Nana paused for a long moment, and then finally her eyes lit up. “I know,” she said sneakily. “Thirty-one!”
“Let’s take a leap of faith on this one,” I said. “Aim higher, Nana! I know you can do it!”
“If that sweater is over thirty-two dollars, we’re going back to the mall right now to return it,” Nana informed me.
“Thirty-two dollars!” I cried. “I knew you could do it!”
“Let me see those receipts,” she demanded, holding her little Nana hand out. “I think it’s weird I guessed right on all three. I think something fishy is going on here.”
Sure, it was true that I had tricked an eighty-seven-year-old lady like I was an executive at Enron, and I had subsidized Nana’s shopping like she was a farmer in Kansas, but I was willing to pay the price to get it done. Done quickly and quietly. If I handed over those receipts, I might as well have gotten my car keys out, too, because that meant we were going back to the mall to undo everything we had just accomplished. Everything. It was a thought I simply could not bear.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I offered. “I’ll give you these receipts if you agree that the next time we go shopping, I get to hold The List.”
Nana fell silent and began writing out the check. I smiled.
A couple of weeks later, my sister Lisa called.
“I took Nana shopping today,” she said as soon as I answered the phone, obviously looking for sympathy.
“Oh,” I replied, mainly because I was still resentful that I hadn’t gotten my fair and well-earned share of pity.
“AT THE MALL,” she said for effect.
I choked on my own spit. “Was she trying to return things without receipts?” I asked. “If she returned a sweater to Banana Republic, I am charging her full price next Christmas!”
“No,” my sister answered to my great relief. “But she made me take her to Nordstrom’s to get perfume for Mom.”
“Oh big deal,” I pooh-poohed. “I took her all over that mall, including Aveda!”
“Yeah? Poor you. Well, I am willing to bet that no one had a heart attack on your shopping trip,” my sister shot back.
“Okay, you got me,” I said immediately. “I’m listening.”
Apparently, Nana’s list had been incomplete when I took her shopping, so my sister volunteered to take her, primarily because my dad had just bought her a car and the layer of obligation on that car was still pretty thick. Out to the mall they went, to the only store that carries the kind of perfume my mother wanted.
Once they got to the perfume counter, a nice saleslady helped them, found the perfume, and even informed Nana that it was a better deal if she purchased the gift set as opposed to the individual perfume. It even came in a box that was wrapped, although this posed a bit of a problem, since the computer code for the gift set was covered up, naturally, with wrapping paper.
While the saleslady was looking for the code in the big code book, the phone rang, and after she answered it, she told my sister and Nana that she had a family emergency and she would get someone else to help them. Nana allegedly wasn’t very happy about that and said very loudly to Lisa, “THAT is the problem with service today. NO ONE wants to help you!”
That was about two seconds before the saleslady yelled to a co-worker at another counter, “Can you please help these ladies? My husband is having a heart attack and I have to go!” Then she left, running.
Unfortunately, none of this information reached Nana’s good ear. All she saw was her saleslady running away, away, away, and not coming back.
Nana started tapping her hand against the glass, and by the time a salesman came to her aid, my sister firmly believed she was seconds away from an open-handed counter slap. He searched through the computer-code book and finally found it, seconds before my sister was ready to rip the wrapping paper off of the gift set herself to find the price.
“Okay, the perfume-and-lotion set is fifty-five dollars,” the salesman said to them.
“Oh, come on,” Nana scoffed. “THAT is ridiculous. You really expect me to pay that for some lotion and perfume? What is it with the lotion these days? Is lotion going extinct? You know, Elizabeth Taylor’s lotion is not that expensive, and it’s a very nice scent!”
Sensing danger, my sister immediately went into action.
“You know what?” she said as she cleared her throat, got the salesguy’s attention, and tapped her fingernail on the glass. “I could have sworn this set was on sale. I’m sure of it. Yes, this set was definitely on sale.”
The salesman took my sister’s cue, nodded, and wholeheartedly agreed as Lisa slipped a twenty into his palm.
“This set is twenty dollars off! It most certainly is!” he said excitedly, which calmed Nana down a bit.
“All right then, that’s more like it,” she exhaled with a deep breath. “Thanks to the sharp eyes of my granddaughter, I got a fair deal. What is it with you salespeople, always trying to rob me? Do I have a sign that says ‘sucker’ on my head? I should report you!”
“No one is reporting anybody,” my sister said firmly. “It’s Christmastime, and we should all be thankful that we’re not the ones having heart attacks right now and that we all just have high blood pressure. Write out the check for the gift set, Nana. It’s time to go home.”
Back in the car, Nana took a deep breath.
“That was some day, huh? All that excitement,” she said.
“Yep,” my sister replied.
“Sure was different than the way I thought I was going to spend the day,” Nana continued.
“Yeah? How was that?” Lisa asked.
“Oh, the usual,” Nana concluded. “Sitting in the chair and moaning.”
“Yeah, shopping sure beats that,” my sister agreed.
“But I sure didn’t expect to spend that much money,” Nana said, shaking her head.
“Oh, me neither,” my sister agreed. “But I think you made out like a bandit.”
Jingle Hell
We all knew that Frank had way too much time on his hands.
All of the neighbors agreed, perhaps not in a ballot-casted community vote, but at one time or another everyone on the block had taken notice, assessed the situation, and had decided that the ninety-pound man who lived across the street from me had spun madly out of control.
It was far beyond our control, anyway.
The first indication that something was seriously wrong on our street came on Thanksgiving Day several years ago, in the shape of eight full-size plywood reindeer, complete with leather reins and bold, brass jingle bells, all planted firmly in Frank’s yard. Behind them glided a robust, gleaming Santa and his sleigh, which was bigger than any actual car that the neighbors owned.
My neighbor Mike sadly shook his head as he scratched his belly. “That’s a man with trouble in his heart,” he said to me, nodding at the holiday extravaganza across the street. “And trouble in his pants. Somebody in that house needs to get laid.”
I had to agree. We all knew Frank didn’t have any kids and spent almost all of his spare time manicuring his already perfect lawn, which made the rest of the neighbors look really bad, especially because we had all moved into a white trash neighborhood specifically so we could spend our leisure time getting drunk and not installing sprinkler systems. Frank had no right trying to fancy up his yard; he was ruining our street, particularly when my next-door neighbors caught the Fancy Yard Fever from Frank and tried to gussy up their place during Christmas, too. The only problem with their improvement was that they were really poor, so they made all of their decorations out of used, broken things. The most precious of which consisted of a huge five-pointed star made out of silver tinsel, held up on an easel and framed with a circle of tinsel around the outside. In short, they weren’t too bright, since they had inadvertently propped up an enormous, shiny pentagram six feet from my house in a very sorry attempt to outdo Frank.
The next year was even worse. In addition to the Santa setup, Frank pres
ented the street with a miniature Disneyland theme, including a Bambi, Thumper, all seven Dwarfs, and a terribly disfigured Dumbo that looked more like a sow than a circus elephant, which he nailed to the top of the tallest tree in his yard. That was also the year he set up a sound apparatus that blared out the Chipmunks and a twinkle-light system that required the expertise of an architect. It had become horribly apparent to all of us that Frank had redirected most, if not all, of his sexual energy away from his wife and into the direction of a jigsaw and sheets of lumber.
This was confirmed one afternoon when all of the neighbors came out to fake work on their yards so we could watch Frank fight with his wife as they were stringing up the lights and disaster struck. Frank’s wife, it seemed, had handed him the wrong end of the extension cord, and in a fit of unleashed fury, he hurled it off the ladder and onto the ground, where it landed in front of her. She looked at the cord, then at him, and back to the cord again.
“Well, you can take that cord and plug it straight into your ass, Frank” was the only thing she said before she walked into the house. Frank got very nervous and started uttering mumbled phrases, although I did catch his comment that she “was only a woman, how could she know about man’s work like this?”
On the heels of every disaster, tragedy naturally follows, and Frank’s yard was no exception. One sunny December morning, everyone on my street woke up to Frank howling mournfully, and a brush of my bedroom curtains revealed a tortured man with his hands on his head, screaming for God over and over again in a crucial plea for compensation. A further brush revealed a handcrafted and diligently loved set of reindeer now embellished overnight, by way of black spray paint, with a full set of impressive male genitalia.
That night, the Chipmunks did not sing. Frank had a plan to catch the reindeer marauders. I don’t know what it was, but I know that it included a tennis racket and a bunch of rope, because that was what he hauled out into the carport as the sun was setting. When it got dark, he commandeered his post in a corner of the carport, sitting on a wooden stool with all of the lights off, a little man alone. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was there because I could see the glow of his cigarette every time he took a drag. The Christmas King guarded his castle for six nights in a row until Christmas came, and he never caught anybody.
The years that followed brought the “Peanuts” characters to Frank’s house, as well as the Simpsons, Frosty the Snowman, and an assorted gang of demonic elves that guarded the compound with steaming red eyes not unlike those of Jody, the demonic pig from The Amityville Horror.
An attempt to kidnap Snoopy was thwarted when one of Frank’s stepsons came home drunk one night and grazed several of the vandals with his car as he attempted to turn into the driveway, although they still managed to escape. This time, a tennis racket wasn’t going to be enough security for the yard, and Frank unabashedly and almost proudly told me of the network he had set up in the neighborhood. It included other seasonal-decoration fanatics, CB radios, and guns. One guy was set up three blocks to the west and the other guy one block to the east. If a vandal was spotted, or even suspected, the network participants would signal to one another as to which direction the perp was heading, and if one was caught, Frank told me point-blank that he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot.
The duration of that season, quite thankfully, was uneventful.
The next year, we could all tell that something big was brewing in the elf factory of Frank’s backyard when sounds of saws, hammers, and sanders consumed our street for weeks. We held our breath for Thanksgiving Day, Frank’s annual self-appointed unveiling date.
And we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Thanksgiving Day came and went, blanketed with a bitter silence as our turkeys turned rancid.
Nothing was happening in Frank’s yard, not a string of lights or a note of Christmas melodies. Something was very, very wrong. It felt dangerous.
It was impossible that he had had sex. His wife had left him during the summer.
Then, one night, I was napping when I heard it.
Tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap.
The tinkle of Frank’s hammer.
I jumped out of bed, as I’m sure my neighbors did, and peered across the way to Frank’s yard, but it was too dark. The sun had already gone down, and all I could see was a big, lumpy shape of something with a floating red light toward the bottom that must have been Frank. I was going to have to wait until morning. Frank, you see, was teasing us.
The next morning, the first thing I did, without even lighting a cigarette, was open the bedroom curtains to see the new creation.
It was bigger than anything I had ever seen on Frank’s lawn before.
It was six feet tall.
It was a monolith.
It was wearing a Santa suit.
It was purple.
It was BARNEY.
Of course I screamed. The first thing I thought was that at nighttime, the thing was going to come alive, gallop across the street, and peek in my windows, mouthing that it loved me.
If Barney was the agent of Satan, as I believed him to be, that made Frank the devil, even if he did weigh less than me. My fear grew even more enormous when I remembered that I was having a Christmas party in a week, and if I knew my friends like I thought I did, Barney had better brush up on some tricks from hell or borrow my neighbor’s pentagram for protection, because he didn’t stand a chance against my guests, which, in turn, was going to put me in an ocean of boiling water with Frank.
Then a miracle happened.
Barney was shanghaied the night before my party. I couldn’t believe my good luck. I was off the hook; I couldn’t be implicated in Barney’s abduction no matter what.
The night of my party, Frank hadn’t even flickered the Christmas lights. The yard remained dark, black, and mourning.
My husband, under the influence of some foul though potent wassail, took a tribe of guests to the other side of the street to prove to them that I don’t make this shit up. There they were, gawking and amazed at the finery, wondering aloud what kind of nut would put forth such a worthless effort, when a voice rang out from Frank’s porch.
“GET OUTTA MY YARD.”
They were in trouble. My husband knows that Frank has guns.
“We were just admiring your yard,” he said. “How did you get rid of—I mean, what happened to the Barney?”
“WOULDN’T GET ANY CLOSER IF I WERE YOU,” Frank warned. “I GOT TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY VOLTS IN THIS YARD.”
And he did.
The entire yard was laced with trip wire, starting at the Snoopy that Frank had placed in Barney’s spot as a lure for when the bandits came back. The lawn, the Bambi, the Linus, the Bart, the elves, were as hot as the Chair when the switch is pulled—well, maybe not that hot, but pretty hot, hot enough to fry a little kid who could wander into Frank’s Christmas Death Trap by mistake.
The boys got out of the yard and came straight back to the party.
The next day, I had to go over to Frank’s to apologize for something else that happened that night. My friend Keith thought it would be fun to bring the British punk band, U.K. Subs, to my house, but by the time they got there, everyone had already gone home. The band didn’t have anyone to entertain them, so they went outside and threw grapefruits at Frank’s yard until Frank announced that he had his rifle cocked and that they were just moving targets to him.
“I probably would have just shot ’em in the legs,” Frank assured me. “Good thing for them that they didn’t come in this yard. Got enough volts running through here to knock a horse on its ass.”
It was then that I noticed the newest addition to Frank’s yard, a handcrafted sign that was spiked right near the entryway.
FORGET THE DOG, it pronounced.
That was odd, I thought. Forget the dog?
Forget the dog?
Then it all made sense.
I read the next line.
&
nbsp; BEWARE OF THE OWNER.
Well.
Enough said.
Where Do Good Trees Go When They Die?
I had just finished opening my last present on Christmas Day when my mother asked me when I was going to take my Christmas tree down.
“I just finished putting it up today,” I answered. “Finally, procrastination has rewards bigger and better than Discover card! Did you know that if you wait to literally the last minute, you get a free tree? The lot was deserted and the gate was open, almost as if the tree warden expected the leftover trees to escape. It was kind of like if it was the last episode of Hogan’s Heroes.”
“You can’t let those things dry out too much,” she said, ignoring me. “And with all the trash you have around that house, a fire will rip through it like a mobile home.”
“I’ll take it down soon,” I stressed, trying to quiet her.
“You’d better,” I heard her whisper.
The week after Christmas, little birdie chirps floated through the air, a cool yet gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the trees, and buttery sunlight glided through my bedroom window. I smiled when I woke up. It was a perfect morning.
Then the doorbell shattered everything.
Ding dong.
Ding dong.
Ding dong!
No one rings my doorbell in the morning like my mother.
“Hi, Mom,” I said as I opened the door.
“Yeah. Listen,” she nodded as she handed over a newspaper that had clearly been delivered to me by mistake. “I was just driving by and I noticed that you haven’t picked up the newspapers in your driveway. You’re just inviting someone to come in and rob you.”
“Good morning,” I smiled.
She looked past me. “Oh my God, that tree is still up? What, are you crazy? I’m telling you, it’s a fire hazard. You are begging this house to catch on fire. When are you going to take it down? I smell smoke. Is that smoke?”
“Trees do not spontaneously combust, Mom,” I said, dropping the papers into the recycling bin. “They don’t all of a sudden catch fire for no reason.”