CHRISTMAS EVE, THREE Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, December 24, 25, 26, 1991 (Clare is 20, Henry is 28)

CHRISTMAS EVE, THREE


Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, December 24, 25, 26, 1991 (Clare is 20, Henry is
28)

CLARE: It’s 8:32 a.m. on the twenty-fourth of December and Henry and I are on our
way to Meadowlark House for Christmas. It’s a beautiful clear day, no snow here in
Chicago, but six inches on the ground in South Haven. Before we left, Henry spent
time repacking the car, checking the tires, looking under the hood. I don’t think he
had the slightest idea what he was looking at. My car is a very cute 1990 white Honda
Civic, and I love it, but Henry really hates riding in cars, especially small cars. He’s a
horrible passenger, holding onto the armrest and braking the whole time we’re in
transit. He would probably be less afraid if he could be the driver, but for obvious
reasons Henry doesn’t have a driver’s license. So we are sailing along the Indiana
Toll Road on this fine winter day; I’m calm and looking forward to seeing my family
and Henry is a basket case. It doesn’t help that he didn’t run this morning; I’ve
noticed that Henry needs an incredible amount of physical activity all the time in
order to be happy. It’s like hanging out with a greyhound. It’s different being with
Henry in real time. When I was growing up Henry came and went, and our


encounters were concentrated and dramatic and unsettling. Henry had a lot of stuff he
wasn’t going to tell me, and most of the time he wouldn’t let me get anywhere near
him, so I always had this intense, unsatisfied feeling. When I finally found him in the
present, I thought it would be like that. But in fact it’s so much better, in many ways.
First and foremost, instead of refusing to touch me at all, Henry is constantly
touching me, kissing me, making love to me. I feel as though I have become a
different person, one who is bathed in a warm pool of desire. And he tells me things!
Anything I ask him about himself, his life, his family—he tells me, with names,
places, dates. Things that seemed utterly mysterious to me as a child are revealed as
perfectly logical. But the best thing of all is that I see him for long stretches of time—
hours, days. I know where to find him. He goes to work, he comes home. Sometimes
I open my address book just to look at the entry: Henry DeTamble, 714 Dearborn, lie,
Chicago, IL 60610, 312-431-8313. A last name, an address, a phone number. lean
call him on the phone. It’s a miracle. I feel like Dorothy, when her house crash-
landed in Oz and the world turned from black and white to color. We’re not in Kansas
anymore.

In fact, we’re about to cross into Michigan, and there’s a rest stop. I pull into the
parking lot, and we get out and stretch our legs. We head into the building, and
there’s the maps and brochures for the tourists, and the huge bank of vending
machines.

“Wow,” Henry says. He goes over and inspects all the junk food, and then starts
reading the brochures. “Hey, let’s go to Frankenmuth! ‘Christmas 365 Days a Year!’
God, I’d commit hara-kiri after about an hour of that. Do you have any change?”

I find a fistful of change in the bottom of my purse and we gleefully spend it on
two Cokes, a box of Good & Plenty, and a Hershey bar. We walk back out into the
dry cold air, arm in arm. In the car, we open our Cokes and consume sugar. Henry
looks at my watch. “Such decadence. It’s only 9:15.”

“Well, in a couple minutes, it’ll be 10:15.”

“Oh, right, Michigan’s an hour ahead. How surreal.”

I look over at him. “Everything is surreal. I can’t believe you’re actually going to
meet my family. I’ve spent so much time hiding you from my family.”

“Only because I adore you beyond reason am I doing this. I have spent a lot of
time avoiding road trips, meeting girls’ families, and Christmas. The fact that I am
enduring all three at once proves that I love you.”

“Henry—” I turn to him; we kiss. The kiss starts to evolve into something more
when out of the corner of my eye I see three prepubescent boys and a large dog
standing a few feet away from us, watching with interest. Henry turns to see what I
am looking at and the boys all grin and give us the thumbs up. They amble off to their
parents’ van.


“By the way—what are the sleeping arrangements at your house?”

“Oh, dear. Etta called me yesterday about that. I’m in my own room and you are in
the blue room. We’re down the hall from each other, with my parents and Alicia in

between.”

“And how committed are we to maintaining this?”

I start the car and we get back on the highway. “I don’t know because I’ve never
done this before. Mark just brings his girlfriends downstairs to the rec room and boffs
them on the couch in the wee hours, and we all pretend not to notice. If things are
difficult we can always go down to the Reading Room; I used to hide you down
there.”

“Hmm. Oh, well.” Henry looks out the window for a while. “You know, this isn’t
too bad.”

“What?”

“Riding. In a car. On the highway.”

“Golly. Next you’ll be getting on planes.”

“Never.”

“Paris. Cairo. London. Kyoto.”

“No way. I am convinced that I would time travel and Lord knows if I would be
able to get back to something flying 350 miles an hour. I’d end up falling out of the
sky a la Icarus.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m not planning to find out for sure.”

“Could you get there by time travel?”

“Well. Here’s my theory. Now, this is only a Special Theory of Time Travel as
Performed by Henry DeTamble, and not a General Theory of Time Travel.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, I think it’s a brain thing. I think it’s a lot like epilepsy, because it
tends to happen when I’m stressed, and there are physical cues, like flashing light,
that can prompt it. And because things like running, and sex, and meditation tend to
help me stay put in the present. Secondly, I have absolutely no conscious control over
when or where I go, how long I stay, or when I come back. So time travel tours of the
Riviera are very unlikely. Having said that, my subconscious seems to exert
tremendous control, because I spend a lot of time in my own past, visiting events that
are interesting or important, and evidently I will be spending enormous amounts of
time visiting you, which I am looking forward to immensely. I tend to go to places
I’ve already been in real time, although I do find myself in other, more random times
and places. I tend to go to the past, rather than the future.”

“You’ve been to the future? I didn’t know you could do that.”


Henry is looking pleased with himself. “So far, my range is about fifty years in
each direction. But I very rarely go to the future, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen
much of anything there that I found useful. It’s always quite brief. And maybe I just
don’t know what I’m looking at. It’s the past that exerts a lot of pull. In the past I feel
much more solid. Maybe the future itself is less substantial? I don’t know. I always
feel like I’m breathing thin air, out there in the future. That’s one of the ways I can
tell it is the future: it feels different. It’s harder to run, there.” Henry says this
thoughtfully, and I suddenly have a glimpse of the terror of being in a foreign time
and place, without clothes, without friends...

“That’s why your feet—”

“Are like leather.” The soles of Henry’s feet have thick calluses, as though they
are trying to become shoes. “I am a beast of the hoof. If anything ever happens to my
feet you might as well shoot me.”

We ride on in silence for a while. The road rises and dips, dead fields of cornstalks
flash by. Farmhouses stand washed in the winter sun, each with their vans and horse
trailers and American cars lined up in the long driveways. I sigh. Going home is such
a mixed experience. I’m dying to see Alicia and Etta, and I’m worried about my
mother, and I don’t especially feel like dealing with my father and Mark. But I’m
curious to see how they deal with Henry, and he with them. I’m proud of the fact that
I kept Henry a secret for so long. Fourteen years. When you’re a kid fourteen years is
forever.

We pass a Wal-Mart, a Dairy Queen, a McDonald’s. More cornfields. An orchard.
U-Pick-M Strawberries, Blueberries. In the summer this road is a long corridor of
fruit, grain, and capitalism. But now the fields are dead and dry and the cars speed
along the sunny cold highway ignoring the beckoning parking lots.

I never thought much about South Haven until I moved to Chicago. Our house
always seemed like an island, sitting in the unincorporated area to the south,
surrounded by the Meadow, orchards, woods, farms, and South Haven was just Town,
as in Let’s go to Town and get an ice cream. Town was groceries and hardware and
Mackenzie’s Bakery and the sheet music and records at the Music Emporium,
Alicia’s favorite store. We used to stand in front of Appleyard’s Photography Studio
making up stories about the brides and toddlers and families smiling their hideous
smiles in the window. We didn’t think the library was funny-looking in its faux
Greek splendor, nor did we find the cuisine limited and bland, or the movies at the
Michigan Theater relentlessly American and mindless. These were opinions I came to
later, after I became a denizen of a City, an expatriate anxious to distance herself
from the bumpkin ways of her youth. I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the
little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter
days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops,
who could keep a secret. I glance over at Henry and see that he has fallen asleep.


South Haven, fifty miles.

Twenty-six, twelve, three, one.

Phoenix Road.

Blue Star Highway.

And then: Meagram Lane. I reach over to wake Henry but he’s already awake. He
smiles nervously and looks out the window at the endless tunnel of bare winter trees
as we hurtle along, and as the gate comes into view I fumble in the glove
compartment for the opener and the gates swing apart and we pass through.

The house appears like a pop-up in a book. Henry gasps, and starts to laugh.

“What?” I say defensively.

“I didn’t realize it was so huge. How many rooms does this monster have?”

“Twenty-four,” I tell him. Etta is waving at us from the hall window as I pull
around the drive and stop near the front door. Her hair is grayer than last time I was
here, but her face is pink with pleasure. As we climb out of the car she’s gingerly
picking her way down the icy front steps in no coat and her good navy blue dress
with the lace collar, carefully balancing her stout figure over her sensible shoes, and I
run over to her to take her arm but she bats me away until she’s at the bottom and
then she gives me a hug and a kiss (I breathe in Etta’s smell of Noxzema and powder
so gladly) as Henry stands by, waiting. “And what have we here?” she says as though
Henry is a small child I have brought along unannounced. “Etta Milbauer, Henry
DeTamble,” I introduce. I see a little ‘Oh’ on Henry’s face and I wonder who he
thought she was. Etta beams at Henry as we climb the steps. She opens the front door.
Henry lowers his voice and asks me, “What about our stuff?” and I tell him that Peter
will deal with it. “Where is everyone?” I ask, and Etta says that lunch is in fifteen
minutes and we can take off our coats and wash and go right in. She leaves us
standing in the hall and retreats to the kitchen. I turn, take off my coat and hang it in
the hall closet. When I turn back to Henry he is waving at someone. I peer around
him and see Nell sticking her broad, snub-nosed face out of the dining room door,
grinning, and I run down the hall and give her a big sloppy kiss and she chuckles at
me and says, “Pretty man, monkey girl,” and ducks back into the other room before
Henry can reach us.

“Nell?” he guesses and I nod. “She’s not shy, just busy,” I explain. I lead him up
the back stairs to the second floor. “You’re in here,” I tell him, opening the door to
the blue bedroom. He glances in and follows me down the hall. “This is my room,” I
say apprehensively and Henry slips around me and stands in the middle of the rug
just looking and when he turns to me I see that he doesn’t recognize anything;
nothing in the room means a thing to him, and the knife of realization sinks in deeper:
all the little tokens and souvenirs in this museum of our past are as love letters to an
illiterate. Henry picks up a wren’s nest (it happens to be the first of all the many


bird’s nests he gave me over the years) and says, “Nice.” I nod, and open my mouth
to tell him and he puts it back on the shelf and says, “Does that door lock?” and I flip
the lock and we’re late for lunch.

HENRY: I’m almost calm as I follow Clare down the stairs, through the dark cold hall
and into the dining room. Everyone is already eating. The room is low ceilinged and
comfortable in a William Morrisy sort of way; the air is warm from the fire crackling
in the small fireplace and the windows are so frosted over that I can’t see out. Clare
goes over to a thin woman with pale red hair who must be her mother, who tilts her
head to receive Clare’s kiss, who half rises to shake my hand. Clare introduces her to
me as “my mother” and I call her “Mrs. Abshire” and she immediately says “Oh, but
you must call me Lucille, everyone does,” and smiles in an exhausted but warm sort
of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy. We take our seats across
the table from each other. Clare is sitting between Mark and an elderly woman who
turns out to be her Great Aunt Dulcie; I am sitting between Alicia and a plump pretty
blond girl who is introduced as Sharon and who seems to be with Mark. Clare’s
father sits at the head of the table and my first impression is that he is deeply
disturbed by me. Handsome, truculent Mark seems equally unnerved. They’ve seen
me before. I wonder what I was doing that caused them to notice me, remember me,
recoil ever so slightly in aversion when Clare introduces me. But Philip Abshire is a
lawyer, and master of his features, and within a minute he is affable and smiling, the
host, my girlfriend’s dad, a balding middle-aged man with aviator glasses and an
athletic body gone soft and paunchy but strong hands, tennis-playing hands, gray eyes
that continue to regard me warily despite the confidential grin. Mark has a harder
time concealing his distress, and every time I catch his eye he looks at his plate.
Alicia is not what I expected; she is matter-of-fact and kind, but a little odd, absent.
She has Philip’s dark hair, like Mark, and Lucille’s features, sort of; Alicia looks as
though someone had tried to combine Clare and Mark but had given up and thrown in
some Eleanor Roosevelt to fill in the gaps. Philip says something and Alicia laughs,
and suddenly she is lovely and I turn to her in surprise as she rises from the table.

“I’ve got to go to St. Basil’s,” she informs me. “I’ve got a rehearsal. Are you
coming to church?” I dart a look at Clare, who nods slightly, and I tell Alicia “Of
course,” and as everyone sighs with—what? relief? I remember that Christmas is,
after all, a Christian holiday in addition to being my own personal day of atonement.
Alicia leaves. I imagine my mother laughing at me, her well-plucked eyebrows raised
high at the sight of her half-Jewish son marooned in the midst of Christmas in
Goyland, and I mentally shake my finger at her. You should talk, I tell her. You
married an Episcopalian. I look at my plate and it’s ham, with peas and an effete
little salad. I don’t eat pork and I hate peas.


“Clare tells us you’re a librarian,” Philip assays, and I admit that this is so. We
have a chipper little discussion about the Newberry and people who are Newberry
trustees and also clients of Philip’s firm, which apparently is based in Chicago, in
which case I am not clear about why Clare’s family lives way up here in Michigan.

“Summer homes,” he tells me, and I remember Clare explaining that her father
specializes in wills and trusts. I picture elderly rich people reclining on their private
beaches, slathering on sunblock and deciding to cut Junior out of the will, reaching
for their cell phones to call Philip. I recollect that Avi, who is first chair to my
father’s second at the CSO, has a house around here somewhere. I mention this and
everyone’s ears perk.

“Do you know him?” Lucille asks.

“Sure. He and my dad sit right next to each other.”

“Sit next to each other?”

“Well, you know. First and second violin.”

“Your father is a violinist?”

“Yeah.” I look at Clare, who is staring at her mother with a don’t embarrass me
expression on her face.

“And he plays for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?”

“Yes.”

Lucille s face is suffused with pink; now I know where Clare gets her blushes. “Do
you think he would listen to Alicia play? If we gave him a tape?”

I grimly hope that Alicia is very, very good. People are constantly bestowing tapes
on Dad. Then I have a better idea.

“Alicia is a cellist, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Is she looking for a teacher?”

Philip interjects: “She studies with Frank Wainwright in Kalamazoo.”

“Because I could give the tape to Yoshi Akawa. One of his students just left to
take a job in Paris.” Yoshi is a great guy and first chair cello. I know he’ll at least
listen to the tape; my dad, who doesn’t teach, will simply pitch it out. Lucille is
effusive; even Philip seems pleased. Clare looks relieved. Mark eats. Great Aunt
Dulcie, pink-haired and tiny, is oblivious to this whole exchange. Perhaps she’s deaf?
I glance at Sharon, who is sitting on my left and who hasn’t said a word. She looks
miserable. Philip and Lucille are discussing which tape they should give me, or
perhaps Alicia should make a new one? I ask Sharon if this is her first time up here
and she nods. Just as I’m about to ask her another question Philip asks me what my
mother does and I blink; I give Clare a look that says Didn’t you tell them anything?

“My mother was a singer. She’s dead.”


Clare says, quietly, “Henry’s mother was Annette Lyn Robinson.” She might as
well have told them my mom was the Virgin Mary; Philip’s face lights up. Lucille
makes a little fluttering motion with her hands.

“Unbelievable—fantastic! We have all her recordings—” und so wiete. But then
Lucille says, “I met her when I was young. My father took me to hear Madama
Butterfly, and he knew someone who took us backstage afterward, and we went to her
dressing room, and she was there, and all these flowers! and she had her little boy—
why, that was you!”

I nod, trying to find my voice. Clare says, “What did she look like?”

Mark says, “Are we going skiing this afternoon?” Philip nods. Lucille smiles, lost
in memory. “She was so beautiful—she still had the wig on, that long black hair, and
she was teasing the little boy with it, tickling him, and he was dancing around. She
had such lovely hands, and she was just my height, so slender, and she was Jewish,
you know, but I thought she looked more Italian—” Lucille breaks off and her hand

flies to her mouth, and her eyes dart to my plate, which is clean except for a few peas.

“Are you Jewish?” Mark asks, pleasantly.

“I suppose I could be, if I wanted, but nobody ever made a point of it. She died
when I was six, and my dad’s a lapsed Episcopalian.”

“You look just like her” Lucille volunteers, and I thank her. Our plates are
removed by Etta, who asks Sharon and me if we drink coffee. We both say Yes at the
same time, so emphatically that Clare’s whole family laughs. Etta gives us a motherly
smile and minutes later she sets steaming cups of coffee in front of us and I think
That wasn’t so bad after all. Everyone talks about skiing, and the weather, and we all
stand up and Philip and Mark walk into the hall together; I ask Clare if she’s going
skiing and she shrugs and asks me if I want to and I explain that I don’t ski and have
no interest in learning. She decides to go anyway after Lucille says that she needs
someone to help with her bindings. As we walk up the stairs I hear Mark say,“—
incredible resemblance—” and I smile to myself.

Later, after everyone has left and the house is quiet, I venture down from my
chilly room in search of warmth and more coffee. I walk through the dining room and
into the kitchen and am confronted by an amazing array of glassware, silver, cakes,
peeled vegetables, and roasting pans in a kitchen that looks like something you’d see
in a four-star restaurant. In the midst of it all stands Nell with her back to me, singing
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and waggling her large hips, waving a baster at a
young black girl who points at me mutely. Nell turns around and smiles a huge gap-
toothed smile and then says, “What are you doin‘ in my kitchen, Mister Boyfriend?”

“I was wondering if you have any coffee left?”


“Left? What do you think, I let coffee sit around all day gettin‘ vile? Shoo, son,
get out of here and go sit in the living room and pull on the bell and I will make you
some fresh coffee. Didn’t your mama teach you about coffee?”

“Actually, my mother wasn’t much of a cook” I tell her, venturing closer to the
center of the vortex. Something smells wonderful. “What are you making?”

“What you’re smellin‘ is a Thompson’s Turkey,” Nell says. She opens the oven to
show me a monstrous turkey that looks like something that’s been in the Great
Chicago Fire. It’s completely black. “Don’t look so dubious, boy. Underneath that
crust is the best eatin’ turkey on Planet Earth.”

I am willing to believe her; the smell is perfect. “What is a Thompson’s Turkey?”
I ask, and Nell discourses on the miraculous properties of the Thompson’s Turkey,
invented by Morton Thompson, a newspaperman, in the 1930s. Apparently the
production of this marvelous beast involves a great deal of stuffing, basting, and
turning. Nell allows me to stay in her kitchen while she makes me coffee and
wrangles the turkey out of the oven and wrestles it onto its back and then artfully
drools cider gravy all over it before shoving it back into the chamber. There are
twelve lobsters crawling around in a large plastic tub of water by the sink. “Pets?” I
tease her, and she replies, “That’s your Christmas dinner, son; you want to pick one
out? You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” I assure her that I am not, that I am a good
boy who eats whatever is put in front of him.

“You’d never know it, you so thin,” Nell says. “I’m gonna feed you up.”

“That’s why Clare brought me.”

“Hmm,” Nell says, pleased. “Awright, then. Now scat so I can get on, here.” I take
my large mug of fragrant coffee and wend my way to the living room, where there is
a huge Christmas tree and a fire. It looks like an ad for Pottery Barn. I settle myself in
an orange wing chair by the fire and am riffing through the pile of newspapers when
someone says, “Where’d you get the coffee?” and I look up and see Sharon sitting
across from me in a blue armchair that exactly matches her sweater.

“Hi” I say. “I’m sorry—”

“That’s okay,” Sharon says.

“I went to the kitchen, but I guess we’re supposed to use the bell, wherever that
is.” We scan the room and sure enough, there’s a bell pull in the corner.

“This is so weird,” Sharon says. “We’ve been here since yesterday and I’ve been

just kind of creeping around, you know, afraid to use the wrong fork or something...”

“Where are you from?”

“Florida.” She laughs. “I never had a white Christmas ‘til I got to Harvard. My dad

owns a gas station in Jacksonville. I figured after school I’d go back there, you
know, ’cause I don’t like the cold, but now I guess I’m stuck.”

“How come?”


Sharon looks surprised. “Didn’t they tell you? Mark and I are getting married.”

I wonder if Clare knows this; it seems like something she would have mentioned.
Then I notice the diamond on Sharon’s finger. “Congratulations.”

“I guess. I mean, thank you.”

“Um, aren’t you sure? About getting married?” Sharon actually looks like she’s

been crying; she’s all puffy around the eyes.

“Well, I’m pregnant. So...”

“Well, it doesn’t necessarily follow—”

“Yeah it does. If you’re Catholic.” Sharon sighs, and slouches into the chair. I

actually know several Catholic girls who have had abortions and weren’t struck down
by lightning, but apparently Sharon’s is a less accommodating faith.

“Well, congratulations. Uh, when...?”

“January eleventh.” She sees my surprise and says, “Oh, the baby? April.” She
makes a face. “I hope it’s over spring break, because otherwise I don’t see how I’ll
manage—not that it matters so much now....”

“What’s your major?”

“Premed. My parents are furious. They’re leaning on me to give it up for
adoption.”

“Don’t they like Mark?”

“They’ve never even met Mark, it’s not that, they’re just afraid I won’t go to
medical school and it will all be a big waste.” The front door opens and the skiers
have returned. A gust of cold air makes it all the way across the living room and
blows over us. It feels good, and I realize that I am being roasted like Nell’s turkey by
the fire here. “What time is dinner?” I ask Sharon.

“Seven, but last night we had drinks in here first. Mark had just told his mom and
dad, and they weren’t exactly throwing their arms around me. I mean, they were nice,
you know, how people can be nice but be mean at the same time? I mean, you’d think
I got pregnant all by myself and Mark had nothing to do with it—”

I’m glad when Clare comes in. She’s wearing a funny peaked green cap with a big
tassel hanging off it and an ugly yellow skiing sweater over blue jeans. She’s flushed
from the cold and smiling. Her hair is wet and I see as she walks ebulliently across
the enormous Persian carpet in her stocking feet toward me that she does belong here,
she’s not an aberration, she has simply chosen another kind of life, and I’m glad. I
stand up and she throws her arms around me and then just as quickly she turns to
Sharon and says, “I just heard! Congratulations!” and Clare embraces Sharon, who
looks at me over Clare’s shoulder, startled but smiling. Later Sharon tells me, “I think
you’ve got the only nice one.” I shake my head but I know what she means.


CLARE: There’s an hour before dinner and no one will notice if we’re gone. “Come
on,” I tell Henry. “Let’s go outside.” He groans.

“Must we?”

“I want to show you something.”

We put on our coats and boots and hats and gloves and tromp through the house
and out the back door. The sky is clear ultramarine blue and the snow over the
meadow reflects it back lighter and the two blues meet in the dark line of trees that is
the beginning of the woods. It’s too early for stars but there’s an airplane blinking its
way across space. I imagine our house as a tiny dot of light seen from the plane, like a
star.

“This way.” The path to the clearing is under six inches of snow. I think of all the
times I have stomped over bare footprints so no one would see them running down
the path toward the house. Now there are deer tracks, and the prints of a large dog.

The stubble of dead plants under snow, wind, the sound of our boots. The clearing
is a smooth bowl of blue snow; the rock is an island with a mushroom top. “This is
it.”

Henry stands with his hands in his coat pockets. He swivels around, looking. “So
this is it,” he says. I search his face for a trace of recognition. Nothing. “Do you ever
have deja vu?” I ask him.

Henry sighs. “My whole life is one long deja vu.”

We turn and walk over our own tracks, back to the house.

Later:

I have warned Henry that we dress for dinner on Christmas Eve and so when I
meet him in the hall he is resplendent in a black suit, white shirt, maroon tie with a
mother-of-pearl tie clasp. “Goodness,” I say. “You’ve shined your shoes!”

“I have ,” he admits. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

“You look perfect; a Nice Young Man.”

“When in fact, I am the Punk Librarian Deluxe. Parents, beware.”

“They’ll adore you.”

“I adore you. Come here.” Henry and I stand before the full-length mirror at the
top of the stairs, admiring ourselves. I am wearing a pale green silk strapless dress
which belonged to my grandmother. I have a photograph of her wearing it on New
Year’s Eve, 1941. She’s laughing. Her lips are dark with lipstick and she’s holding a
cigarette. The man in the photograph is her brother Teddy, who was killed in France


six months later. He’s laughing, too. Henry puts his hands on my waist and expresses
surprise at all the boning and corsetry under the silk. I tell him about Grandma. “She
was smaller than me. It only hurts when I sit down; the ends of the steel thingies poke
into my hips.” Henry is kissing my neck when someone coughs and we spring apart.
Mark and Sharon stand in the door of Mark’s room, which Mama and Daddy have
reluctantly agreed there is no point in their not sharing.

“None of that, now,” Mark says in his annoyed schoolmarm voice. “Haven’t you
learned anything from the painful example of your elders, boys and girls?”

“Yes,” replies Henry. “Be prepared.” He pats his pants pocket (which is actually
empty) with a smile and we sail down the stairs as Sharon giggles.

Everyone’s already had a few drinks when we arrive in the living room. Alicia
makes our private hand signal: Watch out for Mama, she’s messed up. Mama is
sitting on the couch looking harmless, her hair all piled up into a chignon, wearing
her pearls and her peach velvet dress with the lace sleeves. She looks pleased when
Mark goes over and sits down next to her, laughs when he makes some little joke for
her, and I wonder for a moment if Alicia is mistaken. But then I see how Daddy is
watching Mama and I realize that she must have said something awful just before we
came in. Daddy is standing by the drinks cart and he turns to me, relieved, and pours
me a Coke and hands Mark a beer and a glass. He asks Sharon and Henry what
they’ll have. Sharon asks for La Croix. Henry, after pondering for a moment, asks for
Scotch and water. My father mixes drinks with a heavy hand, and his eyes bug out a
little when Henry knocks back the Scotch effortlessly.

“Another?”

“No, thank you.” I know by now that Henry would like to simply take the bottle
and a glass and curl up in bed with a book, and that he is refusing seconds because he
would then feel no compunction about thirds and fourths. Sharon hovers at Henry’s
elbow and I abandon them, crossing the room to sit by Aunt Dulcie in the window
seat.

“Oh, child, how lovely—I haven’t seen that dress since Elizabeth wore it to the
party the Lichts had at the Planetarium. ”Alicia joins us; she is wearing a navy blue
turtleneck with a tiny hole where the sleeve is separating from the bodice and an old
bedraggled kilt with wool stockings that bag around her ankles like an old lady’s. I

know she’s doing it to bug Daddy, but still.

“What’s wrong with Mama?” I ask her.

Alicia shrugs. “She’s pissed off about Sharon.”

“What’s wrong with Sharon?” inquires Dulcie, reading our lips. “She seems very

nice. Nicer than Mark, if you ask me.”

“She’s pregnant,” I tell Dulcie. “They’re getting married. Mama thinks she’s white
trash because she’s the first person in her family to go to college.”


Dulcie looks at me sharply, and sees that I know what she knows. “Lucille, of all
people, ought to be a little understanding of that young girl.” Alicia is about to ask
Dulcie what she means when the dinner bell rings and we rise, Pavlovian, and file
toward the dining room. I whisper to Alicia, “Is she drunk?” and Alicia whispers back,
“I think she was drinking in her room before dinner.” I squeeze Alicia’s hand and
Henry hangs back and we go into the dining room and find our places, Daddy and
Mama at the head and foot of the table, Dulcie and Sharon and Mark on one side with
Mark next to Mama, and Alicia and Henry and me, with Alicia next to Daddy. The
room is full of candles, and little flowers floating in cut-glass bowls, and Etta has laid
out all the silver and china on Grandma’s embroidered tablecloth from the nuns in
Provence. In short, it is Christmas Eve, exactly like every Christmas Eve I can
remember, except that Henry is at my side sheepishly bowing his head as my father
says grace.

“Heavenly Father, we give thanks on this holy night for your mercy and for your
benevolence, for another year of health and happiness, for the comfort of family, and
for new friends. We thank you for sending your Son to guide us and redeem us in the
form of a helpless infant, and we thank you for the baby Mark and Sharon will be
bringing into our family. We beg to be more perfect in our love and patience with
each other. Amen.” Uh-oh, I think. Now he’s done it. I dart a glance at Mama and she
is seething. You would never know it if you didn’t know Mama: she is very still, and
she stares at her plate. The kitchen door opens and Etta comes in with the soup and
sets a small bowl in front of each of us. I catch Mark’s eye and he inclines his head
slightly toward Mama and raises his eyebrows and I just nod a tiny nod. He asks her a
question about this year’s apple harvest, and she answers. Alicia and I relax a little bit.
Sharon is watching me and I wink at her. The soup is chestnut and parsnip, which
seems like a bad idea until you taste Nell’s. “Wow,” Henry says, and we all laugh,
and eat up our soup. Etta clears away the soup bowls and Nell brings in the turkey. It
is golden and steaming and huge, and we all applaud enthusiastically, as we do every
year. Nell beams and says, “Well, now” as she does every year. “Oh, Nell, it’s
perfect,” my mother says with tears in her eyes. Nell looks at her sharply and then at
Daddy, and says, “Thank you, Miz Lucille.” Etta serves us stuffing, glazed carrots,
mashed potatoes, and lemon curd, and we pass our plates to Daddy, who heaps them
with turkey. I watch Henry as he takes his first bite of Nell’s turkey: surprise, then
bliss. “I have seen my future,” he announces, and I stiffen. “I am going to give up
librarianing and come and live in your kitchen and worship at Nell’s feet. Or perhaps
I will just marry her.”

“You’re too late,” says Mark. “Nell is already married.”

“Oh, well. It will have to be her feet, then. Why don’t all of you weigh 300
pounds?”

“I’m working on it,” my father says, patting his paunch.


“I’m going to weigh 300 pounds when I’m old and I don’t have to drag my cello
around anymore,” Alicia tells Henry. “I’m going to live in Paris and eat nothing but
chocolate and I’m going to smoke cigars and shoot heroin and listen to nothing but
Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. Right, Mama?”

“I’ll join you,” Mama says grandly. “But I would rather listen to Johnny Mathis.”

“If you shoot heroin you won’t want to eat much of anything,” Henry informs
Alicia, who regards him speculatively. “Try marijuana instead.” Daddy frowns. Mark
changes the subject: “I heard on the radio that it’s supposed to snow eight inches

tonight.”

“Eight!” we chorus.

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas...,” Sharon ventures without conviction.

“I hope it doesn’t all dump on us while we’re in church,” Alicia says grumpily. “I
get so sleepy after Mass.” We chatter on about snowstorms we have known. Dulcie
tells about being caught in the Big Blizzard of 1967, in Chicago. “I had to leave my
car on Lake Shore Drive and walk all the way from Adams to Belmont.”

“I got stuck in that one,” says Henry. “I almost froze; I ended up in the rectory of
the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue.”

“How old were you?” asks Daddy, and Henry hesitates and replies, “Three.” He
glances at me and I realize he’s talking about an experience he had while time
traveling and he adds, “I was with my father.” It seems transparently obvious to me
that he’s lying but no one seems to notice. Etta comes in and clears our dishes and
sets out dessert plates. After a slight delay Nell comes in with the flaming plum
pudding. “Oompa!” says Henry. She sets the pudding down in front of Mama, and the
flames turn Mama’s pale hair copper red, like mine, for a moment before they die out.
Daddy opens the champagne (under a dish towel, so the cork won’t put out anybody’s
eyeball). We all pass our glasses to him and he fills them and we pass them back.
Mama cuts thin slices of plum pudding and Etta serves everyone. There are two extra
glasses, one for Etta and one for Nell, and we all stand up for the toasts.

My father begins: “To family.”

“To Nell and Etta, who are like family, who work so hard and make our home and
have so many talents,” my mother says, breathless and soft.

“To peace and justice,” says Dulcie.

“To family,” says Etta.

“To beginnings ” says Mark, toasting Sharon.

“To chance” she replies.

It’s my turn. I look at Henry. “To happiness. To here and now.”


Henry gravely replies, “To world enough and time,” and my heart skips and I
wonder how he knows, but then I realize that Marvell’s one of his favorite poets and
he’s not referring to anything but the future.

“To snow and Jesus and Mama and Daddy and catgut and sugar and my new red
Converse High Tops,” says Alicia, and we all laugh.

“To love,” says Nell, looking right at me, smiling her vast smile. “And to Morton
Thompson, inventor of the best eatin‘ turkey on the Planet Earth.”

HENRY: All through dinner Lucille has been careening wildly from sadness to elation
to despair. Her entire family has been carefully navigating her mood, driving her into
neutral territory again and again, buffering her, protecting her. But as we sit down and
begin to eat dessert, she breaks down and sobs silently, her shoulders shaking, her
head turned away as though she’s going to tuck it under her wing like a sleeping bird.
At first I am the only person who notices this, and I sit, horrified, unsure what to do.
Then Philip sees her, and then the whole table falls quiet. He’s on his feet, by her side.
“Lucy?” he whispers. “Lucy, what is it?” Clare hurries to her, saying “Come on,
Mama, it’s okay, Mama...” Lucille is shaking her head, No, no, no, and wringing her
hands. Philip backs off; Clare says, “Hush,” and Lucille is speaking urgently but not
very clearly: I hear a rush of unintelligableness, then “All wrong,” and then “Ruin his
chances,” and finally “I am just utterly disregarded in this family,” and
“Hypocritical,” and then sobs. To my surprise it’s Great Aunt Dulcie who breaks the
stunned stillness. “Child, if anybody’s a hypocrite here it’s you. You did the exact
same thing and I don’t see that it ruined Philip’s chances one bit. Improved them, if
you ask me.” Lucille stops crying and looks at her aunt, shocked into silence. Mark
looks at his father, who nods, once, and then at Sharon, who is smiling as though
she’s won at bingo. I look at Clare, who doesn’t seem particularly astonished, and I
wonder how she knew if Mark didn’t, and I wonder what else she knows that she
hasn’t mentioned, and then it is borne in on me that Clare knows everything, our
future, our past, everything, and I shiver in the warm room. Etta brings coffee. We
don’t linger over it.

CLARE: Etta and I have put Mama to bed. She kept apologizing, the way she always
does, and trying to convince us that she was well enough to go to Mass, but we
finally got her to lie down and almost immediately she was asleep. Etta says that she
will stay home in case Mama wakes up, and I tell her not to be silly, I’ll stay, but Etta
is obstinate and so I leave her sitting by the bed, reading St. Matthew. I walk down
the hall and peek into Henry’s room, but it’s dark. When I open my door I find Henry
supine on my bed reading A Wrinkle in Time. I lock the door and join him on the bed.


“What’s wrong with your mom?” he asks as I carefully arrange myself next to him,
trying not to get stabbed by my dress.

“She’s manic-depressive.”

“Has she always been?”

“She was better when I was little. She had a baby that died, when I was seven, and
that was bad. She tried to kill herself. I found her.” I remember the blood, everywhere,
the bathtub full of bloody water, the towels soaked with it. Screaming for help and
nobody was home. Henry doesn’t say anything, and I crane my neck and he is staring
at the ceiling.

“Clare,” he finally says.

“What?”

“How come you didn’t tell me? I mean, there’s kind of a lot of stuff going on with

your family that it would have been good to know ahead of time.”

“But you knew....” I trail off. He didn’t know. How could he know? “I’m sorry.
It’s just—I told you when it happened, and I forget that now is before then, and so I
think you know all about it...”

Henry pauses, and then says, “Well, I’ve sort of emptied the bag, as far as my
family is concerned; all the closets and skeletons have been displayed for your
inspection, and I was just surprised...I don’t know.”

“But you haven’t introduced me to him.” I’m dying to meet Henry’s dad, but I’ve

been afraid to bring it up.

“No. I haven’t.”

“Are you going to?”

“Eventually.”

“When?” I expect Henry to tell me I’m pushing my luck, like he always used to

when I asked too many questions, but instead he sits up and swings his legs off the
side of the bed. The back of his shirt is all wrinkled.

“I don’t know, Clare. When I can stand it, I guess.”

I hear footsteps outside the door that stop, and the doorknob jiggles back and forth.
“Clare?” my father says. “Why is the door locked?” I get up and open the door.
Daddy opens his mouth and then sees Henry and beckons me into the hall.

“Clare, you know your mother and I don’t approve of you inviting your friend into
your bedroom,” he says quietly. “There are plenty of rooms in this house—”

“We were just talking—”

“You can talk in the living room.”

“I was telling him about Mama and I didn’t want to talk about it in the living room,
okay?”


“Honey, I really don’t think it’s necessary to tell him about your mother—”

“After the performance she just gave what am I supposed to do? Henry can see for
himself that she’s wacko, he isn’t stupid—” my voice is rising and Alicia opens her

door and puts her finger to her lips.

“Your mother is not ‘wacko’,” my father says sternly.

“Yeah, she is,” Alicia affirms, joining the fray.

“Now stay out of this—”

“The hell I will—”

“Alicia!” Daddy’s face is dark red and his eyes are protruding and his voice is
very loud. Etta opens Mama’s door and looks at the three of us with exasperation.
“Go downstairs, if you want to yell,” she hisses, and closes the door. We look at each
other, abashed.

“Later,” I tell Daddy. “Give me a hard time later.” Henry has been sitting on my
bed this whole time, trying to pretend he’s not here. “Come on, Henry. Let’s go sit in
some other room.” Henry, docile as a small rebuked boy, stands and follows me
downstairs. Alicia galumphs after us. At the bottom of the stairs I look up and see
Daddy looking down at us helplessly. He turns and walks over to Mama’s door and
knocks.

“Hey, let’s watch It’s a Wonderful Life” Alicia says, looking at her watch. “It’s on
Channel 60 in five minutes.”

“Again? Haven’t you seen it, like, two hundred times already?” Alicia has a thing
for Jimmy Stewart.

“I’ve never seen it,” says Henry.

Alicia affects shock. “Never? How come?”

“I don’t have a television.”

Now Alicia really is shocked. “Did yours break or something?”

Henry laughs. “No. I just hate them. They give me headaches.” They make him
time travel. It’s the flickering quality of the picture.

Alicia is disappointed. “So you don’t want to watch?”

Henry glances at me; I don’t mind. “Sure,” I say. “For a while. We won’t see the
end, though; we have to get ready for Mass.”

We troop into the TV room, which is off the living room. Alicia turns on the set. A
choir is singing It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. “Ugh,” she sneers. “Look at those
bad yellow plastic robes. They look like rain ponchos.” She plops down on the floor
and Henry sits on the couch. I sit down next to him. Ever since we arrived I have
been worrying constantly about how to behave in front of my various family
members in terms of Henry. How close should I sit? If Alicia weren’t here I would lie
down on the couch, put my head on Henry’s lap. Henry solves my problem by


scooting closer and putting his arm around me. It’s kind of a self-conscious arm: we
would never sit this way in any other context. Of course, we never watch TV together.
Maybe this is how we would sit if we ever watched TV. The choir disappears and a
slew of commercials comes on. McDonald’s, a local Buick dealership, Pillsbury, Red
Lobster: they all wish us a Merry Christmas. I look at Henry, who has an expression
of blank amazement on his face.

“What?” I ask him softly.

“The speed. They jump cut every couple seconds; I’m going to be ill.” Henry rubs
his eyes with his fingers. “I think I’ll just go read for a while.” He gets up and walks
out of the room, and in a minute I hear his feet on the stairs. I offer up a quick prayer:
Please, God, let Henry not time travel, especially not when we’re about to go to
church and I won’t be able to explain. Alicia scrambles onto the couch as the opening

credits appear on the screen.

“He didn’t last long,” she observes.

“He gets these really bad headaches. The kind where you have to lie in the dark
and not move and if anybody says boo your brain explodes.”

“Oh.” James Stewart is flashing a bunch of travel brochures, but his departure is
cut short by the necessity of attending a dance. “He’s really cute.”

“Jimmy Stewart?”

“Him too. I meant your guy. Henry.”

I grin. I am as proud as if I had made Henry myself. “Yeah.”

Donna Reed is smiling radiantly at Jimmy Stewart across a crowded room. Now

they are dancing, and Jimmy Stewart’s rival has turned the switch that causes the
dance floor to open over a swimming pool. “Mama really likes him.”

“Hallelujah.” Donna and Jimmy dance backwards into the pool; soon people in
evening clothes are diving in after them as the band continues playing.

“Nell and Etta approve, also.”

“Great. Now we just have to get through the next thirty-six hours without ruining
the good first impression.”

“How hard can that be? Unless—no, you wouldn’t be that dumb...”

Alicia looks over at me dubiously. “Would you?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not,” she echoes. “God, I can’t believe Mark. What a stupid fuck.”
Jimmy and Donna are singing Buffalo Girls, won’t you come out tonight while
walking down the streets of Bedford Falls resplendent in football uniform and
bathrobe, respectively. “You should have been here yesterday. I thought Daddy was
going to have a coronary right in front of the Christmas tree. I was imagining him
crashing into it and the tree falling on him and the paramedics having to heave all the


ornaments and presents off him before they could do CPR...” Jimmy offers Donna the
moon, and Donna accepts.

“I thought you learned CPR in school.”

“I would be too busy trying to revive Mama. It was bad, Clare. There was a lot of
yelling.”

“Was Sharon there?”

Alicia laughs grimly. “Are you kidding? Sharon and I were in here trying to chat
politely, you know, and Mark and the parentals were in the living room screaming at
each other. After a while we just sat here and listened.”

Alicia and I exchange a look that just means So what else is new? We have spent
our lives listening to our parents yelling, at each other, at us. Sometimes I feel like if I
have to watch Mama cry one more time I’m going to leave forever and never come
back. Right now I want to grab Henry and drive back to Chicago, where no one can
yell, no one can pretend everything is okay and nothing happened. An irate, paunchy
man in an undershirt yells at James Stewart to stop talking Donna Reed to death and
just kiss her. I couldn’t agree more, but he doesn’t. Instead he steps on her robe and
she walks obliviously out of it, and the next thing you know she’s hiding naked in a
large hydrangea bush.

A commercial for Pizza Hut comes on and Alicia turns off the sound. “Um,
Clare?”

“Yeah?”

“Has Henry ever been here before?”

Uh-oh. “No, I don’t think so, why?”

She shifts uneasily and looks away for a second. “You’re gonna think I’m nuts.”

“What?”

“See, I had this weird thing happen. A long time ago...I was, like, about twelve,
and I was supposed to be practicing, but then I remembered that I didn’t have a clean
shirt for this audition or something, and Etta and everybody were out someplace and
Mark was supposed to be baby-sitting but he was in his room doing bongs or
whatever.... Anyway, so I went downstairs, to the laundry room, and I was looking
for my shirt, and I heard this noise, you know, like the door at the south end of the
basement, the one that goes into the room with all the bicycles, that sort of whoosh
noise? So I thought it was Peter, right? So I was standing in the door of the laundry
room, sort of listening, and the door to the bicycle room opens and Clare, you won’t
believe this, it was this totally naked guy who looked just like Henry.”

When I start laughing it sounds fake. “Oh, come on.”

Alicia grins. “See, I knew you would think it was nuts. But I swear, it really
happened. So this guy just looks a little surprised, you know, I mean I’m standing


there with my mouth hanging open and wondering if this naked guy is going to, you
know, rape me or kill me or something, and he just looks at me and goes, ‘Oh, hi,
Alicia,’ and walks into the Reading Room and shuts the door.”

“Huh?”

“So I run upstairs, and I’m banging on Mark’s door and he’s telling me to buzz off,
and so finally I get him to open the door and he’s so stoned that it takes a while
before he gets what I’m talking about and then, of course, he doesn’t believe me but
finally I get him to come downstairs and he knocks on the Reading Room door and
we are both really scared, it’s like Nancy Drew, you know, where you’re thinking,
‘Those girls are really dumb, they should just call the police,’ but nothing happens,
and then Mark opens the door and there’s nobody there, and he is mad at me, for, like,
making it up, but then we think the man went upstairs, so we both go and sit in the

kitchen next to the phone with Nell’s big carving knife on the counter.”

“How come you never told me about this?”

“Well, by the time you all got home I felt kind of stupid, and I knew that Daddy
especially would think it was a big deal, and nothing really happened.. .but it wasn’t
funny, either, and I didn’t feel like talking about it.” Alicia laughs. “I asked Grandma
once if there were any ghosts in the house, but she said there weren’t any she knew
of.”

“And this guy, or ghost, looked like Henry?”

“Yeah! I swear, Clare, I almost died when you guys came in and I saw him, I
mean, he’s the guy! Even his voice is the same. Well, the one I saw in the basement
had shorter hair, and he was older, maybe around forty...”

“But if that guy was forty, and it was five years ago—Henry is only twenty-eight,

so he would have been twenty-three then, Alicia.”

“Oh. Huh. But Clare, it’s too weird—does he have a brother?”

“No. His dad doesn’t look much like him.”

“Maybe it was, you know, astral projection or something.”

“Time travel,” I offer, smiling.

“Oh, yeah, right. God, how bizarre.” The TV screen is dark for a moment, then we
are back with Donna in her hydrangea bush and Jimmy Stewart walking around it
with her bathrobe draped over one arm. He’s teasing her, telling her he’s going to sell
tickets to see her. The cad, I think, even as I blush remembering worse things I’ve
said and done to Henry vis a vis the issue of clothing/nakedness. But then a car rolls
up and Jimmy Stewart throws Donna her bathrobe. “Your father’s had a stroke!” says
someone in the car, and off he goes with hardly a backward glance, as Donna Reed
stands bereft in her foliage. My eyes tear up. “Jeez, Clare, it’s okay, he’ll be back,”
Alicia reminds me. I smile, and we settle in to watch Mr. Potter taunting poor Jimmy


Stewart into giving up college and running a doomed savings and loan. “Bastard,”
Alicia says. “Bastard,” I agree.

HENRY: As we walk out of the cold night air into the warmth and light of the church
my guts are churning. I’ve never been to a Catholic Mass. The last time I attended
any sort of religious service was my mom’s funeral. I am holding on to Clare’s arm
like a blind man as she leads us up the central aisle, and we file into an empty pew.
Clare and her family kneel on the cushioned kneelers and I sit, as Clare has told me to.
We are early. Alicia has disappeared, and Nell is sitting behind us with her husband
and their son, who is on leave from the Navy. Dulcie sits with a contemporary of hers.
Clare, Mark, Sharon, and Philip kneel side by side in varying attitudes: Clare is self-
conscious, Mark perfunctory, Sharon calm and absorbed, Philip exhausted. The
church is full of poinsettias. It smells like wax and wet coats. There’s an elaborate
stable scene with Mary and Joseph and their entourage to the right of the altar. People
are filing in, choosing seats, greeting each other. Clare slides onto the seat next to me,
and Mark and Philip follow suit; Sharon remains on her knees for a few more minutes
and then we are all sitting quietly in a row, waiting. A man in a suit walks onto the
stage—altar, whatever—and tests the microphones that are attached to the little
reading stands, then disappears into the back again. There are many more people now,
it’s crowded. Alicia and two other women and a man appear stage left, carrying their
instruments. The blond woman is a violinist and the mousy brown-haired woman is
the viola player; the man, who is so elderly that he stoops and shuffles, is another
violinist. They are all wearing black. They sit in their folding chairs, turn on the lights
over their music stands, rattle their sheet music, plink at various strings, and look at
each other, for consensus. People are suddenly quiet and into this quiet comes a long,
slow, low note that fills the space, that connects to no known piece of music but
simply exists, sustains. Alicia is bowing as slowly as it is possible for a human to bow,
and the sound she is producing seems to emerge from nowhere, seems to originate
between my ears, resonates through my skull like fingers stroking my brain. Then she
stops. The silence that follows is brief but absolute. Then all four musicians surge
into action. After the simplicity of that single note their music is dissonant, modern
and jarring and I think Bartok? but then I resolve what I am hearing and realize that
they are playing Silent Night. I can’t figure out why it sounds so weird until I see the
blond violinist kick Alicia’s chair and after a beat the piece comes into focus. Clare
glances over at me and smiles. Everyone in the church relaxes. Silent Night gives way
to a hymn I don’t recognize. Everyone stands. They turn toward the back of the
church, and the priest walks up the central aisle with a large retinue of small boys and
a few men in suits. They solemnly march to the front of the church and take up their
positions. The music abruptly stops. Oh, no, I think, what now? Clare takes my hand,


and we stand together, in the crowd, and if there is a God, then God, let me just stand
here quietly and inconspicuously, here and now, here and now.

CLARE: Henry looks as though he’s about to pass out. Dear God, please don’t let him
disappear now. Father Compton is welcoming us in his radio announcer voice. I reach
into Henry’s coat pocket, push my fingers through the hole at the bottom, find his
cock, and squeeze. He jumps as though I’ve administered an electric shock. “The
Lord be with you,” says Father Compton. “And also with you,” we all reply serenely.
The same, everything the same. And yet, here we are, at last, for anyone to see. I can
feel Helen’s eyes boring into my back. Ruth is sitting five rows behind us, with her
brother and parents. Nancy, Laura, Mary Christina, Patty, Dave, and Chris, and even
Jason Everleigh; it seems like everyone I went to school with is here tonight. I look
over at Henry, who is oblivious to all this. He is sweating. He glances at me, raises
one eyebrow. The Mass proceeds. The readings, the Kyrie, Peace be with you: and
also with you. We all stand for the gospel, Luke, Chapter 2. Everyone in the Roman
Empire, traveling to their home towns, to be taxed, Joseph and Mary, great with child,
the birth, miraculous, humble. The swaddling clothes, the manger. The logic of it has
always escaped me, but the beauty of the thing is undeniable. The shepherds, abiding
in the field. The angel: Fear not: for, behold,

I bring you good tidings of great joy...Henry is jiggling his leg in a very distracting
way. He has his eyes closed and he is biting his lip. Multitudes of angels. Father
Compton intones, “ But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”
“Amen,” we say, and sit down for the sermon. Henry leans over and whispers,
“Where is the restroom?”

“Through that door,” I tell him, pointing at the door Alicia and Frank and the
others came in through. “How do I get there?”

“Walk to the back of the church and then down the side aisle.”

“If I don’t come back—”

“You have to come back.” As Father Compton says, “On this most joyous of
nights...” Henry stands and walks quickly away. Father’s eyes follow him as he walks
back and over and up to the door. I watch as he slips out the door and it swings shut
behind him.

HENRY: I’m standing in what appears to be the hallway of an elementary school.
Don’t panic, I repeat to myself. No one can see you. Hide somewhere. I look around,
wildly, and there’s a door: BOYS. I open it, and I’m in a miniature men’s room, brown
tile, all the fixtures tiny and low to the ground, radiator blasting, intensifying the
smell of institutional soap. I open the window a few inches and stick my face above


the crack. There are evergreen trees blocking any view there might have been, and so
the cold air I am sucking in tastes of pine. After a few minutes I feel less tenuous. I lie
down on the tile, curled up, knees to chin. Here I am. Solid.

Now. Here on this brown tile floor. It seems like such a small thing to ask.
Continuity. Surely, if there is a God, he wants us to be good, and it would be
unreasonable to expect anyone to be good without incentives, and Clare is very, very
good, and she even believes in God, and why would he decide to embarrass her in
front of all those people—I open my eyes. All the tiny porcelain fixtures have
iridescent auras, sky blue and green and purple, and I resign myself to going, there’s
no stopping now, and I am shaking, “No!” but I’m gone.

CLARE: Father finishes his sermon, which is about world peace, and Daddy leans
across Sharon and Mark and whispers, “Is your friend sick?”

“Yes,” I whisper back, “he has a headache, and sometimes they make him
nauseous.”

“Should I go see if I can help?”

“No! He’ll be okay.” Daddy doesn’t seem convinced, but he stays in his seat.
Father is blessing the host. I try to suppress my urge to run out and find Henry myself.
The first pews stand for communion. Alicia is playing Bach’s cello suite no. 2. It is
sad and lovely. Come back, Henry. Come back.

HENRY: I’m in my apartment in Chicago. It’s dark, and I’m on my knees in the living
room. I stagger up, and whack my elbow on the bookshelves. “Fuck!” I can’t believe
this. I can’t even get through one day with Clare’s family and I’ve been sucked up
and spit out into my own fucking apartment like a fucking pinball—

“Hey.” I turn and there I am, sleepily sitting up, on the sofa bed.

“What’s the date?” I demand.

“December 28, 1991.” Four days from now.

I sit down on the bed. “I can’t stand it.”

“Relax. You’ll be back in a few minutes. Nobody will notice. You’ll be perfectly

okay for the rest of the visit.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Stop whining,” my self says, imitating Dad perfectly. I want to deck him,

but what would be the point? There’s music playing softly in the background.

“Is that Bach?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s in your head. It’s Alicia.”

“That’s odd. Oh!” I run for the bathroom, and almost make it.


CLARE: The last few people are receiving communion when Henry walks in the door,
a little pale, but walking. He walks back and up the aisle and squeezes in next to me.
“The Mass is ended, go in peace,” says Father Compton. “Amen,” we respond. The
altar boys assemble together like a school of fish around Father, and they proceed
jauntily up the aisle and we all file out after them. I hear Sharon ask Henry if he’s
okay, but I don’t catch his reply because Helen and Ruth have intercepted us and I am
introducing Henry.

Helen simpers. “But we’ve met before!”

Henry looks at me, alarmed. I shake my head at Helen, who smirks. “Well, maybe
not,” she says. “Nice to meet you—Henry.” Ruth shyly offers Henry her hand. To my
surprise he holds it for a moment and then says, “Hello, Ruth,” before I have
introduced her, but as far as I can tell she doesn’t recognize him. Laura joins us just
as Alicia comes up bumping her cello case through the crowd. “Come to my house
tomorrow,” Laura invites. “My parents are leaving for the Bahamas at four.” We all
agree enthusiastically; every year Laura’s parents go someplace tropical the minute
all the presents have been opened, and every year we flock over there as soon as their
car disappears around the driveway. We part with a chorus of “Merry Christmas!”
and as we emerge through the side door of the church into the parking lot Alicia says,
“Ugh, I knew it!” There’s deep new snow everywhere, the world has been remade
white. I stand still and look at the trees and cars and across the street toward the lake,
which is crashing, invisible, on the beach far below the church on the bluff. Henry
stands with me, waiting. Mark says, “Come on, Clare,” and I do.

HENRY: It’s about 1:30 in the morning when we walk in the door of Meadowlark
House. All the way home Philip scolded Alicia for her ‘mistake’ at the beginning of
Silent Night, and she sat quietly, looking out the window at the dark houses and trees.
Now everyone goes upstairs to their rooms after saying ‘Merry Christmas’ about fifty
more times except Alicia and Clare, who disappear into a room at the end of the first
floor hall. I wonder what to do with myself, and on an impulse I follow them.

“—a total prick,” Alicia is saying as I stick my head in the door. The room is
dominated by an enormous pool table which is bathed in the brilliant glare of the
lamp suspended over it. Clare is racking up the balls as Alicia paces back and forth in
the shadows at the edge of the pool of light.

“Well, if you deliberately try to piss him off and he gets pissed off, I don’t see
why you’re upset,” Clare says.

“He’s just so smug,” Alicia says, punching the air with her fists. I cough. They
both jump and then Clare says, “Oh, Henry, thank God, I thought you were Daddy.”

“Wanna play?” Alicia asks me.


“No, I’ll just watch.” There is a tall stool by the table, and I sit on it.

Clare hands Alicia a cue. Alicia chalks it and then breaks, sharply. Two stripes fall
into corner pockets. Alicia sinks two more before missing, just barely, a combo bank
shot. “Uh-oh,” says Clare. “I’m in trouble.” Clare drops an easy solid, the 2 ball,
which was poised on the edge of a corner pocket. On her next shot she sends the cue
ball into the hole after the 3, and Alicia fishes out both balls and lines up her shot.
She runs the stripes without further ado. “Eight ball, side pocket,” Alicia calls, and
that is that. “Ouch,” sighs Clare. “Sure you don’t want to play?” She offers me her

cue.

“Come on, Henry,” say Alicia. “Hey, do either of you want anything to drink?”

“No,” Clare says.

“What have you got?” I ask. Alicia snaps on a light and a beautiful old bar appears
at the far end of the room. Alicia and I huddle behind it and lo, there is just about
everything I can imagine in the way of alcohol. Alicia mixes herself a rum and Coke.
I hesitate before such riches, but finally pour myself a stiff whiskey. Clare decides to
have something after all, and as she’s cracking the miniature tray of ice cubes into a
glass for her Kahlua the door opens and we all freeze.

It’s Mark. “Where’s Sharon?” Clare asks him. “Lock that,” commands Alicia.

He turns the lock and walks behind the bar. “Sharon is sleeping,” he says, pulling
a Heineken out of the tiny fridge. He uncaps it and saunters over to the table. “Who’s

playing?”

“Alicia and Henry,” says Clare.

“Hmm. Has he been warned?”

“Shut up, Mark,” Alicia says.

“She’s Jackie Gleason in disguise,” Mark assures me.

I turn to Alicia. “Let the games begin.” Clare racks again. Alicia gets the break.
The whiskey has coated all my synapses, and everything is sharp and clear. The balls
explode like fireworks and blossom into a new pattern. The 13 teeters on the edge of
a corner pocket and then falls. “Stripes again,” Alicia says. She sinks the 15, the 12,
and the 9 before a bad leave forces her to try an unmakable two-rail shot.

Clare is standing just at the edge of the light, so that her face is in shadow but her
body floats out of the blackness, her arms folded across her chest. I turn my attention
to the table. It’s been a while. I sink the 2, 3, and 6 easily, and then look for
something else to work with. The 1 is smack in front of the corner pocket at the
opposite end of the table, and I send the cue ball into the 7 which drops the 1.1 send
the 4 into a side pocket with a bank shot and get the 5 in the back corner with a lucky
carom. It’s just slop, but Alicia whistles anyway. The 7 goes down without mishap.
“Eight in the corner” I indicate with my cue, and in it goes. A sigh escapes around the
table.


“Oh, that was beautiful,” says Alicia. “Do it again.” Clare is smiling in the dark.

“Not your usual,” Mark says to Alicia.

“I’m too tired to concentrate. And too pissed off.”

“Because of Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you poke him, he’s going to poke back.”

Alicia pouts. “Anybody can make an honest mistake.”

“It sounded like Terry Riley for a minute there,” I tell Alicia.

She smiles. “It was Terry Riley. It was from Salome Dances for Peace!”

Clare laughs. “How did Salome get into Silent Night?”

“Well, you know, John the Baptist, I figured that was enough of a connection, and

if you transpose that first violin part down an octave, it sounds pretty good, you know,
la la la, LA...”

“But you can’t blame him for getting mad,” says Mark. “I mean, he knows that
you wouldn’t play something that sounded like that by accident.”

I pour myself a second drink.

“What did Frank say?” Clare asks.

“Oh, he dug it. He was, like, trying to figure out how to make a whole new piece
out of it, you know, like Silent Night meets Stravinsky. I mean, Frank is eighty-seven,
he doesn’t care if I fuck around as long as he’s amused. Arabella and Ashley were
pretty snitty about it, though.”

“Well, it isn’t very professional,” says Mark.

“Who cares? This is just St. Basil’s, you know?” Alicia looks at me. “What do you
think?”

I hesitate. “I don’t really care,” I say finally. “But if my dad heard you do that,

he’d be very angry.”

“Really? Why?”

“He has this idea that every piece of music should be treated with respect, even if
it isn’t something he likes much. I mean, he doesn’t like Tchaikovsky, or Strauss, but
he will play them very seriously. That’s why he’s great; he plays everything as
though he’s in love with it.”

“Oh.” Alicia walks behind the bar, mixes herself another drink, thinks this over.
“Well, you’re lucky to have a great dad who loves something besides money.”

I’m standing behind Clare, running my fingers up her spine in the dark. She puts
her hand behind her back and I clasp it. “I don’t think you would say that if you knew
my family at all. Besides, your dad seems to care about you very much.”


“No ” she shakes her head. “He just wants me to be perfect in front of his friends.
He doesn’t care at all.” Alicia racks the balls and swivels them into position. “Who
wants to play?”

“I’ll play,” Mark says. “Henry?”

“Sure.” Mark and I chalk our cues and face each other across the table.

I break. The 4 and the 15 go down. “Solids,” I call, seeing the 2 near the corner. I
sink it, and then miss the 3 altogether. I’m getting tired, and my coordination is
softening from the whiskies. Mark plays with determination but no flair, and sinks the
10 and the 11. We soldier on, and soon I have sunk all the solids. Mark’s 13 is parked
on the lip of a corner pocket. “8 ball,” I say pointing at it. “You know, you can’t drop
Mark’s ball or you’ll lose,” says Alicia. “‘S okay,” I tell her. I launch the cue ball
gently across the table, and it kisses the 8 ball lovingly and sends it smooth and easy
toward the 13, and it seems to almost detour around the 13 as though on rails, and
plops decorously into the hole, and Clare laughs, but then the 13 teeters, and falls.

“Oh, well,” I say. “Easy come, easy go.”

“Good game,” says Mark.

“God, where’d you learn to play like that?” Alicia asks.

“It was one of the things I learned in college.” Along with drinking, English and
German poetry, and drugs. We put away the cues and pick up the glasses and bottles.

“What was your major?” Mark unlocks the door and we all walk together down

the hall toward the kitchen.

“English lit.”

“How come not music?” Alicia balances her glass and Clare’s in one hand as she

pushes open the dining room door.

I laugh. “You wouldn’t believe how unmusical I am. My parents were sure they’d
brought home the wrong kid from the hospital.”

“That must have been a drag,” says Mark. “At least Dad’s not pushing you to be a

lawyer” he says to Alicia. We enter the kitchen and Clare flips on the light.

“He’s not pushing you either” she retorts. “You love it.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. He’s not making any of us do something we don’t want

to do.”

“Was it a drag?” Alicia asks me. “I would have been lapping it up.”

“Well, before my mom died, everything was great. After that, everything was

terrible. If I had been a violin prodigy, maybe.. .I dunno.” I look at Clare, and shrug.
“Anyway, Dad and I don’t get along. At all.”

“How come?”

Clare says, “Bedtime.” She means, Enough already. Alicia is waiting for an
answer.


I turn my face to her. “Have you ever seen a picture of my mom?” She nods. “I
look like her.”

“So?” Alicia washes the glasses under the tap. Clare dries.

“So, he can’t stand to look at me. I mean, that’s just one reason among many.”

But—

“Alicia—” Clare is trying, but Alicia is unstoppable.

“But he’s your dad.”

I smile. “The things you do to annoy your dad are small beer compared with the
things my dad and I have done to each other.”

“Like what?”

“Like the numerous times he has locked me out of our apartment, in all kinds of
weather. Like the time I threw his car keys into the river. That kind of thing.”

“Why’dja do that?”

“I didn’t want him to smash up the car, and he was drunk.”

Alicia, Mark, and Clare all look at me and nod. They understand perfectly.

“Bedtime,” says Alicia, and we all leave the kitchen and go to our rooms without
another word, except, “Good night.”

CLARE: It’s 3:14 a.m. according to my alarm clock and I am just getting warm in my
cold bed when the door opens and Henry comes in very quietly. I pull back the covers
and he hops in. The bed squeaks as we arrange ourselves.

“Hi” I whisper.

“Hi” Henry whispers back.

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“It was very cold in my room.”

“Oh.” Henry touches my cheek, and I have to stifle a shriek. His fingers are icy. I
rub them between my palms. Henry burrows deeper into the covers. I press against
him, trying to get warm again. “Are you wearing socks?” he asks softly.

“Yes.” He reaches down and pulls them off my feet. After a few minutes and a lot
of squeaking and Shhh! we are both naked.

“Where did you go, when you left church?”

“My apartment. For about five minutes, four days from now.”

“Why?”

“Tired. Tense, I guess”

“No, why there?”


“Dunno. Sort of a default mechanism. The time travel air traffic controllers
thought I would look good there, maybe.” Henry buries his hand in my hair.

It’s getting lighter outside. “Merry Christmas,” I whisper. Henry doesn’t answer,
and I lie awake in his arms thinking about multitudes of angels, listening to his
measured breath, and pondering in my heart.

HENRY: In the early hours of the morning I get up to take a leak and as I stand in
Clare’s bathroom sleepily urinating by the illumination of the Tinkerbell nightlight I
hear a girl’s voice say “Clare?” and before I can figure out where this voice is coming
from a door that I thought was a closet opens and I find myself standing stark naked
in front of Alicia. “Oh,” she whispers as I belatedly grab a towel and cover myself.
“Oh, hi, Alicia,” I whisper, and we both grin. She disappears back into her room as
abruptly as she came in.

CLARE: I’m dozing, listening to the house waking up. Nell is down in the kitchen
singing and rattling the pans. Someone walks down the hall, past my door. I look over
and Henry is still deep in sleep, and I suddenly realize that I have got to get him out
of here without anyone seeing. I extricate myself from Henry and the blankets and
climb out of bed carefully. I pick my nightgown up off the floor and I’m just pulling
it on over my head when Etta says, “Clare! Rise and shine, it’s Christmas!” and sticks
her head in the door. I hear Alicia calling Etta and as I poke my head out of the
nightgown I see Etta turn away to answer Alicia and I turn to the bed and Henry is
not there. His pajama bottoms are lying on the rug and I kick them under the bed. Etta
walks into my room in her yellow bathrobe with her braids trailing over her shoulders.
I say “Merry Christmas!” and she is telling me something about Mama, but I’m
having trouble listening because I’m imagining Henry materializing in front of Etta.
“Clare?” Etta is peering at me with concern.

“Huh? Oh, sorry. I’m still asleep, I guess.”

“There’s coffee downstairs.” Etta is making the bed. She looks puzzled.

“I’ll do that, Etta. You go on down.” Etta walks to the other side of the bed. Mama
sticks her head in the door. She looks beautiful, serene after last night’s storm.
“Merry Christmas, honey.”

I walk to her, kiss her cheek lightly. “Merry Christmas, Mama.” It’s so hard to
stay mad at her when she is my familiar, lovely Mama.

“Etta, will you come down with me?” Mama asks. Etta thwaps the pillows with
her hands and the twin impressions of our heads vanish. She glances at me, raises her
eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.

“Etta?”


“Coming...” Etta bustles out after Mama. I shut the door after them and lean
against it, just in time to see Henry roll out from under the bed. He gets up and starts
to put his pajamas on. I lock the door.

“Where were you?” I whisper.

“Under the bed,” Henry whispers back, as though this should be obvious.

“All the time?”

“Yeah.” For some reason this strikes me as hilarious, and I start to giggle. Henry

puts his hand over my mouth, and soon we are both shaking with laughter, silently.

HENRY: Christmas Day is strangely calm after the high seas of yesterday. We gather
around the tree, self-conscious in our bathrobes and slippers, and presents are opened,
and exclaimed over. After effusive thanks on all sides, we eat breakfast. There is a
lull and then we eat Christmas dinner, with great praise for Nell and the lobsters.
Everyone is smiling, well-mannered, and good-looking. We are a model happy family,
an advertisement for the bourgeoisie. We are everything I always longed for when I
sat in the Lucky Wok restaurant with Dad and Mrs. and Mr. Kim every Christmas
Day and tried to pretend I was enjoying myself while the adults all watched anxiously.
But even as we lounge, well-fed, in the living room after dinner, watching football on
television and reading the books we have given each other and attempting to operate
the presents which require batteries and/or assembly, there is a noticeable strain. It is
as though somewhere, in one of the more remote rooms of the house, a cease-fire has
been signed, and now all the parties are endeavoring to honor it, at least until
tomorrow, at least until a new consignment of ammunition comes in. We are all
acting, pretending to be relaxed, impersonating the ideal mother, father, sisters,
brother, boyfriend, fiancée. And so it is a relief when Clare looks at her watch, gets
up off the couch, and says, “Come on, it’s time to go over to Laura’s.”

CLARE: Laura’s party is in full swing by the time we arrive. Henry is tense and pale
and heads for the liquor as soon as we get our coats off. I still feel sleepy from the
wine we drank at dinner, so I shake my head when he asks me what I want, and he
brings me a Coke. He’s holding on to his beer as though it’s ballast. “Do not, under
any circumstances, leave me to fend for myself,” Henry demands, looking over my
shoulder, and before I can even turn my head Helen is upon us. There is a momentary,
embarrassed silence.

“So, Henry” Helen says, “we hear that you are a librarian. But you don’t look like
a librarian.”

“Actually, I am a Calvin Klein underwear model. The librarian thing is just a
front.”


I’ve never seen Helen nonplussed before. I wish I had a camera. She recovers
quickly, though, looks Henry up and down, and smiles. “Okay, Clare, you can keep
him,” she says.

“That’s a relief,” I tell her. “I’ve lost the receipt.” Laura, Ruth, and Nancy
converge on us, looking determined, and interrogate us: how did we meet, what does
Henry do for a living, where did he go to college, blah, blah, blah. I never expected
that when Henry and I finally appeared in public together it would be simultaneously
so nerve-racking and so boring. I tune in again just as Nancy says, “It’s so weird that
your name is Henry.”

“Oh?” says Henry, “Why’s that?”

Nancy tells him about the slumber party at Mary Christina’s, the one where the
Ouija board said that I was going to marry someone named Henry. Henry looks
impressed. “Really?” he asks me.

“Um, yeah.” I suddenly have an urgent need to pee. “Excuse me,” I say, detaching
myself from the group and ignoring Henry’s pleading expression. Helen is hot on my
heels as I run upstairs. I have to shut the bathroom door in her face to stop her from
following me in.

“Open up, Clare,” she says, jiggling the door knob. I take my time, pee, wash my
hands, put on fresh lipstick. “Clare,” Helen grumbles, “I’m gonna go downstairs and
tell your boyfriend every single hideous thing you’ve ever done in your life if you
don’t open this door immed—” I swing the door open and Helen almost falls into the
room.

“All right, Clare Abshire,” Helen says menacingly. She closes the door. I sit down
on the side of the bathtub and she leans against the sink, looming over me in her
pumps. “Fess up. What is really going on with you and this Henry person? I mean,
you just stood there and told a big fat stack of lies. You didn’t meet this guy three

months ago, you’ve known him for years! What’s the big secret?”

I don’t really know how to begin. Should I tell Helen the truth? No.

Why not? As far as I know, Helen has only seen Henry once, and he didn’t look
that different from how he looks right now. I love Helen. She’s strong, she’s crazy,
she’s hard to fool. But I know she wouldn’t believe me if I said, time travel, Helen.
You have to see it to believe it.

“Okay,” I say, gathering my wits. “Yeah, IVe known him for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Since I was six.”

Helen’s eyes bug out like a cartoon character’s. I laugh.

“Why.. .how come.. .well, how long have you been dating him?”


“I dunno. I mean, there was a period of time when things were sort of on the verge,
but nothing was exactly going on, you know; that is, Henry was pretty adamant that
he wasn’t going to mess around with a little kid, so I was just kind of hopelessly nuts
about him...”

“But—how come we never knew about him? I don’t see why it all had to be such
a hush hush. You could have told me.”

“Well, you kind of knew.” This is lame, and I know it.

Helen looks hurt. “That’s not the same thing as you telling me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Hmpf. So what was the deal?”

“Well, he’s eight years older than me.”

“So what?”

“So when I was twelve and he was twenty, that was a problem.” Not to mention
when I was six and he was forty.

“I still don’t get it. I mean, I can see you not wanting your parents to know you
were playing Lolita to his Humbert Humbert, but I don’t get why you couldn’t tell us.
We would have been totally into it. I mean, we spent all this time feeling sorry for you,
and worrying about you, and wondering why you were such a nun—” Helen shakes
her head. “And there you were, screwing Mario the Librarian the whole time—”

I can’t help it, I’m blushing. “I was not screwing him the whole time.”

“Oh, come, on.”

“Really! We waited till I was eighteen. We did it on my birthday.”

“Even so, Clare,” Helen begins, but there’s a heavy knock on the bathroom door,
and a deep male voice asks, “Are you girls about done in there?”

“To be continued,” Helen hisses at me as we exit the bathroom to the applause of
the five guys standing in line in the hallway.

I find Henry in the kitchen, listening patiently as one of Laura’s inexplicable jock
friends babbles on about football. I catch the eye of his blond, button-nosed girlfriend,
and she hauls him off to get another drink.

Henry says, “Look, Clare—Baby Punks!” I look and he’s pointing at Jodie,
Laura’s fourteen-year-old sister, and her boyfriend, Bobby Hardgrove. Bobby has a
green Mohawk and the full ripped T-shirt/safety pin getup, and Jodie is trying to look
like Lydia Lunch but instead just looks like a raccoon having a bad hair day.
Somehow they seem like they’re at a Halloween party instead of a Christmas party.
They look stranded and defensive. But Henry is enthusiastic. “Wow. How old are
they, about twelve?”

“Fourteen.”


“Let’s see, fourteen, from ninety-one, that makes them...oh my god, they were
born in 1977. I feel old. I need another drink.” Laura passes through the kitchen
holding a tray of Jell-O shots. Henry takes two and downs them both in rapid
succession, then makes a face. “Ugh. How revolting.” I laugh. “What do you think
they listen to?” Henry says.

“Dunno. Why don’t you go over and ask them?”

Henry looks alarmed. “Oh, I couldn’t. I’d scare them.”

“I think you’re scared of them.”

“Well, you may be right. They look so tender and young and green, like baby peas
or something.”

“Did you ever dress like that?”

Henry snorts derisively. “What do you think? Of course not. Those children are

emulating British punk. I am an American punk. No, I used to be into more of a
Richard Hell kind of look.”

“Why don’t you go talk to them? They seem lonely”

“You have to come and introduce us and hold my hand.” We venture across the
kitchen with caution, like Levi-Strauss approaching a pair of cannibals. Jodie and
Bobby have that fight or flight look you see on deer on the Nature Channel.

“Um, hi, Jodie, Bobby.”

“Hi, Clare,” says Jodie. I’ve known Jodie her whole life, but she seems shy all of a
sudden, and I decide that the neo-punk apparel must be Bobby’s idea.

“You guys looked kind of, um, bored, so I brought Henry over to meet you. He
likes your, um, outfits.”

“Hi,” says Henry, acutely embarrassed. “I was just curious—that is, I was

wondering, what do you listen to?”

“Listen to?” Bobby repeats.

“You know—music. What music are you into?”

Bobby lights up. “Well, the Sex Pistols,” he says, and pauses.

“Of course,” says Henry, nodding. “And the Clash?”

“Yeah. And, um, Nirvana...”

“Nirvana’s good,” says Henry.

“Blondie?” says Jodie, as though her answer might be wrong.

“I like Blondie,” I say. “And Henry likes Deborah Harry.”

“Ramones?” says Henry. They nod in unison. “How about Patti Smith?”

Jodie and Bobby look blank.

“Iggy Pop?”


Bobby shakes his head. “Pearl Jam,” he offers.

I intercede. “We don’t have much of a radio station up here,” I tell Henry.
“There’s no way for them to find out about this stuff.”

“Oh,” Henry says. He pauses. “Look, do you want me to write some things down
for you? To listen to?” Jodie shrugs. Bobby nods, looking serious, and excited. I
forage for paper and pen in my purse. Henry sits down at the kitchen table, and
Bobby sits across from him. “Okay,” says Henry. “You have to go back to the sixties,
right? You start with the Velvet Underground, in New York. And then, right over
here in Detroit, you’ve got the MC5, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. And then back in

New York, there were The New York Dolls, and The Heartbreakers—”

“Tom Petty?” says Jodie. “We’ve heard of him.”

“Um, no, this was a totally different band,” says Henry. “Most of them died in the

eighties.”

“Plane crash?” asks Bobby.

“Heroin,” Henry corrects. “Anyway, there was Television, and Richard Hell and

the Voidoids, and Patti Smith.”

“Talking Heads,” I add.

“Huh. I dunno. Would you really consider them punk?”

“They were there.”

“Okay,” Henry adds them to his list, “Talking Heads. So then, things move over to

England—”

“I thought punk started in London,” says Bobby.

“No. Of course,” says Henry, pushing back his chair, “some people, me included,
believe that punk is just the most recent manifestation of this, this spirit, this feeling,
you know, that things aren’t right and that in fact things are so wrong that the only
thing we can do is to say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud, until someone
stops us.”

“ Yes,” Bobby says quietly, his face glowing with an almost religious fervor under
his spiked hair. “Yes.”

“You’re corrupting a minor,” I tell Henry.

“Oh, he would get there anyway, without me. Wouldn’t you?”

“I’ve been trying, but it ain’t easy, here.”

“I can appreciate that” says Henry. He’s adding to the list. I look over his shoulder.
Sex Pistols, The Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, The Mekons,
The Raincoats, The Dead Boys, New Order, The Smiths, Lora Logic, The Au Pairs,
Big Black, PiL, The Pixies, The Breeders, Sonic Youth...


“Henry, they’re not going to be able to get any of that up here.” He nods, and jots
the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. “You do
have a record player, right?”

“My parents have one,” Bobby says. Henry winces.

“What do you really like?” I ask Jodie. I feel as though she’s fallen out of the
conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting.

“Prince,” she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! and I start singing 1999 as
loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we’re doing a bump and grind across the
kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it’s a
dance party.

HENRY: We’re driving back to Clare’s parents’ house from Laura’s party. Clare says,
“You’re awfully quiet.”

“I was thinking about those kids. The Baby Punks.”

“Oh, yeah. What about them?”

“I was trying to figure out what would cause that kid—”

“Bobby.”

“—Bobby, to revert, to latch on to music that was made the year he was born...”

“Well, I was really into the Beatles,” Clare points out. “They broke up the year
before I was born.”

“Yeah, well, what is that about? I mean, you should have been swooning over
Depeche Mode, or Sting or somebody. Bobby and his girlfriend ought to be listening
to The Cure if they want to dress up. But instead they’ve stumbled into this thing,
punk, that they don’t know anything about—”

“I’m sure it’s mostly to annoy their parents. Laura was telling me that her dad
won’t let Jodie leave the house dressed like that. She puts everything in her backpack
and changes in the ladies’ room at school,” says Clare.

“But that’s what everybody did, back when. I mean, it’s about asserting your
individualism, I understand that, but why are they asserting the individualism of 1977?
They ought to be wearing plaid flannel.”

“Why do you care?” Clare says.

“It depresses me. It’s a reminder that the moment I belonged to is dead, and not
just dead, but forgotten. None of this stuff ever gets played on the radio, I can’t figure
out why. It’s like it never happened. That’s why I get excited when I see little kids
pretending to be punks, because I don’t want it all to just disappear.”

“Well,” says Clare, “you can always go back. Most people are glued to the present;
you get to be there again and again.”


I think about this. “It’s just sad, Clare. Even when I get to do something cool, like,
say, go to see a concert I missed the first time around, maybe a band that’s broken up
or somebody that died, it’s sad watching them because I know what’s going to
happen.”

“But how is that different from the rest of your life?”

“It isn’t.” We have reached the private road that leads to Clare’s house. She turns
in.

“Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“If you could stop, now... if you could not time travel any more, and there would

be no consequences, would you?”

“If I could stop now and still meet you?”

“You’ve already met me.”

“Yes. I would stop.” I glance at Clare, dim in the dark car.

“It would be funny” she says, “I would have all these memories that you would

never get to have. It would be like—well, it is like being with somebody who has
amnesia. I’ve been feeling that way ever since we got here.”

I laugh. “So in the future you can watch me lurch along into each memory, until
I’ve got the complete set. Collect ‘em all.”

She smiles. “I guess so.” Clare pulls into the circular driveway in front of the
house. “Home sweet home.”

Later, after we have crept upstairs into our separate rooms and I have put on
pajamas and brushed my teeth and sneaked into Clare’s room and remembered to
lock the door this time and we are warm in her narrow bed, she whispers, “I wouldn’t
want you to miss it.”

“Miss what?”

“All the things that happened. When I was a kid. I mean, so far they have only
halfway happened, because you aren’t there yet. So when they happen to you, then
it’s real.”

“I’m on my way.” I run my hand over her belly, and down between her legs. Clare
squeals.

“Shhh.”

“Your hand is icy.”

“Sorry.” We fuck carefully, silently. When I finally come it’s so intense that I get
a horrible headache, and for a minute I’m afraid I’m going to disappear, but I don’t.
Instead I lie in Clare’s arms, cross-eyed with pain. Clare snores, quiet animal snores
that feel like bulldozers running through my head. I want my own bed, in my own
apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads.


Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs,
turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey, I’m home. I’m home.

CLARE: It’s a clear, cold morning. Breakfast has been eaten. The car is packed. Mark
and Sharon have already left with Daddy for the airport in Kalamazoo. Henry is in the
hall saying goodbye to Alicia; I run upstairs to Mama’s room.

“Oh, is it so late?” she asks when she sees me wearing my coat and boots. “I
thought you were staying to lunch.” Mama is sitting at her desk, which as always is
covered with pieces of paper which are covered with her extravagant handwriting.

“What are you working on?” Whatever it is, it’s full of scratched-out words and
doodles.

Mama turns the page face down. She’s very secretive about her writing. “Nothing.
It’s a poem about the garden under the snow. It isn’t coming out well at all.” Mama
stands up, walks to the window. “Funny how poems are never as nice as the real
garden. My poems, anyway.”

I can’t really comment on this because Mama has never let me read one of her
poems, so I say, “Well, the garden is beautiful,” and she waves the compliment away.
Praise means nothing to Mama, she doesn’t believe it. Only criticism can flush her
cheeks and catch her attention. If I were to say something disparaging she would
remember it always. There is an awkward pause. I realize that she is waiting for me to
leave so she can go back to her writing.

“Bye, Mama,” I say. I kiss her cool face, and escape.

HENRY: We’ve been on the road for about an hour. For miles the highway was
bordered by pine trees; now we are in flat land full of barbed-wire fences. Neither of
us has spoken in a while. As soon as I notice it the silence is strange, and so I say
something.

“That wasn’t so bad.” My voice is too cheerful, too loud in the small car. Clare
doesn’t answer, and I look over at her. She’s crying; tears are running down her
cheeks as she drives, pretending that she’s not crying. I’ve never seen Clare cry
before, and something about her silent stoic tears unnerves me. “Clare. Clare,
maybe—could you maybe pull over for a minute?” Without looking at me, she slows
down and drives onto the shoulder, stops. We are somewhere in Indiana. The sky is
blue and there are many crows in the field at the side of the road. Clare leans her
forehead against the steering wheel and takes a long ragged breath.

“Clare.” I’m talking to the back of her head. “Clare, I’m sorry. Was it— did I fuck
up somehow? What happened? I—”

“It’s not you,” she says under her veil of hair. We sit like this for minutes.


“What’s wrong, then?” Clare shakes her head, and I sit and stare at her. Finally I
gather enough courage to touch her. I stroke her hair, feeling the bones of her neck
and spine through the thick shimmering waves. She turns and I’m holding her
awkwardly across the divided seats and now Clare is crying hard, shuddering.

Then she’s quiet. Then she says, “God damn Mama.”

Later we are sitting in a traffic jam on the Dan Ryan Expressway, listening to Irma
Thomas. “Henry? Was it—did you mind very much?”

“Mind what?” I ask, thinking about Clare crying.

But she says, “My family? Are they—did they seem—?”

“They were fine, Clare. I really liked them. Especially Alicia.”

“Sometimes I just want to push them all into Lake Michigan and watch them

sink.”

“Um, I know the feeling. Hey, I think your dad and your brother have seen me
before. And Alicia said something really strange just as we were leaving.”

“I saw you with Dad and Mark once. And Alicia definitely saw you in the

basement one day when she was twelve.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No, because the explanation is too weird to be believed.” We both laugh, and the
tension that has ridden with us all the way to Chicago dissipates. Traffic begins to
accelerate. Soon Clare stops in front of my apartment building. I take my bag from
the trunk, and I watch as Clare pulls away and glides down Dearborn, and my throat
closes up. Hours later I identify what I am feeling as loneliness, and Christmas is
officially over for another year.