Christmas in Austin Read online

  You have to prepare yourself for these conversations. Otherwise, the Essingers … you have to be ready for them. Thinking these thoughts, preparing herself, she fell asleep, and then, after Jean and Bill drove away (Dana could hear the old Volvo coming to life, and clanking in the dip in the pavement as it backed onto Wheeler), she fell asleep again.

  When she woke up, the birds were making a tremendous amount of noise, like rusty scissors, scraping back and forth, and Cal was looking at her, in the half-light, filtered by wooden blinds.

  “Hey, Buddy,” she said, which is what Paul called him. Snail tracks of dried snot covered his upper lip; his nose was crusted.

  “Is it morning?”

  Now that he was talking, there was something strangely formal about the way he put together sentences. Even his voice seemed small and clear, very careful.

  “I don’t know. Let me look.”

  Her watch lay wherever she had put it the night before—among her clothes, on the club chair. It took her a minute to find it.

  “Are the … kids here?”

  “What kids do you mean?” She was teasing him.

  “You know,” he said. “Those kids.”

  “You mean Ben and William? And the baby?”

  He looked at her. Sometimes she worried that because of the way he was living, sometimes with Paul, in Texas, sometimes in New York, the people in his life coming and going, he had learned to be too self-contained. But maybe he was just her son. Men used to call her cold. She used to feel the same about her mother.

  “I don’t know their names,” he said. “Those big kids.”

  “I think so. I think they got in last night. Did they wake you up?”

  He was climbing out of the crib in his pajamas.

  “Don’t wake them up,” she said. “They got in late. They’ll be tired.”

  “I’m not.” (Indignantly.) “I’m going downstairs.”

  “What are you going to do downstairs?”

  “Watch TV.”

  “Who says you can watch TV?”

  “Bill.”

  “Bill’s not there.”

  “Bill always lets me,” he said, and opened the door.

  She listened to his footsteps in the corridor, thinking, I should go, too, he’s got nothing on his feet, he’s got a cold. Also having a minor reaction to the fact that he felt comfortable in the house without her. But she waited a minute anyway, still sitting on the bed. Leaving the room meant facing everybody again. All right. All right. She put on her slippers and a robe and emerged. The door to Susie’s bedroom was shut; so was Liesel’s. There was a kind of galleried hallway running to the head of the stairs, and cloudy morning light came in from windows overlooking the side of the neighbor’s house. Cal had disappeared. She went to the bathroom (Jean had left the door open at 5 a.m.) and brushed her teeth and checked her face in the subtly distorting mirror over the sink. The faucet dripped a little; the old mint-green floor-tiles hadn’t been changed since the Essingers moved in, forty years before. Dana felt fine without makeup but liked to know what she looked like before she showed it to anyone else. Fine.

  *

  Jean was in the kitchen, washing her hands in the sink, when Dana came downstairs. “Morning,” Dana said, from the doorway. “Did Bill get off all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is there any news?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s still in bed.”

  Dana could hear cartoon noises coming from the TV room at the other end of the hall. The flicker of violent light shone in the glass of the narrow double doors, so she went to check on Cal, who was sitting where Bill usually sat and staring at the screen. Above him, and behind his head, one of Susie’s undergraduate paintings filled the wall space. An Essinger family portrait, all of the kids lined up against a reddish background, sitting in the same room, on the sofa, and watching TV: Nathan, looking handsome and unhappy; Paul in his skinny teenage youth, with a big head of uncombed hair and slightly out-of-perspective hands; Jean, maybe ten years old, fat-cheeked but not quite innocent anymore, smiling too much to show that she was still the baby of the family; and Susie herself, hovering somehow behind them in the background, sad-eyed and slightly crazy, like the woman in the attic.

  Dana thought, staring at Cal underneath it, What have I gotten you into? His face was intent and completely expressionless.

  “He said he was allowed,” Jean said, when Dana joined her in the kitchen.

  “Allowed to what?”

  “Watch TV. I think he meant that Bill lets him.”

  “He makes that stuff up. I don’t mind though.”

  “I de-snotted him,” Jean said. “The scones are still warm if you want one.”

  Dana made her thank you, I’m a bad mother face. She put her hand on Jean’s shoulder, as Jean turned away, looking for a paper towel. Dana couldn’t tell if she was mad at her about something, or if Dana herself was just being tired and paranoid. Maybe not mad but distant, not quite on her side.

  The rest of the morning passed in a series of appearances and exits. Liesel came down in her dressing gown and put the coffee on. Her silver hair looked vaguely electrostatic; her eyes were bright and well-intentioned. Dana by that point was picking up Cheerios from the carpet from Cal’s breakfast—Cal was still eating, he had a face full of jam.

  “Coffee?” Liesel asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Dana said.

  “You’re always so polite. My children were badly brought up.”

  Jean had gone for what she called a “very slow not even a run more like a walk like when you have to go to the bathroom.” She banged in the backdoor, looking red in the face, and grumpy about it, too. “I hate running,” she said. “I’m not any good at it. I don’t know why I do it.”

  “Have you tried …” Dana began, and they spent the next ten minutes in a pointless argument about fitness fads. Spinning, hot yoga, that kind of thing.

  “When the kids were younger it was jazzercise,” Liesel said at one point, which Jean referred to in a friendly but also mocking way as “a surprisingly relevant contribution to the conversation.”

  The family atmosphere, which always took a little getting used to, comforted Dana, too. As if nothing that had happened with Paul made any difference to them. But maybe that’s not what she wanted. Cal kept bugging her to wake up the “big kids” and she had to restrain him. Which he responded to by asking to watch more TV, so they had a fight about that, which Dana won. But only at the expense of spending the next half hour on her knees in the TV room, on the rough old carpet, building a tower and bridge with blocks, getting kind of into it, and then trying to restrain Cal from knocking it down, and thinking, oh what’s the point, who are you doing it for, while he knocked it down.

  Jean and Liesel read a newspaper next door, at the breakfast table, talking, about Bill, about Rose, about the shooting in Sandy Hook. And all the time Dana’s mood went up and down, she was glad to be there, she was bored already, she felt at home, this wasn’t her family. Then Ben came in and said, “I’m watching TV.”

  He wore glasses, he looked friendly and disinterested, and Dana realized she didn’t have the status to contradict him. He was twelve years old, it was his grandparents’ house, he had found the remote control. So Dana left Cal to join him on the sofa and went in the kitchen to give Susie a hug. She had May in her arms, feeding; her dress was pulled down, her shoulder was bare. She looked good, post-pregnant and sleep-deprived, her belly and breasts still carried a little weight, but she looked good—hassled, but in the middle of life, biologically active or whatever, and somehow because of the baby more sexually exposed or public than she would usually permit. William, her other son, dug a waffle out of the ice mess in the freezer.

  Breakfast happened in several stages, it lasted several hours. Liesel started with a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, she ate a Ryvita cracker, spread with one of the several unusual jams collecting mold in the cupboard behind her (fig, quince, lemon cur
d), and only graduated to one of the pastries after Susie came down. People set the table piecemeal. Bill’s work, a stack of scribbled-on typed-up pages, was first pushed to one side, and then resettled on the large wooden chest under the window. Liesel refilled a jug containing red-berried pyracantha twigs with water from the faucet, and placed it in the middle of the table, on the tablecloth, after Jean insisted on clearing the plates from the first sitting and starting again. Silver napkin rings, all of them antiques, none of them related to each other, were identified, filled with fresh napkins, and parceled out. Eventually Ben walked in from the TV room, picked up a scone, and started to eat.

  Susie said, “Get a plate, sit down.”

  Cal insisted on sitting next to him. He had been staring at Susie and May. Dana felt vaguely relieved.

  Meanwhile, the morning wore on—people argued. Jean and Liesel came back to their discussion of Sandy Hook, until Susie, with tears in her eyes, asked them to stop. Not in front of the kids. “I don’t mind,” Ben said. “What do you think kids talk about?”

  “William is six,” Susie said.

  They talked about what they wanted to do, about where they wanted to eat lunch, and Dana remembered again, like someone putting on wet clothes, the sensation of entering into another family’s life. The Essingers seemed less friendly than her own but maybe more intimate. Dana had to explain what her parents were doing, which was really an explanation of why she was spending her Christmas in Texas, since she wasn’t with Paul anymore. “On a cruise,” Dana said. “In the Caribbean.” She could tell they were being judged for it, though nobody said anything, until she added: “According to the brochure, there’s an adults-only sundeck. I don’t know what they’re doing.” Jean laughed politely, and Dana felt she had betrayed something.

  The weather turned from cold and white to cold and white and drippy, but William went outside anyway, and Dana tried to get Cal to join him. The age gap was just over two years—this is the friendship she hoped to depend on for the next few days. William looked like his father, pink and fattening, barrel-chested, fair-haired, and had his father’s energy. In the kitchen, he drove everybody nuts after breakfast by kicking a tennis ball against the trash can, trying to make it bounce away at an angle, into the corridor. This is why Susie sent him outside. “If you want to kick things, kick things there. Put on your coat, it’s cold.” But he just stomped out and Susie let him go.

  “Do you want to kick a ball around?” Dana said to Cal.

  But Cal was more interested in the baby, who kept dropping things out of the tray of her high chair. He started picking them up, Cheerios, her spoon, her sippy cup, it turned into a game. For a while, Dana and Susie sat around, pretending to read the newspaper but mostly just watching the two of them interact. Liesel was upstairs getting dressed, Jean was showering.

  “He’s very sweet with her,” Susie said, in the voice she used among women, which Dana responded to because she couldn’t help it but she didn’t like it much. This is how her mornings disappeared, sitting around with women.

  Then David came in, Susie’s husband, unshaven, overweight, but strong, too, looking as he always looked, tired and happy. He sometimes referred to his “unintellectual body”—he meant that he looked like a laborer, and actually, in his 20s, before he knew what he wanted to do with his life, had spent several summers working on farms in Spain and South America. Susie liked to explain, this was a typically upper-class thing to do. His parents were gentleman farmers. They owned cattle in Hampshire. David went to Winchester and Oxford. He said, “Who wants coffee?”

  “We’ve all had coffee,” Susie said.

  “Who wants real coffee?”

  He was offering to pick something up from one of the food trucks near the Spider House Café. There was a blood bank parking lot next to it, with several berths—you could get coffee, churros, Greek gyros, Japanese ramen, depending on the weather.

  “Ben, you coming?” he shouted, in the general direction of the TV room. But nobody answered and David said, “See you in a minute,” and went out the back, letting the screen door rattle behind him and some of the cold air in. There was a gate at the end of the yard that led to the stores. Dana had asked him for a cappuccino.

  “Check on Willy,” Susie called after him. And then: “Ben, turn off that TV.” In a different voice, she said to Dana, “What’s actually going on with you and Paul?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cal had wandered into the TV room. Liesel came down. It was eleven o’clock. The leftovers of several breakfasts had accumulated on the table: plates sticky with maple syrup and pastry crumbs, used cups of tea and coffee, soggy bowls of children’s cereal, warm glasses of milk and juice. Susie, sighing, said, “I was really hoping for a little sunshine. We’ve had twenty inches of snow so far in Connecticut.”

  “It’s supposed to clear up this afternoon,” Liesel told her.

  And so the day went on. Nothing much happened, except for moments of lurching progress in several ongoing arguments. They decided on somewhere to eat lunch. Jean got her way, Ruby’s BBQ, a bright-yellow low-roofed restaurant behind the house, very run-down-looking inside, with a kind of indoor/outdoor seating section, protected from the weather by hanging clear-plastic flaps. You could sometimes smell the smoker from the backyard, depending on which way the wind blew. It took about half an hour to get everyone together. May needed a diaper change, William had to be lured and then pulled out of the bamboo hedge, Ben was doing something on the iPad. Everything takes time.

  “Has anyone called Paul?” Jean asked, but nobody had. “What did you arrange?” And she looked at Dana, who made her helpless face. “Okay, I’ll call him,” Jean said and left a message: “We’re going to Ruby’s.” It was Sunday—he usually went biking with Lance.

  Then just as they were on their way out, the phone rang. Liesel ran hobbling back to pick it up. She thought it might be Bill, but it was Nathan on the other end. “Have you seen the weather reports?” he said—his voice sounded just like his father’s, and like Bill he took a kind of cheerful practical pleasure in disaster. A huge snow front was expected to hit the northeast around midnight; people were being advised against nonessential travel.

  “What about Bill?” Liesel kept saying.

  “He’s fine, he should have landed by now, and by the time he gets to Yonkers, what are we talking about. It’s a ten-minute drive from Rose’s house to the hospital. Anyway, I wanted to let you know.” Know what, Liesel thought, and then Nathan told her. Their flight had been canceled. Part of him was tempted just to show up at the airport and see what they could get. Now, before the storm hits, but it’s a bad time of year to wait around for standby. Plus, there were the kids—they needed four seats.

  Each of the Essingers came to the line at different points, and Dana overheard Jean saying, “How about TF Green. I think they fly to Atlanta.” Susie for some reason kept shaking her head. “He always does this.” What, Dana didn’t know. But Susie explained, “The truth is, he prefers having Christmas in Cambridge anyway. Clémence likes to be at home.”

  Dana saw tears in Liesel’s eyes as they walked to the restaurant—across the damp grass of the backyard, past the gazebo and the little water-lily pool (the fountain had been turned off), under the old pecan. Nobody else seemed to notice. Jean and Susie were arguing about something, Cal and Ben and William had run ahead, and so Dana hung back for Liesel, whose progress across uneven ground was always slow.

  “First Bill and now Nathan,” Liesel said, smiling but wet-eyed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sure something will work out.”

  “Probably not. Everything’s already overbooked.”

  “Nathan is very persuasive.”

  And Liesel made her thank-you frown. There was a stack of firewood at the back fence, black with rot; the grass around the foot of it had edged away. Liesel, as she held open the gate, said, “Paul keeps saying we have to get rid of it. It’s a snake trap. He says he’ll do it hi
mself but then he doesn’t.”

  Dana walked through and waited for Liesel to shut the gate behind her. The dead end of a dead-end road was on the other side. It was a funny sort of street, very wide and quiet. Dana could see, over fences, into the large backyards of expensive houses, but there were also more modest bungalows and student apartments, with bikes and old sofas on the porch. And arching over everything, the trees—mostly live oaks but also sycamores and sumacs, Japanese maples. Very old Austin, Paul once told her, the first time she visited. The kind of place where you can rent somewhere cheap and live off not much and nobody bothers you. You can do your shift at the co-op grocery store or some data center and come home every night and listen to your vinyl collection or read your old comics and sit outside on warm evenings, drinking beer and thinking, Fuck it, life is pretty good.

  Liesel said, as she stepped down carefully from the curb, “I don’t know what he does. I don’t think he is very happy.” Everyone walked in the middle of the road, on the pitted asphalt—even the kids, who were waiting with David at the intersection, maybe a hundred yards ahead. Jean was there, too; she had taken Cal by the hand. Susie, carrying May, followed slightly behind. “I think,” Liesel went on, “he went a little crazy when he retired. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He gets these … even as a kid, he was very easy, very undemanding, he went along with everything, ninety-five percent of the time, but from time to time, he would get an idea, and there was nothing you could do, you had to give in.”

  “Well,” Dana said.

  “And now he has this idea about … living in Texas, about, I don’t know, building a house where everybody can live. But nobody wants to. He’s all on his own.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wants.”

  Liesel stopped and looked up. Her round face, very brown under the white hair, seemed exposed somehow, less protected than other faces. She wore a tarnished silver necklace among the wrinkles of her neck. Her large eyes were still rimmed with red, but she also looked cheerful enough, she recovered from her emotions quickly.