The Christmas Sweater (5 page)

“Really, it’s great. Really. I did need a sweater.” I couldn’t get past my own disappointment
or look beyond myself to see what the gift meant to her.

I thought back to the note Mom had left for me under her bed. She was right, I had
“missed” my gift. Mom had been making it right in front of me every night while forcing
me to watch
Little House on the Prairie.
(She thought Pa
Ingalls was cute, and I had to suffer for it.) But now it all made sense: a stupid
handmade gift made while watching a stupid show. I bet my friends who got to watch
the shows they wanted, like
Starsky and Hutch,
also got presents they’d actually asked for.

My disappointment over the morning snow now seemed trivial compared to how upset I
was about my present.
You’re an idiot,
I thought to myself.
You should have known. You should have seen it coming.

Mom looked at me with eyes that were, for once, surprisingly hard to read. Was she
relieved that I seemed to be so happy, or did she see right through my act? Quite
honestly, at that moment, I didn’t really care, but I knew that I couldn’t keep up
the charade forever. I had to escape.

“I’m just going to run up to my bedroom and put it away. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I felt a familiar, relentless burn returning to my eyes. I ran upstairs before Mom
could see my tears.

M
y bedroom window looked out over the street in front of our house. Before my prepubescent
growth spurt, I could stand at the sill, put my elbows on it, and rest my chin on
my hands.

That Christmas morning I was just a little too tall to do that anymore, so I stood
back a few inches, put my hands on the sill, and leaned forward until my forehead
rested against the cold glass. It burned my skin, but I felt like I deserved the pain.

The snow had finally started. They were big, beautiful flakes, and the thin white
coating on the street meant that
it had already been falling for a while now. I guess I’d been too busy feeling sorry
for myself to notice.

I was just about to turn away when I saw the little girl across the street riding
a brand-new bike in her driveway. Her dad was walking alongside, as if he didn’t trust
the training wheels on the slippery asphalt. My eyes began to burn again, right along
with my forehead.

I crossed over to my bed and fell on it. Luke Skywalker taunted me with the memory
of a great Christmas present from the past. Images of the girl on the bike kept running
through my head. I saw the wheels spin around and around as she rode it like she’d
been the freest girl in the world. Free to travel two, three, maybe four houses away.
Free.

I focused on my ceiling. It was filthy. The roof leaked a little every time it rained,
and water soaked the plaster, leaving splotches and lines. Nothing in my life was
perfect. Other kids had new bikes, two parents,
and
ceilings that didn’t leak. It just wasn’t fair.

“Eddie!” Mom cried out from the hall as my bedroom door swung open. “Have you looked
outside yet? Dad’s
gift to you is here…it’s a Christmas miracle! It hasn’t snowed like this since—”

I had been staring at the ceiling, unable to look at her when she came in. I knew
my face would betray me. But after a few seconds of silence I sat up on the bed to
see what was going on. Mom was staring at the floor by my dresser. “Is that your sweater?”
she asked quietly. I had dropped it there without even thinking. It was rolled up
like a ball, like something that belonged in the trash can.

“Sorry. I should have put it away,” I said meekly as I started to get up from the
bed.

“It looks like you already have,” she replied. The pain in her voice and the disappointment
on her face shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. After a few moments of silence,
she looked up from the sweater and directly into my eyes. “Please don’t treat your
sweater that way.”

I knew that we didn’t have much money, but until that moment I never realized how
heavily that weighed on my mother. In my mind I saw my mom walking by the new bikes
in Sears every day at work, knowing which one I
wanted and knowing she couldn’t afford it. I saw her looking at the sweaters I didn’t
want, and she couldn’t afford, picking out yarn and knitting every night while trying
to convince herself that somehow I would understand and love that sweater just as
much as a new bike. Knowing in her heart I never could.

I sat there awkwardly, watching in silence as Mom picked up the sweater as gently
as if it had been an injured kitten. She slowly folded it and neatly placed it on
top of my dresser. She lingered there for a moment, her hands pressing the sweater
down as if to flatten out wrinkles that didn’t exist.

I really didn’t know how much my mother believed in the magic of Christmas until I
saw it die for her in a rumpled ball on my bedroom floor.

Mom gently pulled my bedroom door closed without another word. My eyes began to burn
again. I went back to the window, hoping the snow would cheer me up. I pressed my
head up against the cold glass again. The girl across the street was gone, and so
was the snow. One final flurry
danced slowly toward the ground. It looked as sad and alone as I felt.

Then it started to rain.

When Dad first started to get sick, Mom, along with some of our close family friends,
tried to keep City Bakery going. They did the best they could, but it quickly became
obvious just how good a baker Dad really was. A recipe might seem like a simple list
of ingredients and instructions, but there was obviously a lot more that went into
his creations than just what was handwritten on a bunch of old grease-stained pages.

When Dad passed away, Mom quickly sold the business. I guess it was probably inevitable
anyway. Our downtown, like my father, had been slowly dying for years. I don’t know
how much money she got, but I do know that it couldn’t have been much, because even
after she got the check I still wasn’t allowed to order milk when we went out to eat.
I think she used most of it to pay off Dad’s medical bills.

I never thought I’d miss the bakery, but the truth was that I did. I missed it a lot.
I didn’t miss cleaning the pans or sweeping the floor, but I missed being together.
Even though we’d all been working, we’d all been working
together.
Somehow that had escaped me until it was gone.

For a long time, Mom avoided driving by the bakery after she sold it, but someone
told me it had been turned into a shoe store. I took their word for it; it was too
hard to picture someone trying on a pair of high heels in the same place my father
used to crack eggs or knead dough.

Right around the time Mom sold the bakery, she also sold our car and house. I guess
she was trying to make a clean break. The Impala got traded in for our Pinto wagon,
and our house was downsized to a white one so small that our one-car garage basically
doubled the size of the whole interior.

I didn’t like all of the new stuff, but at least the Pinto didn’t have the smell of
Dad’s Old Spice cologne trapped in the fabric of its headrests, and the new house
didn’t constantly smell like Dad’s German chocolate cake.

Thinking about all the changes that had happened so
quickly in my life only added to my misery. If Dad had still been alive and still
had the bakery, then he would’ve had enough money to buy my bike. It just wasn’t fair.
Why was I being punished?

After about an hour of watching the rain I went back downstairs. Mom was in the kitchen.
“Is there anything left for lunch?” I asked, hoping that we could pretend the sweater
incident had never happened.

“We don’t have time now. We’re going to head over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house a
little early. Go put on your sweater—your grandmother helped me pick out the yarn
and pattern, and she’s very excited to see you in it.” She spoke without any joy.
Like me, she had apparently decided to pretend that the sweater incident had never
happened.

With the way things were going, I did
not
want to go to my grandparents’ farm, and I definitely did
not
want to wear what I was sure was an itchy, hot, uncomfortable, not-a-bicycle sweater.

I went back upstairs and put on the sweater. The full-length mirror hanging on the
back of my door caught my
attention. I stared into my own eyes. What was I doing? I looked at myself in the
sweater that I knew my mother had worked so hard on and was so proud of. I wanted
to like it, but I couldn’t.

I left my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and not too quietly stormed around the house.
Remembering the lessons from my grandfather, I tried to create just enough of a ruckus
to make a point, but not so much as to get into trouble.

It didn’t work.

Mom handed me two bread bags and glared at me with eyes that I dared not try to read.
It never dawned on me that Mom knew her father’s tricks far better than I ever would.

I
’m only going to say this once, Edward Lee. When we get to the farm, you will be a
boy having a merry Christmas. Is that clear?”

Mom using my full first name was always a bad sign, but Mom using my full first name
and
my middle name was almost unprecedented. This was a code-red alert.

“Clear,” I answered curtly as I stared out the back window of our Pinto. I could never
figure out why Mom would spend as much time driving to see my grandparents as we actually
spent visiting with them. The drive was an hour and a half each way and we rarely
stayed
much longer than two hours unless we were sleeping over.

Except for the sound of heavy rain battering the roof and spraying up from the tires,
the ride was spent mostly in silence. Mom stared straight ahead. She didn’t even look
at me in the mirror.

The radio was playing a Christmas song by the Carpenters, but it felt as out of place
as if it had been July. Mom reached over and rolled the front passenger window down
partway, letting cold, wet air rush into the car. The Pinto’s heater only had two
settings: Off and Furnace. I didn’t know if she was getting sleepy or if she was just
taking pity on me in my heavy wool sweater.

As we drove, the houses got further and further apart, until finally I saw the first
in a series of small farms that lined my grandparents’ street. One of them was obviously
vacant. There were big gaps in the wooden fencing, an overgrown front lawn, and an
old farmhouse that looked empty and unsteady. I thought I saw a flash of light in
one of its broken windows.

No. It must be a reflection. Who would live in a place like that?

Less than a minute later, I saw Grandma’s hydrangea bushes and the old plow that Grandpa
had put at the end of the drive to mark his small raspberry and chicken farm. Mom
turned in, and the sound of our tires crunching through the wet gravel floated in
through the window.

The Pinto’s engine always ran for a couple of seconds every time it was shut off.
I usually made a game of getting out of the car before the rumbling stopped, but this
time I waited for Mom to get out before I reluctantly followed her.

“Merry Christmas, Mary!”

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” she answered. Her voice seemed to have softened a little since
she’d last spoken to me.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Eddie,” Grandpa teased. He laughed whenever he called me that.
I didn’t understand why until Mom sat me down in front of a rerun of an old show with
a guy who talked to his horse. But did Wilbur ever call Mr. Ed “Mr. Eddie”? I don’t
think so.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I mumbled. I was trying hard to maintain my sour attitude, but he always
made that hard.

“Look at that
beautiful
sweater,” Grandma said as she took me by the shoulders. Luckily, she wasn’t a cheek-pincher.
“And such fine knitting.” She gave my mother a quick look of approval. “How do you
like it, Eddie?”

I looked over at Mom. She was watching me, expressionless, waiting to see what I was
going to say. After quickly considering all possible answers, I said, “It’s fine.
Maybe a little scratchy…or itchy…or whatever. But it’s fine. I like it.”

Mom’s icy stare made the short walk to the front door seem like a mile. Her eyes were
lecturing me again.

My grandfather was a big man with snow-colored hair. It was more white than gray,
but not like an old person’s. For years I thought he was Santa. He and Grandma were
the same age, but she had beautiful brown hair with just a hint of gray in it. “A
miracle of modern science,” Grandpa liked to say.

I sat on the big, old, comfortable sofa in front of the fire, and Grandpa sat across
from me in his chair while Mom and Grandma worked in the kitchen. Grandpa didn’t know
it, but Mom and I called it his “storytelling
chair,” because he couldn’t seem to sit in it without offering some epic tale from
his past. The problem was that Grandpa was so good at mixing fact with fiction that
almost no one, including him, was really sure what was true anymore. Asking him to
retell a story only made things worse. “Grandpa,” I once asked, hoping he’d confirm
a story I’d remembered from years earlier, “did you really help build the lunar rover?”

He loved to answer a question with a question. “Have I ever lied to you?” he replied,
making sure that if he had told the story “in fun,” he wasn’t going to lie now by
confirming it. It was the perfect system. Even Grandma didn’t seem to know the truth
anymore. When I would ask her to confirm one of Grandpa’s tales, she would simply
say, “Could be.” She wasn’t being coy or playing along, she really just didn’t know
anymore. “Could be…” was the best—no, make that the
only
—answer she could legitimately give.

Sometimes Grandpa would begin weaving a story together and, after a few sentences,
Grandma would show her disapproval by yelling his name: “Edward!” Grandpa
would then lower his voice and tell me to move closer to his chair. The procedure
would repeat itself throughout the story until finally I would be sitting at my grandfather’s
feet, looking up at him in awe as he whispered lie after lie.

“Grandpa, did you really build this whole house by yourself?”

“Yes, in fact, without a hammer and with only two—”

“EDWARRRRRRD!” Grandma yelled from the kitchen. I never knew how she could hear him
from that far away. Mom always used to tell me that she had eyes in the back of her
head, so I guess I just figured that Grandma had ears in other rooms.

Now, as my grandfather sat across from me in his chair, stroking his chin on a rainy
Christmas afternoon, I hoped that he would start in on another story. I couldn’t have
cared less if he made the whole thing up; I just didn’t want to think about the sweater,
bikes, or Dad anymore.

Unfortunately, he had another idea. “So, Eddie, are you ready to try and beat me at
Chinese checkers?”

Chinese checkers? What the heck was going on? I figured that Grandpa had either taken
every last dime from the people he played cards with or he was looking to test his
system out on a different game. I risked pressing the issue. “Why don’t you want to
play cards?”

“Cards?” Grandpa looked away quickly, a telltale sign that he was about to make something
up. “I haven’t been able to find my deck. Besides, Chinese checkers is more fun. You
don’t have to do any math.”

Math? Apparently Grandpa’s system was even more complicated than I thought. But at
that point the truth was that no game sounded like very much fun. “No thanks, Grandpa.”

“Something wrong, Eddie?”

“Nah, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas. Maybe it’s the rain.”

“Hmmm. Not Christmas? I’d better get rid of that tree, then,” he said with a smile
much warmer than I deserved.

I was thinking about telling him what had happened that morning, how I’d gotten a
sweater instead of the bike
that I deserved. If anyone would understand my disappointment, it was Grandpa. I figured
if that went well, maybe I would apologize to Mom for the way I’d acted. The ninety
minutes of silence in the car ride over had made the trip seem so long that the thought
of enduring an equally silent ride home was almost unbearable.

I was about to tell Grandpa the story when I caught sight of their Christmas tree.
It was unlike me to not have already noticed it and done a thorough investigation.
There were only a few presents under it.

Grandpa caught me looking. “You know Grandma doesn’t put them there.”

I was lost in thought, and I barely heard what Grandpa had said. I turned back to
face him. “What?”

“Grandma. She thinks that you and I take sneak peeks at the presents, so she won’t
put them under the tree anymore. She hides them.”

“Why would she think that?” A slight smile involuntarily took hold of my face. I wasn’t
as experienced at lying as Grandpa was.

“I have no idea.” Grandpa’s face gave nothing away.
“But I do know this: If pirates hid their treasure the way Grandma hides her presents,
they’d have all gone bankrupt. I’m getting socks and a new tool belt.”

I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. “What about me? What am I getting?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Eddie. I do know that you have some pajamas coming, but she hasn’t
even wrapped them. I think she’s just going to put them in your dresser.” Grandpa
looked away. “But other than that I couldn’t find any of yours. Say, would you mind
helping me bring in some more firewood?”

“No, I don’t mind.” It was really hard to say no to my grandfather and impossible
to do it twice in a row.

We trudged through what was left of a sloppy, wet snow to a long stack of firewood.
I caught myself enjoying my attempts to completely hide my footprints inside my grandfather’s.
It wasn’t hard; his feet seemed to be about three times bigger than mine.

“Grandpa,” I whispered, “what do you mean you couldn’t find my presents?”

Grandpa ignored my question as he piled sticks of
wood into my cradled arms, making sure to add one more than I could comfortably carry.
He tucked a single piece under his arm, stuck his hands in his coat pockets, and followed
me back to the house.

“
There
you are,” Grandma said as she opened the door for me. “We were beginning to think
you two got lost.”

Grandma knew better than anyone that Grandpa
never
got lost. Sure, he usually wasn’t where everyone else thought he should be, but Grandpa
always knew where he was and, more importantly, why he was there.

Grandpa winked at me. “What do you mean, dear? Eddie and I were just getting some
wood.”

“I thought maybe you’d gone into town without telling us,” she said with a smile.

Whenever I’d visit, Grandpa looked for any excuse to take me into town. He could turn
the simplest errand into an adventure in finding the gray area between the letter
and spirit of Grandma’s law. A few summers earlier, Grandma asked him to go to the
hardware store to pick up some new bags for the vacuum cleaner, and I tagged along.
Instead of going to the one that was about ten minutes
away, Grandpa drove us all the way to the far end of town to another hardware store.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out why: This particular store happened to have
a soft-serve ice cream counter in the back.

We got back three hours later. Grandma didn’t even have to ask what happened; our
ice cream mustaches gave us away. But before she could say a word, Grandpa pulled
the vacuum bags out and gave her a big hug. It was really hard for anyone ever to
be mad at him.

A smile crept across my face as I thought about that trip.

Mom was standing behind Grandma, wearing one of her gingham aprons. She saw me smile,
and she smiled back.

As only a twelve-year-old could, I stupidly put up another wall and acted as though
I wasn’t ready to give in yet.

I looked right past her.

If Grandpa was the king of telling stories, the dinner table was his court. It was
always fun, but since Grandma made
us wait to open our presents until after dinner, Grandpa tried to keep his stories
shorter than usual on Christmas. He wanted to get to the tree just as much as I did.

This year Grandpa seemed to be in an exceptional hurry. Mom and I knew he was up to
something, but neither of us could figure out what it was. Finally, about halfway
through dinner, Grandma apparently had had enough of his fidgeting. She turned to
him and whispered, “Tomorrow, Edward.” Grandpa’s face revealed his disappointment.

After the coffee was poured we all filed into the family room. Grandpa sat in his
storytelling chair, Mom and Grandma sat on the couch. I went right to the tree. I
was given the Santa hat; as usual, I was the designated present distributor. I got
right to work.

“Here you go, Grandpa,” I said as I brought him a present that was suspiciously light.
Light as socks,
I thought to myself. Grandpa winked at me as I put the box by his feet.

Each time I went back to retrieve another box from under the tree I secretly hoped
to find my name written
on the tag—but it happened only twice. Even Mom had three presents.

I slowly started to unwrap my first gift when I noticed that the piece of tape sealing
one of the end flaps had a slight bubble in it. Grandpa. I looked up to give him my
version of the “I know what you did” look, but he ignored my glare and concentrated
intently on his present.

Given the size of my two presents, I knew that neither would contain a bike, but I
still held out hope—just as I had before opening my sweater earlier that morning.
What if Grandpa wrapped up a picture of a bike?
I would never put anything past Grandpa’s imagination, but I had to admit that it
seemed like a stretch at this point.

“Socks!” My thoughts were interrupted by Grandpa’s overly excited scream from across
the room. Gosh, he was good at this.

While most people on television tear off the wrapping paper, crinkle it up into a
ball, and throw it into the trash bag across the room, we always had to open the packages
slowly and carefully so that we could reuse the paper the following year. I think
my mom and grandmother were
secretly in a game to see which one of them would be the first to be unable to salvage
the paper anymore. This year each of their gifts had been wrapped in paper that was
only two years younger than I was.

While I always hated the whole paper-saving process because it slowed down the present
opening, it did help cover up any mistakes that Grandpa and I might’ve made during
our “previews.” If we’d accidentally torn a bit of paper or ripped a piece of tape,
it could always be blamed on the mandatory recycling program.

I picked up one of the boxes that had my name on it. It wasn’t even wrapped. I slowly
pulled the ribbon off, lifted the top, and pushed the tissue paper out of the way.
My heart was racing with anticipation. If anyone would wrap up a clue to a scavenger
hunt that would end with a bike, it was my grandfather.