corner from the
kitchen. She wiped her hands on her apron and held them out as an invitation to a
Christmas hug.

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said as I gave her a twelve-year-old half-a-hug. I didn’t
want to get pancake flour all over my pajamas, and I knew that if I let her give me
a full hug it would be five minutes before I wriggled out of it.

I broke free as quickly as I could and headed toward the tree in the corner. It glowed
with a single strand of
lights that were too big for the small evergreen. Popcorn strings and foil icicles
connected ornaments of glass, wood, and paper. Very few of the ornaments were store
bought. Many were the result of school projects or family activities, but most had
been made by Mom over the years.

I moved my practiced gaze around the green felt skirt at the base of the tree where
Mom had stitched the nativity scene. There were only a couple of gifts that hadn’t
been there on Christmas Eve and only one that I didn’t immediately recognize from
Operation Sneak Preview. None of them were even close to being large enough to be
a bike, but I still had high hopes. I knew that Mom had enough of Grandpa in her blood
to put me through the same kind of cat-and-mouse games that he did. A few years ago
she’d waited until all of my presents had been opened before pointing through the
back window to my last present: a brand-new sled with a big bow on top.

With that Christmas still fresh in my head, I began to think how Mom might have hidden
the bike. There were a lot of possibilities, but my guess was that she’d probably
wrapped up a picture of the Huffy and stashed the actual
bike in the garage. It would fit her perfectly—she could keep me guessing while not
wasting any wrapping paper, something she always seemed to be preoccupied with.

I picked up a present so that I could better see what was behind it, hoping to find
one that I hadn’t yet seen so I could shake it.

“Is that for me?” Mom sang.

She was too quick for me. “Oh, yes, Merry Christmas.” I turned hesitantly from the
gifts and handed her the present I’d paid for by picking berries at my grandfather’s
farm over the summer.

She carefully opened the clumsily wrapped package. “Gloves!” she exclaimed with a
little too much enthusiasm for me to believe her. Then she got a thoughtful look on
her face and said quietly, “I did need new gloves. They’re perfect, honey. Thank you.”

I wasn’t listening, because I was too busy fishing for her other gift. I found it
and handed it over. “Here’s my other present for you.”

“Oh, my, another one?” she said as she took the small, rectangular box. Inside were
a handwritten card and a bar
of chocolate. “‘Merry Christmas, Mother,’” she read aloud. “‘You are as sweet as this
chocolate.’” She laughed. “Eddie, did you buy this yourself?”

“Yes,” I replied proudly. “I was thinking you could eat it or make cookies with it.”

“Do you know what Baker’s chocolate is?”

“It’s chocolate you can bake, isn’t it?” I replied. Mom smiled at the thought of how
much I loved cookies yet obviously hadn’t listened to a word my father had said about
making them.

“Yes, dear, but it isn’t very—” She stopped and smiled as if it had absolutely been
the best Christmas gift she’d ever received. “You,
you
are the sweetest boy—I mean, young man—who ever lived.” Then she opened the package
and ate a square with her eyes squinting a bit and a grin on her face. “Best chocolate
I’ve ever had.”

She came to me and took me in her arms. It seemed like an eternity.

“My turn?” I asked anxiously.

“Your turn, sweetheart.”

I first opened the presents that I had, well, already
opened. I did my best to act surprised as I held each of them up to show Mom: Homemade
mittens from my cousin, a baseball from an uncle I hadn’t seen in years, and a bag
of candy that I was sure was the exact same striped stuff that I didn’t eat the year
before. I wondered if Mom hadn’t been putting out the same bag every year since I
was four.

Finally.
Only one present was left. It was a fairly large box, but very light.
Please, God,
I thought to myself,
let it be a Polaroid or even a handwritten note or card.
I couldn’t believe I was actually hoping to
not
open a BB gun or a set of walkie-talkies, but the Huffy was the only present on my
mind. It was the only present that would make me happy.

Mom had decorated the box with a large bow and a ribbon that looked suspiciously like
the one I’d taken off my birthday gift. I tore through reindeer-and-snowflakes wrapping
paper until I was left with a simple plain brown box. My heart raced as I slowly lifted
off the top and pushed aside the crinkled white tissue paper.

It was a sweater.

“Do you like it?” Mom asked as I stared at the gift, un
able to speak. She shifted on the couch and crossed her arms as she waited several
seconds for an answer.

Holding on to my last possible fragment of hope, I unfolded the sweater, hoping there
was something tucked inside that would point me toward the bike. I shook it back and
forth as hard as I could without being obvious, but nothing happened. That’s when
I realized there wouldn’t be a bike that year—just a stupid, handmade, ugly sweater.

“Do you like it? Do you really like it?” Mom was hoping my silence was due to my unspeakable
joy.

A stupid, handmade, ugly sweater that wasn’t a bike.

“Sure, Mom, it’s great.” I felt like I should cry. I was entitled to cry, I thought,
but it was the kind of sad that didn’t include tears. If I hadn’t worked so hard all
year, if I hadn’t thought about a new bike every waking second of my life, if I hadn’t
promised God I would
earn
it, then I might not have noticed how the color of the yarn would perfectly match
the Wonder Bread polka dots on my bread-bag boots. But I had done all of those things,
and I did notice.

“I’m really sorry about the bike, honey.” Mom’s voice was too soft and tender for
how I felt. “It’s just that the repairs for the roof were so much more than I expected.
I know you understand. Maybe I can save up enough to get it for you next year.”

I understood all right. I understood that we would always be the poor family and I
would always be the poor kid with plastic boots and no bike.

I stared down at the sweater and felt my body temperature rise, almost as if I’d already
put it on. I didn’t know who had let me down more: Mom, for not buying me what I deserved;
Dad, for not watching over me like he was supposed to; or God, for ignoring my promise.
I was so disappointed with all of them that I forgot I was supposed to put the neck
under my chin as if I’d been trying it on.

“I hope it fits!” Mom said, trying to remind me to do the “chin thing.” I didn’t get
the hint.

“I’m sure it will,” I replied without enthusiasm. Mom finally came over, took the
sweater from me, and held it up to my back. She pressed her fingers into my shoulders
as
she matched the edges to the outline of my body. “Oh sure,” she said. “At the rate
you’re growing it will be just the right size by next fall!” She was way too excited
about the whole thing.

I could muster only a halfhearted reply. “Thanks, Mom, it’s great.”

“It’s just like the expensive ones we sell at Sears,” she offered proudly, attempting
to combat the obvious disappointment that had involuntarily spread across my face.
“We ask almost forty dollars for a real, hand-knit wool sweater. I couldn’t afford
that, of course, but I was able to come up with enough to buy the good yarn.” She
stopped talking and looked at me as if embarrassed to be explaining her gift.