Mom put the sugar shaker down and wiped her hands on her apron. “Horace McAllister? Why did he say that?”
“Is he right?”
Mom stopped wiping her hands on her apron. “Do you want me to tell you the honest truth?”
I nodded. She took a breath, blew it out.
“Dad and I sneak downstairs on Christmas Eve and put out all the presents from Santa.”
“The stockings, too?”
“Yes, my love.”
I considered this. “So you lied to me. To us.”
Mom didn’t react with shock or dismay, like I’d thought she would. Instead, she looked at me a little sadly, as if disappointed in my response. “Dad and I pretend Santa comes down the chimney and leaves presents for all of us, yes. The same as our parents did with us.” She smiled. “You already knew Santa wasn’t real before Horace said anything, didn’t you?”
This was true, as the previous Christmas I had noticed that the handwritten To Ethan—Love, Santa on my stocking presents looked suspiciously similar to Mom’s own handwriting. But I had shoved my suspicions into a dusty closet in my mind and ignored them, until Horace had opened his big mouth at recess earlier that week, telling everyone that Santa was a lie. I wasn’t sure which was more upsetting: my parents lying to me, or Horace exposing the lie with a smirk on his face, like the rest of us had all been played for suckers.
Mom walked around the island counter and put an arm around my shoulders. “I like to think that Santa is real myself,” she said. “That there’s someone in the world who loves kids so much that he wants to reward them for their good behavior and spreads joy wherever he goes. It’s the spirit of the thing that’s true. And pretending to be Santa and seeing you and your sister on Christmas morning … that makes your father and me very happy. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “Yeah, okay,” I said. And it did make sense to me. It was the spirit of the thing that was true.
She gave me a gentle squeeze; then a slight frown creased her forehead. “You aren’t going to tell your sister, are you?”
“No!” I said. I was actually a bit horrified at the idea, both because I didn’t want to ruin Santa for my sister and because I didn’t want to deal with whatever infernal plan she would come up with as revenge. “Why would I do that?”
Mom smiled then, a beautiful radiant beaming, and kissed me on the top of my head. “You’re a good son, Ethan,” she said. Then we hugged and went back to decorating sugar cookies.
That moment has a kind of soft, golden light around it in my memory, like a Hallmark ad, if you will, although Hallmark would never make an ad about a kid learning that Santa isn’t real. “You’re a good son, Ethan,” Mom told me. I had instinctively made the right choice, and my mother praised me for it, and so I tried—for a short time, anyway—to live up to that standard, to make the right choice. I have revisited that memory often, turning it over and over in my mind until it was worn smooth as soapstone.
A far more recent set of memories, darker and disturbing, rubs against that single one of my mother, like bits of gravel in a shoe. Memories and thoughts of Marisa.
Dating Marisa was fun and exciting at first. The sex was—is—fantastic, and left me wanting more. That night at the Westin … God. No luggage, no spare clothes—it felt sexy and decadent. The next morning we had to share the hotel’s tiny tube of complimentary toothpaste, which made us laugh. One thing led to another, and we barely made the checkout time. When I finally got home, I was able to brush off Susannah’s questions and just smiled at her.
Beyond all that, though, I’ve also felt something else, a kind of connection that usually causes me to bolt. Marisa is a combination of assertive and vulnerable that draws me in, and she seems to understand me on a level most people don’t, or can’t.
But recently something has shifted between us, as if we have taken a strange turn.
Last week, my AP class was talking about contemporary examples of popular feminist texts, and Sarah Solomon brought up the Disney movie Mulan and was all over it when Marisa, in the back of the classroom, started laughing. “Jesus Christ on a merry-go-round,” she said. “Mulan? Really? She has to pretend to be a guy to get any respect.”
I froze. So did Sarah and most of the other students, although some of them, like Mark Mitchell, looked delighted by the unexpected commentary.
Marisa continued. “I mean, most feminist role models in classic lit are BS anyway, right? Jane Eyre? She ends up married to Rochester, who then recovers his sight. I’m surprised the power of love doesn’t help him grow a new hand, too.” Laughter from the class. Marisa smiled and kept going. “What about Lizzie Bennet? She falls for that condescending git Darcy. Shakespeare’s the worst, though. Ophelia? Total victim. Gertrude? Horny adulterer. Juliet? Kills herself because of a guy she’s known for four days.”
This is probably when I should have tried to steer the class back in the direction of the original lesson, or openly engaged in a conversation with Marisa. Her going off on a related tangent was fine, but this felt more like a hijacking. But I was so startled and flummoxed that I said nothing, and Marisa took the opportunity to continue.
“Now I can hear Mark”—Marisa pointed at Mark—“saying, ‘Hey, but what about Lady Macbeth?’ Okay, what about her? She calls on the spirits of darkness to ‘unsex me here’ so she won’t have any soft feminine moral compunctions.” Mark blushed while his classmates laughed. “Honestly, women get treated terribly in the world, both in real life and in books and movies,” Marisa said. “Women aren’t weak, but God it pisses me
