Suncatchers (62 page)

After another failure at arranging in order the events of his first month in Derby, Perry stopped trying and reminded himself of the different ways there were to enjoy a picture book—in fact, of the way he used to modify picture books as a child, once the novelty of the story had worn off. He remembered the time as a little boy when he had shown Beth his trick of opening the book anywhere and starting a brand-new story from the picture, then flipping to another page and extemporizing the next part of the story. Beth had been horrified. She had fixed him with an indignant glare and plugged her ears. “That's
not
the right story!” she had shouted, and he had protested, “No, it's a
new
one.” And Beth had gone to tell their mother, who said she had a headache and they were making too much noise. Perry thought she may have even taken the book away and put it on a high shelf.

But anyway, somewhere during adulthood, he realized now, he had almost forgotten that you didn't have to proceed through the pages of a book in order. You could skip around. Or even do like Dinah used to do. She always looked through magazines from back to front. After this, he allowed his mind to wander around Derby, sauntering from memory to memory, disregarding chronology. He felt as if the time started going a little faster after this, though each time he checked his watch, he couldn't believe such a few short minutes had passed. He even wondered at one point if maybe the battery of his watch was weakening, but the radio confirmed the time.

Occasionally, things he saw along the interstate began triggering memories about Derby so that gradually the two levels of his thinking merged into one. Near Knoxville when he passed a sleek Thunderbird, for example, with a tiny pair of baby shoes dangling from the rearview mirror, he thought at once of the pair of cheap fuzzy dice he had received at the White Elephant gift exchange the previous Sunday night. Everybody had roared with laughter, and Phil Spivey had shouted, “I used to have a pair of them in my red fifty-seven Chevy!”

Eldeen had gone into convulsions of laughter when she opened her White Elephant gift—a book titled
Nickel Savvy
. The subtitle was
All You Want to Know about the 300,000 Uses of Nickel
. “Three hundred thousand!” she had said. “My stars, I didn't know there was but one!” After she had quit laughing, though, she spent a good while looking through the book, and on the way home from church she had talked at length about nickel's resistance to corrosion and its usefulness in electroplating, a process she tried to explain until Jewel said, “That doesn't make sense, Mama. I'm afraid you lost me.”

Jewel's gift had been a coffee mug bearing a picture of a dark-skinned native with a huge disk in his lower lip and the caption “Keep a stiff upper lip.” Eldeen had looked up from her
Nickel Savvy
book and laughed along with everyone else, but then sobered and said, “You know, there's really lots of folks in the world who
do
look like that, sad to say. I've seen pictures in magazines of the awfulest things stuck in their noses and ears, stretching them all out of shape ever' which-a-way, and their bodies all painted up wild and scars all over from their wicked pagan knives.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “And you just
know
most of 'em's never heard the first word about Jesus. Not the first word.”

Joe Leonard's White Elephant gift had been a tiny mirror with a little battery that played “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” whenever someone picked it up by its handle. Willard had gotten a sickly green glow-in-the-dark rubber ghost. “That's from me!” Bernie Paulson had bellowed. “I got it on sale after Halloween!” Sid Puckett had gotten a tube of yellow “mood lipstick” that was supposed to change colors and adjust itself to your disposition once you put it on, and Trudy Gill had gotten what looked like a canister of potato chips that ejected a dozen or so wiggly rubber snakes when opened.

When Perry had realized that Sunday afternoon that he didn't have anything for the White Elephant exchange, he had walked through the house looking for something he could give. He had seen several items of Beth's that would meet the qualifications for the gift perfectly. According to the announcement in the bulletin, it was supposed to be “anything useless, tacky, outdated, and/or ridiculous.” The lava lamp on a shelf in Beth's hall closet would have been great, as well as an old record album of a group called “Arabella and the Ding Dongs” or the plastic daisy clock on the kitchen wall. The ugly plaid couch would have worked, too, except the bulletin had also stipulated that the gifts be small and “easily transportable.” Just as Perry had been ready to wrap up a box of Band-Aids decorated with Disney characters, which he had mistakenly picked up instead of plain ones at the drugstore, he had thought of something.

He had walked into the living room and looked at the musical snow globe on the small table beside the front door. It had been sitting there since February, and every Saturday Joe Leonard had faithfully dusted it off when he came to clean Perry's house. Perry picked it up and turned it upside down. The broken figure of the little boy floated up and swirled around amid the snowflakes. It landed on the housetop and slid off onto the ground beside the snowman. A person could make a game out of it, Perry thought. He turned it upside down again to see if he could get the figure to settle in the branches of the bare tree on one side of the house. It took a few tries, but he did it. Landing it in the tree could be five points, balancing it on the chimney of the house could be ten, and so forth.

As he stood there studying the small boy lying sideways in the tree, Perry realized he hadn't held the snow globe for many months, and he marveled at his lack of feeling for this memento he had been so careful to confiscate when he left Rockford. What had happened? During his first few days in Derby back in February, he had been unable to look at the snow globe without feeling a choking sensation. The few times he had made the mistake of turning it upside down, he had felt physically ill, as if someone had just flipped
him
upside down and shaken all his feelings about. Hearing the tune had been like a painful rehearsing of his failures. But somehow he knew that the snow globe belonged to another era now, and he wasn't sure why. It wasn't as if anything had changed really. He was still the estranged husband, the absent father, the exile from home. When, he wondered, had the snow globe ceased to claim his attention? Why did it no longer evoke the same responses? Was it simply because it was broken that he now felt what could only be described as a mild repugnance for it?

So two of the adjectives for the White Elephant gift clearly fit the snow globe—
useless
and
outdated
. And even
ridiculous
, with the little figurine stuck in the tree. In the hall closet Perry found a box, quickly put the snow globe inside, and used the Sunday comics for wrapping paper.

Libby Vanderhoff had been the one to end up with it. He recalled the confused look on her face as she had pulled it out of the cardboard box it was wrapped in. She had held it up at eye level and stared in awe. “Look, it's got a knob underneath,” she had said to her husband, Earl. She had turned the knob, a hopeful crease in her brow, and everyone grew quiet as “Winter Wonderland” began playing.

“Who brought this?” Libby had asked, looking around the circle of happy faces.

“Isn't that yours, Perry?” Eldeen said loudly, and everyone turned to look at him. Perry felt his face grow warm as he nodded.

“But . . . but it's too
nice
,” Libby Vanderhoff had said. “It still works and everything.”

“It's broken,” Perry said shortly. “There's a loose piece inside.”

“You call that broken?” Earl Vanderhoff said. He took the snow globe from his wife and peered inside, then turned it upside down and examined the wooden base. “I believe I might could fix that,” he said. “It's gonna take some doing, but I got me some epoxy that'll hold anything.” He ran his finger around the bottom of the glass globe. “The hard part's going to be getting inside there,” he said. He scowled with concentration, biting down on his lower lip.

“Well, if anybody can do it, Earl can!” cried Eldeen. “Now me, I'd end up spilling all the water out and there'd go all them little sparkly snowflakes.” Turning to Perry, she said, “Earl's the best handyman you ever did see! Once he fixed a cuckoo clock of Marvella's, and it's worked ever since.”

“All it needed was some oil,” Earl said.

“Well, anyway,
I
couldn't of done it to save my life,” Eldeen stated. “Mark my words, Perry, Earl's going to have that little feller fastened down inside of there before tomorrow's done! And then it'll be like new. I sure wish I had of said something the first time I ever saw it. I should of told you then about Earl's handy way of fixing things.”

Perry shrugged. “Oh, it's all right,” he said to Eldeen. “It's not really anything I'm attached to. In fact, I was looking for an excuse to get rid of it really.”

Louise Farnsworth was holding the snow globe now, admiring it volubly in her breathy voice. Grady Ferguson was telling Harvey Gill about one his daughter had brought back from Germany, and Vonda Snyder asked Louise to wind it up again so they could all hear the song. Perry heard Fern Tucker say, “I can't
believe
anybody would give that away!” and Nina Tillman said, “I wonder if he knows how much those cost in the stores.”

Perry wished he had thought this through more carefully beforehand. “It's not the crown jewels, for pete's sake,” he wanted to say. Of course, if he had been told how the gift exchange worked, that they would all be sitting in a huge circle watching everyone open gifts one by one, he would certainly have brought the Disney Band-Aids instead. He might have known these people would make a big deal out of something like a musical snow globe, even a broken one—or, maybe,
especially
a broken one. It would go right along with their obsession with broken hearts, broken spirits, broken wills, broken loaves, broken pitchers, broken walls of partition. “Broken Vessels”—hadn't that been the title of one of Brother Hawthorne's sermons a couple of months ago?

He felt a sudden tingle of panic. Although Perry thought it highly unlikely that Earl really could remove the base without breaking it, manage to keep the water and snow from sloshing out, glue down the broken figurine, then put it all back together,
what if he did?
Would such an act place some tacit demand on Perry—to repair his life, for instance, to pick up the broken pieces of his home, to figure out what he really did believe about God? On the one hand, he longed desperately to do exactly that, to pry his life apart and anchor things down, to oil it and make it run smoothly, then put it all back together again. But on the other hand, he feared that he never could. It was too big a job, and certainly not one he could do alone. He shot a glance at Brother Hawthorne, seated farther down the circle next to Edna, waiting his turn to open the bright red-foil gift in his lap. What did the pensive look on his face mean? Was he thinking right now of a way to use the broken snow globe as a sermon illustration?

Stop reading meanings into everything, Perry told himself. That's what women do. And stop wrenching symbols out of everything. That's what preachers do. He took a deep breath and looked on around the circle. No one else seemed to be drawing any connection between the imperfect snow globe and Perry's personal life. He relaxed and watched Louise Farnsworth pass the snow globe down to Barb Chewning, who passed it on to Marjorie Eckles and then to Eldeen. Eldeen held it in her large palm and stroked the glass dome gently, as if it were the bald head of an especially charming baby.

“My, my, my,” she said, her deep voice tender and husky. “I'd forgot just how pretty it was.” Then she turned her sunken eyes on Perry and said earnestly, “I
know
it can be fixed up.”

Somewhere between Knoxville and Lexington, Perry turned on the radio again. “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was being sung by either a mature child or an immature adult, he couldn't tell which. Although he had heard the song every Christmas for as far back as he could remember, the words had never struck him as they did now. According to that song, Santa Claus wasn't really the nice guy he was cracked up to be. Watch your conduct, the song was saying, because Santa is spying on you. You'd better be good even when you're sleeping or else he'll cross you off his list.

What did that remind him of? It was something he'd heard not long ago. In a sermon maybe? Yes, of course, that was it. Brother Hawthorne had been talking about false perceptions of God, how some people see God as a big snoop, lurking around corners, peering between the cracks in blinds, gleefully rubbing His hands together when He caught them doing something wrong, sadistically levying heavy punishments. “The God of the Bible isn't like that,” Brother Hawthorne had said. “The desire of His great heart of love is to bless and reward us. True, He often allows us to suffer, but the God that I know from this book”—he had held up his Bible reverently—“is a wise and kind Shepherd. When the sheep of His pasture walk through dark valleys, He goes before them with His staff of love.”

A small Honda Civic whizzed past Perry, its backseat and rear window crammed with gifts. He wondered if he would get to Rockford before Dinah and Troy opened their gifts. Or maybe they already had. What if Dinah . . . but he stopped himself.

He thought of the gifts he had taken over to Jewel's before he left Derby. He had planned, of course, to present them on Christmas Day, but when he decided so suddenly to drive to Rockford, he had called and asked Joe Leonard to help him carry the jelly cabinet from his kitchen to Jewel's. When he came back a few minutes later with the other gifts, he had found Eldeen hunched over the cabinet, her face in her hands. She had looked up at Perry, her lined face distorted with joy, and had lumbered toward him with both arms outstretched. As she embraced him, he suddenly remembered how long it had been since he had felt a woman's arms around him. Eldeen was surprisingly strong but soft, too, so that pressed against her Perry felt protectively cushioned. He felt her stiff gray hair brushing his cheek, smelled the faint odor of peppermint and talcum. He timidly raised his right arm and laid it lightly on her broad back. For several moments the only sound was her guttural crooning—“Mmm, mmm, mmm.” Then at last she relaxed her embrace and held him at arm's length, gripping him with her large solid hands. “You are a dear, precious boy,” she said, and once again her forehead puckered, her eyebrows drew together, and a pained smile spread over her face.