There was a gathering of silence and then her barely audible voice. “All right, see you later.”
Alexander left.
When he came home Saturday night, Anthony was watching TV alone and the door to the bedroom was closed. Alexander dropped his keys on the table, took off his jacket and sat by Anthony. “What’s Mommy doing?”
“She said she wasn’t feeling well.”
The house didn’t smell like Saturday usual—like it had been cooked in. “What, there’s no food?”
“Mom and I had leftovers. She said you would have had your dinner out.”
“She said I would have had my dinner out?”
“Yes.”
After fixing himself a plate of cold stuffed peppers and bread, Alexander sat back down on the couch. “Did you go grocery shopping? There’s no milk.”
“We didn’t go. She said we weren’t going today.”
“What’ya watching?”
“Gunsmoke.”
“Um—so you didn’t go grocery shopping, what did you do?” The Christmas tree stood in the corner of the living room unlit. “No one turned on the tree?”
Anthony looked. “Guess not.”
Alexander went to turn it on. “So what did you do?” he repeated.
“Spent all day at the mission orphanage.”
“Where?”
“Dad, remember? We go every Christmas. We bring our old clothes, I do crafts with the kids, Mom reads to them.”
“Oh. Yeah. So... how was your mother today?”
“Silent. I thought I’d done something wrong.”
“Did you?”
“I asked her, she said no.”
Alexander finished his food and waited until Gunsmoke was over. “Ant, you shouldn’t have said anything about me coming home so late. I had told Mommy I came home earlier because I didn’t want her to worry. Now she thinks I was lying.”
“Well . . .” Anthony was weighing his thoughts. “Weren’t you?”
“Technically. Because I didn’t want to upset your mother for nothing.”
Anthony clammed up.
They sat.
“She didn’t seem upset, like angry, Dad, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Anthony at last. “She just seemed extra tired. She said she hadn’t been feeling well.”
Unable to go into his bedroom, Alexander asked the boy if he wanted to go to the pictures. Anthony jumped up, they threw on their jackets and went out. They saw Attack of the Crab Monsters and Aztec Mummy, and when they came home, the bedroom door was still closed.
Alexander couldn’t face her. He didn’t know how he was going to get into bed with her. After Anthony went to sleep, Alexander had three shots of vodka and half a pack of cigarettes and thought about all the things he could say when she would inevitably ask him why he had lied to her. He decided he would blame it all on poker-playing Johnny.
Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning—stayed out too late, didn’t want to tell you, when I was half dead, in bed, upset you for nothing, I’m sorry I’m sorry, was going to come clean—Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning.
Were they going to see Johnny any time soon? He’d need to give Johnny-boy a heads-up on that one. Thus fortified with poetic lies and prosaic vodka, Alexander opened the bedroom door. Tatiana was sleeping in a fetal position on top of the covers. The room was dark. Not wanting to accidentally wake her—God forbid—Alexander covered her with a couch blanket and crawled into bed. He was unconscious in seconds, having barely slept the night before.
In the morning when he finally woke up, he heard noises of her and Anthony making breakfast outside.
“Good morning, Dad,” said Anthony when Alexander staggered out. “Today is cookie day.”
He had forgotten that, too. Five friends of Tatiana’s from the hospital were coming over to bake cookies for St. Monica’s Mission. In the evening they were going to Shannon and Amanda’s Christmas party. Would Johnny be there?
“They’ll be here soon,” Tatiana said, not addressing him. Meaning, he was nearly naked, wearing only his snug-fitting BVDs, reminiscent of his Red Army skivvies. He wore them because Tatiana liked the way he looked in them. Not today perhaps, because her back was to him. When he turned to go, he heard her voice. “I found your clothes in the dryer,” Tatiana said. “I didn’t know you knew how to use the washer and dryer. Imagine my surprise. I folded them for you and put them on your dresser.” Slowly Alexander turned to her. She was facing the stove.
“I spilled beer on them,” he said lamely.
Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning—stayed out too late, didn’t want to tell you, when I was half dead, in bed, upset you for nothing, I’m sorry I’m sorry, was going to come clean, I spilled beer on my jeans— Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning.
She didn’t bring him any coffee. He poured his own. But since she made eggs and bacon for herself and Ant, she did put some on a plate for him, and she did put the plate in front of him. They didn’t speak, not even through Anthony. Alexander was incapable of speaking to her about bullshit when an African elephant was sitting on top of their breakfast eggs.
At noon the girls came and started baking, eating, laughing, reading recipe books. Christmas music went on, there was cheer. Anthony helped part of the time, Alexander disappeared in the woodshed, and then he and Ant went out to shoot some baskets. It was a mild December Sunday in Arizona, sixty degrees. “Tatia, would you like to live in Arizona, the land of the small spring?”
Alexander was outside picking the ball out of the bushes, and he was careless for a moment—careless because he was consumed with the impossible and trying not to think of the impossible—and was not paying attention, and didn’t see two rolled-up cholla clusters that had separated and drifted over to the basketball. The germinating cholla plant pollinated by jumping and attaching itself to whatever was near. Alexander was near. He grabbed the ball, and the cholla instantly attached itself to his palms. Hundreds of needle-like fine teeth penetrated his skin, pierced it, broke in and dug in, burrowing inside like malignant animals. The palms immediately started to swell. The ball game was over.
Anthony ran to the house. “Mom! Mom! Look what Dad did. Mom!”
Her hands were covered in flour. “What did he do now?” she said to Anthony, turning to look.
“It’s nothing,” Alexander said.
“Alexander,” said Tatiana, “you have blood on your hands.”
They stood. “Just a little cholla,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”
The girls, all nurses, gasped and twittered, fussed and fretted, dispensing anxious, extremely high-pitched advice. “Oh, no, not cholla!” “The needles will fall out after seven to ten days.” “Oh yes, but there will be such an infection!” “Oh, yes, but to pull them out is impossible!” “It will positively shred him!”
“The cholla is like barbed wire!”
There was so much lamentation. Only Tatiana remained silent.
“Well, what do you want to do?” she said, looking into his face, the first time this Sunday. Her eyes were green ocean water, frozen over. “You want to leave the needles in? They’ll get infected, but they will fall out in a week. Or I can pull them out. It’ll rip your palms up. But they’ll be out.”
Anthony was patting him on the back. “You’re between a rock and a hard place, Dad,” he said. “As you say, either way, you’re—”
“Anthony!”
“What?” Anthony was all innocence.
“Rip them out,” Alexander said to Tatiana.
He sat at her table; she took out her anesthetic needle. He declined. The anesthetic he needed was not for his palms. “If you want me to do this for you,” Tatiana said, “let me numb your hands.”
“Tania,” said Alexander, “you stitched a gash in my shoulder, a shrapnel wound, without anesthetic. I’ll be fine.”
Without discussing it further, Tatiana put the needle away and started to take off her surgical gloves.
br /> “All right, all right.” He sighed. “Numb the hands.”
“Mom,” said Anthony, “how come you’re wearing gloves?” He chuckled. “Are you afraid Dad will infect you?”
Tatiana paused a little too long before she said, “The needles penetrate. I’ll need two pairs of gloves, to protect myself, and it still won’t be enough.”
Alexander’s gaze was on his unfeeling bloodied hands. Anthony stood by Alexander’s side, his supportive patting arm on his father’s shoulder, and five women stood watching, over Tatiana’s back, over Alexander’s, while she with surgical pliers wrenched the barbed-wire cholla glochids out of his upturned palms, leaving oozing wounds.
Anthony, not flinching and never taking his hand off Alexander’s back, said to the women, “Want to know what my dad says about cholla?”
“Anthony!”
“What? No, no, this is the mild version.” Anthony grinned. “When we first came here, Dad didn’t know what cholla was. But he learned quick, though he’s never gotten hit like this. So he started saying, ‘I know there is no hell, because they keep telling me it’s hot down there. Well, don’t give me hot, because I do hot every day. Now if they told me there was cholla in hell, then I’d believe them.’ Isn’t that right?”
“Well,” said Alexander, “they don’t call it the devil cholla for nothing.”
“Mom says,” said Anthony, smiling at his mother, “that the cholla is possessed by evil spirits.”
“Well, Antman, they don’t call it the devil cholla for nothing,” said Tatiana.
The ladies clucked as Tatiana continued to twist the needles out of Alexander’s palms. She had to stop at one point to staunch the copious bleeding by pressing a cloth to his hands for a minute before continuing. They sat during this minute, with him looking down at her blonde braided head and her looking down at his palm in her hands.
“I would not, could not, be so calm,” said Carolyn, with an impressed chuckle. “I’d be a wreck with my Dan. Tania, how do you stay so calm with your own husband?”
Tatiana’s head was bent. “I really don’t know,” she said without glancing up.
Alexander flinched.
“Dad,” said Anthony, “your hands are numb. Why are you flinching? Mom, maybe you should give him another shot.”
“Your father needs a shot of whiskey, is what he needs,” said Carolyn, going to get the bottle from the cabinet. “Tania, do you think if his hands were smaller, less cholla would have gotten in?”
“Cholla is cholla,” Tatiana said, leveling her frigid stare away from Alexander. “What does it know about hands?” After she was done, she disinfected his wounds with iodine, cauterized them with silver nitrate, bandaged them tightly, and said, oh, and you’re welcome by the way. And Alexander flinched again.
Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning—stayed out too late, didn’t want to tell you, when I was half dead, in bed, upset you for nothing, I’m sorry I’m sorry, was going to come clean, I spilled beer on my jeans, the cholla knows nothing—Poker with Johnny, till six in the morning.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . .
She is so beautiful his heart hurts. Her skin is porcelain cream and to match it she is wearing an ivory pencil skirt, ivory stockings, and a tight ivory cashmere cropped sweater with a shelf top. She is a sweater girl bar none. Her gold hair is pinned but down, flaxen and soft. She must be the only woman in the United States whose hair remains long and unteased, uncurled and unsprayed. She smells like musk and cinnamon and burnt sugar—from the cookies she’s been making—and her lips have gloss.
’Tis the season to be jolly . . .
Alexander imagines the ivory cream skin above her lace stockings. Tonight, despite that they haven’t talked—despite everything—when stopped at a light, he slips his bandaged hand under her skirt and glides it up under her open girdle to touch the adored bare sliver of her thigh with the tips of his fingers. Her skin is cold. They’re in his truck. She and Anthony are sharing the passenger seat. Tatiana was going to get in after Ant, but the boy said, no, no, I don’t get into any vehicle before my mother, you first, Mom, like always. So now she is next to Alexander, motionless like a block of ice. There are so many things crashing against Alexander’s chest that he has to take his hand away.
He drives in silence.
“How do I look?” she asks. They are on their way to Shannon and Amanda’s party. The season is full of them, joyful parties, one after another. Alexander wonders if Johnny is going to be there; he needs him for perfidy. He wasn’t able to reach him by telephone during the day. He wonders if he would get some points for keeping his truck chaste. Look, I didn’t let a floozy sit in my truck in which I take my family out on nights like tonight, that’s good, right? Keeping a truck faithful? Because that’s what you want to keep faithful.
“Fine,” he manages to reply, his hands like clamps around the wheel.
“Don’t listen to Dad,” says Anthony. “He never knows the right thing to say. You’re going to be the prettiest mom at the party.”
“Thank you, son.”
Alexander speaks. “Anthony, I’m going to tell you something. In 1941, when I met your mother, she had turned seventeen and was working at the Kirov factory, the largest weapons production facility in the Soviet Union. Do you know what she wore? A ratty brown cardigan that belonged to her grandmother. It was tattered and patched and two sizes too big for her. Even though it was June, she wore her much larger sister’s black skirt that was scratchy wool. The skirt came down to her shins. Her too-big thick black cotton stockings bunched up around her brown work boots. Her hands were covered in black grime she couldn’t scrub off. She smelled of gasoline and nitrocellulose because she had been making bombs and flamethrowers all day. And still I came every day to walk her home.”
Anthony laughs. “Well, you were smitten with Mommy back then, and I don’t think you want her to wear black stockings bunched at her ankles and to smell of nitrocellulose now, do you, Dad?”
“I’m saying it doesn’t matter, son.”
Tatiana wrapped her arms around herself and stared straight ahead.
Anthony suddenly peered at his mother, glanced at his father—and turned his face away. They all fell quiet. Alexander laid a patch on the road. What choice did they have?
Tra-la-la-la-LAA-la-la-la-LAAAAA.
At Shannon and Amanda’s house Tatiana went straight to the kitchen to help the girls, carrying out food trays, wine glasses, finger foods. There was some general oohing and ahhing over a stoic wife pulling needles out of her husband’s palms. “Are they shredded?” asked Shannon. “Are they absolutely shredded? Johnny-boy, come here and see what our Alexander has done. Oh, man, he won’t be able to hold a glass of beer for weeks!”
“Oh, come on,” said Johnny, drinking and grinning. “Not even a glass of beer? What’s he going to do on Friday nights?”
Alexander, holding a glass of beer at that very moment, said nothing. Johnny turned to Tatiana. “Um—how are you, Mrs. Barrington?” he said with grave solemnity. “May I just say, you’re looking especially fine this evening.” Johnny was always insipidly stilted when he talked to Tatiana. He told Alexander once that he was terrified of her because despite all the charming, polite, nice things he tried to say, she seemed to somehow see right through to the bone, to the asshole that was buried deep underneath.
Alexander had laughed. “She doesn’t think you’re an asshole,” he said. “I couldn’t have hired you if she thought so. She just thinks you’re a bit wild.”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “Wild in that asshole kind of way.”
And so, tonight after he paid her a compliment, she eyed him with spectacular detachment and said, “Thank you, Johnny-boy. Have a late night Friday night?”
“No, no, ma’am, it wasn’t too bad,” said Johnny, glancing frightened at Alexander as if already sensing that he was once again being set up and shown up for being exactly the asshole that he was, not knowing that it was
n’t him who was being set up.
Well. That was that. And that was too bad, because the poker poetry was good poetry and would have gone over well. And she would have believed it. She would have believed it because she wanted to believe it.
Your move, Alexander.
His next move was Tyrone, Johnny-boy’s really wild friend. Alexander would say he went with Tyrone to a strip club downtown. Very very very sorry. No poetry this time. Strip club and Tyrone were bad enough.
Tatiana didn’t dance with Alexander, didn’t talk to him, didn’t look at him.
He watched her from afar. When she wasn’t putting on a smiling face for the mingling Christmas crowd, Anthony was right, there was something vanquished in her demeanor. She didn’t look quite herself.
The music was plenty loud, Elvis Presley gyrated on the radio, exhorting the partygoers to be true, to love him tender, be his teddy bear, to not be cruel to a heart that was true . . .
Nat King Cole sang some Christmas music, played “Unforgettable,” played “Auld Lang Syne.”
Nat King Cole played “Nature Boy.”
Alexander was standing in one cluster in the living room, talking to a group of friends. Tatiana, with Anthony by her side, was standing nearby. “Oh, listen, Dad,” Anthony called over grimly. “Your favorite song.” In front of them was a patch of floor where couples were dancing pressed together. The tree was twinkling, the Christmas candles burned. And Nat King Cole sang of loving and being loved in return.
Alexander made his way over to her and said, “Let’s go home.”
He held the coat for her in front of Shannon and Amanda, who asked if everything was all right, and Shannon gave Alexander a tense non-glance into the plants. “Everything is wonderful,” Tatiana said to her hosts without a glimmer of a smile.
On the way home, it was Anthony who broke the searing silence by starting to sing . . . it’s lovely weather/for a sleigh ride together with you... Alexander leaned forward and shot Anthony a side look that said you better stop this second. Anthony stopped that second but not before he whispered, it’ll be the perfect ending/to a perfect day . . .
Alexander stayed outside, read the paper and smoked, and sat so long, he fell asleep on the bench. Waking up freezing and cramped, he went to bed and lay down beside her. He remembered them in Lazarevo, lying clamped together near the fire under the stars, searching for Perseus up in the galaxy. Her family was gone. His was gone. And fifteen and a half years later, in a miracle, in a dream, with divine grace, they lay unclamped in a home they had made for themselves after all they had been through, while she was in a nightgown, possibly wore underwear and a bra, possibly even a steel helmet and flak jacket, and he couldn’t come near her to find out, thinking of all the possible lies for last Friday and all the possible lies for the coming Wednesday.