She glanced at her watch again.
She was going to have to set the fucking table herself.
SETTING THE TABLE for a big dinner had always been something Holly and Tatiana had done together. Even back when Tatty was too little to touch the china or the crystal, she would reach up and slap the silverware onto the table beside the plates. There’d only ever been that one mishap, when Tatty was about six years old and had too excitedly reached into the buffet for the gravy boat. The gravy boat (a white ceramic swan with a hole in its face out of which the gravy poured) had survived, but three of Holly’s mother’s iridescent water glasses hadn’t. It was never clear to Holly what had happened. Tatty was too hysterical—both wildly defensive and tearfully apologetic—ever to tell the whole story, but when Holly turned around the glasses were on the hardwood floor in front of the buffet, and the globe of each was so perfectly cracked away from the stem that it looked more like a surgical amputation than an accident.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said to Tatty. “I have nine more of those. Things break.”
“You didn’t watch me,” Tatty had screamed. “You should have told me.”
Holly had tried not to be annoyed by the injury of this. Not only had Tatty broken her water glasses, but she was now blaming it on Holly, when Holly was simply trying to forgive her. To comfort her daughter, Holly tried to come up with some anecdote about breaking something precious, herself, but she couldn’t recall any such incidents. Until she was an adult, Holly hadn’t been around anything breakable long enough to break it. Still, one time she’d apparently grabbed a blue crayon and scribbled all over a wall, and that had become a family joke, although Holly had no recollection of it whatsoever. When she’d announced her plans to go to graduate school in order to become a writer, Janet had laughed and said, “You always wanted to be a scribbler!”
Ha-ha.
So Holly had told Tatty that story to comfort her, to show her how things could be damaged both purposely and by accident. Told her how her mother had managed to scrub the crayon off the wall before her father saw it, and had waited weeks before telling him. It wasn’t until she was halfway through the telling of it (as she discarded the water glasses and Tatiana sniffled with her face in her hands at the dining room table) that Holly remembered that she’d already told her daughter this story, back in the summer, when she was trying to get her to admit that she’d scratched up all of her and Eric’s CDs. Scribbling with a safety pin perhaps? What other explanation was there?
But the anecdote hadn’t helped—neither to get Tatiana to admit to scratching the CDs in the summer, nor to make her feel better for having broken (with such precision it seemed frankly willful) the three water glasses on Christmas. Instead, Tatty had narrowed her eyes as if the story of her mother’s naughtiness confused and, perhaps, disgusted her:
And this would be the case over the years with nearly every attempt Holly made to make Tatty feel better about something she’d done by describing how she had, herself, once done something equally clumsy, or wrong, or shortsighted. The worst had been when, after Tatty and Tommy had been dating six months and Tommy had turned seventeen, Holly suggested to Tatiana that she keep a condom in her purse, just in case.
“What?” Tatiana had said. Her ruby-blue lips had parted in an expression of true horror.
Holly had repeated herself. The condom. She said she thought it best that Tatiana and Tommy wait, of course, but that she knew that sometimes teenagers—
“Oh my God, Mom,” Tatiana had said. Her dark eyes were wide, her mouth an astonished zero. Holly could see her teeth in there. A perfectly white mountain range. Tatiana had never even needed braces, those teeth were so perfect. Choking back tears, it seemed, Tatiana said, “I have no idea what you were doing when you were my age, but that’s not what Tommy and I are doing.”
“Well, Tatiana,” Holly had said, and she’d gone on to explain that, at Tatty’s age, Holly and her boyfriend also hadn’t planned to have sex, but, since no one had been open enough with Holly to tell her about contraception, she’d been unprepared, and she’d gotten pregnant, and had an abortion. It had been a terrible experience. Thank God, she’d told Tatty, it was possible to get an abortion at Planned Parenthood at fifteen without your parents’ permission, because if her father had found out—
Tatiana, then, had collapsed onto her bed and burst into tears and refused to be comforted until Holly had promised never to raise the subject again. Holly agreed, but she insisted that Tatiana know that she could come to Holly whenever she needed—
“I know! I know! Stop talking! I don’t want to hear about you! I don’t want to know about your mistakes! I’m nothing like you!”
For a terrible second Holly was sure that Tatiana would say the words she’d dreaded and expected all those years:
You’re not my mother.
But she didn’t. Not then. Not ever. Only once, when she was four years old, Tatiana had asked, tentatively, “Mom, do you know who my real mother was?”
To hear those two words together, real and mother, had made Holly’s eyes fill instantly with tears, the physical response happening before she’d even processed those two words in her consciousness.
But, as she’d always planned to do, Holly told Tatiana the truth—that she didn’t know anything about her biological mother. That, given the conditions in the town that Tatiana was born in, it was likely that her mother had been a teenager, maybe an orphan herself, probably very poor, very uneducated:
The whole area had been teeming with abandoned children. The orphanages, of course, were full of them, but there were also older abandoned children everywhere, who’d either never been institutionalized or who’d been released, and they rushed at the passersby at every bus stop and crosswalk, asking for money, or for something—your watch, your candy bar, your scarf—and running alongside you with their hands cupped, shouting into your face. Holly and Eric had been warned not to talk to these street children, and not, under any circumstances, to stop or give them money, that if you did so these children would steal your purse while you were fishing through it. Or worse. There was a story of one couple who’d gone to Siberia to adopt a baby and had been badly beaten by a pack of children in an alley after stopping to offer them food. The prospective mother had been permanently blinded by a blow to her head. The question Holly had wanted answered—did they still adopt the baby?—could, apparently, not be answered.
When they were still back in the States, being given these dire warnings by the adoption agency’s overseas travel director, Holly could not imagine hurrying past an abandoned child at a bus stop. But, as it turned out, it was easy. There were so many of them, so badly dressed, so filthy, so rude, that they did not seem like children. And this, it turned out, was the attitude of the Russians themselves toward these children—that they were not, exactly, children, that they were tainted by bad genes, even the youngest of them. It was an attitude that was held even toward infants, and it was the reason, Holly and Eric had been told, that there were so many available babies to adopt in Russia. Russians did not want these castoffs. Even childless, desperate Russians did not want to adopt these children.
“Russians are exactly like Americans,” the overseas director (who was Bolivian, herself) had told Holly and Eric, “except that they’ve been through centuries of pure hell. Like Americans, they’re affectionate and sentimental and egotistical”—at this, Holly and Eric had looked at one another, amused by this description of themselves, which was clearly an insult—“but not nearly as naïve. This is why it’s so easy for Russians to take advantage of Americans. They understand Americans because they are like them, but they believe that Americans will always choose not to see basic truths that Russians are born understanding.”
Of course, she did not tell Tatiana this, but Holly imagined that Tatiana’s mother and father could have been among those Siberian street children. Abortions were so common and so readily available as a form of birth control in Russ
ia (there was, it seemed, no taboo against them, and they were offered so far into a woman’s pregnancy that, Holly had been told, some of the babies one found in orphanages were actually the result of abortions that didn’t “take”) that unless the mother was too strung-out on drugs or vodka to obtain the procedure, she might simply have been too young even to understand that she was pregnant until her baby was being born. And, since they’d been assured by the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 that Tatiana had no drugs in her system at birth, and clearly did not have fetal alcohol syndrome, it seemed that she could easily have been the abandoned child of one, or two, of those thousands of other abandoned children.
“We’ll never know,” Holly had told Tatiana of her birth mother. “But I’d be honored to always-always-always-always be your real-real-real-real mother.” She’d taken her daughter in her arms, and they’d stayed like that, with their faces pressed together, mixing their tears, and it had been, and would always be, the sweetest moment of Holly’s entire life.
AFTER THE DISHES and the glasses and silverware were set on the tablecloth (Holly still planned to leave the arranging to Tatiana), she glanced again at the picture window.
Now absolutely everything out there except the snow itself had been erased by the blowing snow. Christ, Holly thought, this isn’t a snowfall any longer. This is a blizzard. There’d been no word about a blizzard on Christmas Day that Holly had heard. No weather warnings on the radio or the television at all. Until yesterday, when flurries had been predicted, they’d actually been suggesting that this year it might not even be a white Christmas.
Holly went to the kitchen island to pick up her iPhone and, just as she did, Dylan started singing his haughty warning again, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain—all that foreboding captured somehow in a space as small as the palm of a child’s hand—and the screen lit up the name Thuy.
“Thuy,” Holly said into the phone.
“Holly,” her friend said. “Merry Christmas. But, Jesus, have you looked outside?”
“I know, I know,” Holly said. “I can’t believe it. Eric’s still on his way back from the airport with his parents. And I expected his brothers and their families to start showing up one carload at a time by now, but no one’s here except me and Tatty.”
“Sweetheart, they’ve closed down the freeway. If your relatives aren’t already in town, they won’t be showing up for hours. You’d better start making some phone calls. And don’t leave the house! Patty, Pearl, and I barely made it home from church. It took us an hour to drive ten miles. Pearl’s on her back on the floor right now, recovering. She was driving.”
Holly heard Pearl call out from some space beyond Thuy and her cell phone, “Tell her it’s one for the books.”
“Seriously?” Holly said to Thuy, not ready to fully believe this account of things. “I mean, where did this come from? I thought it wasn’t supposed to snow today.”
“Well, they started the dire warnings about six o’clock this morning, but it was still barely snowing when we left for church at eleven, and we thought, yeah, right, I mean, how much snow can fall during the span of an hour and a half? Well, let me tell you. A lot. And a lot more is on the way. You better turn on your radio.”
“Oh, God.” Holly suddenly understood what the implications of this were. She put a hand to her forehead and said, “Thuy, you’re not calling to say you’re not coming, are you?”
There was a silence, and into it Holly made whiny-puppy noises.
“Holly, there’s no—”
“Oh my God, you’re going to abandon me on Christmas Day! Rent a sleigh! I’ll come get you! I need my Thuy and my Pearl and my sugarplum fairy.”
Thuy laughed a little, but not much. They both knew it was only partly a joke, that not coming over for Christmas Day broke a tradition that mattered more to Holly than it did to them. Holly was trying, with the melodrama, to sound less desperate than she felt.
“Holly, there’s no way. Even if it stops snowing right this second, which it’s not going to do, the roads won’t be clear enough to—”
“I heard a plow!” Holly said. “Just, maybe, thirty minutes ago. I bet our road is clear!”
“Hon, that plow is a finger in the dike. No pun intended. And, besides, I couldn’t get Pearl off the floor and back into the car today if our lives depended on it.”
Holly heard Pearl call out, “Tell Holly we’re so sorry! We’ll bring over our presents and our sugarplum fairy tomorrow or the next!”
Pearl, Holly knew, was trying to get Thuy off the hook, and off the phone. She knew that they would have liked to come for Christmas, but it wouldn’t ruin their day now that they couldn’t. They were probably planning to make a fire in their woodstove, cuddle up on the couch with Patty. They’d probably stocked the fridge and freezer with things they could make a Christmas dinner with, in the event that this would happen. It might even have seemed like a relief to them, staying home, just the three of them, instead of being here, dealing with Holly’s in-laws and the Coxes. But Holly couldn’t stop herself. She said, “You’re sure? This will be the first Christmas in fourteen years you haven’t been over here. Tatiana will be heartbroken. She’s already in a terrible mood.”
“Oh, Holly,” Thuy said, and Holly could imagine her making a face at Pearl, maybe pointing at the phone receiver, shaking her head. “It’s impossible. Really. Or we’d be there, hon. It’s truly not possible.” She enunciated and emphasized each of her last three words, as if Holly, not Thuy, were the nonnative English speaker.
“Bleh,” Holly said. “I hate you. I love you. You’re ruining my life.”
Thuy laughed then, recognizing the humor as permission to get off the phone and get on with her own life, with her own family, with her own Christmas. “Well, tell Tatiana we love her,” she said.
“I will,” Holly said, “if she comes out of her bedroom today.” She wanted to tell Thuy about Tatiana. Her bad mood. She’d locked Holly out of her room! Although Thuy had been a mother half as long as Holly had, Thuy always had the best mothering advice.
“Oh, no,” Thuy said. “What’s wrong with Tatty?” But the tone didn’t invite Holly to go into detail. The conversation was winding down, not up. Holly had known Thuy for two decades and logged hundreds of hours on the telephone with her. She knew when Thuy was standing at the counter, ready to walk out the door, and, conversely, when she was settling into her lounge chair, ready to chat for hours, by the length of the pauses between her sentences (although there’d been less and less of the latter since Pearl had moved in, and almost none now that they had a child together).
“I don’t know,” Holly said. “She’s just grumpy, I guess.”
“Everything okay with Tommy?”
“I think so,” Holly said, but in truth she hadn’t thought about the possibility that there was some problem with Tommy. “That’s a good thought, though. I’ll ask her.”
“Okay, Holly. Merry Christmas, my dear. Call later if you need to vent. But, honestly, I wouldn’t get too excited about a big party at your place today. This isn’t our grandmothers’ white Christmas.”
“Hmm,” Holly said. “That could be good, or that could be bad. I’ll let you know. Bye-bye.”
“Bye, babe.”
And that was it. The line between them was severed—or, now that there were no telephone lines, the band of energy, the ghost-wave that had carried their voices to one another was—what? Snuffed? How did that work? Holly had never even understood how the old system worked—how sound had traveled through wires strung from one pole to the next across the country, let alone got transported across oceans. But at least that system had made an intuitive kind of sense. The sound was in the wires, and if you had to call overseas the system became more complicated, and astonishingly expensive, so you didn’t do it very often, and when you did the voices you heard sounded very far away—echoes and buzzings accompanying the voices—and sometimes you used to be able to hear the mu
rmurs of other conversations taking place under the conversation you were having, and all of this had made the process of speaking to a disembodied person over a great distance seem possible, physical.
But, now, the voice of someone in Siberia would sound as close or as far as someone down the block. Often, Tatiana, just calling home from Tommy’s house two blocks away, sounded on her cell phone as if she were calling from Siberia. Conversely, when Eric had called on his cell phone from Tokyo two summers ago, it had sounded as if he were standing just outside the closed front door.
ERIC.
Christ, in all this melodrama with Tatiana, Holly had managed to forget all about Eric and his parents in the car, trying to get home from the airport in a snowstorm. She looked at her watch again. What if Eric had gotten stuck in a snowbank, or gotten into a fender bender? That’s as far as her imagination would take her, but it chilled her. Why hadn’t he phoned to let her know where he was?
“Tatiana?” Holly called out. She needed to break the news about Pearl and Thuy and Patty to her daughter, but she also just needed company now. She needed someone with whom to discuss the day’s changed plans. Should she bother with the mashed potatoes now? Was anyone going to make it here for Christmas dinner? Should she start making phone calls, and to whom? “Tatty?”
Still, nothing.
God damn her. That little bitch. Holly decided just to let herself feel that anger. Usually, she tried to stuff it down, to remind herself that Tatty was still a child, and that she herself had been no picnic when she was a teenager. When she felt this angry at Tatty she always tried to remind herself how badly she’d wanted a child. What about that? Had she thought it would all be rainbows and gumdrops?
Well, she and Eric had gotten nearly fourteen years of rainbows and gumdrops and kisses every day and love cards every holiday and birthday, construction paper cards carefully decorated with crayons: I love you so much, Mommy. Daddy I love you to the moon! Holly would tell herself that she would just have to focus on those memories as Tatty passed through these few years during which she did what teenagers are supposed to do: separate themselves as best they can from their parents so that they can go out into the world on their own.