A Christmas Story from 1960s NJ

[N.B., I wrote this story many years ago, and it's still one of my holiday favorites. A few years ago, I gave a reading at the Taos Writer's Conference, and found myself cracking up so hard with the audience that it became difficult to read. Enjoy! And keep in mind, it's not quite as fictional as it would seem...]

Eugene Thatcher “Bucky” Davidson was a 12-year-old boy trapped in a very bad marriage. You could see it in his eyes, ducking for cover behind the horn-rim equivalent of orthopedic shoes. In them, a combination of his mother’s cyclone path of orbit and his own search for the nearest emergency exit. You could see it in his head, exposed at the cowlick, like a baby whose skin had yet to grow over its fleshy pink patella. You could see it in his pants, purchased in the young men’s department but imbued with a certain sensibleness befitting someone four times his age.

Our mothers had gone to school together, and thus we’d had some sort of vague connection since birth. Secretly, I rued the day they ever crossed paths. We’d bumped into each other in doctor’s offices and public spaces—Bucky and his mother walking in the park holding hands (retch), me pushing my mother on the swing. I thought this guy the biggest geek on the planet, northern New Jersey’s very own Piltdown man.

I was 11 years old and spent most days after school listening to Simon & Garfunkel records and caring for my mom, who suffered from ferocious migraines, depressive sensitivity, and a particular ill-suitedness to domesticity. Evenings when she was feeling better, she’d take us to Willowbrook Mall, where Bucky’s father, Big Gene, played organ in the Hammond store. His countenance completely placid as he pressed his fingers deep and hard into the plastic keys, Gene Davidson was a sight that compelled morbid fascination. To his rear, crouching in a corner, sat Bucky, his father’s biggest—though surely not only—fan. Arms hugging his knees close to his compact body, the boy listened to impassioned versions of “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Misty,” soaking the music into his pores, lost in the place his mother tried frequently to rouse him from.

I still have a Polaroid photo of Bucky at this time, perched in front of our Christmas tree, his eyes slightly crossed, angry at the camera. The whole contingent had arrived—Ruth, Big Gene, young Buck, and his five-year-old baby sister. They’d rumbled up our long driveway in their sputtering stewed-tomato VW bug on Christmas Eve. I remember my mother’s groaning, “Who could that be at this hour?” as she struggled to push the tree aside and squint out the window. Then the ominous, “Oh, no...”

We had put up the Scotch pine that evening and sat languishing in the fit of energy and trauma it had exacted from us. After calculating the best angle at which to position the pine for maximum branch exposure, my father had finally stopped yelling at my mother and the tree an hour before. Both seemed relieved. My mother had lain on the couch with a cool rag on her head, looking as if she were going to vomit and begging me to bring her some Bufferin. I began to wonder if the labor pains of celebrating Christmas were medically advisable for those predisposed to mals a tête.

When we heard the car doors slam, a tactical plan quickly emerged. We would run into the front room—stay away from that door!—and pretend to be out caroling or slurping cocoa at a neighbor’s house. “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel up to...,” my mother started.

“Rat a tat tat,” sounded Gene Danielson’s massive, hairy, organ-thumping hand against our back door pane. “Rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat.” Almost musical, without quite breaking the glass. If you strained, you could hear “Silent Night” in the rhythm of it.

Since I was the smallest, my mother sent me to peer out into the kitchen from our hiding place. Her anxiety was palpable enough that I suddenly felt a bit like Anne Frank. Just left of the dangling dog leash, I spied their sappily grinning faces, Gene appearing pleasant as all hell, and Ruth with that weird sloppy loopy look that had never so much as licked a glass of holiday punch. “Helloooou... Hellooouu, hellooou—Merrrrrrry Christmas everyone!!... Hey! Isn’t anyone home? It’s Ruth and Gene and Bucky and Little Girl.... Hellooouuuuuuuu??”

My God, they were persistent. And seeing them out there with snow pelting down their backs on that cold Christmas Eve, I could not in good conscience recommend that my mother continue the “we’re-out-caroling” charade. “They look pretty happy…,” I attempted. “It’s almost Christmas.…” My mother turned to glance at my father, who could not be reached for comment. “They might have presents for us,” I added. In those days, I would suffer any geek gladly for the right present.

“Oh, OK,” my mother relented. She was a major sucker for those of weak linkage and poor boundaries, and my father’s circannual Jimmy Stewart sentimentality had set in. Our family marched through the darkened kitchen to meet theirs in a fusillade of merry Christmases and hugs through heavy parkas and camel car coats. I hated Ruth Danielson’s hugs more than just about anyone else’s. Her odd smell and questionable breath always lingered on me longer than the supposed uplifting to be derived from such feel-good moments. Big Gene was somewhat better, though a similar olfactory ripeness made me wonder what the two of them bathed in. Bucky looked like he was trying to put on a vaguely festive face, but that decking the halls had taken its toll on his young, easily undone spirit. The little girl was smiling sweetly, though clearly lost in all of this nonsensical outpouring. She walked toward the basement and never did return.

“Well!” Ruth piped up, chipper as a March hare on an April morning, “We stopped by because it’s CHRISTMAS! and we couldn’t think of any, not any, other folks we’d rather spend CHRISTMAS! with than the Utzes! So here we are.” Then, in a barrage more staccato than reindeer patter on a tin roof, “Are you having a happy Christmas yet? Is Santa Claus going to come tonight, Carey? Did you make a list? What presents did you ask for? Did you leave some food out? He gets hungry, you know. Little Girl made a big list, and we put out a nice tray of cookies and some cranberry juice. We forgot to clean the chimney, though, Gene!” Her laughter, bordering on a cackle, sent a DB-1 full of shrapnel into my Christmas Eve reverie. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Gene, we forgot to clean the chimney! Gene?! Gene?!” She poked him hard. “Gene!”

“Oh,” he tuned in ever so remotely, like a ham radio on a stormy night. “Oh, yeah, right, we did,” he said in the same flat, somber voice he probably used to proclaim, “I won the lottery,” “The house is on fire,” and “Ho! what a party.”

Realizing her spiel was falling on deaf ears, Ruth turned toward Bucky, pulled him close, and began to rub the back of his coat with delicious gusto. He leaned to the left, gearing up for the weave-and-dodge of a prize fighter attempting to break free of her grasp. “Well, Bucky here has something for Carey. Don’t you, Bucky?” she said.

“Uh, yeah,” he murmured, and with some effort wrested a crumpled red and green package from the big pocket of his long, steel-grey parka. “Here.” He stretched out an arm in no specific direction.

“Bucky, you can put your hood down, we’re inside,” his mother advised.

“Uh huh.” He was as out of it as a plastic punch cup.

“Bucky, give Carey the present, will you? Bucky? Gene, get Bucky to give Carey the present. Bucky, give Carey the present. Oooh, does anyone have a camera? We ought to take a picture, don’t you think? We could go sleigh-riding tomorrow, you know, there’s a lot of snow out there. Over on the driving range, that’s where they do it. Tobogganing. Faye had a friend who lost his leg when they were tobogganing, didn’t you, Faye? What a sad thing. But let’s not let a little lost leg get in the way of a good time, shall we, kiddos?” Eight tiny reindeer were no match for Ruth Danielson.

Bucky stirred from his lethargy, and I swore I saw a microscopic snarl emerge from his left upper lip, his head tilted ever so slightly in his mother’s direction. The poinsettia paper sighed “hreep, hreeep” in his hand as he tried to ball my present into his fist. I turned in his direction and looked him squarely in the eye. Give me the present, dammit. I can’t wait any longer.

One eye drifted inward, and he placed the soft, mottled package in my hands. If they ever needed to dust for fingerprints, they’d check here first.

“Oooh, Bucky, she’s gonna love it. She’s gonna love it. Bucky made this, you know. Well, I helped with the crocheting, but Bucky did the best thing with it. Didn’tyaBucky?”

A look of terror crossed his face as I pulled on the first paper swath and unleashed the creature. Its black coat-button eyes—slightly crossed— glowered at me. From its sea-blue crocheted head sprouted lime-green hair—not just any lime green, but shaded, with a yarn that changed from forest to clover to mint to white like a bad peroxide frosting left long in the sun. The snarling mouth on Bucky’s progeny looked a bit too familiar, as if an accident of woolly DNA.

My mother, as usual, was far more encouraging than the situation warranted. “Oh, Bucky! What a beautiful doll!” she oozed. I ripped off the remaining wrapper to see its vastly crocheted body stuffed with white paper. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a wonderful doll!” she added, going in for the Oscar. At the end of its long, distended gut hung the saddest touch of all: two black legs cut from thick swatches of semi-stretchy waistband material. I tugged on them, and the doll’s long, thin head plopped easily onto its chest.

“Thank you, Bucky,” I managed. “It’s nice.”

“But wait—Bucky, Bucky—show them! Show them what, what it does. Bucky! You’ve got to show them!” Ruth was practically gasping for air she was so excited.

He proceeded to take the beast from me, turn it on its belly, and twist a gold wind-up knob springing like a toadstool from the paper in its back. He twisted and twisted and twisted until the knob could budge no further.

“Bucky, you’re doing that too tight. Stop it. Stop it, Bucky!”

Suddenly, fiercely, “We Need a Little Christmas” poured out of the creature’s back with a shrieking intensity. It played loudly and lightning-fast—a pace no one could sing along with, though Ruth was gearing up to try.

“Oh, we neeeed a little Chris-mess,” she started in alto, then hit her church-soprano stride, “right this very minute. Bucky, sing, come on. Candles in the window. Gene, come on. Cookies on the spin-it. Yes, we need a little...” Ruth warbled on, accompanied only by the tinkling of the ever-slowing music box. Finally, the sound went south and began to twist and miss notes. Bleep a blleeep bleeerpp bleeeeeerrrrpah. Bleep. Bleep. Bleeeee-urp. It was so warped. It almost sounded like Gene’s Hammond at the end-of-the-night store closing, when he’d play soft legatos in a quiet minor key, and a look of peace crossed his face.

“HERE’s what we need!” Ruth screeched, in silent night¬¬¬–rending decibels. She pulled out a Thermos of eggnog, and I half-suspected she was about to baptize one of us with its contents. It was a heavy, green, industrial-looking Thermos, the kind that might well have served in an early ’60s bomb shelter, had the Cubans made moves more stealthy than Ruth’s. But meridian mania and jaundiced joie de vivre will always win out over Commie bastards and fighter planes, and Ruth’s flask met its destiny: to be filled with a creamy yellow liquid bound and determined to up the ante on our forcibly burgeoning holiday spirit.

She hoisted it high, then passed it around for all to drink. Fearing backwash from her mouth’s questionable past, I feigned an eggnog-related allergy and quickly shuttled the vessel to my father. It took his ever-analytical mind just two seconds to assess the contents of the cylinder, judge the relative proportion of redolent sludge to oral gratification, and pass it posthaste to his wife.

“Well, well, then,” my mom said, hoisting the canteen with convivial vigor, “a toast to Christmas Eve and being with our friends!” A forced, buoyant enthusiasm let her off the hook from actually taking a swig, as my father shot the tree a look to make sure its interpolated lights were flashing at correct intervals. Whenever social awkwardness got the better of him, he tried to make sure things added up.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Ruth responded. “Bucky, are you drinking this? Drink with us, Buck, come on. Show your spirit! Ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of eggnog! Hahahahahahaha! Get it? Eggnog? Instead of rum? No rum in this eggnog, no sir-ee. But you know what I do have? A little leftover from our dinner this evening. The Swedes say it’s supposed to bring you luck on Christmas Eve. Isn’t it, Bucky?” Ruth reached deep in the recesses of her camel coat and pulled out a small tin canister. A smell more distinct than her own filled the room, and women and children like myself would have been well-advised to clear the area. “Look at what we have heeeeeeerre,” Ruth said with a devilish lilt to her voice. “Will ya look at this? SARDINES!!!”

Bucky pulled his hood up over his head, until its fake-fur lining covered his nose. But in one fell swoop, his mother flung the hood away and shoved the tin under his nostrils, like smelling salts he’d never asked for. Suddenly, from behind the boy’s back flew the Crocheted Creature from the Black Lagoon. “Arrraggggghhhhhh!” Bucky managed, as he smashed the doll into Ruth’s face in self-defense.

“Heeheehee!” Ruth’s unfortunate sense of play responded. “Here you go, guys. How’s this for Christmas spirit? How’s this?!” And with that she plunged the doll’s nose squarely into the sardine can, over and over and over again. It emerged with a single gold, gooey fish lodged between its crocheted loops, right where its nose should have stood.

“Now, whaddya think of his good fortune this holiday season, everyone? Looks like he’s got luck coming out of his nose!!!!” Not sure if she would bust a gut or pop a lung, I edged toward the model train, circling its way around the Christmas tree.

“Come here, Bucky,” I offered quietly. “Let’s see if we can set up some new tracks for the train.” He looked at me, squinting like mad through the Coke bottles and wincing with his mouth. Up and down, left and right his lips moved, as if trying to avert a Yule tide of imminent danger.

“OK,” he said, as he huddled in next to me under the lowest branches of the tree. “Can we make it go all the way to South America?”

I nodded and drew the boughs close in all around him, covering his ears, his eyes, and the top of his small head like a great regal crown.