Protecting Marie (6 page)

“Oh, Fan,” Ellen said, “I'm only up for one kind. I made dough for cutout cookies. I know you like them best.” Ellen ran her finger around the rim of her mug. “We've got that huge cake anyway.”

“Yeah,” Fanny whispered, disappointed. Absently, she poked her toes through the spaces between the posts of the banister and picked at paint specks on the newel post with her fingernail. The wood was knotted and worn, and the distorted image of an old man's face that Fanny had discovered in the post when she was three years old suddenly transformed itself into a mosaic of Christmas cook
ies of every imaginable kind.

“You can bake whatever else you'd like,” Ellen told Fanny. “I'm just not in the mood for more than cutouts this year.”

“It's no fun to do alone. I wish Mary were here.”

“Do you wish now that you'd gone with the Dibbles?”

Fanny shook her head no. She tried to muster up all the courage she had to shape this Christmas into a good one. She forced a smile.

Ellen looked at Fanny with such patience. “They'll be the best cutout cookies ever. I guarantee it. We'll go all out with decorating them.”

“Okay,” Fanny said, nodding. “Okay.” She dashed upstairs to shower and dress.

Fanny had a lump in her throat. So much for her theory about mornings. She turned the water in the shower as hot as she could stand it. With her arms folded across her chest, she tipped her head back, then let it fall slowly forward until the water was beating against her neck. Water
pooled at her elbows, and when she unfolded her arms to wash herself, the collected water hit the tile floor with a slap. She worked up a great lather all over her body. The bubbles contained little rainbows. She blew at them.

Why did Fanny feel so disappointed about baking only one kind of Christmas cookie this year? She and Ellen always baked far too many cookies. More than they and Henry could ever eat themselves or give away. A good number of them often turned stale, forgotten in the cupboard behind cereal boxes or the large tin of olive oil, until someone found them looking for something else and threw them out weeks, even months, after the holidays. But somehow Fanny felt that her world would only be right if she and her parents did all the same things for Christmas every year. And that included the number of kinds of cookies they baked. Starting at Thanksgiving, Fanny would look forward to Christmas with an odd combination of wistfulness and determination, long for it to be exactly the same as the perfect memories she held. (Had that perfect Christmas ever existed
anyway?) Every detail had to be correct—from the cookies, to the village beneath the tree, to the fire in the fireplace, to the ham at three o'clock, glazed with honey and marmalade and trimmed with lettuce and spicy red gumdrops to look like holly.

The Christmas Fanny was five, the weather had been balmy—sunny and in the sixties—unusual for winter in Wisconsin. Fanny sobbed. “This isn't the way it's supposed to be,” she cried. “It's supposed to be snowy and cold. Like always.”

Henry stifled a laugh and covered Fanny's small hands with his big ones.

Ellen brushed Fanny's long, damp bangs from her eyes. “Fanny,” she said gently, “if you want everything to be perfect, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. It doesn't always snow for Christmas—you know that. Why give yourself such a hard time, sweetie? It's Christmas—let yourself be happy.”

Despite the heat, Fanny buttoned her dressy fur coat up to her chin, pulled on her mittens
and brand-new ice skates, and sat on the front porch. Oh, how she wanted to try her new skates! But the rink, which should have been hard and smooth as a mirror, was a soggy brown puddle.

Determined as ever, Fanny stood, wobbling at first. She drew in a deep breath through her nose, and then she took off, stomping clumsily across the porch. She tried a figure eight. She tried to stand on one leg, leaning forward breathlessly. Mostly, she ended up grabbing for the porch railing, hand over hand, while her weak ankles caved in beneath her.

Fanny didn't realize how noisy she was being. And she didn't realize how badly she was scarring the soft pine floor until Henry and Ellen came out to see what the clatter was. Neither scolded Fanny, but the marks remained, and for months, if Fanny was in a particularly vulnerable mood and happened to pass the scarred floor, a wave of regret washed over her, making her hot.

I'm so stupid, Fanny said to herself. I'm not
five anymore. But that's exactly how she felt. She wondered if she was the only twelve-year-old in the entire world who felt this way. Would a normal person her age even
care
about Christmas cookies? Or remember so clearly a Christmas so long ago? She watched a bubble rise from her hand. It bobbled as it floated upward. She imagined it growing larger, filling the shower stall, until Glinda the Good Witch of the North would come forth from the filmy shell in a sharp, quick
pop
to grant Fanny's every wish. To make everything perfect. Perfect cookies. Perfect Christmas. Perfect father.

When Fanny came back downstairs, she was flushed from her shower. The shirt she had on was an old one of Henry's. It was faded chalkboard green, flannel, and so worn that it was almost glossy under the fluorescent kitchen light. The elbows were threadbare, the stitching at the collar was loose, and the creases in the sleeves were white.

“God, I haven't seen that shirt in a long
time,” Ellen said. She casually held the old blond rolling pin in one hand as if it were no heavier than a twig.

“I took it out of a bag that Dad was giving to Goodwill a few weeks ago,” Fanny said. The shirttail hung low over her jeans. She pulled on it with both hands.

“I loved that shirt. It's
so
soft.” Ellen paused. “Your father looked good in it.”

Fanny became acutely aware of how the shirt felt between her fingers. If she rubbed too hard, she thought it might disintegrate.

“Want some breakfast?” Ellen asked. “Before this becomes a full-fledged bakery?”

“I think I'll just pick at the dough. I'm not very hungry.”

“Are you sure?”

Fanny nodded.

“Okay.”

They smiled at each other for a long moment.

“I know you're thinking about him . . . as if you could help it,” Ellen said quietly. “You know, there's no law against baking and talk
ing at the same time.”

Fanny shrugged and made a face.

Ellen blew a piece of her hair out of her eyes. “I thought I'd just open the door . . .” She spun the rolling pin, and it squeaked.

“Do you care if I quietly close it? The door. At least for now?”

“No.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Fanny pushed up her sleeves and playfully grabbed the rolling pin from Ellen. “I'm ready,” she said. “To bake.”

One pan of cookies—three long rows of stars, paper-thin—was already on the counter, just waiting to be popped into the oven. In what seemed to be a single effortless movement, Ellen picked up the cookie sheet, pivoted, opened the oven door, slipped the cookies in, closed the oven door, and set the timer. “There,” she said as the cookie sheet shifted in the hot oven, making a muffled
clang.

“How about angels next?” Fanny said. “Let's make lots of angels.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Ellen. “You can never have too many angels.”

They baked angels and stars and bells and reindeer. They baked Santas and snowmen and trees. When they had begun working in the kitchen, the icicles outside the windows had been solid and thick. As the morning turned to afternoon and the kitchen filled with steamy heat, delicious smells, Christmas carols from the stereo, and stacks of golden cookies, the icicles melted. Fanny could hear the
drip, drip, drip
between songs. The windows had become misty, too.

As Ellen had promised, they went all out with decorating the cookies. They mixed five different colors of frosting. The frosting looked like stiff, chalky paint in the china bowls on the counter. Fanny dragged the step stool across the floor and scavenged in the cupboard. She found several dusty little bottles of decorations. Chocolate sprinkles and colored sugar made exotic angel robes. Cinnamon Red Hots became the eyes of snowmen and the noses of reindeer. Nonpareils speckled bells and stars. Fanny saved the silver dragées for the angel wings.

Fanny arranged the completed angel cookies in a triangular formation on the table—some this way, some that way, each one precise in its placement—as if they were dolls. She stared at the angels until they appeared to be floating off the wooden surface en masse, hovering the way angels should. Do you call a group of angels a flock? she wondered.

There was a particular angel that caught Fanny's eye—it needed a few more dragées on its creamy white wing. Fanny touched it gently to see if the frosting had hardened. She thought the additional tiny silver balls would stick if she pressed them firmly into the frosting with her finger. This time when Fanny unscrewed the lid on the bottle, she noticed that the label on it said,
NONEDIBLE. USE ONLY AS DECORATION.

“Hey, Mom,” Fanny said. “Look at this.” She handed the bottle to Ellen. “We're not supposed to eat these.”

Ellen read the label. As she turned the bottle in her hand, the shiny balls rattled, sounding like a maraca. “We probably shouldn't use
them. I never knew they weren't meant to be eaten.”

“
I've
eaten them before,” Fanny said, her eyes widening with concern.

“I have, too,” Ellen said. “Don't worry about it. Let's just throw them away.” Ellen tossed the bottle into the garbage container under the sink. “Maybe we should pick them off the cookies. They'll look fine without them.”

“They're just on the angels,” Fanny said. “On the wings.”

Ellen carefully plucked the dragées from each angel wing, and Fanny smoothed the frosting with a knife.

“They're not as pretty as before,” Fanny remarked.

“Oh, well,” said Ellen. “I think they look beautiful without them. Almost too beautiful to eat.
Almost
.” She picked up an angel from the table and bit its head off. “Mmm. This is very good,” she mumbled. She offered the rest to Fanny.

Fanny broke off the wing. She ate it slowly,
relishing every crumb. I'm eating the wing of an angel, she thought. The wing of an angel is inside me.

Just then, the telephone rang. Ellen answered it. The telephone was portable, and Ellen walked out of the kitchen.

Fanny stayed. She knew it was Henry. Her face tightened. She bit her lip. While she waited, she reached into the garbage container and retrieved the bottle of silver dragées. She didn't know why, but she wanted them badly. They were perfect little things. And she found it ironic that something so perfect and tiny and sparkly could be bad for you. She pushed the bottle into her pants pocket. Henry's shirt covered the bulge.

“That was your father,” Ellen told Fanny from the doorway.

Fanny looked at Ellen expectantly.

“He said he'd be home by seven. And he said he was bringing dinner.”

F
anny waited for Henry in her room. She was organizing. Her thoughts, her room, her life. She had not inherited Henry's penchant for neatness, as a quick look around her room would clearly indicate. Schoolbooks lay here and there; two were turned over like sagging tents to hold her place. Scattered among the books were shoes. Shirtsleeves and tights
snaked out from beneath the closet curtain. Drawers—opened ever so slightly, opened wide, closed—made the dresser look askew, tilting oddly forward.

When Fanny was younger, her messy room bothered Henry enough that he invented a game they would play once a week on the night before garbage day. It was called Stupid Hunt. “It's time for a Stupid Hunt,” Henry would say, scooping Fanny up in his arms and marching off to her room. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

The first time, Fanny had been eager to participate, enchanted by the idea that her father had a secret game for the two of them to play.