We won’t see until after the season, others are empty – just extra decoration for the tree. As soon as I admit that, I catch my mother’s eye. Her infectious laugh rings out.
We’re both thinking of the same story, and we’re both trying to tell it at the same time, in the sort of mock competition that is our tradition. We take turns acting out the tale: One year, my father’s big client didn’t ante up for his land survey bill until shortly before Christmas.
So after Thanksgiving, my mother and sister loaded down boxes with piles of the Waco Tribune Herald and Dr Pepper bottles, and wrapped everything up so the tree would look festive until the real thing arrived.
I was very young, but I did my part to help: I spilled my guts to the first visitor who commented on our lovely tree and all the presents. To this day, I don’t know whether I felt guilty or was just showing off my adult informed self.
My sister Lois was mortified. She had plans to be an interior designer when she graduated from high school, and I imagine she saw me as her inaugural bad client.
After we all laughed again at the re-telling, Mama suddenly looked a little teary, and I held my breath instinctively. But it passed. The two of us gossiped in the kitchen while I made my storybook Christmas luncheon, complete with linens and our wedding china and a turkey surrounded by lush parsley and perfectly halved cherry tomatoes.
My father and husband were watching television in the living room; I could pick up their intermittent remarks. Daddy has trouble hearing me anymore – sounds and voices in the upper registers are a special problem for him.
I miss his joking banter, the easy way he laughs; I guess it’s hard to make a clever remark when you aren’t sure what’s being said, but I wish he’d try more often. Daryl’s low tones and the familiar language of men seemed to connect, though.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE…MAYBE
Who in the world could have predicted that watching It’s A Wonderful Life would be a mistake? They both seemed so chipper after an afternoon nap, and Life’s a wholesome, life-affirming movie. We were all sprawled out on our comfy couches, playing with the cats via crumpled-up wrapping paper when Mama made her first comment during the commercial: “That’s nice, but life isn’t that way.”
Daryl didn’t really notice – this wasn’t his mother. But I was on full Red Alert, missiles ready to launch. Sideways looks at Mama’s face showed the storm clouds brewing. I should have switched the program on the spot. To anything. Even the National Geographic video of the lions eating the other animals would have been better.
Every time she tried to say something else, I interrupted her, negated her remarks, ignored her feelings. Finally, she just looked away from the television while the rest of us watched Jimmy Stewart’s joyful revelations.
I was a DC-10 headed for Successful Parent’s Christmas Visit International Airport and wouldn’t acknowledge the air traffic controller in my gut. I was sure the final scene would overpower any negative feelings.
And what do you know? Movie ends, everybody plays happy, bedtime again.
LIFE AND MOVIES
It’s the last day of the visit, and the ladies laze around in bathrobes until late morning. I make coffee, and Mama assumes her station at the kitchen table for our last Christmas chat.
Turns out that It’s Not a Wonderful Life after all. We’re back to that blasted movie, and she is going to have her say. It doesn’t matter that Jimmy Stewart is one of her favorite actors; it doesn’t matter that I obviously don’t want to talk about this.
Just moments before, I was the Good Daughter, bringer of Christmas cheer; now I’m the Coldhearted Changeling. I stiffen, I look out the window. I try to be loving, but all I can feel is my carefully planned “happy holiday” slipping away, like the cat once he makes it over the front door threshold. I fight the impulse to tackle Mama and wrestle her, yowling and hissing, back into safe territory.
The memories she chooses to re-live are painful, and I am stubborn about that. But I bring my eyes back to her face and sit quietly.
It’s true, my family’s life hasn’t been “that way.” I can see why it’s hard for Mama to enjoy that movie; she has never been able to pretend, like me.
In our lives, no angel brought us back to a world where everything wrong was made miraculously right again.
We didn’t wake up from the bad dream that began so many years ago when a train soundlessly rounded a blind rural stretch of tracks. Driving through the railroad crossing was a carload of giggling high school girls on their lunch hour on a pretty day in April, on their way to our little green brick house just down the road. My mother waited for them – my sister and her best friends, Mary and Nancy; they were all seniors in high school, and there were parties to be planned.
I was in my fourth grade classroom when I heard the ambulance wail past. Some lady came and got me, walked me down the long sidewalk from the school building to the parking lot, told me things that didn’t make any sense, then drove me home. When we crossed the railroad tracks, I saw smoke and Lois’ band director, Mr. Tate, beside a twisted pile of metal, bent over like somebody had punched him in the stomach.
At our house, Mama was in bed with all these people around her while she sobbed and clung to me. Then I sat in the living room and tried to figure out who everyone was. I looked for my brother, and remembered he was a grown-up in another city. My father came in after awhile and crouched in front of me, holding my hands together in his and crying.
Three years went by, and the nightmare became worse, and no angel came with a reprieve that time either.
I was getting ready to go shopping for school clothes with Mama when a station wagon driven by a pastor’s wife and filled with kids spun out of control in a rainstorm on a two-lane road in North Texas. The highway patrolman who witnessed the accident said the green Dodge Dart coming the other direction never even had time to hit the brakes. Daddy was driving that car, and my brother Mark was in the passenger’s seat.
Mark had survived Vietnam, just returned from the war, in fact. But the telephone call said my father was in the Denton hospital, and they didn’t have any record of my brother.
We sat on a bench in the glaring lights of the emergency room hallway, my mother and I. She was looking up, talking with a doctor, when my father came racing by, prone on a gurney, tubes coming from everywhere, pale as the sheet he lay against.
Then I heard my mother cry out my brother’s name. She had been told why Mark wasn’t in the hospital. I heard her say the word “no” again and again.
TIME FOR GOODBYE
The memory of It’s a Wonderful Life has faded, but the impact hasn’t.
Mama cries a little, and I had her a kitchen towel. She doesn’t cry much anymore in front of me; Daddy did only that one time. I reassure her that I understand and that I love her and that it’s “all right.”
Multiple deaths in a household affect easy socializing much like a contagious virus. I never hear anyone but Mama and me even say their names anymore.
Lois. Mark.
The stages of loss – denial, anger, grief, acceptance – sound rather orderly, like learning how to tie your shoes. But just as shoes come untied, people who lose someone they love revisit those first three feelings from time to time. Acceptance is not likely to last undisturbed over the long years, and it forsakes different family members at different times. You have to take turns.
I guess it’s Mama’s turn today.
I am 41 this year; it occurs to me that this is how old my mother was when she created that perfect Christmas for me. I think I’ve tried to do that too. But she isn’t five years old, and her heart isn’t fresh and unbroken. So I manage the best I can and finally begin to make peace with that.
After not too long, conversation lilts again to the pleasant, easy things that mothers and daughters talk about – clothes, shopping, cooking, work, gardening… .
Before I know, it’s time for them to leave.
Three o’clock and the car is loaded with the neatly packed green Samsonite suitcase and the slim garment bag, and the presents and some loving memories.
The Jeep’s engine is running; Mama hugs me and tells me what a good visit it was. She looks happy and sounds like she means what she says. Daddy smiles and hugs me back and mumbles something I can’t entirely understand, but the way he looks at me still makes me feel safe and fine.
I wait until they’re out of sight before going inside, but even then I push aside the lace curtains and stare out a front window. A neighborhood couple is shepherding their small daughter down the sidewalk pushing a bright red and yellow plastic lawnmower, perhaps a treasured Christmas toy.
I can’t hear them, but I can see that the little girl is singing as she bumps along, giving a little hop periodically, perhaps in time with the melody. Probably Barney or Rug Rats music.
I find myself humming merrily along with the only nursery song I remember.
“Down in the meadow, where the green grass grew, swam three little fishes and the momma fish too.”
