The House Without a Christmas Tree (2 page)

That seemed to happen a lot to my father and me. I could never figure out just what the trouble was. As far as I could tell, I talked in plain sentences. I was, after all, the smartest person in the fifth grade, and I was very good in English. But my father seldom understood what I
meant
. And he seemed to have the same trouble getting his ideas across to me. It was as if our words to each other passed through some mysterious spy code machine that made them come out all scrambled at the other end.

Sometimes I would look through the family photograph album and see pictures of him and my mother together in the ten years before I was born. They would be fishing or sitting in an old roadster or having a picnic, and there was even a funny picture of him all dressed up as the bride in a mock wedding. They seemed to have had fun then, but he was not like that when I knew him. I always wondered why he was so different to me than he seemed in those photographs.

As I finished buckling my big, black galoshes, I noticed Grandma standing in the doorway watching. She had that expression that always seemed to be half suspicion, half amusement. That was the way she looked when she knew I was up to something.

“You get something nice for Tanya, now,” she said.

I nodded my head, but made a face, and Carla Mae and I raced out the door.

The school was only two blocks away, but it took us a long time to get there. It had snowed in Clear River the night before, and the snowplow had pushed big ridges of snow up along both sides of the streets. We had to climb up on the highest piles and have a shoving contest to see who could stay on top longest. Soon some of the other kids walking back to school came by, and we had a full-scale King of the Mountain game going, with one person trying to stay on top of the pile and shove everyone else down. Only the King on top was allowed to use the snow clods for ammunition, but it was perilous to bend over and pick one up, because you were liable to a sneak attack of pushing from behind.

By the time the school bell rang, we were exhausted and sweating from the exertion, and we ran gasping toward the schoolhouse door, taking in great gulps of lung-searing, cold air. There was a long, narrow, dark cloakroom outside our classroom, and at this time of the day, all twenty-seven of us in the fifth grade seemed to be in there at once, giggling and shoving and struggling out of our snow-caked galoshes and wet wool, smelling like a steaming herd of goats.

If any fights were going to break out during the day, they almost always started here. There was something about that dank, crowded space that brought out the devil in everyone. Someone was always getting punched or kicked or bopped over the head with a book, and I was always getting my pigtails pulled, especially by Billy Wild.

I was standing on one leg like a stork, trying to pull off my left boot without pulling off my shoe and sock too, when Jerry Walsh gave Billy a big shove and pushed him right into me. I went sprawling on the floor, getting the seat of my blue jeans wet in the puddles of melting snow, and Jerry giggled and shouted, “Billy's beating up Addie!”

“You got me all wet, you dodo!” I shouted, and threw my boot at the two of them. Suddenly we heard Miss Thompson's high heels clicking across the varnished floor of the classroom in our direction. She was always on guard for fights in the cloakroom, and I quickly retrieved my boot and we all stood up and looked very busy at neatly hanging our coats on the hooks along the wall. Miss Thompson gave us a little smile that said she knew better, and we all filed quickly into the classroom.

Our class Christmas tree was in the corner by Miss Thompson's desk. It was over seven feet tall and loaded down with all the ornaments that we had been making in art class for the last month. It had colored paper chains; strings of cranberries and popcorn; stars, bells and candles of colored construction paper trimmed with glitter and silver foil we had saved from gum wrappers and our fathers' cigarette packages; lacy white snow-flakes cut from folded paper and even a string of lights Miss Thompson had brought from home. Underneath were most of the presents that we would open that Friday.

I thought it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen and would have been happy with one half that size. I started thinking then about some dramatic approach to use on Dad that night.

Chapter Two

Miss Thompson called us to order as the afternoon bell rang and reminded us that our presents for the class present exchange must be under the tree by Friday morning. I had been elected to the committee to buy Miss Thompson a gift, and we planned to shop for it the next day.

We all adored Miss Thompson, and she adored us right back. At least we thought she did. She was tall and pretty, with dark hair worn in a style just like Betty Grable's, the famous movie star. Of course Betty was blonde, and Miss Thompson was a brunette, but we didn't think the comparison was strained.

All Miss Thompson's suits and dresses had fashionable padded shoulders, and the seams of her stockings were always straight. She wore Evening in Paris cologne and always had nice corsages of artificial flowers on her lapels. Miss Thompson tried not to play favorites with any of us, but I was pretty sure she especially liked me, and I spent a lot of time after school helping clean up and smacking blackboard erasers together out on the fire escape.

“We don't want anyone to be left out of the gift exchange,” Miss Thompson was saying, “So remember that Santa Claus will be here Friday.”

We all giggled, thinking it very funny to have a Santa Claus at our age. In fact, Santa would be played by Delmer Doakes, who was the chubbiest boy in the class, and Carla Mae's true love.

“Remember,” Miss Thompson reminded us, “the maximum you can spend for the person whose name you drew is fifty cents.”

“What's the minimum?” asked Delmer, being silly.

“Zero!” said Billy Wild from behind me.

Everybody giggled at his dumb joke, and I turned around and made a face at him.

“You're so parsimonious!” I said. It was a new word we had just learned in vocabulary that morning, and I was delighted to find an opportunity to use it so soon. I was very good in vocabulary, and always tried to use new words right away—especially if I could use them on Billy. He was always showing off his cowboy boots because he was the only kid in class with a horse. I would have given anything for a horse, but even getting a pair of cowboy boots seemed unlikely.

Billy made a face back at me and gave one of my pigtails a yank. It always annoyed him that I usually got better grades than he did. Whenever I got 100 on a test he would call me “teacher's pet,” and I would plot to get back at him the rest of the day. I knew I was the best student in the class, but I had been taught at home to be modest about it, so I took the attitude that my smartness was just an annoyance I had to put up with, like being born with freckles or six toes. I couldn't help it if I got good grades all the time, it just happened.

I knew if I didn't get straight A's, I would be in trouble with my father. My mother had been valedictorian of her high school class, and he expected me to live up to that. He hardly ever talked about her to me, but that was one thing he had told me. He had never finished high school himself, and I think he wanted me to make up for that too.

I got home right after school that afternoon, because Grandma had to fit my costume for the church Christmas pageant. I was playing the lead angel, and while I was busy wrapping foil around my coat-hanger halo, she was fitting my white angel costume. She had made it from an old sheet, sewed up on her sewing machine. She sat at the machine in the little bedroom we shared, and I stood on a kitchen chair in front of her so she could make the hem even all around. I turned around and around as we talked.

“You kids will be stopping by here tomorrow night to sing Christmas carols, won't you?” she asked.

“I don't know if we'll be here or not,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Why not?” Grandma asked, sounding surprised.

“Well, I'm ashamed to have them come here.”

“My glory! Why? You're not ashamed of your old grandmother, are you?” she asked.

“No! It's just … well, I'm ashamed we don't have a Christmas tree. We're probably the only people in town who don't.”

“If you don't come here and sing carols, your Dad is going to feel awful bad!” she said.

“It serves him right!” I said angrily. “I feel bad not having a Christmas tree!”

“Addie! Being vengeful is not Christian! What would Reverend Teasdale say if he heard you talk like that? I'll bet you wouldn't be playing the lead angel in the Christmas pageant.”

I gave a big sigh and went on fixing my halo. I knew the only reason I got to play the lead angel anyway was because I was the tallest and could hold the star of Bethlehem up higher than anyone else, but Grandma thought it was some kind of honor for good behavior, so I let her go on thinking that. She took churchgoing very seriously, and always insisted that I go to Sunday School and church and young people's Bible-study classes. She didn't go very often herself because she could no longer hear or see well enough to participate in the services, but she read her Bible faithfully every day.

When she was reading, she would push her thick glasses up on top of her head, hold her Bible just a few inches from her face and squint at it, sometimes through a magnifying glass. When she found a verse she particularly liked, she would get a stubby little pencil, which she sharpened with a paring knife, and scrawl the verse on a little scrap of paper. She would add that to all her other little scraps of paper. She was always cutting out recipes and patterns from the newspaper and little tidbits of information, four or five line stories that newspapers refer to as “fillers,” which she thought were the best part of the paper. It would be something about Bolivia producing 600,000 tons of coal last year or that the largest tomato in the world was grown by Mr. Jonas Phillips of Rhode Island.

She tried to keep all these scraps of paper in one place, in a cigar box on the floor near the sofa, but somehow they always found their way to other parts of the house. You never knew when you were going to suddenly be confronted with a verse from Isaiah or part of a Psalm or a recipe for chocolate meat loaf or a flash about Mr. Phillips' tomato.

My dad, who was terribly neat and organized, found this quite an irritation, but I rather liked it. I thought it was a pretty good way to get inspired in the middle of dusting under the bed—suddenly finding some message like, “Consider the lilies of the field.” In fact, I always wondered if Grandma didn't scatter her scraps around on purpose, as a kind of supplementary education project of her own. It would have been just like her, because she liked being in charge of everything, and when she couldn't do it one way, she would find another.

I took after her in that respect, and between the two of us, I guess we kept my dad on his toes. He often found himself not knowing quite what to expect next, caught between two rambunctious and unpredictable females.

I told Grandma then that I would think about our coming to the house to sing Christmas carols.

“You'd better come,” she said.

I didn't say anything for a few moments, as she worked on the hem.

“Why is Dad so parsimonious?” I asked suddenly.

“That's a pretty fancy word.”

“We learned it in vocabulary this week. It means stingy.”

“He's not stingy,” she said. “He's careful. He remembers what it's like to be poor. Folks had a bad time back in the Depression.”

“Well, he's not poor now! He has almost $6,000 in the bank!”

“How do you know?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“He was teaching me how to write a check, and he had all his papers out, and I saw the balance in his bankbook.”

“You shouldn't be so nosy about other people's business.”

“Well, I'd have to be blindfolded not to see it!” I said. “You know, the other kids think it's pretty peculiar.”

“What?”

“That we never have a Christmas tree in this house!”

“Just say we're going to Uncle Will's and sharing his tree.”

“That sounds so dumb.”

“You don't need to give a fig what others think,” she said. “Now, let's see how this looks.”

I twirled around on the chair. “How do you know angels dressed like this?” I asked.

“Tells in the Bible,” Grandma said. “If you paid attention in Sunday School, you'd know too.”

“It doesn't say they wore old bed sheets!” I said, twirling around some more.

“Stop fidgeting!” she said.

“I bet angels wore robes of pure silk!”

“Addie, will you stand still!”

“Do you think Dad might do it this year? Might buy me a tree?”

“Oh, yo!” she said, wearily. “I wouldn't nag him about it.”

“I don't nag. He never listens to me! I have to ask him everything a million times!” I said. “He doesn't care anything about me. He never pays any attention to me …”

Grandma looked at me disapprovingly. “He buys your food and clothes, don't he? Pays the doctor bills … all the bills in this house.”

“But he doesn't
talk
to me!” I said, trying to make her understand. “I'm a person too, you know. I like to be talked to.”

Grandma went on working on the hem, and I could tell she was hoping I'd give up the idea.

“You said Dad always bought my mother a tree. How come he wasn't stingy with her?”

“It was different then,” she said quietly. “They always spent Christmas Day at home. Now we go to Uncle Will's.”

“Do you think he might do it this year, though?”

“Well,” Grandma sighed. “I s'pose there's no harm in asking.”

I hugged her, thankful she was at least part way on my side. “OK! Tonight I'm going to implore him to buy a tree! Implore means beg, but it sounds better.”