I'm Your Girl. J.J. Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ be making cookies for Santa, which only I would eat in the morning. I should be wrapping gifts (mainly for myself) or listening to carols or even looking out the window for the snow showers they’re predicting. Roanoke might have a white Christmas for the first time in anyone’s memory. But aren’t all Christmases white anyway? You have a white Jesus, white shepherds, white angels, and white stars. It’s a Caucasian Christmas. At the library, we’ve been listening to a country station that plays only Christmas music from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. Our library isn’t completely quiet, because Kim “Prim” Cambridge, the library director says, “We have to compete with the mall, and they’re playing that music, too.”

      Kim is…odd.

      So, I’ve been subjected to eight hours of “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Silent Night,” “White Christmas,” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Oh, and “The Christmas Song” sung by some white guy with a twangy voice. Where are Nat King and Natalie Cole? Or just Nat? Mmm. I could get used to Nat’s creamy-butter voice in my life. I doubt I’ll hear him on that station, though I did hear a little Luther Vandross one day. It surprised me so much when he belted out “O Holy Night” that I did a little chair dance right there at the reference desk.

      Francine, the other Grade Four Clerk, had then had the nerve to ask if I needed some lotion for my behind. “You look all itchy and twitchy,” she had said.

      White folks just don’t know a good chair dance when they see one.

      I was listening to that station earlier tonight, but I’m all Christmased out. Those reindeer keep hitting grandma—because grandma is drunk—and the little drummer boy (all seventeen different versions, three every half hour) is giving me a headache with all that rum-pum-pum-pumming. I’m no Scrooge, but when you start hating “The First Noel”—the first Christmas song I learned to sing when I was five years old—you don’t have any Christmas spirit left.

      I look at the gifts under my Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a remnant of a tree I actually bought at a Christmas tree lot. “Topped it off a real big one,” the man had told me, and I had talked him down to three dollars.

      You know you’re horrible at celebrating Christmas when you talk a man down to three dollars for the top of a “real big one” and your tree fits in the front passenger seat of your Hyundai.

      And, you know you’re lonely when there are only four gifts under that tree. Two are from anonymous coworkers (one from a gift exchange with the circulation staff, one from a gift exchange with the reference staff), and both are books: The Da Vinci Code and The Handmaid’s Tale. Neither book is my cup of tea, but they’ll look nice in my library. The third gift is a sweater I bought for myself at Lane Bryant. I had tried on several sweaters ranging from sizes ten to eighteen, and though my heart had said, “Give yourself a size ten, girl,” and my mind had said, “You’ll look just fine in a fourteen,” my body ordered me to wrap up the size eighteen. It actually fits me better, though I’m embarrassed that it fits me better. It will give me an excuse to get out after Christmas to exchange it…for a sixteen…or a fourteen, who knows? I may take a couple walks around the block tomorrow.

      And the last gift really isn’t a gift at all. They’re books I get to review for the Mid-Atlantic Book Review, an on-line book club I’ve belonged to since I arrived in Roanoke. “We’re MAB, and we’re Mad about Books!” is our slogan. I didn’t make the slogan, and, for the most part, I’m “Mad at Books.” The trifling stuff they publish these days…At least these books will keep me busy for a week or so.

      Until then, I’ll just—

      “Finally!”

      Now if I can only find a red jack, I’ll be…

      Set.

      Time to shuffle.

      Again.

      Merry Christmas, girl.

      2

      Jack Browning

      I don’t know why I’m putting up this tree.

      Old habit, I guess.

      Yeah.

      It’s something to do.

      There are so many ornaments. Baby’s first, second, where’s the—There it is. Baby’s third. Stevie opened it last year…before tearing into his other presents.

      Without a second thought.

      He was a kid. He was excited. He opened this bear on a train in about five seconds. He loved his bears. I wanted to get him a plane, or an old car, or even a Harley-Davidson ornament, but Noël said to stay in sequence. “We’re creating heirlooms for him to share with his own family one day.”

      One day.

      Don’t think about it.

      I can’t help it.

      You and Noël were just keeping Hallmark in business, you know.

      I was getting to like that tradition.

      You can’t miss putting together his toys.

      They were fun.

      You cursed the directions too much.

      They weren’t written in decent English half the time.

      I look up at the goofy tree topper, a star I picked out at Wal-Mart. Half of the lights have the colors of the rainbow, and the other half are clear white. I don’t know why they keep burning out.

      That’s what lightbulbs do.

      But they only put in two replacement bulbs. How nice of them.

      That’s how they keep you coming back, year after year.

      Noël always winced and shrugged when we had completed the tree, but she took the picture anyway with Stevie in front of the tree, all warm in his footy pajamas, his stuffed teddy bear named Mr. Bear in his arms, his eyes sparkling like all the tinsel—

      He was a cute kid.

      The cutest.

      I’m sure Mr. Bear is still in Stevie’s closet. I ought to donate it and all the Christmas gifts Noël bought for Stevie during the year to the Salvation Army. She was always thinking about Christmas, even in July.

      You thought she was crazy.

      Yeah.

      I just can’t open her closet door to get at them yet, mainly because I can’t quite get myself to open the door to that room. My back aches from sleeping on the bottom bunk of Stevie’s bunk bed, and I ought to wash those sheets…but that little boy smell is still in them.

      Have I done everything correctly?

      Something’s missing.

      The train! Why didn’t I put that together before I hung the ornaments? I did the same thing last year. We put up the tree, wrapped it in lights, hung all the ornaments, and threw on lots of tinsel, so much so that it choked Tony the cat.

      Tony СКАЧАТЬ