I’m about to promise to be nice to my missing, dead husband if and when he is found alive when suddenly, from behind me, I hear a car pull up, and as I turn around, I can see it’s him. He gets out of the car and waves.
“Where have you been?” I say as I run up to the porch, entirely relieved.
“At work,” he says, giving me an odd look.
“You’re almost an hour late!” I cry. “You are totally late!”
“It’s only nine twenty-five,” he says, opening the front door.
“No, it’s not,” I insist. “Don’t try and trick me! Is that something your girlfriend told you to try?”
“What?” he says, looking at me. “It’s nine twenty-five! Look at the clock!”
I look really hard, and no matter which way I squint my eyes, it still says the same thing. Big hand on the 9, little hand on 25. It’s nine twenty-five. He is absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly on time.
Apparently, if all I really needed to know I learned in kindergarten, I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Either that or Miss Brown, who I once threw up on because I forgot my snack, was simply not concerned with helping me avoid scenarios thirty years into the future in which I would accuse my spouse of cheating, alcoholism, and selfishness and, more horrifyingly, come dangerously close to making a sick promise to let city buses in ahead of me in a frantic yet paranoid moment because clearly I had not really, truly, and successfully learned how to tell time. Damn my codependency on digital clocks, and God help the six-year-olds of today with Velcro on their shoes, I scream in my head. In thirty years, I can just picture numerous corporate execs standing on train platforms, tears streaming down their faces, their mouths open in horror as they point to their feet, their shoelaces nearly liberated and unbound as they shriek, “CAN SOMEBODY HELP ME?”
“Why is my pillow and the dog’s blanket on the couch?” my husband asks me.
“I was just getting ready to change your pillowcase,” I reply, with a smile. “And just so you know, if a gang member comes to the door and asks you to buy candy for thirteen dollars, you hand him a can of spray paint and show him to the nearest wall.”
Enough with the Love: Aberrant Tales of an Absolutely and Completely Normal Family (as Told to My Therapist)
Every March, I curse myself for my holiday spirit. That’s typically when my husband and I will finally turn off the television set, finish off our frozen dinners, and do the nasty task we’ve been putting off for four months.
We take down the Christmas tree.
If it was really up to us, we would most likely leave it up all year-round and just replace it with another one after every Thanksgiving. Same with the lights trimming the eaves of our house, except we’d replace those only when they started to spark or catch things on fire.
We’re that kind of people. Halfway folks. When it was time to repaint the exterior of the house last year, we took a good look at the twenty-eight window sashes and the eight peaks in our roof and decided that it was really only the front of our house that needed new paint. That’s the part that everyone sees most.
I don’t curse myself as much during the decoration removal as my husband does, and I understand that. With his hair filled with brown, curling pine needles and his hands scratched from the dried and dead trunk, he’ll tow the tree through the house out to the backyard, mumbling, “You and your big ideas! This is the third dead Christmas tree we’ll have in the backyard! Are you happy? We have enough old wood out there to raise a barn!”
“That’s only enough for a teepee,” I’ll correct him.
It’s at that point that I’ll swear to myself, never again. I’ll look at the petrified forest out there and shake my head. Not this year, I’ll tell myself, I’m not getting sucked in. But slowly, ever so slowly, it happens. The transformation begins. I buy small presents, then big presents, then more big presents. Last year I even bought one for my boss, who I discovered had read all of my personal e-mail. I go to the supermarket with my husband’s truck for weeks until I finally tell the cashier, “I need a pack of Camels, a book of stamps, a bag of ice, and . . . oh yeah, a tree. Got a twenty-footer?” When my husband finds the tree after my unsuccessful attempt to hide it or blend it into the decor, I insist that I’m just holding on to it for a friend. I buy wrapping paper and tape, and I found myself last Christmas making gift tags out of pieces of cork and a rubber stamp. In Target, I argued with a hefty, permed housewife who could have easily taken me down with one swipe of her paw over the last string of gold lights. Gold lights? Who am I, I thought, brushing the dirt from my skirt as I got up, Wayne Newton?
This year, at our Thanksgiving family dinner, I was feeling so determined that in between family fights, I actually got out the words “I don’t think we should exchange gifts this year.”
Everyone got quiet. My mother was first to speak.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted, hitting me with the dish towel she had posted over her shoulder. “Is that the way you want to celebrate Christmas? Like an animal? What should I make for Christmas dinner? Maybe we should kill a family pet and the rest of us will eat after it’s your father’s turn at the carcass? Answer me!”
I hadn’t been in that much trouble since my friend forged my mom’s signature on a deficiency notice in eleventh grade.
“I already bought your gift,” my younger sister said before she burst into tears. “And it wasn’t even on sale!”
“Well, if you don’t want to get me anything, that’s fine!” my other sister said with a glare. “But you’re my sister . . . and I love you!”
“I love everybody,” my nana piped in from the corner.
“Enough with the love! We don’t talk like that in this house!” my mother shouted, and then turned to my sister. “You’ve been to Sedona too many goddamned times! And you,” she said, turning back to me, “better get your ass back to church!”
“Everybody shut up or you’re all getting life insurance policies for Christmas!” my father said, rising from his chair. The room hushed.
You have a BIG MOUTH, my husband mouthed silently to me.
“One Christmas Eve when I was a little boy,” my father said, “we waited for my father to come home from work. Grandma had the Christmas Eve antipasta on the table, and everybody was excited to open their presents. It got dark. Still, Grandpa didn’t come home. It got later, and later. Finally, Grandpa’s boss came to the house and told us that the coal mine had collapsed, and Grandpa was trapped inside. We all started to cry. The men from the town worked all night, digging to try and rescue Grandpa, and as the sun came up on Christmas Day, they heard him calling from the mine. They pulled him to safety just as the whole mine collapsed and got sucked down into the ground. But Grandpa was safe, and that was the best present we could have had. We forgot all about our gifts until a couple of days later, we were so happy.
“That’s when I understood what Christmas is about. It’s about family, and being together. It’s about being grateful that everyone you care about—yes, even love—is safe and healthy. So Laurie, if you don’t feel that buying presents is a way that you want to celebrate Christmas, well, then, I’ll break both your legs right now in front of everybody. Your sister paid full price!”
Oh yeah. Way more trouble than when I got expelled from journalism camp for drinking when I was a senior in high school. Only my arm was threatened then.
“I guess we’re celebrating Christmas,” my husband said on the way home. “But your dad was right. Christmas is about bigger things than taking down lights.”
“Glad you said that,” I said. “Especially because there are no coal mines in Brooklyn. Pull over! I see a twenty-two-footer in that Safeway parking lot!”
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 d
ecided 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 to 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. I remember 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 presented 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 hand-crafted and diligently loved set of reindeers 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 hand-crafted 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.
BEWARE OF THE OWNER.
Well.
Enough said.