Christmas
In 1939, Daddy was relieved of his job at the General Electric boiler room. Fired, in other words. They’d lost a contract, they said. I’d never had much interest in what Daddy did when he left in the morning but life was certainly easier when he was busy and away. Now he was around, frowzy and irritable. Our mother got quieter and quieter. Roast beef disappeared from our lives and was replaced with vegetable casseroles, ground chuck, and the less glamorous parts of pigs.
No one told Jane that when your father doesn’t have a job at Christmas that you should dampen down your hopes, present-wise. This didn’t discourage her. Disappointment and disaster have never been more than the drama that precedes the happy ending to her. Then and now, Jane believed that in the end your wishes come true, and if something besides the wish showed up, then you must have made a mistake about what you thought you wanted. That was how Jane Terhune managed her life.
But back to 1939, a year with carefully parceled-out coal and lots of vegetable dinners. We told her that ponies don’t fit in Santa’s sleigh and they made reindeer nervous, but she went ahead and wrote PONEE on her Christmas list anyhow, all capitals and an illustration of the kind of pony she wanted directly below the list: a little piebald stocky thing with ears that looked like a rabbit’s. She picked out a name and had a serious talk with the ice man, who had a gray gelding named Bonehead, about hay and grain and stabling. When once again there was a package with home-knitted mittens under the tree instead of a PONEE, she stuffed them with paper, had me help her sew button eyes on them, and arranged for the two mittens to fall in love by supper and be married by bedtime. By Epiphany she’d dressed empty thread spools in ribbons and toilet paper and made them the mittens’ children. I helped her.
In 1939, Santa was still expected to bring the tree as well as the presents, and that was the way our parents did it. That year Daddy waited until well after dark, into the bargaining hours when buyers were thin and the trees would be worthless in just a few hours. Stockings went up after dark as well, and everybody but Jane got to stay up long enough to switch our oranges out of our socks and into Jane’s. She loved them more than we did; we loved her more than we loved our own oranges.
If anybody had asked me what religion I was I would have said “Christmas,” and the Bible of my Christmas was the Sears Wish Book. It arrived just after Thanksgiving and lived on the kitchen counter beside the meat grinder. People nowadays forget how small a person’s life could be before the war. Before every boy in our neighborhood shipped out for France or the Pacific, nobody on our block had traveled more than forty miles from Lynn, Massachusetts. We expected to marry somebody we met in high school, exactly the way our parents did. We figured getting to college was as likely as picnicking on Mars, and spittle-bent copies of National Geographic held the only exotica I ever expected to see. The Wish Book was a plate-glass window onto any number of faraway lives in which we would wear the mink stoles (page 287) and consider ordering the optional let-out skins (as soon as we figured out what a “let-out skin” actually was). We’d wear the gold watches (page 125) and live in a complete Arts and Crafts house (kits from $1,250, starting on page 368).
There were no monsters in the Sears Wish Book universe. There were tools for welders, short-throw lever-action rifles for hunters, and baling equipment for farmers. If a potato farmer appeared in an illustration, he was as neat and blond and purposeful as the characters in a Dick and Jane primer. Nobody in the Wish Book lost his job. There were no Snyders in the country of Wish Book—Snyder who had made Jane cry by hiding her favorite plastic horse and telling her that it had died in the night. That was Snyder to a tee, senselessly mean in very little ways. I say it was a senseless meanness because being mean didn’t make him any happier. If you’re going to hide a plastic horse and tell its owner it’s dead, you should at least get some pleasure from it. Otherwise what are you doing? That was my enduring question—what was he doing?
Why was our mother letting him get away with this? Where was justice! I told her what he’d done. She said it was none of my business. I said yes it was, and she said I was to butt out and mind my own business. MYOB, she said. Then I said something about it being her business to whack him good, but she wasn’t taking care of business and so he got away with tormenting every last one of us.
I was told that cleaning out the coal bin might help me remember what MYOB meant. It was a long, dirty job and it didn’t warm me up to the idea of minding my own business at all. How can you mind your own business with your family trampling all over it at every opportunity? This question was still on my mind an hour later when I walked into the empty midafternoon living room and approached the record collection. You’re a Sweet Little Headache was our mother’s favorite, played so much that every one of us knew right where the scratches were. I sifted through until I found it. I brought it to my secret reading place at the back of the closet and I brought You’re a Sweet Little Headache down hard against the floorboards and left the shards where they lay. Maybe I half hoped that she had heard the sound of cracking vinyl and would come and find the remains. I know I felt a keen, gusty swoosh of satisfaction as the record broke. Then that feeling drained away and I felt what I imagined was how you feel when you’re poisoned, like something inside you was dying. Or had done it already. I didn’t speak to my mother all the next day. She pretended not to notice, which I minded.