She did her best. She read an article in a magazine suggesting she put sage and walnuts in the dressing. So she did. She boiled cranberries for cranberry sauce according to the directions on the plastic package of cranberries, and marveled at the way the skins of the berries split and spilled their deep burgundy syrup into the saucepan. Who, she wondered, had first thought to do that? They were such tough little berries, and so sour. Who would have guessed that sugar and boiling would change them so completely? Jiselle tried to picture the inventor of cranberry sauce—some woman not unlike Jiselle but wearing a pilgrim’s black dress and white apron, hair pulled back in a bun, peering into a pot with grim determination.
Jiselle was just pulling the turkey out of the oven when Mark stepped in the front door. His hair and the shoulders of his black leather pilot’s jacket were dusted with snowflakes, and he was holding a bouquet of orange tiger lilies.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” he said.
He didn’t even take the jacket off before standing at the head of the table and carving the turkey, which was somehow miraculously browned on the outside, steamily moist as he sliced into it. Outside, the snow continued to fall, and except that Sara was wearing black lipstick and a ripped T-shirt, and Camilla had said she wasn’t hungry and so was lying on the couch in the other room watching MTV, they were, Jiselle thought, a kind of Norman Rockwell painting—a healthy American family gathered around the Thanksgiving table.
The Christmas season came fast on the heels of Thanksgiving, faster than Jiselle ever remembered it coming. For weeks the newscasters had been announcing that there had never been such a lavish holiday season. Money was being thrown to the wind, credit cards maxed out. Shelves were being emptied. Some said the cause was a renewed confidence in the economy. Others said it was fear of a coming depression, or a fatalism brought on by the flu, or the anticipation of the end of the war or the start of a new one. One historian Jiselle heard interviewed on NPR said, in a voice so low it sounded like the source of gravity itself, that a return to traditions often preceded the complete collapse of a culture.
Jiselle had driven into St. Sophia one Saturday afternoon. It was a week until Christmas, and she needed to mail something to her mother, because her mother again had made other plans. This time she was going to visit an old high school friend in Maine. Jiselle decided to buy her a bracelet at the local jewelry store and FedEx it to her.
She parked Mark’s Cherokee outside the store, and was surprised to see how many shoppers were strolling through St. Sophia’s tiny downtown. They wore expensive parkas and sunglasses and carried shopping bags. A fluffy snow, looking like feathers, was falling from a few marble-gray clouds in a blue sky. The air was so still that the flakes seemed to hang, weightless with patience, before drifting down in long pendulum arcs through the air, resting on the branches of the trees and the ground, sometimes surging upward again before settling. She looked up at the sky, where she thought she could see, up near the clouds, a few white balloons traveling overhead. But they were too far away to be sure. She saw them so often now that she might have been imagining them.
Jiselle had to wind her way carefully down the sidewalk crowded with shoppers. Surely they were tourists from Chicago (visitors who wanted to be part of an old-fashioned small-town Christmas scene for a few hours on a Saturday) because there were more people downtown today than there were
And the town did look like the quaintest of villages in the snow that afternoon. Garlands hung from the brick facades of the stores. Tinsel and lights were strung in the trees, swaying between the street signs. When Jiselle reached the jewelry store, she was surprised to find a real reindeer tied by a red velvet ribbon to a lamppost outside. Beside the reindeer stood an old-fashioned Santa—thin, wearing a maroon robe and hood—with an antique sleigh. Children had crowded around, petting the reindeer, which raised and lowered its head with such dignity it seemed as if it might address the crowd:
Jiselle stopped, too, and gazed at the strange sight. The reindeer’s antlers looked so heavy she wondered how he held his head aloft. She imagined what it might be like to feel the first stirring of those bones growing out of your skull—the ache, the itching, the excitement. And this St. Nicholas, Jiselle could tell, had a real beard—long, gray, and authentic. His eyes were startlingly blue. He looked Old World and serious, nothing like the mall Santa Clauses of Jiselle’s childhood, who’d been the kind of Santas you might glimpse later in their red felt costumes smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.
No, it seemed impossible to her that they’d ever been fooled by those, but they had. Somehow they’d managed to believe that each one of those costumed men was Santa despite the impossibility—the identical red felt and plastic and the tin buckles of their belts. As children, they’d whispered their secrets to him. They were sure he’d grant their wishes, even when he didn’t.
The jewelry store was crowded. Customers in their parkas elbowed one another politely out of the way. A teenage girl went from glass case to glass case with a bottle of Windex and a paper towel wiping off fingerprints. Under the glass counters, row upon row of diamond rings flickered with their tiny, cold fires. Strand after strand of gold was laid out on a black velvet tray. Loose gems were scattered around in the display case—rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Some perfect pearls glowed in a half-shell.
Jiselle picked out a slim, bright silver bracelet for her mother. She held it against the underside of her own wrist to look at it. It was like a silver vein traced against the skin there. A man and his wife looked at it, too, waiting, it seemed, for Jiselle to put it down.
“Are you buying that?” the woman asked impatiently. “If you’re not buying that, I’d like it.”
Jiselle ignored them, signaled the woman at the cash register, and said, “I’ll take this one,” holding it up. The couple huffed and walked over to another display case.
The saleswoman wrapped the bracelet for Jiselle in pale purple tissue paper, tying it with a scarlet ribbon. By the time Jiselle was back on Main Street, outside Starbucks, St. Nicholas and his gathering of children were gone. A dwarf in a green velvet elf costume, bells jingling on his cap, was sweeping the reindeer’s droppings into a paper bag.
Christmas morning, Sam was up first. At daybreak, he came to Mark’s and Jiselle’s door and knocked until they got out of bed. “Presents!” he shouted. “Now!” When he was certain that Jiselle and Mark were up, he went into his sisters’ rooms, pulling them by their arms, groaning, yawning, into the living room.
While Jiselle went to the kitchen and made coffee, Mark started a fire in the fireplace, and the smell of the Christmas tree mixed with the coffee and the sulfur smells of the fire, which roared up quickly—a few black ashy stars from the newspaper drifting among the dancing flames.
Sam was wearing his thermal underwear. Camilla, a long white gown with lace at the sleeves. Mark had his black velvet robe pulled around him, socks on with his plaid slippers.
Sara wore a black slip. Dime-store satin. She perched herself on the arm of the couch, and from where Jiselle sat on the floor, she could see that Sara was again wearing that pair of panties trimmed in black lace that Jiselle had bought for herself in Paris.
“I have to warn you,” Mark had said after Thanksgiving. “Christmas. It was Joy’s favorite holiday. She was very
Jiselle didn’t speak as he shared this information with her, but later she tried to get more details. What had Joy done for Christmas? How had she decorated? What did she cook? But Mark dismissed the questions, saying, “Joy’s been gone a long time by now, Jiselle. It would be worse if you tried to…” He didn’t have to say it:
But if the children were thinking of their mother on Christmas Eve, they didn’t show it. Bobby Temple came over and watched TV with Camilla, and Sara listened to her iPod, sprawled on the family room rug. Sam helped
