All She Ever Wanted (8 page)

“Well, you never know…” she said, giving me her dimpled smile. “Maybe he’ll come this year.”

I wasn’t holding my breath.

I had been attending Sunday school regularly with May, and I decided to go to the Christmas program with her on the Sunday night before Christmas. She played baby Jesus’mother, Mary, in the pageant—a wonderfully poignant and dramatic performance. When the innkeeper turned her away, sending her to the stable to sleep, May got so carried away with her role that she wept real tears and asked, “Can’t we even come in for a drink of water?”

The innkeeper wasn’t the experienced performer that May Elizabeth was; he shook his head and said, “No! That isn’t in the script.”

May was outraged. “You’d better not get leprosy,” she yelled, “because I’ll tell Jesus not to cure you!”

I wasn’t very familiar with the original version of the story, so I thought the altercation was quite gripping. The rest of the audience found it hilarious.

After the program, the Sunday school superintendent passed out candy and oranges to all the kids, and Miss Trimble gave everyone in our class a present. Mine was a necklace with a little gold cross on it. I couldn’t seem to keep the tears out of my eyes when I thanked her for it, especially when she patted my hand and said, “Jesus loves you, Kathleen.” Her eyes looked a little watery, too, but it might have been because she was old.

The church looked so pretty with all the decorations and colored lights that I made up my mind to ask Daddy if we could buy a Christmas tree for once. I sat down beside him on the couch when I got home from the pageant, and he got very quiet when I showed him my new necklace. May Elizabeth had helped me put it on, and I’d already decided that I would never, ever take it off.

“That’s real pretty,” Daddy said. “Looks like good quality, too. It shouldn’t turn your neck green.” His words were meant to reassure me, but I was so alarmed at the thought of my neck turning as green as a Martian’s that I almost forgot what I wanted to ask him.

“Can we get a Christmas tree this year, Daddy?”

He sighed. “A tree is only half the problem. We’d need lights and decorations and all that malarkey… and then people might expect to find some presents underneath it, too. No, we don’t have that kind of money, Kathy. Things are pretty tight, right now.”

I was disappointed but not surprised. If we did get a tree, Poke and JT would probably demolish it faster than you could say “Kris Kringle.” And what good was a tree without any presents? But later that night, after Daddy and Uncle Leonard had polished off a six-pack of beer, he suddenly changed his mind.

“Get your coat on, Kathleen. I think I know where I can get a tree— and lights.”

We jumped into my uncle’s car, and Daddy let me sit up front with him. Our crummy neighborhood looked festive with a handful of Christmas lights twinkling and all the trash and junked cars buried under a layer of snow. We took the road to Bensenville for a ways, then turned off on a side road and headed out to the country where the farms were. As the houses and barns got farther and farther apart, Daddy slowed the car and turned off his headlights. My stomach began to make sickening little flips as we drove another mile in the dark.

“What do you think of that one?” Daddy suddenly asked, pointing to a little pine tree at the end of a farmer’s driveway.

He had lowered his voice to a near whisper, so I answered in a hushed voice, “Isn’t that someone’s front yard?”

“That tree has a nice shape to it, don’t you think? And see? It even has lights.” He pulled the car to a halt beside it and left the engine running.

“I don’t think those people will like us taking their tree, Daddy. …”

“Shh… Let’s listen a minute and see if they have a dog.” He opened the car door and stepped out, scanning the quiet farmyard, listening. “All clear,” he whispered. “Come on.”

He pulled an axe and a saw out of the trunk and motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t know what to do. Getting a Christmas tree had been my idea, so I could hardly back out now. Even so, I was pretty sure that whoever had decorated the row of trees and bushes at the end of this driveway had never intended for people to come along and chop one down. But I couldn’t disobey my father, could I?

I zipped up my coat all the way to my chin and tried to scrunch down inside it as I stepped from the car. The words to “Silent Night” kept playing over and over in my mind as I tried to summon the peace and contentment I’d felt in church earlier that night:
All is calm… all is bright. …

“Stick your hand through the branches, Kathy, and hang on to the trunk for me. Like this…” Neither of us wore gloves, and the pine needles pricked me like pins as Daddy guided my hands through the branches and showed me where to hang on. The trunk felt cold and sticky. “Try to hold it steady, honey. This should only take a minute.”

Daddy crouched down and started chopping away at the trunk of the tree. I wanted to burrow into a snowbank and hide. I kept my eyes glued to the farmhouse at the end of the driveway, waiting for the front door to burst open and a shotgun-wielding farmer to run out with his pack of snarling Dobermans.

… Sleep in heavenly peace. …
Why had I ever mentioned a Christmas tree?

“We’ve almost got it now,” Daddy said cheerfully. “Hang on tight.”

The trunk vibrated beneath my hands as he switched from the axe to the saw. My toes were starting to go numb.

Hur-ry up,
I silently sang to the tune of “Silent Night.”
Please, hurry up. …
I was afraid I might wet my pants.

“Wait!” Daddy said at the last minute, “the lights are still plugged in.”

He crawled around searching for the extension cords, and the lights abruptly blinked off—not only the lights on our tree but on all the trees and bushes to the left of it.

“Oops!” Daddy said, stifling a laugh. “Guess we’d better hurry!”

I wished he would stop saying “we.”

Daddy sawed as if he were in a race with Paul Bunyan, and suddenly the tree started to fall over, pulling me with it. “Daddy, help!” I squeaked. He grabbed hold of it just in time, saving the tree and me from crashing to the ground. He started to laugh, and it was such a rollicking, joyful sound that I couldn’t help giggling along with him. My laughter verged on the hysterical side at first, but once we’d finished stuffing the tree into the trunk of the car and had roared off down the road, I felt genuinely happy. We had a Christmas tree! With lights!

We were flying high, and my wonderful, happy-go-lucky daddy began to sing: “Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh. …”

I joined him on the chorus and we roared into Riverside with a Christmas tree bouncing in our trunk, singing at the top of our lungs: “Jingle bells, jingle bells… jingle all the way. …” We were still laughing and singing as Daddy carried his prize up the porch steps, and we crammed it through the front door.

“Merry Christmas!” Daddy crowed. He set the tree trunk down on the floor with a triumphant thump. Poke and JT started dancing around the tree like two little pagans. The commotion set Annie wailing.

“It’s covered with snow, Donald!” Mommy said. “You’re getting the floor all wet.” As if that would be a disaster in
our
house.

“How are you going to keep it up without a tree stand?” Uncle Leonard asked. “Or are you planning to stand there until Christmas is over?”

“It even came with lights,” Daddy said with a grin. “Plug them in, Kathy. Show everybody how nice it looks.”

I got down on all fours and groped around for the plug, then crawled over to the wall socket. It was already overflowing with wires and plugs and extension cords, and I hoped we wouldn’t blow a fuse. That was a regular occurrence at our house. I unplugged a floor lamp, just to be on the safe side, and a moment later our glorious tree sprang to life.

“Ta-da!” Daddy sang.

“The capitalists at the power company will be delighted,” Uncle Leonard said. “That’s why they invented this pseudo-holiday.”

I refused to let my uncle spoil this great moment. “Christmas is Jesus’birthday,” I told him.

“Then he must be a capitalist, too.”

Eventually, Daddy got tired of holding up the tree, and he and my uncle rigged a stand out of scrap lumber. It looked as dilapidated as everything else in our house, but at least we had a Christmas tree. It seemed like a miracle.

On Christmas Eve, an even bigger miracle happened. I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I heard someone knocking on our front door. My heart began to pound. If Santa Claus did decide to venture into our neighborhood, he would have to use the front door since we didn’t have a fireplace. I heard voices, and I crept out to the hall for a peek. It wasn’t Santa, but the man in our doorway was carrying an armload of brightly wrapped presents. I wondered if he was Santa’s bodyguard. Then I recognized the second man—the Sunday school superintendent—and he had an armful of presents, too.

“What’s all this?” Uncle Leonard asked. He had been getting ready for bed and had answered the door in his undershirt and boxers.

“Some presents for your children,” the superintendent said. “Merry Christmas!” The two men piled their packages beneath our stolen tree and left as quickly as they had come. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I had to pinch myself the way they do in stories to see if I was dreaming.

When I finally crept back to bed, Uncle Leonard was still standing in front of the tree in his boxer shorts, slowly shaking his head.

Spring brought flowers—and another stomach-churning crisis. The entire school had to undergo a head-lice inspection. Mrs. Wayne made everybody in our class line up and walk down to the nurse’s office in a single file. The nurse wore rubber gloves as she examined us one by one. When she lifted the hair on the nape of my neck with a wooden tongue depressor, I heard her gasp.

“Look here,” she told the high school girl from the Future Nurses’Club who had volunteered to help. “Those are
nits
!”

The future nurse leaped backward so fast that she tripped over the scale and brought it crashing to the floor with a loud clang. Charlie Grout, who stood in line behind me yelled, “Kathy has cooties!” and Mrs. Wayne’s orderly line dissolved in chaos. The boys hooted with laughter and the girls shrieked in fear as if the Russians were attacking us.

I was hustled home from school, thoroughly humiliated. They sent my brother Poke home with me. We slept in the same room and used the same comb and brush, so naturally we all got the same lice infestation. We were a perfect example of an equitable society with a free distribution of goods, just like Uncle Leonard wanted. Even Annie had lice in her matted snarl of hair.

Mommy gave the boys crew cuts, which solved their problems. I’d always worn my hair long, but she had to cut it all off and throw it into the burning can along with our comb and brush. When I glanced in the mirror, my hair looked as though Mommy had plopped a mixing bowl on my head and trimmed around it. Afterwards she scrubbed me down with a special shampoo that smelled terrible and burned like fire. It was powerful stuff. Then she wrapped what was left of my hair inside one of our threadbare towels for fifteen minutes to make sure all of the nits died. I’d seen photographs of the devastation that followed a nuclear explosion, and I was certain that my poor head would remain bald for the next fifty or sixty years from the fallout.

When the school officials finally allowed me to come back—following a preliminary inspection in the nurse’s office, of course—I learned that I had been rechristened. “Cootie Kathy… Cootie Kathy,” the boys chanted on the playground. The girls ran from me whenever I got too close, squealing, “Watch out! You’ll catch Kathy’s cooties!”

Nobody wanted me on her team in gym class. Anybody who had to stand in line next to me was careful to leave a wide buffer of uncontaminated space between us. All the kids who sat in neighboring desks scooted them away from mine until I looked like the sole survivor on a deserted island. I thought of Miss Trimble’s Sunday school lesson on lepers and wondered if I would have to shout, “Unclean!” for the rest of my life. Even May Elizabeth kept me at arm’s length.

“What’s it like to have cooties?” she asked, her eyes wide with fascination. “Can you feel them crawling around on your head?”

I walked away from her.

As I headed home from school at the end of that terrible week, May’s mother pulled her Cadillac to a stop alongside me and rolled down the window. “Kathleen, hop in a minute. I have something for you.” She gestured to the place beside her on the front seat. May Elizabeth sat safely huddled in the back.

I climbed in, careful not to let my head touch the car in case I still had a nit or two hiding in the stubble waiting to hop out and contaminate someone.

“Kathleen, honey, I heard that some of the other kids have been teasing you about having lice, and I wanted to tell you not to listen to them. You don’t need to feel ashamed about something that wasn’t your fault.”

I stared at my lap, nodding, unsure what to say.

“Here, this is for you. …” Mrs. Hayworth said. She handed me a Macy’s bag. Inside were two brand-new packages of barrettes and a little gift box with three bottles of pink liquid: one was shampoo, one was cologne, and one was hand lotion. They all smelled like strawberries. I gazed up at her, too moved to speak.

“You have beautiful hair,” Mrs. Hayworth told me, and she reached out to touch it, her bejeweled fingers gently caressing my head. A tear slipped down my cheek.

I knew how the lepers felt when Jesus touched them and made them whole again.

Chapter
8

O
nce school got out for the summer, I didn’t see May Elizabeth again until the fall. Her family went on vacations to exciting places every year and also spent time at their cottage on the Finger Lakes. And, of course, May and Ron spent a week or two at summer camp. I had to stay home and try to keep my brothers from killing themselves, each other, or the neighbor kids.

That was the summer Poke and JT convinced Charlie Grout’s little brother, Larry, that he was Superman and got him to fly off the roof of his house. Luckily, Larry survived with only a broken leg. And my brothers’feud with Mrs. Garvey began that year, too. Poke and JT, who were always hungry, stole produce out her garden and fruit off her trees as fast as it ripened. The resulting enmity rivaled the legendary battle between Peter Rabbit and Farmer McGregor—although I don’t think Mrs. Garvey would have actually baked them into a pie. When Mrs. Garvey called them “stinking little thieves” and chased after them with a hoe, they decided to get even by sticking the nozzle of her garden hose down her dryer vent and turning it on.