I'm a Stranger Here Myself (18 page)

When I left you last time, I was expressing a certain queasy foreboding at the thought that at any moment my wife would step into the room and announce that the time has come to get out the Christmas decorations.

Well, here we are, another week gone and just eighteen fleeting days till Christmas, and still not a peep from her. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

I hate doing the Christmas decorations because, for a start, it means going up into the attic. Attics are, of course, dirty, dark, disagreeable places. You always find things up there you don’t want to find—lengths of ominously gnawed wiring, gaps in the roof through which you can see daylight and sometimes even poke your head, boxes full of useless odds and ends that you must have been out of your mind ever to have hauled up there. Three things alone are certain when you venture into the attic: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped lavishly over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

When I was growing up, my friend Bobby Hansen had a secret stairway in a closet leading up to the attic, which I thought was the classiest thing ever. I still do, come to think of it, particularly as our house in New Hampshire, like all the other houses I have ever lived in, offers access to the attic only through a hatch in the ceiling, which means you have to get a stepladder out each time you want to go up there. Now the thing about putting a stepladder directly beneath an open attic hatch, I find, is that when it comes time to go back down you discover that the ladder has mysteriously moved about four feet toward the top of the hall stairs. I don’t know how this happens, but it always does.

In consequence, you have to lower your legs through the hatch and blindly grope for the ladder with your feet. If you stretch your right leg to its farthest extremity, you can just about get a toe to it, but no more. Eventually, you discover that if you swing your legs back and forth, rather like a gymnast on parallel bars, you can get one foot on top of the ladder, and then both feet on. This, however, does not represent a great breakthrough because you are now lying at an angle of about sixty degrees and unable to make any further progress. Grunting softly, you try to drag the ladder nearer with your feet but succeed only in knocking it over with an alarming crash.

Now you really are stuck. You try to wriggle back up into the attic, but you haven’t the strength, so you hang by your armpits. Plaintively, you call to your wife, but she doesn’t hear you, which is not just discouraging but inexplicable. Normally, your wife can hear things no one else on earth can hear. She can hear a dab of strawberry jam fall onto a white carpet two rooms away. She can hear spilled coffee being furtively mopped up with a good bath towel. She can hear dirt being tracked across a clean floor. She can hear you just
thinking
about doing something you shouldn’t do. But get yourself stuck in an attic hatch and suddenly it is as if she has been placed in a soundproof chamber.

So when eventually, an hour or so later, she passes through the upstairs hallway and sees your legs dangling there, it takes her by surprise. “What are you doing?” she says at length.

You squint down at her. “Hatch aerobics,” you reply with just a hint of sarcasm.

“Do you want the ladder?”

“Oh, now there’s an idea. Do you know, I’ve been hanging here for hours trying to think what it is I’m missing, and here you’ve figured it out straight off.”

“Do you want it or not?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then say please.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Say please.”

You hesitate, sizing up your position—which is not, in all candor, terribly strong—and say please.

“And who is the loveliest person in the universe?”

“Oh, don’t do this to me,” you beg. “I’ve been hanging here so long my armpits have a wood grain.”

“And who is the loveliest person in the universe?”

“You are.”

“Infinitely lovelier than you?”

“Infinitely.”

You hear the sound of the ladder being righted and feel your feet being guided to the top step. The hanging has evidently done you good because suddenly you remember that the Christmas decorations are not in the attic—never were in the attic—but in the basement, in a cardboard box. Of course! How silly not to have recalled! Off you dash.

Two hours later you find the decorations hidden behind some old tires and a broken baby carriage. You lug the box upstairs and devote two hours more to untangling strings of lights. When you plug the lights in, naturally they do not work, except for one string that startlingly, and in a really big way, goes WHOOOOMP! and hurls you backward into a wall with a lively jolt and a shower of sparks, and then does not work.

You decide to leave the lights and get the tree in from the car. The tree is immense and lethally prickly and impossible to grasp in any way that does not result in deep pain, loss of forward vision, and tottering imbalance. As branches poke your eyes, needles puncture your cheeks and gums, and sap manages somehow to run backward up your nose, you manhandle it to the back door, fall into the house, get up and press on, fall over, get up and press on. And so you proceed through the house, knocking pictures from walls, clearing tabletops of knicknacks, knocking over unseen chairs. Your wife, so recently missing and unaccounted for, now seems to be everywhere, shouting confused and lively instructions:“Mind the thingy! Not
that
thingy—
that
thingy! Oh, look out! Go left! Left! Not
your
left—
my
left!” Then eventually, in a softer voice, “Are you all right, honey? Didn’t you see those steps?”

By the time you reach the living room the tree looks as if it has been defoliated by acid rain, and so do you.

It is at this point that you realize you have no idea where the Christmas tree stand is. So, sighing, you hike up to town to the hardware store to buy another, knowing that for the next three weeks all the Christmas tree stands you have ever purchased—twenty five in all, one for each Christmas of your adulthood—will spontaneously reappear, mostly by dropping onto your head from a high shelf when you are rooting in the bottom of a closet, but occasionally taking up positions in the middle of darkened rooms or near the top of the hall stairs. If you don’t know it already, know it now: Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

While you are at the hardware store, you buy two additional strings of lights. These will not work either.

Eventually, exhausted in both mind and body, you manage to get the tree up, lit, and covered with ornaments. You stand in the posture of Quasimodo, regarding it with a kind of weak loathing.

“Oh, isn’t it
lovely
!” your wife cries, clasping her hands ecstatically beneath her chin. “Now let’s do the outside decorations,” she announces suddenly. “I bought a special surprise for you this year—a life-size Santa Claus that goes on the roof. You fetch the forty-foot ladder and I’ll open the crate. Oh, isn’t this fun!” And off she skips.

Now you might reasonably say to me: “Why put yourself through this annual living hell? Why go up to the attic when you know the decorations won’t be there? Why untangle the lights when you know from decades of experience that they have not the slightest chance of working?” And my answer to you is that you just have to. It is part of the ritual. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without it.

Which is why I’ve decided to make a start now even though Mrs. Bryson hasn’t ordered me to. There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.

If you need me for anything, I’ll be hanging from the hatch.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, when I was about eight years old my parents gave me a pair of skis for Christmas. I went outside, strapped them on, and stood in a racing crouch, but nothing happened. This is because there are no hills in Iowa.

Casting around for something with a slope, I decided to ski down our back porch steps. There were only five steps, but on skis the angle of descent was surprisingly steep. I went down the steps at about, I would guess, 110 miles an hour, and hit the bottom with such force that the skis jammed solid, whereas I continued onward and outward across the patio in a graceful, rising arc. About twelve feet away loomed the back wall of our garage. Instinctively adopting a spread-eagled posture for maximum impact, I smacked into it somewhere near the roof and slid down its vertical face in the manner of food flung against a wall.

It was at this point I decided that winter sports were not for me. I put away the skis and for the next thirty-five years thought no more about the matter. Then we moved to New England, where people actually look forward to winter. At the first fall of snow they cry out with joy and root in closets for sleds and ski poles. They become suffused with a strange vitality—an eagerness to get out into all that white stuff and schuss about on something fast and reckless.

With so many active people about, including every member of my own family, I began to feel left out. So a few weeks ago, in an attempt to find a winter pastime, I borrowed some ice skates and went with my two youngest to Occum Pond, a popular local spot for skating.

“Are you sure you know how to skate?” my daughter asked uneasily.

“Of course I do, my petal,” I assured her. “I have been mistaken many times for Peggy Fleming, on the ice and off.”

And I do know how to skate, honestly. It’s just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overexcited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of Occum Pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as twelve feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from under me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and I had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

“
Wow!
” said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. “That ice is
hard
.”

“Hey, let ME see,” cried my head and instantly down I went again.

And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extremities of my body—shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs—hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator. Eventually, when I had nothing left to bruise, I crawled to shore and asked to be covered with a blanket. And that was it for my attempt at ice skating.

Next I tried sledding, which I don’t even want to talk about, except to say that the man was very understanding about his dog, all things considered, and that that lady across the road would have saved us all a lot of trouble if she had just left her garage door open.

It was at about this juncture that my friend Danny Blanch-flower stepped into the picture. Danny is a professor of economics at Dartmouth and a very brainy fellow. He writes books with sentences like “When entered contemporaneously in the full specifications of column 5.7, profit-per-employee has a coefficient of 0.00022 with a t-statistic of 2.3” and isn’t even joking. For all I know, it may even mean something. As I say, he’s a real smart guy, except for one thing. He is crazy about snowmobiling.

Now, a snowmobile, as far as I am concerned, is a rocket ship designed by Satan to run on snow. It travels at speeds up to seventy miles an hour, which—call me chicken, I don’t care—seems to me a trifle fleet on narrow, winding paths through boulder-strewn woods.

For weeks Danny pestered me to join him in a bout of this al fresco madness. I tried to explain that I had certain problems with outdoor activities vis-à-vis the snowy season, and that somehow I didn’t think a powerful, dangerous machine was likely to provide my salvation.

“Nonsense!” he cried. Well, to make a long story short, the next thing I knew I was on the edge of the New Hampshire woods, wearing a snug, heavy helmet that robbed me of all my senses except terror, sitting nervously astride a sleek, beast-like conveyance, its engine throbbing in anticipation of all the trees against which it might soon dash me. Danny gave me a rundown on the machine’s operation, which for all I understood might have been a passage from one of his books, and jumped onto his own machine.

“Ready?” he shouted over the roar of his engine.

“No.”

“Great!” he called and took off with a flare of afterburners. Within two seconds he was a noisy dot in the distance.

Sighing, I gently engaged the throttle and, with a startled cry and a brief wheelie, took off with a velocity seldom seen outside a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Shrieking hysterically and jettisoning weight via my bladder with every lively bump, I flew through the woods as if on an Exocet missile. Branches slapped my helmet. Moose reared and fled. The landscape flashed past as if in some hallucinogen-induced delirium.

Eventually, Danny stopped at a crossroad, beaming all over, engine purring. “So what do you think?”

I moved my lips but no sound emerged. Danny took this as assent.

“Well, now that you’ve got the hang of it, shall we bang up the pace a bit?”

I formed the words “Please, Danny, I want to go home. I want to see my mom,” but again no sound emerged.

And off he went. For hours we raced at lunatic speeds through the endless woods, bouncing through streams, swerving past boulders, launching into flight over fallen logs. When at length this waking nightmare concluded, I stepped from my machine on legs made of water.

Afterward, to celebrate our miraculous intactness, we repaired to Murphy’s, our convivial local hostelry, for a beer. When the barmaid put the glasses down in front of us it occurred to me, with a flash of inspiration, that here at last was something I could do: winter drinking.

I had found my calling. I’m not as good at it yet as I hope to be—my legs still tend to go after about three hours—but I’m doing a lot of stamina training and am looking to have a very good season next year.