Page 34 - WTP VOl. X #3

I.
Jason’s last memory of Cousin Andy was of him singing full-throated at church, hymnal open at his belt, just before midnight Christmas Eve. That was four years before he died. He’d played trumpet earlier that same night—red-faced, a spidery blue vein throbbing in his temple, but his lungs strong, his embouchure strong—and everybody downstairs heard it, bright clear and distant. Jason, shy, young, had not wanted to play after Cousin Andy because he wasn’t as good, and secretly because he didn’t want to touch his mouth to that mouthpiece, which had pressed into the yellow meal secreted from
the corner of Cousin Andy’s mouth. So they played poker, as Cousin Andy taught him, with quarters, nickels, and dimes, which left a happy, hefty weight in Jason’s pocket, and slid and shingled and made his hand smell like metal money.
II.
Every year Jason’s mother gave him an advent calen- dar. Last year’s showed a warm hearth-lit cabin under heavy snow. Two days into that calendar, he received a second calendar in the mail, from his grandmother: a nativity scene crowded with angels. Each window revealed a passage from the Book of Luke or Matthew, depicted in a wooden, colorful Orthodox style.
On December 1st, bundled children skated on a fro- zen river, while just thirteen inches away Mary and Joseph took the cold, dusty road to Bethlehem. As shepherds trembled, blind with terror before the archangel, their wrists over-bent in supplication, the cabin children ski-hiked over the hills, their exhala- tions trailing them like banners. At night they gath- ered around a massive storybook from which the el- dest read aloud, unaware that at the same time three
astronomer-kings held discussion amongst their bronze-and-silver astrological equipment of a new star separately witnessed by each. Just as the three shared their discovery with King Herod, the first signs of material joy appeared in the cabin: carved and painted nutcrackers, the old family guitar, shim- mering sleigh bells, fresh wreaths decorated with pinecones and peppermint, toy trains that snaked through the gifts... and as Herod raised his thin and terrible sword over the infants of Judea, the family discovered a small piano in some long-forgotten apse of the two-room cabin. The mother knew how to play, and everyone sang merrily.
This year Jason’s mother didn’t buy him a calendar and his grandmother didn’t send him one either; and on December 3rd, after his cereal and grapefruit, he went to the wall calendar and saw the empty num- bered days, with appointments and meetings. All the holidays were labelled in small text at the bottom of their rectangles. Just outside, a double-parked car blinked its headlights in the cold rain.
On Christmas Eve his aunts, uncles, and cousins ar- rived. The earliest guests had stood in a circle in the kitchen, but soon this circle pushed up against the boundaries of that room, ruptured, and congealed into a conversational knot throughout the house. Presents compiled beneath the tree, a pot of cider was put on the stove, Tall Aunt Olivia bent down to hug him, and then exclaimed to see Uncle Arnold; adults opened bottles of wine and liquor; some happily chatted, others happily shouted, and Jason wandered about, carrying his mug of cider.
He couldn’t find anywhere to stand. He didn’t know where his cousins were, and he would have to shout to make himself heard over the grown-up conversa- tion. He squeezed between waists to get to one side of the room, and finding himself in the way there, squeezed his way back. Finally, he made for the bath- room and shut the door.
For a minute his senses continued to run at a high pitch, but as the mirror repeated his face back to him, the sounds outside lost their sharpness. He opened the window a crack: a whiff of frigid air. Even the noise was pleasant when muted through the bathroom door, and he saw no reason he couldn’t stay there.
27
Bitter Water
Lydia host