SEE AMID THE WINTER’S SNOW
Christine Schutt
Once their faces easily pinked in the Christmas gaudy. Toy-mad and dithered, the boys at Christmas, running out of sweaty parties and open to the wind. We crossed to walk the park side, lamped and darkening, and looked up through the trees to see the sky was turned to firmament; the stars, to ancient purpose; nothing was as it was, but indwelling-spirit swelled and fat with Christmas. Mother buttered strudel and cried for no occasion except that they were gone, MotherandDaddy, her own, who used to have, who used to do, who always something-something at this time of year. Mother cried for me and for the boys and for my brother (who would not forgive her).
“But what have I done?” In the tunnels of tree stands, she cried, and at the first snow, and sometimes when the boys brushed against her and always when the boys sang. Her tears delighted them. “Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying, Mother!”
“Mother,” I said, “come help me,” and she watched from a stool as I toothbrushed the silver. “Who besides us is coming?” she asked.
No one, no; and no, to that question, too. No, I am not. He did not, we never. She did not understand why I didn’t take him to court or where my in-laws got their money or why I bothered to bake. What did she raise in me, my mother, except such heat that all I could do was rush from the kitchen and put on the music that made me feel holy and sad and slightly foolish. Personent hodie, thumped and vigorous, embarrassed me, but “In the bleak mid-winter” was quieting, and Mother sipped her drink. I didn’t mind then the hard light, bright as any snowfield, and glaring off the buildings our windows faced; I could stand to look with little-boy church-voices vaulted in the background.
The boys were in the background, too; my own, and Mother’s, too, these boys talking for the toys they moved in battles sounded through the afternoon. The pursed, soured, shrunk about our lives, Mother’s as much as mine, fell away when the radiators shushed out sharp heat and we were safe.
Where were the boys then just before Christmas?
Who would sugar the cookies?
Mother lay in bed and read whatever had taken her fancy in the airport: the Royals this Christmas with their corgies at Balmoral—look! Mother wanted to live in a castle just like that—and why not? Didn’t she deserve it? Mother using up the bubbles in her afternoon ablutions, a sworl of steam and fragrance. Mother was a fragrance, an expensive fragrance, Red. Her suitcase smelled of it, and the silky lingerie she packed was acrid with the mixed-up smell of her and her perfume and what she drank.
What did she bring that was new this time?
Less and less, the same and the favorites, lace loose and straps thinned. Nothing to borrow. . . single earrings and unstrung pearls, dulled rings homemended with bandaids. . .grit in the boxes she used to case them, her jewels as Mother called them. Her jewels or her sparkles. . . Oh, what a sparkle-plenty you are! Darling! Mother had been belling the cat with us now for how many Christmases? “Count,” and Mother did: that was the year your father, your husband, my ex-husband, your ex-husband, the ugly man—who was he?
“Mother, please, can you talk of something else, please.”
The snow tracks fast filling in with falling snow, winter solstice in the Sheraton Avenue house where she sat at the top of the staircase and saw her handsome brothers off. Black mufflers, camel coats, lustrous patent-leather dancing shoes, her brothers in high dress. Mother said she saw them from the staircase and from the landing’s window sliding on those shoes, boys still, in and out of light. Good-bye! She huffed the window to make a smoke to draw in, but the ring came out small and her mark disappeared.
“You dasn’t” was how the maid said no to her. “You dasn’t go in your brothers’ rooms when they are out.”
My mother went in anyway, but looking for what?
“I wanted to be surprised,” Mother said. “I was nosey. Even when I knew what it was in a drawer, I opened it.”
I was also that way. For a long time, even after I knew the contents, I went on opening Mother’s house; but she didn’t bother to look through my rooms anymore. In powdered undress she sat on the edge of my bed and said, “So this is Christmas.”
My sentiments exactly when the boys were gone although there was tonight with the boys at the theatre— her treat. “Remember?”
She had almost forgotten.
She said, “I don’t feel well today,” and she went back to bed with a littleglassofsomething as she called it. She wanted to take advantage of the quiet and for a while to shut her eyes, to clear her head, to think of other things besides Christmas. Mother said, “I have no business buying theatre tickets, but I’m glad I did, of course, for the boys. The boys should get to see good theatre—only the expense of it!” Money, money, money, the cold wind of Christmas hissing under the opened window, I had felt that chill before and longed for bed.
“Want more?” I asked.
“You are so much like me,” Mother said.
I hoped not, but I was.
I was rushing bacon and using too much cleanser on pans; whatever I cooked in them came out tasting soapy. I can’t eat this, Mom, from a boy. Me, forgetting and forgetting or getting there late. Mom!I was full of apology but unprepared. Who carried safety pins and didn’t get lost? I will make it work, I will make it work, be patient. The boys did not believe me anymore than I believed my mother when she said, “I promise.” Mother promised roller blades for Christmas; for the other boy, Australia. She said to me, “When he is twenty-one I am taking him.”
“Does it snow in Australia?” he asked, come home from the park and out of the sky’s new falling and already anxious to be gone again and released and dangerous and loud.
“Be quiet,” I said. “Both of you. Nana is resting.”
But Nana was calling to them, and if she was resting, then why was she talking?
They went on asking, ”Nana?” walking into her room, trailing gifts from school to show but running out before she did.
“Nana’s crying, Mother!” from both boys in excited voices.
“Nana’s crying!”
The sharp stink of expensive, old-lady perfume and Mother, an old lady, crying over it. Not broken, only spilled, I assured her, and only a little spilled, all right then, enough to wear, and not to cry over, Mother. I righted the empty glass and set the clock back so she could better see it.
“Your brother gets so mad,” Mother said to me, and she was crying again because we should have been together. “We’re too few as it is,” she said. “He should be here and his wife and those children. They don’t even know me. What are their names? You see, I forget. This is not my idea of Christmas.”
I reminded her about the theatre and said tomorrow he will call and maybe we would all go out for dinner.
But MotherandDaddy, MotherandDaddy doused the pudding and put it aflame.
I said, “Your drink, Mother, here.”
“Your brother,” she said, sipping. “I don’t dare around him.”
Mother grunted off her nightgown and trembled down the hall in just her nylons and brassiere. She said, “What are you going to wear?” and she watched me dress and wondered when it happened she got old, and I was old, too, she assured me, and my brother was getting old. Mother said, “Daddy wasn’t so very old when he died, yet poor Daddy. They would not let me see him. They didn’t even call in time for me to see him. They just put him in the ground. I found out later.”
“Mother. . . .” Was I rolling my eyes, making a face?
“See how you like it. See what it feels like . . . lost, and now you have to worry.”
“Mother. . . .”
She was trying on perfumes and asking, “Local?”
“Cheap,” I answered. I said yesandno to everything else she asked me. It is not as it was with MotherandDaddy; we will never again. “Give me,” I said and took her drink and huffed up the fumes of it and thought I could catch fire.
“Outside,” I said, “it looks like Christmas,” and it did. The snow, expected but turned larger, sifted in the wind and worked its intimate diminishment. Only the sky was left to see and violet-colored, pretty flakes falling on our tongues. Ahhhhhhh at the heavens running backward and Mother, repeating, “I don’t dare fall. If I fall. . . .” The boys said they would catch her. Then the snow’s assaulting angle sharpened, and it stormed, and we couldn’t see the sky, and Mother was crying. She was very, very drunk by then, and it came as no surprise to me that she fell at a curb, almost at the theatre, amid a host of people. Mother fell on her knees, and I let strangers help her.