Moondance

xtra Presents

by Tery Áine Griffin

Susan sips her wine and tries to concentrate on the sound of the minute hand moving around the face of the kitchen clock. It is not the same clock she learned to tell time on, with her father sitting where she sits now, finishing his coffee, smoking filterless Camels, his frown growing deeper as he watched the minute hand move. She'd studied that clock, unable to understand its language. "The numbers," he explained, pointing at the clock with his cigarette, "mean five minutes. Each little dot between the numbers, that's one minute. And," he finished loudly, "if many more minutes pass before your mother gets out here, sure we'll be late for Mass."

This is not the same clock; this is three or four clocks later, but it, like each one in between, hangs in the same spot on the kitchen wall. And Susan cannot hear the minute hand move, though she knows it makes a sound. She's heard it during family gatherings, when she'd lean against the sink below it. Mostly she's heard it late at night, when she'd sit at this table avoiding sleep, or lie in one of the bedrooms off the kitchen, waiting for sleep to come.

She refills her glass from the bottle on the kitchen table. The red wine is chilled and too sweet for her taste, but it is necessary. A glass and a half is what it takes to go into the living room behind her. If she stops listening to the clock, she can hear her older sisters. Margaret is arranging and rearranging the presents under the tree, sometimes exclaiming how very many there are, other times saying perhaps there should be more, perhaps she should check to be sure there is something for everyone, what does Hope think? Hope does not know. Hope rarely knows. Life happens to Hope; she sits looking a little confused while everyone moves around her, then the activity stops and she is asked for her opinion, for that is the way they have of including Hope, since she will not include herself.

"I don't really know," Hope says, "but it doesn't seem quite right."

Susan tops off her glass, screws the cap on the bottle, and returns it to the refrigerator. In the living room, she finds Hope settled into the recliner, the small amber ashtray from the cocktail table in her lap. Margaret is wedged between the radiator and the artificial Scotch pine, pushing at some packages near the wall. Margaret's hair is dyed a tasteful brown, but the caution and stiffness with which she moves in small places give her age away. "Susan, I was wondering . . ." Margaret turns to Susan and catches sight of the wine. Her voice takes on a chill Susan pretends not to notice. ". . . where you'd gone." Margaret has one highball at the beginning of each party or holiday dinner, then switches to cups of black coffee she calls high-test. Margaret sees no reason why she, or anyone else, should enjoy alcohol.

She makes the last of a series of adjustments that seem to Susan to make no difference whatsoever, then sits back on her heels and sighs. "What do you think?"

Susan looks to see if Hope will answer, but she has turned away from the tree and is shaking a cigarette from her tan vinyl case. Susan knows what will come next: Hope will tap each end against the back of her hand, balance the cigarette between her fingers for a moment, then squeeze the filter into an oval shape before putting it between her lips. Hope's style of lighting a cigarette mirrors their father's.

Susan examines Margaret's handiwork. It's just not Mama, she thinks. The old air-conditioner is in the window behind the tree; Mama would've had it removed at the first sign of cold weather. Margaret forgot to put the white drop cloth down, so the presents sit on the olive green rug. She has pushed Mama's portable TV out in front of the fireplace and turned the digital clock with the five-inch-tall numbers, "for an old lady's eyes," Mama had said, to the wall. And she has removed the throw covers from Mama's couch and draped a crocheted blanket, red with white snowflakes, over its back.

Susan crosses the room and turns the clock around. Nine-forty-four, it says, and she would bet it is still right; Mama was almost fanatical about her clocks. She studies the front of the tree. "Where's Dad's ornament?"

Margaret looks at her. "Dad's ornament?"

"The boot. The red Santa boot. Dad always left an extra present in it for me, a piece of candy or a pack of gum. So I'd have something to open as soon as I got up. It goes right here." She touches a green glass ball near the tree's center.

"Haven't seen it," Margaret says. "Maybe it's still in the box. How's the tree look?"

Susan moves a small blue pillow Margaret found God-knows-where out of the way, sits in the far corner of the couch, and looks at the tree. She wants to steal Hope's line--"I don't know. It doesn't seem quite right"--but she does not. That is not her place in this family. Susan is youngest; her job is, if at all possible, to agree. "Great," she says. She looks at Hope, who is lighting her cigarette. Susan leans back against the snowflake blanket. It smells of dusting powder and cedar; Margaret must have brought it from home. "It looks fine." Susan hates Christmas trees, has hated them for years. People drink too much and fall into them. And being alone in the house with one is like being all alone in the world. She looks away from the room and into her glass. "The kids will love it."

"Might as well light it up before we get ready for Mass, what do you think?" Margaret starts working her way out from behind the tree. Hope begins to rise, changes her mind, sits back down.

"No, not yet." From where Susan sits, she can't tell whether Margaret has replaced their mother's quiet white bulbs with her own multi-colored blinking ones; it was one of the things she threatened to do when, after their mother died last spring, Margaret announced she'd organize Christmas this year. Susan is not ready for the multi-colored blinkers. "Let's wait a while."

Margaret comes around to inspect the tree from the front. "Is something wrong?" She looks the tree up and down, backs off a few feet, checks it again.

Susan puts her wine on the table and crosses her legs under her. "I think I'll skip the Mass this year." Bad enough she'll have to survive the bunch of them trooping back here later: Margaret and her husband and kids, Hope and her husband, their brother Michael with his sons Josh and Abie, whom he is mostly trying to raise as Jews to keep a promise to his dead wife, and Uncle Joey, perhaps alone, perhaps with his wife Catherine, depending on how they are getting along this week. Another of Margaret's innovations, this stopping at their mother's house for pastry after midnight Mass.

"You're supposed to go to Mass. It's Christmas," Hope says evenly. She stares at the tree as if it will convince her of something.

"I'm supposed to tell the truth, too." Susan picks at the fabric on the arm of the couch. "And the truth is, I don't believe any of that stuff."

Margaret turns to Susan. "You be quiet." She moves to the chair nearest the tree and reaches for the box of Christmas ornaments they pulled out of their mother's attic.

"Or what?" Susan swirls the wine in her glass. It occurs to her that she's seen this done in movies; she laughs. "Wait. I know: you'll pray for me." Her sisters prayed for her the first time she came home roaring drunk; one of her standard jokes is that their prayers did not help her hangover. They prayed for her when they guessed she was sleeping with the nice young man with the dancer's body and tight blonde curls. They did not pray when her ex-husband took off; she felt from their silence they thought she somehow deserved to be left.

"You can use all the help you can get," Margaret says, and Hope nods along. "We all can."

"For all the good it does." Susan reaches for her glass and toasts Margaret, but Margaret is not watching. Susan suspects that her sisters pray more than her mother ever did. She can remember her mother's religious fervor, but it had cooled way back, before Susan's first communion.

"Where the hell is that adaptor?" Margaret rummages around in the ornament box. "Whatever happened to you anyway?" She pulls something out of the box, examines it, tosses it back in. "Didn't you used to want to be a nun?"

"That was Hope," Susan says. Hope adjusts the footrest on her recliner and laughs. It is the brittle sound Hope makes when she feels she is supposed to say something but does not know what the something might be. Susan thinks of a small girl in a pink dress when she hears it. "Maybe the same thing happened to me that happened to Mama."

Margaret stops digging and faces Susan. "And what was it you think happened to Mama?"

"I don't really know." Susan sits back against the blanket. The smell of cedar is oddly comforting. She thinks for a moment of the woods she liked to walk through in her teens. "I always thought Father Paul happened to Mama." Their father's brother Paul was the closest family member they could claim as clergy. His name was mentioned to the parish priest regularly, and at the first meeting with any new neighbor. Their father would chuckle quietly; he considered Paul one of his contributions to the family. "I always thought Mama changed after Paul left the priesthood." Susan sips her wine and is surprised by a sudden desire for a cigarette; it's been five years since she quit, and half that since she's wanted a cigarette.

Hope blows a smoke ring. "I never wanted to be a nun," she says. "Mama wanted me to be a nun. Mama told people I wanted to be a nun. I never wanted to be a nun."

"I never really knew why he did that, you know. I was pretty young." Susan puts her wine glass on the table and picks up the blue pillow. "All I can remember about the whole thing is a lot of whispering. Later, I heard all sorts of rumors from Aunt Catherine. First, Paul left to marry a woman from the parish, then something about a male lover, then something about an altar boy." She rubs the pillow, trying to adjust the nap to cover a worn spot. "After a while, I figured Catherine's rumors had to be more interesting than the truth." She arranges the pillow next to her on the couch. "Besides, whenever I asked Mama, she'd jump up and ask me if I wanted a cup of tea. Where'd you find this thing, anyway? I haven't seen it in years."

"In the attic, while you two were looking for the ornaments." Margaret retrieves a piece of red plastic from the box. "Is this that ornament of Dad's you were looking for?"

"Mama wanted Michael to be a priest, too," Hope says. She looks at Margaret, then at Susan. "She had that in her mind."

"Yeah, that's it." Susan crosses the room and sits on the floor in front of Margaret. She takes the plastic boot, looks into it, puts it to her nose to see if it smells like anything about her father. She blows dust and bits of tinsel out of it.

"Paul fell in love." Margaret pulls something brown from the box. "Here's the adaptor." She tucks the box between the table next to her and the tree. "No law against that. Though it's probably not the best move in the world for a Catholic priest."

"But that was all a long time ago." Hope crushes her cigarette in the ashtray.

"Mama never saw him again, did she?" Susan says. She watches Margaret reach over and remove the bulb from the lamp on the table, screw the adaptor into its place, then screw the bulb into the adaptor. "I remember she just sort of stopped going to the Rosary Society. She seemed to stop going to any church function that wasn't absolutely required. I don't think she really believed anymore. She was just covering her bases."

Hope leans over, dusts the cocktail table with her hand, and places the ashtray on it. "She believed," she says quietly.

"She used to tell me we had one too many uncles," Margaret says. "She never said Paul, but it must've been." She goes to the kitchen; Susan hears water running and the kettle scraping against the stove burner. "Anybody else want coffee?" she calls.

"You're supposed to go to Mass." Hope looks at Susan, then at the tree. "It's Christmas."

Susan laughs. "Too many uncles is right." She puts the Santa boot on the table. "But not Paul."

Hope raises the recliner's footrest and leans back. "What?"

"What about what?" Margaret walks through the door and past Hope. She sits in her chair and removes a strip of tinsel from her sweater.

"Joey." Susan sips her wine. "How many full-grown men do you know who go around being called Joey?" The pig, she thinks, then empties her glass. She notices that Margaret is looking at her; Hope is looking at her; Susan tries to remember whether she heard herself say pig. Neither seems upset, but both continue to watch her. She rolls the wine glass between her palms, wishing it wasn't empty. She decides that if she was thinking out loud she meant it, and if she was not, she meant it anyway. "The pig," she says, quietly but clearly.

Hope coughs. "Don't talk like that." She sits forward and the recliner's footrest bangs shut. "Joey's Mama's brother. He's family." She reaches for her cigarette case and pulls out another cigarette. She taps the ends, squeezes the filter, then removes her lighter from the pouch on the front of the case.

Susan looks at the tree, then back at Hope. "He's a pig."

Hope clicks her lighter, which does not catch. "He's your uncle." She takes the cigarette from her mouth. "If you ever needed help, you could go ask Uncle Joey and he'd help you in a minute."

Margaret pokes a foil-wrapped package with her foot. "Don't kid yourself; Joey still has the first dollar he ever made."

"He'd help you in a minute." Hope puts the cigarette back to her lips and flicks the lighter, then inhales. "Or Margaret. Or me. Who do you think you are, anyways? You always have something bad to say about everyone."

Susan laughs and sits forward on the couch. "He'd help himself is who he'd help. To whatever he wanted. Even if some of the things he wanted were wrong, Hope. Even if some of the things he wanted were so wrong the priest would never forgive him, never want to see him again, never want him near a church or a statue or an altar or children, especially near children . . ."

"Stop it." Hope says. "Stop it. You shut up."

Susan looks at the angel on the top of the tree. She hopes that, whatever else Margaret has done, she has not stuck a blinker inside that old angel. "I wasn't even fourteen."

Margaret moves to the floor. She examines the tree but cannot seem to find anything to change. She glances at Susan, then leans over and makes a few minor adjustments to the packages in front, the first ones the kids will see when they come through the door. "I was," she says. "Just. Sitting at the kitchen table after my fourteenth birthday party, trying to decide between another piece of cake and my ladylike figure." She wiggles the yellow stick-on bow on a package to be sure it is fastened securely.

"What?" Susan's glass falls over as she sits forward and reaches to put it on the table. "What did he do?" She tries to catch the glass as it tumbles over the edge, hits the rug, and begins to roll.

Margaret sits back on her heels and sighs. "Came up behind me and grabbed. First it was outside my blouse. Then inside. Sometimes I could stop him. Sometimes I couldn't." She reaches for the glass and hands it back to Susan. "I used to threaten to tell Mama."

"The bastard." Susan slams the glass on the table. "I thought it was me. I thought it was my fault. He said it was my fault. He said it was because I was bad. And you know, I always was. I mean I always thought I was. The nuns were forever sticking me in corners and taping up my mouth for talking and shit. I thought, if I told Mama, I'd get in trouble-- big." She waves smoke from Hope's cigarette out of her eyes.

"Mama didn't believe me." Margaret stares into the pile of presents. "She said, 'Your Uncle Joey wouldn't do that. Don't you ever again say such a thing about your Uncle Joey. Just you watch how you dress.' So I stopped saying."

"I should send the bastard my therapy bills." Susan picks up the plastic boot. "I never told Mama or Dad. Fifteen years later, I tell some stranger I'm paying to listen." She looks at the boot from the front, turns it, examines it from the side. "Isn't that funny?"

Hope reaches for the ashtray and flicks the ash off her cigarette. "Just let it go. Joey's family."

"He's the one who needs therapy," Susan says.

"But he didn't stop doing." Margaret removes a wooden sleigh from the tree. "Not for a long time." She looks at the ornament, then around the tree. She hangs the sleigh a little to her left, removes it again, places it back in its original spot. "Not for a long time."

"Didn't you ever wonder?" Susan squeezes the red plastic boot. "Didn't you ever wonder if he was doing it to someone else?"

Hope coughs. She reaches into the magazine rack next to the recliner and starts flipping through the magazines.

"He told me it was my fault," Margaret says. "I thought it was just me. I thought when he stopped with me, he'd stopped. But he just moved on, didn't he? When did he move on? When you got old enough, Hope? Was that it?"

Hope stops flipping and stares at a magazine cover. "I told him if he touched me, if he touched me ever again, I would scream. I told him I would tell the priest, I would tell Daddy, I would tell everyone." She pulls the magazine from the rack.

Susan turns to Hope. Hope knew, she thinks. Hope knew how to make him stop. Hope does not look back; she starts slowly turning pages. Susan wants to scream at Margaret, at Hope--"You knew . . . You knew . . . You had to have known . . . Why didn't you tell me he would do that? . . . Why didn't you tell me how to make him stop?"--but she is afraid that if she opens her mouth she will start to cry and that if she starts to cry she might never stop. She takes a deep breath and holds it as she stares at Mama's clock. The large red numbers say ten-fifteen.

Hope stops turning pages and tilts her head back as if she were wearing her bifocals. She lays the open magazine on her lap and stares into a page.

Susan breathes slowly and watches three minutes pass on the clock before she looks back at Hope. She sees that one page of Hope's magazine has an advertisement and the other no headlines; she has opened to the middle of an article. Susan turns to Margaret.

Margaret sighs. "I don't know . . . maybe I did wonder . . . for a while. Then . . . later . . . well . . . he'd stopped. Who was going to believe me, anyway?" She slaps her hands against her thighs. "God, I could use a drink. Anyone want anything?"

Susan watches Margaret. "I want this to have never happened."

"You can't change it," Margaret says. "Just don't think about it."

"That's right." Hope nods. "That's all you can do."

Margaret stands. "Want anything from the kitchen?"

Susan holds out her wine glass. "I've never stopped being uncomfortable around him."

Margaret takes the glass. "I don't like him much, either. I don't think about it. Anything, Hope?" Hope waves her hand. Margaret walks out of the room.

Susan listens to the sounds from the kitchen: the refrigerator door opening and closing, pouring, metal hitting against glass. No one told Margaret or Hope, either, she thinks. Hope turns pages. Maybe that's the way life is. It just happens; there's no reason; you go on. Susan walks to the tree, removes the green glass ball, hangs the Santa boot in its place. "I don't suppose you have a pack of gum?" Hope looks up from her magazine, shakes her head, looks back down. Susan walks over, takes three cigarettes from Hope's pack, and arranges them in the boot. Margaret returns carrying a tray with Christmas cookies, a glass of wine, and two cups of coffee.

"Oh, okay," Hope says as she takes the coffee with milk, and one cookie, which she lays on the arm of her chair. Susan takes the wine and moves to the chair near the tree. Margaret places the tray on the floor between Susan and herself, sits next to it, and takes the black coffee.

"Merry Christmas," Margaret says, raising her cup.

Susan raises her glass, then drinks. Hope sips her coffee.

Susan examines the tree. She reaches down, puts her wine glass on the floor, and pushes it back against the wall. She crawls between the table and the tree and hunts behind the presents for the end of the strings of lights. She finds the plug and pushes it into the adaptor. She reaches under the lamp shade, loosens the bulb, and turns the switch.

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