In the living room, he asks me to hold the tree straight while he screws it into the base. I do so while staring mutely at the wall trying to untangle my thoughts about the vagina ring from my thoughts about an engagement, but I can’t.
David is so focused on the tree, he doesn’t notice my withdrawal. After the stump is screwed in, he puts the Beach Boys Christmas album on the record player and sinks down next to me on the brown leather sectional. He wraps an arm around me and pulls me into his side. “This is my dad’s favorite Christmas album.” He gives a contented sigh as we stare at the slightly crooked tree that’s noticeably sparser in the top left quadrant.
Our decorating has reached its anticlimactic conclusion since we don’t own any Christmas ornaments. But after a minute, David hoists himself off the couch.
“Where are you going?” I ask accusingly. For a second I stop breathing, wondering if he’s going to get the ring, but he passes the bedroom and heads for a seldom-used hall closet. The closet is a vertical junk drawer packed with ski gear, board games, plastic bins of loose charging cables whose purposes have been long forgotten, and the sleek white boxes from every Apple product we’ve ever owned, which we agree we don’t need but also cannot bring ourselves to throw away. The only items of note in there are our suitcases, and my panic shifts from a proposal to a fear he’s leaving. I don’t want that either! Why can’t things stay exactly as they are? Things are good how they are. Steady.
Instead, he pulls out a medium-sized cardboard box with fragile written on the side in his mother’s looping cursive and two packages of string lights.
“My mom sent us some things to get us started,” he tells me. “I’ve been nervous all week that you were going to find them and ruin the surprise.”
“Nope, I had no idea,” I tell him. But what I really want to know is when he plans to employ his other surprise, the one I did stumble on, and why he picked that particular—hideous—ring.
He sets the box down in front of me. Inside are a few sealed boxes of glittery red and gold balls; a selection of ornaments David made as a kid, including a photo of him and his brothers in a popsicle-stick frame; and, wrapped in tissue paper, a half dozen of June’s beloved Christopher Radko ornaments. I recognize them because I scoffed at the price—$103 for Perfectly Plaid Santa—when we bought one for her as our joint gift last Christmas. Her willingness to part with them feels akin to an engraved invitation to the family.
“It was really nice of her to send these,” I tell him, and lever myself off the couch to hang a sparkly snowman ornament on the tree, so he doesn’t mistake this for his moment to propose.
Meanwhile, David methodically adds a hook to the photo ornament of him and his brothers—the three of them match in holiday sweater vests; he smiles with the crooked buck teeth he had before braces gave him the straight, even smile he has today. “I was wondering,” he asks, then hesitates for a moment. “What kind of Christmas ornaments did you have as a kid?”
“Well, my mom always did all white ornaments. Sometimes a few gold ones, too, but nothing else,” I tell him as I remove the tape sealing the package of glittery red ornaments.
“Should we get some white ornaments in her honor?” he asks.
I laugh. “Oh god, no! It’s a nice suggestion, but definitely not. I was terrified of her tree. We weren’t allowed to touch it, but I did anyway, and I was so scared Santa would find out. I always tried to wake up a little early on Christmas morning to sneak downstairs and make sure there were still presents for me and that I hadn’t made the naughty list.”
He sticks out his bottom lip in an exaggerated pout. “Sweet baby Hannah.”
“I know,” I say, laughing. Warmth spreads through me thinking about the Christmases of my youth. I hadn’t thought about the fussy white trees in ages. I’m glad to be able to share this memory with David.
“Okay, here’s an idea.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “What if, instead, we become a kooky-tree family.”
“I like it!” I tell him.
I try to hold on to the contented feeling while we decorate the tree to the sounds of Brian Wilson crooning that it will be a blue Christmas without you, but the ring keeps popping into my mind. And telling myself not to think about the ring only makes me think about it more. Rings with cartoonishly large Disney character feet cha-cha through my brain, taunting me.
When we finish, we collapse back onto the couch to admire our handiwork. “Well, we definitely have our work cut out for us,” David remarks. “This tree does not look kooky at all. In fact, it looks like the kind of tree that has a mortgage and drives a Honda Accord.” I laugh, already excited about the prospect of hunting down more ornaments to make this tree ours.
“How about you pour some wine while I start dinner?” David asks.
“Sounds perfect,” I say. Relief courses through me as he heads toward the kitchen. Braised chicken feels like a fairly unlikely place to hide a ring.
twelve
Hannah
This year, December 2
The next afternoon, Theo leads me through the designer women’s wear floor at Saks, navigating us around displays of sequin-encrusted evening gowns. Behind a selection of pointy-shoulder blazers that remind me of “Vogue”-era Madonna, he rings a doorbell next to a plain wooden door.
After he invited me on this last-minute shopping trip, my next call was to Priya, ostensibly to invite her to join, but I also wanted her opinion on the ring. She knew David the best out of my friends. Even though David lived alone when we started dating and we easily could have holed up in his apartment, he made it a point to spend time at mine, too.
One rainy Sunday early in our relationship, Priya made chana masala—another of her mother’s specialties—as we watched back-to-back showings of Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13 on cable. After licking his bowl clean, David insisted she teach him how to make the dish. For months, our minuscule kitchen became an off-license cooking school as the two held weekly Sunday cooking lessons. They only stopped when we reached the dog days of summer and the apartment was too stuffy to justify using the stove. Priya taught David to make saag paneer and malai kofta—the latter requiring a few FaceTimes with Priya’s mom to perfect. I was happy to be the designated taste tester, and even happier to see David win Priya’s enthusiastic stamp of approval.
But when I called her this morning, she brushed me off with vague excuses about work even though it’s Sunday. “Maybe I can meet you later?”
“Also, I found a ring in David’s sock drawer,” I told her before she could hustle me off the phone.