“No.”
“Well, if and when that happens, just answer the phone. That’s that. If the phone rings, answer the phone. Until then, you have your own phone, and please leave mine on the counter where I can find it if Daddy calls.”
“I was at the counter while I was looking at it.”
“Fine, okay, sweetheart. You win. I’m sorry. We truly do not have time for this. I need to start cooking, or we won’t have anything to eat.”
“God, Mom. You should’ve started cooking two hours ago,” Tatty said. “Every year you start cooking at, like, eight o’clock in the morning.”
“Well this year I overslept! Okay? This year I slept in! Shoot me, Tatty! Just put me out of my misery! Please!” Holly turned, and forced a laugh out of her lungs to try to dilute the sound of her rage, and also to spare herself the indignity of having lost her temper, but her heart was pounding hard in the soft spot at the base of her neck, which made her feel like some sort of underwater creature. As if she had some panicky gill there. She could hardly swallow. She was about to instruct Tatty in what she could do to help hurry the Christmas dinner preparations along, instead of complaining, when, on the counter where it lay, her cell phone began to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Holly turned. Tatiana was looking at the phone without touching it. “Is it Daddy?” Holly asked.
“No. It’s Unavailable,” Tatty said.
“Well go ahead and answer it if you want to, sweetheart.”
But Tatiana just stood and stared into the phone. She’d sat down on the stool next to the kitchen island, so that now her feet dangled four inches from the floor in their little black slippers, exactly the way they used to when Tatty was three and a half feet tall and sat behind Holly in her car seat as Holly drove her to day care.
Christ. Holly felt so sad. She’d chastised her daughter, who was now afraid to touch her cell phone. And poor Tatty looked worried. Her eyebrows were arched so that they formed an upside-down V on her forehead. They were dark, a little bushy, Tatty’s eyebrows—but that was fashionable now, and Tatty’s facial features were so elegant that no eyebrows could have taken away from that. Still, someday Tatty would probably want to pluck them, and the idea of that also made Holly feel sad. Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world. Bob Dylan continued to rasp out the lyrics—And where have you been, my darling young one?—and her daughter just kept looking into the phone. Again, Tatiana’s face took on that awful hue—the silvery blue of a fish tossed up on a pier—and she made no move whatsoever to answer Holly’s phone.
“Oh, come on,” Holly said, and picked it up, hit the green answer bar with her thumb. “Hello?”
But the call had already gone to voice mail, and if there was a way to interrupt voice mail and answer the call at this point, Holly hadn’t learned it. She’d only learned how to use about half the features of this phone. It was like the brain, the way the experts claimed a human being only used about 10 percent of what was available up there. Steve Jobs, like God, had given her much more to work with than she would ever be able to make use of.
She put the phone on the counter again and cocked her head at Tatty, determining that she was not going to ask her why she hadn’t answered. It was, obviously, punishment for Holly’s having told her to put down the phone a few minutes earlier. Holly did not want to get into a defensive position again, especially since it had been irrational, which Tatiana knew full well and could call her on in a flash. Holly had asked her daughter to put down the phone because she didn’t like the color it was turning her daughter’s skin as she peered into it. There was certainly no explaining that.
“No one’s going to leave a message,” Tatty said. “They never do.”
“No,” Holly said. “They don’t. They never do. They’re robots who want to sell things to people. They don’t like to talk to other robots.”
Tatiana jumped down from the stool so quickly then that for a second Holly thought she’d fallen, so she hurried instinctively toward her daughter. But Tatiana held up a hand as if she had to hold her mother back, as if Holly had planned to strike her, not help her.
“You don’t know,” Tatty said, shaking her head. “You have no idea who’s calling.”
“I realize that,” Holly said. “I don’t know, because you didn’t answer. If you’d answered the phone, I would now know who it was who called.”
“You told me not to answer!”
Holly took a step back and threw her hands in the air. “I what?”
Tatiana muttered something.
“What? What are you talking about, Tatiana?”
Tatty’s dark eyes searched the space just to the right of Holly’s shoulder, not looking at her directly, but not looking away from her, either. Her profile looked like a marble sculpture. Pale and polished and a little cold.
“I’m not going to continue this absurd argument, Tatty,” Holly said. “You didn’t answer the cell phone to spite me. Either that or you didn’t want to be bothered to talk to the robot, either.”
Tatiana turned and began to walk from the kitchen island to the family room, to the Christmas tree in the corner—its branches drooping under the weight of all the ornaments and the strings of lights. The whole scene—the tree, the lights, her daughter in her Christmas dress—looked wan to Holly in the glare pouring through the picture window, which was now just a scrim of snow outdoors. Who knew how long it might take Eric to get back from the airport, or where his brothers and their families were by now as they attempted to converge on the house from the various hotels they’d spent their nights in? God help her if she had to entertain the Coxes very long without any help. At least Thuy and Pearl and Patty lived only a few miles away. Surely they would have no reason to be late, no matter how much snow was falling.
The Christmas lights drowned themselves in their own dull brilliance as Tatty peered into them, looking curious, the way she’d peered into Holly’s cell phone, as if something either wonderful or terrible might be hiding in there.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Let’s not fight. I love you so much. It’s Christmas, and we have a lot to do.”
She waited for her daughter to turn around. When she did, Holly thought, she would take Tatiana in her arms. She would hold her until she warmed and softened in her embrace. They would start the day again.
But Tatty didn’t turn around. Instead, she said something under her breath, which Holly chose to ignore, and as it became clear that she could stand there all day waiting, and Tatiana was not going to turn around, Holly herself turned around, went to the refrigerator, and opened the door.
The refrigerator was so crammed full from her shopping trip the day before that Holly had to step backward to see the contents fully. The roast was what she was looking for, but in order to get to it she would have to swim through eggnog and sparkling juice (Eric’s brother Tony didn’t drink) and champagne bottles (his wife most certainly did) and whipping cream and fruit salad. The roast was at the very back, still wrapped in the plastic bag in which she’d brought it home from the grocery store the day before.
As she always did, Tatty had grimaced at the plastic bag (“They aren’t biodegradable! They never leave the earth!”) as the bag boy slid the roast (sixty dollars’ worth of prime) into it.
But Holly had given her a look, and said, “We need it in plastic, Tatty. So it doesn’t bleed all over the refrigerator,” to which her daughter had made an even more dramatic expression of revulsion and then hurried away from the checkout line to stare into the glass cage of stuffed animals near the automatic doors:
How many dollars, over the years, had Holly stuffed into that machine so that Tatty could try to snag a miniature teddy bear or pink cat? Something cheap and synthetic, probably made in China, stuffed with some kind of formaldehyde-soaked substance that had been outlawed in this country for years? It
had been remarkable, really, how many times Tatty, as a little girl, had snagged one of those prizes with the machine’s mechanical claw. The cashiers used to comment on it, saying they’d never seen anyone outsmart that game as often as Tatty had.
At the car Tatty had helped her unload the groceries into the trunk from the cart, steering clear of the roast in the plastic bag, which Holly tossed into the backseat (was she trying to rile her daughter?), where it landed with a ridiculous, decapitated thunk. Tatty sat beside her in silence as Holly maneuvered them out of the parking lot, but when they were in the road and had reached the speed limit, Tatty said, “Before plastic bags there must have been ways to keep meat from bleeding all over the refrigerator, Mom.” She said bleeding in such a way that Holly anticipated that soon Tatiana would be announcing her vegetarianism.
“That’s right,” Holly had said. “I bet there were, but I bet they didn’t work as well as a plastic bag,” and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. She turned it down so the voices were just a whispering background and tried to engage Tatiana in a bit of conversation by asking her if she knew who the musician was, but Tatty just said, “No.” And then, as if to pound a nail in Holly’s coffin, they passed the town’s largest tree—a white pine that towered over the church next to which it grew, even over its steeple—and, snagged practically at the very top like a mocking Christmas star, a white plastic bag fluttered around in the wind.
HOLLY LIFTED THE meat out of the refrigerator with both hands, as if it were a sleeping baby, and put it, in its white plastic bag, down on the kitchen counter.
As she’d known she would, she found the bottom of the plastic bag pooled with blood, but she resisted the urge to call Tatty over to show her what the point was of that evil plastic bagging. She wondered about those many public school teachers who’d driven home their lessons about sustainability and biodegradability and migrating birds with their feet tangled in plastic grocery bags over the years—what did they bring their meat home in? A little rivulet of blood made its way down the side of the granite countertop and onto the tiles near her stocking feet.
Holly glanced at it, and chose to ignore it. She’d clean it up later. The tiles were red, and the blood—dark as menstrual blood or cherry syrup—was camouflaged there. No one would know it was there but her. She opened the plastic bag, slit open the cellophane wrapper around the meat, lifted the roast off the Styrofoam it rested on, and peeled off the Kotex-like bandage from the bottom. She then lifted and placed the meat gently (again a sleeping baby came to mind) in the roasting pan she’d left on the counter the night before.
It looked, of course, unappetizing. It looked like an accident, Holly thought. It looked like what it was—an animal, uncovered, like what any one of them would look like, she supposed, stripped of all exteriors. Some mushrooms, onions, and potatoes would help, and pepper, and as Holly began to grind the pepper mill over the top of the meat she called over her shoulder to Tatty, “Could you get the mushrooms out of the crisper and wash them?”
There was no response. Holly turned and looked at her daughter, sharply, to which Tatty responded with an expression of such infinite weariness that it made Holly want to laugh.
This was the expression Tatty gave the world whenever she was asked to do some chore she didn’t want to do—a sad deflation, the expression that might be worn by a princess slave as she was being taken in chains to the dungeons.
Holly remembered, then, her own teenage years, and a few friends she’d had like this. Girls who rolled their eyes so languidly and so often it seemed their eyeballs could have permanently disappeared somewhere above their brows. She recalled lying on the floor of Cindy Martin’s bedroom, listening to Billy Joel on a transistor radio propped up between them, and the way Cindy had parted her lips at the ceiling in a kind of silent scream, squeezing her eyes shut and letting her shoulders sink deeper into the white shag carpeting when her mother called from below, “Cindy? You need to feed the dog!”
Holly herself had been envious. The mother. The chore. The dog. These normal trappings of a normal childhood. She herself was never asked to do anything at home, because she had two older sisters, each of whom had made it her goal in life to let Holly have a “normal childhood” despite their mother’s death and their father’s “secret” alcoholism. It was why Holly did not chastise Tatty for her resentful reactions to being asked to empty the dishwasher or take out the garbage. These were luxuries, these small burdens. It was a luxury to be able to dole out such burdens. As Tatiana made her way to the refrigerator, to the crisper, Holly said, cheerfully, “Thanks, Tat,” trying to let her daughter know that she recognized that this was an effort for her, this indignity, but also that it was ridiculous, and charming, that it was such an effort.
Outside, a snowplow growled by, and Holly heard the sound of its blades scraping against the pavement. It really was a blizzard, then, wasn’t it? These days it seemed that the snowplows only came out during emergencies. Cutbacks. And this was Christmas! Imagine the overtime the city had to pay a snowplow driver on Christmas Day. Like the U.S. Postal Service, snowplowing had been a service Holly used to take for granted. There was a time (only ten years ago?) when the snowplows came out just, it seemed, for the show of it:
Give us a flurry, a dusting, a glaze, it had seemed, and we’ll make it rue the day!
But those days seemed like longer ago than a decade now—like those old-fashioned days when they used to serve you dinner on airplanes, or pump your gas for you, or carry your groceries out to the car. And now, of course, they were talking about shutting the post office down.
How much snow must have fallen for them to be willing to pay overtime to the snowplowers on Christmas Day?
Holly glanced over at Tatty, who was staring at the carton of mushrooms in her hands as if completely baffled by them.
“Did you hear that?” Holly asked.
“Hear what?” Tatty said, under her breath, still looking down at the mushrooms.
That profile:
The lowered eyes. The fixed stare. An ancient beauty carved by someone whose identity was lost to time. And the ancient message of it, which seemed to be, Gaze upon me, I’m here and also not here, of you and apart from you.
Tatiana’s cold marble profile unnerved Holly. She said, “Just put those down, Tatiana. I’ll do it.”
Tatiana continued to stare into the carton of mushrooms.
Holly said, too loudly, “Did you hear me?”
Tatiana seemed, then, to hear her, but it was as if she’d picked Holly’s voice up on a walkie-talkie from miles away. She shook her head a little, placed the carton of mushrooms carefully in the sink, looked over at Holly—and then Holly realized that the attitude she’d taken to be Tatiana’s annoyance at having been asked to do a chore was not that.
Tatiana had been crying!
“Honey!” Holly said, turning from the meat to her daughter, wiping her bloody hands on her dress—because who cared? There were more important things, and the dress was so busily floral a bit of blood would simply look like part of the ridiculous pattern. “Oh my God, what’s wrong?”
She took her daughter by her shoulders so quickly that she almost knocked Tatiana over—so thin, that frame, so frail!—and she pulled her to her hard, cupping the back of Tatiana’s skull in a hand just as she had when Baby Tatty had been small enough to carry on her hip from room to room, from crib to bath, from car to playground. “What’s wrong, my sweetheart?” she asked again.
Tatiana let her forehead rest on her mother’s shoulder, but she said nothing and didn’t raise her arms to return Holly’s embrace. It was like holding a mannequin, except that Tatiana smelled like tea tree oil and citrus fruit and fields full of unearthly flowers—flowers that had been raised in factories and tinkered with until their scents conformed
to some inventor’s idea of the scent of the perfect flower.
And something else. Something not quite right. A bit of rotten fruit, again. Just a whiff. And then Holly felt that urgency return.
Something had followed them home from Russia!
There was something in all of this. Something about it that, without time to sit at a desk and puzzle it out in words with a pen, Holly feared she would never understand! And, yet, the very thing she was doing—embracing her child—made it impossible to slip away, to find the pen and paper or to boot up the computer.
And even if she’d had the time—then what? What would she write? Something had followed them home from Russia? It was meaningless! It explained nothing! And Holly was no longer a writer, had not been one for years and years, had not written a decent sentence or a real line of poetry since way back then, back in those days of dinners served on airplanes, back when you could wait at the gate for your loved ones to disembark from the plane and the snowplows roared out into the roads at the first few flakes. Holly knew that she could be given all the time in the world, and despite this conviction that she had something to write and no time to write it, there would be nothing. How many beginnings had she jotted down in the last eighteen years, and how many of those jottings had led to anything but frustration and an ill-temper that lasted for days? Hundreds of beginnings, resulting in nothing. What could possibly have been the point of trying to break her writer’s block, and, no less, on Christmas day?
And still she felt the need to push her daughter (gently) away from her. Holding her, asking her what was the matter—it was just more futility, more fruitlessness. Her daughter, even if she knew what was wrong, wasn’t going to answer, would never offer any explanation for her tears or her moping or moodiness. If pushed, she would simply start up the argument about Holly oversleeping again, or the plastic bag. It would be a waste of both their time.
Holly loosened her grip on her daughter, and Tatiana, who’d remained stiff through the embrace, straightened up, stepped away, and headed silently back to her bedroom. Holly heard the door close with an efficient little click, and then (surely not) could she have heard Tatiana slip the hook into the lock’s eye? That hook and eye she had refused even to acknowledge since Holly had installed it for her? Was that the kind of day this was going to end up being? Was Holly never going to be forgiven for having overslept?