Ed looked at his feet. She noticed that the soles were separating from the leather of his shoes. He needed a new pair, or at least a resoling. She had been leaving details like this unattended to. Her secret thought, the shameful thought she’d been harboring more frequently lately, was that Ed wouldn’t notice anyway.
“I was trying to get to the mall.”
“What in the hell!” she shouted. “Tell me the truth. Did you get lost trying to get home?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“I need to know, Ed.”
“I wanted to get you something.”
“We decided about this. Remember? You and I aren’t exchanging presents this year. It’s just easier that way.”
“Not for Christmas,” he said.
“For what, then?”
“Our anniversary.” He stretched out his hands and poked at his ring. “New Year’s Eve,” he said.
“We got married on January twenty-second, Edmund.”
“But we met on New Year’s Eve.”
She was quiet. She pictured Tess’s concerned look when they got home. The look would say, in the most well-meaning way possible, Why did you let him go out in the first place? Ed sat heavily in the passenger seat. “We need to get back,” she said. “Everyone is worried sick.”
When they were nearly home, she looked over and saw him holding his wallet.
“I didn’t have any money anyway,” he said.
She hadn’t put any in his wallet in a while. She’d also taken the cards, to prevent someone from taking advantage of him.
She turned the car around and drove back to the mall, parked in front of Macy’s. She fished her own wallet out of her purse. A hundred-dollar bill flashed up at her, along with a couple of singles.
You stirred up emotions in a man when you gave him cash. She’d practiced defusing that ticking bomb during her father’s retirement years, when she still lived at home. When Ed handed her his wallet, she folded the hundred in briskly, economically, as though she were giving a flu shot.
They went inside. She told him she’d wait in the purse section and watched him amble off. He stopped to talk to a salesgirl, who pointed him toward the escalator. As he began to rise, clutching the thick rubber rail with both hands and looking over the side as though it were the edge of a ship, she decided to follow him from a distance. She trailed him into the women’s section. She had a vision of him throwing dress after dress over his shoulder in a frenzied spree, but he walked the aisles deliberately, like a big cat stalking its prey, looking at dresses without touching them. He moved from rack to rack, evidently making quick decisions, and stopped in front of a row of dresses along the far wall. He appraised them as she pretended to look at clothes across the aisle. A salesgirl came over and he waved her off. As if he had read Eileen’s mind about the dowdy-looking dresses in front of him, he headed to an adjacent rack and, after a sweep of those offerings with his eyes, held up a dress. She could see it shimmering in the light. The pattern was tasteful, the cut elegant. He waved the salesgirl over again with a frantic hand, holding the dress in front of him as though it were a banner in a parade.
She watched a strange exchange between Ed and the salesgirl. A look of patient confusion crossed the girl’s face as he passed her his wallet. She held it dubiously as he jabbed at a pocket behind where his credit cards would have been. Frustrated, he took the wallet back, removed a slip of paper, and handed it to her.
The girl nodded and returned with an identical-looking dress. He must have written Eileen’s size on the slip of paper. She couldn’t imagine the effort he’d expended in memorializing this detail. Still, there was little chance the number was correct. She needed a ten now.
As Ed approached the cash register, she realized that the dress must have cost well over a hundred dollars. She rushed over. She knew Ed would be furious, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She tapped him on the shoulder. He sprang forward, startled, and let out a little cry. When he saw it was her, he yelled her name a few times in manic excitement, the trapped heat of emasculation radiating off him.
“Funny meeting you here,” she said.
“You like this?” he asked. The girl, who had arranged her features into a beatific grin, handed it over for inspection.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She glanced at the dress size: eight. He was closer than she thought.
“I like you in blue,” he said. The simplicity of the declaration put an ache in her chest. He directed no animosity at her for having rescued him in the transaction. He seemed to feel only a naked desire to please. He was being stripped of pride, of ego, ruined, destroyed. He was also being softened.
“We’ll use this.” She handed her credit card to the salesgirl before Ed could reach for his wallet, which was sitting on the counter. The girl passed her the index card Ed had written on. It said, “Eileen’s size,” with a big “6” crossed out and an “8” written in its place. When Ed turned away, she took a pen and crossed out the “8” and wrote “10” next to it in as close a hand to his as she could manage. She would come back and exchange it for a ten. She slid the paper back in his wallet and put the hundred into her own. There was no reason for him to be walking around with a bill that large.
? ? ?
The McGuires and Coakleys couldn’t make it that year. They had excuses—the Coakleys had been talking about heading out to Arizona to see Cindy’s brother for years, and Frank’s niece in Maine had just had a baby—but she couldn’t help being annoyed at their not trying harder to be in town. They’d been so strange around Ed lately, the women tentative, the men garrulous and impersonal, that she imagined they were relieved to have a reason to get away. It seemed to her that she had graduated from the ranks of ordinary wives into a rare stratum inhabited by widows whose husbands were still alive.
At one in the morning, she and Tess sweated to get the mess cleaned up. Just when it looked as if she might escape the evening without a major disturbance, Ed woke and wandered out of the bedroom. He paced back and forth in the upstairs hallway, screaming and flailing his arms violently. She couldn’t silence him. One by one the houseguests gave up the pretense of sleep and emerged from their rooms—Pat, Tess, the girls, her aunt Margie, who had also decided to stay. Pat tried to intercede, puffed up by macho gravitas, but she held him off and allowed Tess to help her corral Ed.
The morning saw no enthusiastic ripping open of presents; the girls handed them around with a perfunctory languor. As Connell had grown older, she’d worked hard to keep alive the Christmas morning ritual, and she tried to pump some life into the girls, but their exhaustion won out. They put in a lackluster effort at breakfast as well, nursing cups of coffee and leaving heaps of food untouched. She thought, Connell was right not to come home.
As she scraped scrambled eggs into the trash, she resolved to have one more real Christmas, with all the trappings and ceremonies of the occasion. Next year, the big green star would make its way to the top of the tree. She hadn’t felt safe when she’d been on the top step of the ladder, leaning over the branches, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask Ed to get up there and do it, and by the time Pat arrived she’d moved on to other tasks for him to do and had forgotten all about it. When she’d sat at dinner, though, all she’d been able to focus on, other than her anxiety about Ed’s embarrassing her, was the treetop sticking up like a tumor, even though it was out of sight in the den. It was in plain view in her mind’s eye. She hadn’t realized how important that star was in rounding out the scene she so carefully constructed. When the lamps were off, it winked with a hazy, emerald loveliness that seemed to pull you toward it. Next year, she would need Connell there to put it up for her. After that, he wouldn’t have to come home for another holiday if he didn’t want to. She was going to wring enough perfection out of next Christmas to last her the rest of her years on earth.