The House Without a Christmas Tree (4 page)

I pounded on the back door of the Carters' house with our special knock so Carla Mae would know it was me.

“I'm not ready yet!” I heard her yell from inside, so I went in to wait for her.

She was in the kitchen finishing up her breakfast, and the place was in its usual uproar. Her four-year-old sister, Debbie, was standing on a chair in front of the stove, frying an egg for her own breakfast. Minnie, their fat, black Scottie, was sitting on another chair at the table and finishing up somebody's leftover sausage. Two-year-old Tim came waddling through in his diaper, with his bottle firmly clenched in his teeth, and several other people of assorted sizes and shapes were in and out of chairs and under the table and all over the kitchen. The table was a hodgepodge of half-eaten food, three-wheeled trucks, one-eyed dolls and broken crayons, all in happy confusion. Carla Mae grabbed one last piece of sausage before Minnie could get to it, and pulled on her coat.

As we left I thought how different her family was from mine and how they seemed to be able to understand each other so much better than we did. I was feeling very depressed by the time we got into the school cloakroom and started struggling out of our heavy coats and galoshes. Then Jerry Walsh made a crack abut my grandmother, and that was the last straw. I clunked him right over the head with one of my wet galoshes, and a real fight got started.

Miss Thompson was there immediately.

“Stop that at once!” she said, and pulled us apart.

“She hit me first,” said Jerry in his whiny voice.

“You asked for it!” I said.

“He started it!” Carla Mae said, coming to my rescue. “He was making fun of her grandmother.”

“I was not,” said Jerry.

“You were so!” I answered.

“It's not my fault your grandmother's an old character!” he said.

“She is not a character!” I shouted.

“She looks like a nut, pulling that little red wagon!”

“It's my wagon, and she can pull it any damn time she wants!”

“Addie!” said Miss Thompson sternly. “There will be no swearing here.”

“She takes my wagon to the grocery store,” I explained to Miss Thompson. “She's too old to carry big, heavy bags.”

“Yeah,” said Jerry, snickering. “And when she wants Addie to come home she sticks her head out the window and blows a police whistle!”

“Sounds like a good system to me,” said Miss Thompson.

“It's nutty!” said Jimmy.

“Say that once more, and I'll punch you in the nose!” I snarled.

“Now, calm down, Addie,” said Miss Thompson with her hand on my shoulder. “You children don't seem to know the difference between a ‘nut' and a ‘character.' Come inside the classroom, and we'll talk about it.”

She started into the room with the others, and Jerry and I lingered behind, both hoping to get in the last word.

“You sure got up on the wrong side of the bed, you grump!” he said.

“You better button your lip, creep!” I hissed at him, hands on my hips. “I dare you to say one more thing to me.”

At that moment, Miss Thompson looked back to see what we were doing, and motioned us both to come into the room. We did, and I had the last word.

Miss Thompson talked to us about “nuts” and “characters,” and we all came to the conclusion that a nut was someone who was crazy, while a character was just someone who was different, like Thoreau or Columbus, and not a bad thing to be at all.

After our discussion, we practiced Christmas carols for the caroling we were going to do that night, and I had a sudden inspiration as we practiced. I told them that when we stopped at my house I wanted them to sing a certain carol that was my grandmother's favorite. The class agreed and we practiced it. I wondered how it would go over at home.

After school that afternoon, our committee for buying Miss Thompson's present trooped uptown to Main Street to do our shopping. The class had had the good sense to elect four girls—no boys, thank heavens—so I knew we would be able to choose something nice. Boys were so dippy to go shopping with. They always giggled and acted crazy if you tried to pick out something personal like bubble bath or dusting powder, and the year before there were boys on the committee, and they were going to buy Miss Thompson a horrible, dowdy wool shawl. They simply didn't understand glamour and good taste, and we had no use for them on a shopping trip. I don't think they minded at all.

The committee got into three separate snowball fights on the way uptown and had to stop and talk to a lot of people. It was one of those towns where you knew who lived in every house and recognized every car and said hello to everyone on the street. There was one doctor, one movie theatre, and five bars and five churches, which the people of Clear River found a nice balance of sin and salvation. We also had a weekly town newspaper, where it was big news if Mrs. Dinsley wallpapered her upstairs bedroom.

We decided to try shopping at the drugstore first, because Mr. Brady always had a good selection of gifts. We passed the IGA grocery on the way, and while the other girls went on ahead, I peeked at the price tags on the Christmas trees standing outside on the sidewalk. I was hoping that, since Christmas was so near, the prices might be reduced, but I saw that the trees were still too expensive for me to buy one from my allowance, especially after my Christmas shopping.

Our gift-buying committee looked at just about everything Mr. Brady had in the whole drugstore and couldn't agree on anything. I said I was nearly ready to give up and give Miss Thompson something practical like nose drops, and Tanya Smithers said that was the most disgusting thing she had ever heard of. I wanted to say, “Wait till you see the icky gloves I got for you,” but I didn't. I didn't want to spoil the surprise.

Mr. Brady suggested Evening in Paris cologne.

“She buys that all the time,” he said.

“We know,” said Carla Mae. We knew a lot of such details about Miss Thompson, because we came right out and asked her.

“We don't want to give her stuff she buys herself!” I said, annoyed at everyone's lack of imagination. We turned down a comb and brush set and a manicure set and bubble bath and a brooch shaped like a Christmas tree. Mr. Brady's suggestion of a curling iron just made us laugh, because we all knew Miss Thompson had naturally curly hair. I explained to Mr. Brady that that was why her hair style looked like Betty Grable's.

We told him we had four dollars and twenty-five cents to spend, and he said he thought he had something we might like, though it was a bit expensive. Then he got a box down from a high shelf and brought out the most beautiful thing we had ever seen—a fabulous jewelry box made of deep blue mirror-glass.

“Zowie!” I said. “That looks like something a real movie star would have on her dresser!”

“Yeah,” sighed Carla Mae. “Betty Grable would like that!”

Mr. Brady lifted the lid, and the box began to play “The Blue Danube.” We all stared at it goggle-eyed. It was lined with pale blue velvet. We wanted it.

“How much is it?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer.

Mr. Brady turned the price tag over, and I saw that it read $5.95. I started to tell him we couldn't afford it when he pulled out a pencil and crossed out the $5.95 and wrote in $4.25.

“Been meaning to put this thing on sale for some time now,” he said. “Glad I remembered to do it in time for Christmas.” We all smiled at him, and he smiled back, and we took the box and carried it very carefully home and wrapped it.

After supper, we met to go caroling, and in a half-hour we came by my house, where Grandma was making hot chocolate for us. We all came into the kitchen, stomping the snow off our boots and unwrapping our mufflers. As soon as we could get out of our boots, we all went into the living room, blew our noses and got ready to sing. I stepped forward and said, “Now we're going to sing a special request.” I didn't say it was Grandma's special request, as I had told the class. In fact, it wasn't her request at all.

Dad was settled in his chair, and Grandma in her rocker as we began to sing. When Dad heard the first strains of “Oh, Christmas Tree,” he looked at me suspiciously, and I looked away. He knew what I was up to. We sang every verse, and it took quite a while. When I got up the courage, I looked over at Dad again, and I saw that he had a very sad look on his face and seemed to be far away somewhere, lost in his thoughts. I wondered if singing “Oh, Christmas Tree” had been such a good idea after all.

Chapter Five

The next morning at breakfast, Dad, Grandma and I were careful not to mention the words “Christmas” or “tree” to each other. We seemed to have made a momentary truce, and breakfast was proceeding as usual. Dad was telling me a lot of things I didn't think were important, about sitting up straight and getting your elbows off the table, and I was telling him a lot of things he didn't think were important, about what we were going to do at school that day, and Grandma wasn't paying any attention to either of us because she was trying to get a pancake all the way from the stove to the table without putting it on a plate. She would pick it up from the skillet with her spatula and then whirl around and try to get it to land on somebody's plate instead of on the floor. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

Grandma always did everything the hard way, which was just her nature. She would rather risk dropping the pancakes than dirty another dish. She saw that as her kind of individualism, but my dad found it very irritating, and I thought it was just plain funny. The three of us seldom had the same reaction to anything. As I look back on it now, I see that our differences had a lot to do with enriching my life, but at the age of ten, I saw them only as the cause of all my troubles.

A pancake hit the floor just then, and Grandma gave a little snort of a laugh and stomped her foot on the floor as though to punish herself for missing the target.

“Whoopsie!” she said, and flung the fallen pancake halfway across the kitchen and into the sink. My dad always said she would have been a heck of a shortstop, but this morning he didn't find her slapdash way of doing things very amusing.

“If you don't hit my plate with one of those pretty soon,” he said, “I'll have to leave for work without my breakfast.”

“Here, Dad, you can have one of mine,” I said, and started to scrape one off my plate onto his.

“No!” said Dad, and quickly put his hand protectively over his plate. “I wouldn't touch one of those with a shovel. The way you eat, Addie, you'll be lucky if you live past ten.”

That was his clever way of saying that he didn't approve of what I put on my pancakes—peanut butter and jelly.

“I'm the tallest person in the fifth grade, so I guess I'm eating OK,” I said. “And there's really no reason why a person shouldn't put peanut butter and jelly on pancakes. After all, they're made of flour, just like bread, and you put peanut butter and jelly on bread, don't you?”

“I don't! And I don't want any lectures on what pancakes are made of either. I've been eating them all my life. When I can get 'em, that is,” he said, and looked meaningfully at Grandma.

“Comin' up!” shouted Grandma, like a short order cook, and spun around and shot one in the direction of his plate. It landed half on his plate and half on the oilcloth, and she looked quite satisfied with that. Dad just shook his head silently and slid the pancake onto his plate, and I pressed my lips together hard to keep from laughing.

After Dad left for work, Grandma managed to aim a couple of pancakes at her own plate and sat down at the table. I took my plate to the sink, and she noticed for the first time what I was wearing—my usual costume of jeans and red flannel cowboy shirt with green piping around the collar. I had put green rubber bands on my pigtails to match the green trim on my shirt, and I thought that was Christmasy enough for anybody the last day before Christmas vacation. Grandma didn't agree.

“You're not going to school like that the last day before vacation!” she said. “This is the day you open presents in your class. You ought to wear something good. Go put on your red plaid circle skirt and red sweater.”

I knew from experience I would never win an argument about clothes with Grandma, so I groaned a lot and dragged myself into our bedroom and changed. I hated wearing skirts because I had to wear old-fashioned heavy cotton stockings that were held up by a horrid garter belt.

In the wintertime, Grandma always made me wear “snuggies” and warm cotton undershirts, and when they were combined with garters and long stockings, I felt miserably uncomfortable and tied up. I was gangly and skinny, and I hated having my knobby knees sticking out from under my skirt. Besides, it was cold. I made a horrible face at myself in the mirror as I dressed.

I finally got into the whole get-up, right down to my sturdy brown oxfords, which I wore every day. I was never allowed to wear tennis shoes or penny loafers or, what I wanted most of all, cowboy boots, because they would “ruin” my feet. The only other shoes I had besides my sturdy oxfords were my black patent leather Mary Janes, which I wore to church on Sunday. Then I had to take them off right away when I got home, because even Mary Janes would ruin my feet.

I never knew why so much time was spent worrying about feet, except that my father had been rejected by the army in World War I because he had flat feet. When he went back to school, he was the only boy left in the class, and he had been so embarrassed that he dropped out in the eleventh grade. I, however, didn't plan to go into the army, so I didn't see what difference it made if my arches were high up or flat as a pancake. But then, grownups always had a lot of strange ideas. At the shoe store in Omaha, the man put your foot in a weird machine, and then you looked down through a scope of some sort, and in the middle of this screen filled with green light, you could see the bones of your foot—your own foot skeleton wiggling around—and the man could tell you if your feet were getting ruined and if you needed a bigger size this year. I seemed to need a bigger size about every six months.