Why hadn’t I followed the directions exactly? Why had I thrown the measuring cups to the wind and decided to spread my architectural wings?
Worse, though, than the visual presentation was the sensation of the gingerbread house inside the mouth.
First, the teeth made hard, damaging contact with the bathroom tilelike cake. Next, the tongue was burned by the cheap, hardened vanilla frosting. A single bite was enough to onset juvenile diabetes.
Still, the front door and a tiny portion of roof were politely sampled. A number of gumdrops had been removed, then placed back. The dog refused a chunk of window even though it was caked with frosting “snow.” This very same dog did not hesitate to eat the wadded-up ball of aluminum foil she found on the floor next to the trash can.
And so my fiasco sat in ruin on a platter in the center of the dining table. Now no longer a food item but a stand-in for a decoration.
And then my brother appeared. He had briefly left his bedroom and all the electronic equipment in there to forage for food.
With one swift and decisive motion of the hand, he cracked a third of the roof away from the structure and got as much of it into his mouth as possible before I could scream at him and tell him to stop. But I wasn’t going to scream at him. My mouth was open in amazement, not anger. I was just waiting for him to snarl in disgust and spit the partially chewed roof right out onto the floor.
“You like it?” I asked, amazed.
He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. Why, did you put something funny in it?” he said suspiciously, holding the last corner of roof out away from him.
“No, it’s edible,” I said. “There’s no tricks.”
He nodded. Then he devoured the fragment in his hand and returned to the cake for more, breaking away nearly one entire wall of my holiday housing unit.
“Well, since nobody else is gonna eat it,” he said, carrying the wall away with him down the hall and back to his room.
I looked at the wretched structure on the table and I smiled. My gingerbread hovel had suddenly turned in to a loved—or at least somewhat appreciated—gingerbread home after all.
Claus and Effect
AT MY ELEMENTARY school, the teachers always did a little something special to celebrate everyone’s birthday. About an hour before the yellow buses arrived to take us home at the end of the day, one of the teachers would unroll the torn but taped-back-together crinkly red paper streamer that was used over and over, year after year, and hang it from one end of the chalkboard to the other. HAPPY BIRTHDAY would be written in neat teacher-script on the board. And a couple of boxes of Twinkies would be opened and placed on the long fake wood table below the streamer and chalkboard sign. Apple juice would be poured into tiny paper cups from a half-gallon plastic jug. It was a small school in the country; such a makeshift little party was exciting for everyone.
Except for Glen.
Sooner or later, after the juice cups had been crumpled up and pelted at the girls and the last Twinkie was gone, somebody would always say, “Poor Glen, he never gets a party.” And this never failed to plunge the room into silence. “Yeah, that’s right. Hey Glen, that really sucks.”
The two Brendas and a couple of other girls would walk over to Glen and put their hands on his shoulder, petting him lightly, as one would a bony and pitiful dog. Because of all their work with dolls, young girls could be shockingly maternal; they could confuse you and make you cry and want a grilled cheese sandwich.
Glen, embarrassed by the clutch of empathetic girls and annoyed that the spotlight had once again been aimed at him would laugh uncomfortably and say, “It’s no big deal. I don’t care, really. I never do anything for my birthday anyway.”
And all of us would then hold our breath because Glen had spoken the unspeakable.
Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer.
Glen had been born on the day after Christmas.
“My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that’s all,” he explained.
But we knew this was a lie. Glen’s parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.
Mrs. Sobel had tried to make Glen feel less like a hobbled cripple by telling him, “I know just how it is, honey. My mother was born on Pearl Harbor day.”
Everybody had just stared at her vacantly until Andi ruined it for everybody by raising her hand and saying, “My mother has pearls. She got them from her mother and she says when I’m grown-up, I’ll get to have them.”
That was how Mrs. Sobel discovered that none of us had ever heard the words pearl and harbor combined before. Thus began a two-week social studies project where we learned about the fateful day and were each forced to paint our own small corner of a wall mural depicting bombs falling from the sky and sinking boats at one end and Japanese kids throwing Frisbees at the other, but none of us had ever seen a Japanese kid before, so they were drawn like what we saw in cartoons: black, jagged hair, two slanted slashes for eyes, and a karate robe. Mrs. Sobel approved and suggested a Japanese flag be added to the headband.
In the corner, hidden by an explosion, I had slyly drawn an oyster with a pearl inside. I had written, “Don’t kill me, I’m so pretty!” as a tiny thought bubble coming from the pearl.
Everybody had silently blamed Glen for this art project, a task we considered punishment. Still, nobody could really hate him for it the way they could hate, say, Allison Murray because she was always telling on everyone. Life itself had punished Glen enough already.
I knew that I would rather spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair like one of Jerry’s Kids than suffer through life with a birthday the day after Christmas.
Sure, other kids had lousy birthdays, too. Like Mark, whose birthday was in the no-man’s-land of March, or that hog-faced Bertha from up in the fourth grade who was born on February second—Groundhog Day. But these were just run-of-the-mill cruddy birthdays.
Glen suffered an actual birth defect. And that’s why no matter whose birthday we were celebrating, it was always Glen who went home with the last Twinkie, even though he protested. “Aw, c’mon, don’t make me take it, please? It’s bad enough already with everybody feeling so sorry for me.”
“Nonsense,” the teacher would say, cramming the greasy, cream-filled sponge log into his backpack while we all looked at him with pity, weak smiles on our lips, tears glittering in the teacher’s eyes.
But because there is the slum in India, so, too, must there be Beverly Hills.
I had an October birthday. October twenty-third. This was the calendar’s finest piece of real estate. Mine was the Rodeo Drive of birthdays.
The only-in-the-way spring birthdays were long past as were those pesky, mosquito-bitten summer birthdays. September was a somber month as summer’s death was mourned. But by mid-October everyone was suddenly ready for the fall.
The air was refreshing. People were excited about Halloween. But they were not distracted by it, consumed with it. They were not cutting down trees and making lists and worrying about money. Everybody was happy because everybody—even the grown-ups—would soon get to have some candy.
And when you had a birthday on October twenty-third, there was always something to talk about at your birthday party: “What are you gonna be this year? I was a bat last year. I’m going as a toothbrush this time.” Plus, nobody could skimp on your presents because you were still far enough away from Christmas.
I didn’t care a thing about Halloween. In fact, it always made me feel a little foolish. It seemed to me that if you were going to be in costume, there should be a studio audience. I saw my October birthday merely as the very first step on the grand staircase to Christmas.
But I lived for Christmas.
And once my birthday arrived, it was only one slippery week until Halloween had come and gone. And then there was nothing in the way of Christmas.
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If you didn’t count that annoying Thanksgiving, which I absolutely did not.
I despised those pilgrims with their buckle shoes and their coffin clothes. I resented having to study them in class and then be forced to delay Christmas festivities until their stupid canned-cranberry-sauce holiday was over.
Likewise, I hated the Indians for not slaughtering them all.
Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.
While I no longer believed in Santa at the age of nine, I did believe in giving.
And as far as I was concerned, my parents would give me whatever I wanted. It was my payment for enduring the other 364 days of the year with them. Between my nasty drunk father and my suicidal, mental-patient mother, I felt I was owed certain reimbursements. They had aged me; I would drain them dry.
Beginning December first, I became like a young network executive; trying to organize a thousand different things at once, establishing lists of priorities, creating fallback plans and passing these documents along to those who would make it happen—my parents.
“It’s just a first draft,” I told them as they sat stone-faced at the kitchen table, my mother’s strained, medicated eyes focused on the salt and pepper shakers and my father, as usual, barely glancing up from his college students’ exam booklets.
I slid the document onto the table between them. Neatly printed along the top was the title, STOCKING STUFFERS: YOUR OPTIONS, followed by a list of acceptable items.
14K gold electroplate LED watch (Mountain Farms Mall)
OR
Bag of coins (quarters and above)
OR
Real gold nuggets (5–6)
AND
Real leather wallet (filled with assortment of bills)
Variety of candy (chocolate, NO fruit-based candies)
Red candy canes, not green NO MINT OR
WINTERGREEN ANYTHING
AND
Level B surprise gift—Mother-selected
Assortment of level C gifts—Mother-selected
A second sheet of paper was provided featuring a list of lower-priced B items, such as sterling-silver neck chains, mood rings, Silly Putty, and finally a C list of gums, Jawbreakers, and other under-a-dollar items, most of which could cause cavities or stain fabric. I had to specify mother-selected because if my father chose the gifts, they would be grossly inappropriate for the era.
Last year, my stocking was filled with brittle cellophane-wrapped packages of Lance Toastchee peanut butter and cheese crackers. Then into the toe of the stocking my father had crammed a useless nickel with a lumpy cow on the back.
Worst of all, he’d included three unsharpened pencils.
“Well, these are the presents I used to receive in my stocking when I was your age,” he said. And he didn’t look mad about it, either. He looked all happy and dippy, like he always did when he remembered his own kid things.
“Jack and Carolyn gave you a bunch of junky crackers and that’s it?” I asked, astonished.
“Junky? These were brand new back then. Why, nobody had ever seen anything like them! Crackers with real cheese and peanut butter inside? It was amazing. Like a sandwich you could carry around in your pocket. I took a package with me to my classroom and showed the other kids and boy oh boy, were they envious.”
I looked at the fifteen or twenty packs of crackers I’d dumped out on the carpet. Our dog, Cream, had come over and sniffed them and she had walked away. “Well, then you can have these, too,” I said, sliding the mound of them toward his rocking chair. And without comment, I slid the pencils toward him, too.
“You don’t want your pencils?” he said, stunned, like I was handing him back a crisp fifty. “Those are number-one lead pencils. We used to fight over those in school.”
“Yeah, so do the kids at my school. Only they fight with them. Eric got stabbed in the eardrum. That’s why we have to use those Flair felt tips now.”
He considered this.
“And the nickel? That was your big present?” I asked sourly, pinching the dirty coin between my thumb and index finger like I would a dead roach.
“Son, that’s not just a nickel. It’s an Indian Head nickel. You don’t see too many of these anymore. Did you turn it over?” he asked, reaching from his chair.
I turned it over and shrugged. Then I crawled across the carpet, too lazy to stand, and handed it to him.
He chuckled as he inspected the coin. “Yes, yes, there it is. See? The buffalo on the other side. A great big old buffalo, how about that?”
“I thought it was just a cow,” I said, bored. “I get those animal nickels in change sometimes. I always throw them in the trash because I thought they were counterfeit.”
My father nearly swallowed his tongue. “You th-th-threw away your Indian Head nickels?”
“Well, yeah. How was I supposed to know they were real? The only animal allowed on regular American money is that bird. We don’t put farm animals on the money anymore.”
My father said, “Well, I cannot imagine. When I was your age, we used to beg my mother for her change purse so we could hunt for Indian Heads. If I had been given one in change? Why, that would have been the happiest day of my life.”
He looked truly bewildered, lost in time. It was like I had informed him, “Yes, and not only do the horses now have engines strapped to their stomachs? But their legs have been chopped off and replaced with wheels!”
So this year, I wanted to make sure I didn’t wake up on Christmas morning and find another stocking filled with more junk from his childhood—nails, paper clips, rocks. It amazed me that he loved Christmas almost as much as me, though for clearly different reasons.
My father studied my documents. “Gold nuggets!” he said, alarmed. “What on earth are you going to do with gold nuggets?”
I said, “Polish them. Have them. I don’t know. I just want them, that’s all.”
Now he removed his reading glasses. “Well, son, I don’t think you would be as happy with gold nuggets as you think. Often, this natural gold that you want, these nuggets, as you call them, are contaminated with pieces of rock—almost a kind of dirt—and—”
“What do you mean, dirt?” I said. “Gold doesn’t come with dirt stuck on it. I’ve seen pictures.”
He said, “No, that’s not true, now. Gold does indeed sometimes have little pebbles mixed in with it. And even a kind of dirt. It’s not especially pretty. They have to melt it down to make rings and whatnot.”
I looked at him with my eyes narrowed to see if I could detect a lie. He sounded suspiciously like my older brother, who lied constantly about everything. It had been my brother who told me there was no such thing as Santa Claus. “Not anymore there’s not,” he’d said. “Santa worked in the off-season at a shipyard in Amsterdam and he was killed in a forklift accident.”
I’d been mortified and believed him unquestionably. Only that night because I asked my father where they’d buried Santa’s body did I learn the truth. He wasn’t really dead. He never existed.
Having already believed for many years that Santa and Jesus were the same person, I was kind of relieved to actually be done with him. He never really had made any sense to me.
But my father did not appear to be playing a trick on me.
“Can’t you wash it off?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not, son,” he said. “The little pieces of rock are embedded within the gold.”
I snatched my list back and crossed out Gold nuggets. “Okay, forget those,” I said. Then I wrote in Gold bars.
All my father said was, “I don’t know about that.”
I raised my eyebrows in challenge. As far as I was concerned, Christmas was my yearly paycheck and I wasn’t about to accept any deductions.
“Did I ever tell you,” he said now, leaning back in his chair, “about the year I received a chimp as a Christmas present?”
Now I wa
s certain he was lying and I didn’t find it funny. “You never had a chimp.”
“I most surely did. Your grandfather bought it for me overseas and he had it shipped all the way to Lawrenceville, Georgia. We kept it in a big ol’ cage in the backyard. Boy, was that one mean chimp. If you tried to get up close to him, he’d be liable to pee on you. And if you went anywhere near the bars, he’d try and bite you. Oh, he was just a mean, nasty animal.”
“You kept it in a cage?” And I imagined a little person-monkey dressed in overalls and tap shoes, clutching a harmonica in one hand and a banana in the other, being jammed into a cage.
“We had to. Son, this was a wild, wild animal, taken from its home in nature. Not some TV chimp dressed up in human clothing and trained to do silly tricks,” he said, with disdain.
I said, “You never mind the outfits and the tricks, can you still get chimps as pets?”
He told me he wasn’t sure, but he expected that you could. Although you would be foolish to want one. “People are under the false impression, from these TV animals, that chimps are fun, almost human companions. Well, I can personally tell you that they are aggressive, hateful creatures that throw their own bowel movements at you. They growl and snap like the worst dog imaginable. They are just terrible, terrible animals.”
Of course, I knew this was untrue. I knew the monkey only resented the cage and the pencil-twirling Goody Two-shoes that came out once in a while to inspect it. A chimp needed love and tenderness, just like a person. It also needed a glitter headband, a bib, and a tambourine.
I once again snatched my paper back and scribbled Monkey? in the corner. “I have to revise this,” I told him. “I’ll have a fresh copy for you in the morning.”
“Margaret!” my father shouted. “Stop your damn daydreaming.”
My mother startled and looked up from the salt and pepper shakers, seeing me for the first time. “Hey there,” she said, smiling warmly. “Do you have a fever?”