Holly in Love (8 page)

“That’s okay, Jamie,” I said nervously. “It’s getting late and your house is in the opposite direction. Thanks for the muffins. I had such a nice time. And congratulations on winning! I’m truly impressed.” I kept talking on and on, as if we were parting forever and I had to wrap up the loose ends of my entire life.

Finally I managed to stop babbling. Jamie was just grinning at me. “You’re welcome,” he said. “See you.” He turned and walked off toward his house.

I felt incredibly lonely, seeing him go. He was broad-shouldered, as big as Stein and Beaulieu and the others on the hockey team. He doesn’t look sixteen, I thought. I took one step after him. “Jamie?” I called.

He looked back at me, with his same sweet grin. “What?”

And then I didn’t know why I had called after him. I flushed and stammered a moment. “You aren’t really going to put an antique threshing machine in the backyard, are you?”

“Probably not. My father’s reached his limit with that hobby. But it’s nice to daydream, don’t you think?”

I definitely thought. He daydreams, too, I thought. I felt vaguely giddy. We said goodbye again, and more quickly this time, as the sun was gone and the air was turning downright hostile with night cold, and I went home alone.

I
LOVE CHRISTMAS.

The gaudy lights, shaped like enormous bells, that are hung each year from the telephone poles in the village. The streams of jazzed-up carols piped through every store. The window decorations with their pretend snow and their flickering lights. Candles on the table and shiny wrapping paper and curling ribbons and bows.

I love it all.

In church we hung beautiful evergreen wreaths around the old copper wall sconces and tied them with fragrant winter apples and tiny, scarlet velvet bows. For me, it was the smell of Christmas: apples and pine.

My father, who frets over everything, worries each year that someone in the village, or from the college, will be alone Christmas Day, and that sounds so awful to him that he extends invitations to anyone who might possibly require the company of strangers for Christmas dinner. So this year our table seated a few stray foreign students (including a confused Hindu and a fascinated Moslem), a few students too broke to fly home for the holidays, a couple of elderly widows, one man in his fifties whose wife had just left him after thirty years of marriage, and my grandmother.

It was a wonderful meal, with wonderful conversation, and I noticed that Christopher and I had passed out of our embarrassed stage. For years we blushed when Dad prayed, and ducked our heads when he read from Luke, and tried to leave when he lit the Advent candles. But this year I just loved it. As the strangers at our table added their prayers for peace, I thought of Jamie, and what sort of things he might have talked about with my father, and I saw my own father differently: as the sort of man Jamie would consider a friend.

Dad was especially happy because the church had given almost half again as much money for the migrants as he’d asked for, and so he felt he really
was
accomplishing something in this wicked world. My mother made no comments, just smiled. I don’t think she’s one fraction as religious as Dad, but she won’t hurt his feelings or confuse the issue by saying it. I hoped that in a few years my mother and I would discuss things like that. Or even this year. Seventeen was adult.

I had loads of lovely gifts. Long, dangling gold filigree earrings from my grandmother—the sort you’d wear with a satin gown at the party of the year. Two beautiful sweaters—soft pastel knits with creamy snowflake patterns. New boots—thick, furry, lined boots to keep even
my
toes warm. Beautiful, tiny velvet draperies for the drawing room of my Victorian mansion. Dad had made me an octagonal Shaker barn to go with the mansion. It was a triumph of woodworking, although not precisely a period match.

“A whole new world!” I said. “Now I’ll need tiny fences and shrubbery and miniature paving bricks for paths. I can make hay from yellow broom tips.”

Christopher handed me a package. He’d bought me a flock of miniature china chickens and one gaudy old china rooster looking ready to peck my fingers! “I thought we’d put the dollhouse on a four by eight piece of plywood,” said Dad, “and you can make a yard and have the barn out back and leave a space for that gazebo you’re planning.”

Even if it came in winter, Christmas was wonderful!

I went upstairs to put on the new earrings. All my others were costume jewelry—enameled scarlet hearts, miniature crayons, preppy alligators, and that sort of thing. I slid into a wonderful daydream about the sort of dances and dates I’d have in the New Year where my grandmother’s filigree gold earrings would be just right. I could see myself swirling on a dance floor, sparkling like a princess.

Downstairs I listened to the prayers for peace. Our Indian and Iraqi guests prayed in their own languages, and Mother spoke some old Latin prayers, and one of the students, a French major, prayed in French.

Christopher had vanished outdoors. I’d gotten him a pair of snowshoes, and he was wild with excitement. My mother worried a little, looking out into lightly falling snow and talking of trackless wilderness in which Christopher could get lost, but actually we could see him just fine tramping across the college campus.

A white Christmas. Two years (to the grief of the ski industry) since our last white Christmas. I sat indoors and dreamed and thought of peace and love.

On December twenty-sixth, I called Kate to see what she’d gotten and whether we could get together. She’d gotten the new ski boots she was yearning for and had left very, very early to get a space on the slopes. I called Lydia, but she’d gone with her boyfriend to work on their ice sculpture.

I called two other girls. They were both out. One was skiing with Kate, and the other had gone to a hill to take her little brother and sister sledding.

I sat in my bedroom and stared at my doll-house and my lovely sweaters and the soft bubbly feeling of Christmas dwindled away. Christopher was out with his friends. My father was checking on three families he thought might be short of money to order fuel oil, and my mother was correcting term papers. Grandmother was back in Boston.

It was a long day. Longer than any I could remember.

I had plenty of projects I could start. Doll-house stuff. A kit from my uncle in Milwaukee for making Ukrainian Easter eggs: the kind with intricate designs on them. Some strange, rough-feeling but beautiful knitting wool from a sheep farm near us.

But I was not in a crafts mood. I was in a company mood. I wanted to talk to a friend.

I thought about telephoning Jamie, just to talk.

Would it be as easy on the telephone as it was in person? Would we start laughing and telling stories right away? Or would he be startled and unable to figure out what I was doing on the line? Would he think I was chasing him? Be horrified and embarrassed?

I wondered whether his parents had let him tow an antique threshing machine into the yard. What sort of gifts had been given Christmas Day to a boy who was crazy about steam engines?

For supper, we had leftover ham and warmed-up sweet potatoes. It had such a day-after feeling to it. I couldn’t even finish eating.

When the telephone rang I knew it was for somebody else. It felt like years since anybody had shown any interest in me, and I dragged myself around the table, clearing it, thinking that the only thing anybody wanted Holly Carroll for was doing the dishes.

“For you, Holl,” said my brother.

Jamie? I thought, and the thought surprised me. Why should
he
call? Why should I even think that he might? “Who is it?” I said.

“Kate.” Christopher doesn’t care for Kate. She’s going to be eighteen next month and once or twice, when Christopher was ten or eleven, she actually babysat for him. Why, Kate’s almost two years older than Jamie, too, I thought. No wonder she thinks of him as a kid.

“Hi, Kate. Have a good Christmas?”

“Super.” She told me every detail, concentrating on how wonderful the skiing had been that day, and how they had oversold tickets, so that there were infuriating lines at the lifts, but still, she had had a ball and everybody had been there, everybody but me. “Hollyberry,” she said, “come skating with us tomorrow? The temperature is going to be up in the high twenties with no wind, and the sun shining so it’ll be really very comfortable. Come on, please?”

It’s pretty bad when your best friend has to hear a weather report before she dares invite you anywhere. “I’d love to,” I said, and I made a mental note never to mention weather again. Hope and Christopher were right: I was a bore, the way I kept whining about the frigid air outdoors.

“Do your old skates fit?” said Kate anxiously. “Mom says you can wear hers.”

Kate and her mother had talked over how to get me to the skating party. It warmed me right down to my toes, being wanted like that, “Great,” I said. “Mine are a little crunchy around the toes.”

We giggled. I forgot about Jamie. What I’d needed all day was a friend, and Kate was the best friend I had.

K
ATE’S MOTHER’S SKATES WERE
just a fraction too big, and even with two pairs of socks and the ankles laced as tight as my fingers could pull, I didn’t have enough ankle support. I hadn’t skated once that year, and I was very rusty.

I wound slowly around the pond, getting my coordination back, and I was circling for the fourth time when Christopher came gliding toward me at full speed, making faces and yelling, “Is that slow-moving vehicle actually my sister?” I tried to veer away from him, but of course he didn’t really plan to bump me, and he veered in the same direction. We crashed right into each other, and even before I heard my ankle hit the ice I knew the bone was going to break.

Christopher just bounced a little and was back on his skates in the space of an instant, but I took a terrible spill, turning my ankle under me with a crack that sounded as if the ice was splitting. Half the skaters heard it and turned, cringing, to see who it was.

It hurt so much I literally could not speak. I could not untwist myself from my fallen position, and the skate kept my ankle in a horrid unnatural curve.

“Somebody call an ambulance,” said a voice. “She’s really hurt.”

Christopher hunched down beside me, white and horrified. “Oh, Holly,” he said desperately, “I’m sorry, I was only teasing.”

I couldn’t even moan. The breath had been knocked so completely out of me it was all I could do to breathe. Tears sprang into my eyes, from cold and pain and shame, and when the ambulance attendants unwrapped my legs and straightened me out, I bit right through my mittens trying to hold back the scream.

In the ambulance they unlaced the skate, and I really thought I would die. It felt as if they were amputating my ankle with a wood-saw.

“Oh, does it hurt that much?” said the ambulance attendant.

I tried to laugh but I sobbed instead. When I saw the needle coming toward me I almost leaned into the shot, I wanted the pain relief so much.

I will say two things for the hospital.

First, it was warm. No drafts or subzero temperatures on the orthopedic floors!

Second, it was full of friends. Everybody came to visit me. You practically had to have reservations, like for the ski lift. I had so much fun it was almost worth the broken ankle! Writing on my plaster cast was the most popular activity during the last week of the Christmas holidays. Even Hope and Grey came, and Grey turned out to be a budding cartoonist—he drew cute little cats hobbling around on crutches, and sprinkled the cats among all the signatures. “Jonathan says hi,” Grey told me.

“Oh,” I said, flushing. “Tell him hi back.”

Fortunately my mother came in, saying hello to Hope, and Grey had to be introduced, so I was spared any details about Jonathan.

Jamie came the third day. I’d been thinking about him, and then stopping myself from thinking about him. And there he was.

“Got your ticket out of winter sports, I see,” he said.

“Get one yourself,” I suggested. “Plenty of empty beds.”

“No, thanks! Maybe during final exams, but never, never during a school vacation!”

We gave each other enormous grins. I noticed all sorts of details about him I’d never seen before: how his hair parted unevenly and fell in floppy, soft blond waves. How he had a habit of tugging at his lips, as if he had another grin coming and he didn’t want it to emerge just yet. How he was obviously still growing, because even what were evidently his new Christmas clothes seemed too short at the wrists and too narrow at the shoulders. “You get your threshing machine?” I said.

“Nope. My mother said we weren’t even going to discuss anything as ridiculous as that, and my father said—well, it’s probably best to delete anything my father says. So how was your Christmas, Holly?”

We talked about Christmas. School. Life. Careers. Hobbies. We even got into heavy things—like people suffering while we were fat and happy. About volunteering and charities and religions. Then we fell back onto school topics again.

“I’m sure school has a purpose,” said Jamie morosely, “but this year it’s much harder to discern.”

“I know what you mean. Every single subject that comes up, I think to myself—do I care? And the answer is—no.”

“Always excepting Spanish, right?”

“That’s right. Spanish is an exception. How did you know?”

“Are you kidding? You’re a legend in your own time, Holly. The girl who plans her future so thoroughly she knows what climate, what language, and even what nation she’ll be emigrating to.”

We giggled like little kids. “Yep,” I said. “I’ve got my whole future planned weather-wise. It’s the other stuff—like college, career, income, money, that kind of thing—that I haven’t solved yet.”

We had the best time talking. Jamie brought a funny article from a magazine for me to read, and when I said I’d read it later, he said, no, he wanted me to hear it now. So he read it aloud to me.

He wore reading glasses. I’d never been in a class with Jamie, and I’d never even known about the reading glasses. They aged him. He looked distinguished. Older. Looks like Grey, I thought suddenly. Why, even Hope would approve of Jamie in glasses.