Authors: Laura Kasischke
She let go of the doorknob and stepped back.
Jesus Christ.
Holly sighed so deeply that it sounded, in her throat, like a growl as the air passed out of her, out of the depths of her and over her tonsils and back into the world. Jesus. Christ. Okay. So, Tatiana
was
, apparently, going to punish Holly
all day
for having overslept on Christmas.
Go to hell
, Holly felt like saying, but instead she stepped away from the door and said to it, as steadily as she could, “When you decide to grow up, please feel free to join us.”
Please feel free to join
us
.
Of course, there was no one else in the house at the moment, and Holly felt the weakness of that. For the first time that day, Holly felt a cool wash of relief about the company on the way, even the Coxes. There wasn’t the slightest possibility that Tatty, being the kind of girl she was, would behave this way around guests. She’d be polite to everyone, and happy to see them, and she’d interact politely with Holly because of this, and by the time the day was over the fake Holly and the fake Tatty (“Sweetheart, can you whip the cream?” “Sure, Mom”) would have metamorphosed into the real Holly and Tatty.
She glanced at her watch again.
She was going to have to set the fucking table herself.
SETTING THE TABLE
for a big dinner had always been something Holly and Tatiana had done together. Even back when Tatty was too little to touch the china or the crystal, she would reach up and slap the silverware onto the table beside the plates. There’d only ever been that one mishap, when Tatty was about six years old and had too excitedly reached into the buffet for the gravy boat. The gravy boat (a white ceramic swan with a hole in its face out of which the gravy poured) had survived, but three of Holly’s mother’s iridescent water glasses hadn’t. It was never clear to Holly what had happened. Tatty was too hysterical—both wildly defensive and tearfully apologetic—ever to tell the whole story, but when Holly turned around the glasses were on the hardwood floor in front of the buffet, and the globe of each was so perfectly cracked away from the stem that it looked more like a surgical amputation than an accident.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said to Tatty. “I have nine more of those. Things break.”
“You didn’t
watch
me,” Tatty had screamed. “You should have
told
me
.
”
Holly had tried not to be annoyed by the injury of this. Not only had Tatty broken her water glasses, but she was now blaming it on Holly, when Holly was simply trying to forgive her. To comfort her daughter, Holly tried to come up with some anecdote about breaking something precious, herself, but she couldn’t recall any such incidents. Until she was an adult, Holly hadn’t been around anything breakable long enough to break it. Still, one time she’d apparently grabbed a blue crayon and scribbled all over a wall, and that had become a family joke, although Holly had no recollection of it whatsoever. When she’d announced her plans to go to graduate school in order to become a writer, Janet had laughed and said, “You always wanted to be a scribbler!”
Ha-ha.
So Holly had told Tatty that story to comfort her, to show her how things could be damaged both purposely and by accident. Told her how her mother had managed to scrub the crayon off the wall before her father saw it, and had waited weeks before telling him. It wasn’t until she was halfway through the telling of it (as she discarded the water glasses and Tatiana sniffled with her face in her hands at the dining room table) that Holly remembered that she’d already told her daughter this story, back in the summer, when she was trying to get her to admit that she’d scratched up all of her and Eric’s CDs. Scribbling with a safety pin perhaps? What other explanation was there?
But the anecdote hadn’t helped—neither to get Tatiana to admit to scratching the CDs in the summer, nor to make her feel better for having broken (with such precision it seemed frankly willful) the three water glasses on Christmas. Instead, Tatty had narrowed her eyes as if the story of her mother’s naughtiness confused and, perhaps, disgusted her:
And this would be the case over the years with nearly every attempt Holly made to make Tatty feel better about something she’d done by describing how she had, herself, once done something equally clumsy, or wrong, or shortsighted. The worst had been when, after Tatty and Tommy had been dating six months and Tommy had turned seventeen, Holly suggested to Tatiana that she keep a condom in her purse, just in case.
“
What?
” Tatiana had said. Her ruby-blue lips had parted in an expression of true horror.
Holly had repeated herself. The condom. She said she thought it best that Tatiana and Tommy wait, of course, but that she knew that sometimes teenagers—
“Oh my God
, Mom,” Tatiana had said. Her dark eyes were wide, her mouth an astonished zero. Holly could see her teeth in there. A perfectly white mountain range. Tatiana had never even needed braces, those teeth were so perfect. Choking back tears, it seemed, Tatiana said, “I have no idea what you were doing when you were my age, but that’s not what Tommy and I are doing.”
“Well, Tatiana,” Holly had said, and she’d gone on to explain that, at Tatty’s age, Holly and her boyfriend also hadn’t planned to have sex, but, since no one had been open enough with Holly to tell her about contraception, she’d been unprepared, and she’d gotten pregnant, and had an abortion. It had been a terrible experience. Thank God, she’d told Tatty, it was possible to get an abortion at Planned Parenthood at fifteen without your parents’ permission, because if her father had found out—
Tatiana, then, had collapsed onto her bed and burst into tears and refused to be comforted until Holly had promised never to raise the subject again. Holly agreed, but she insisted that Tatiana know that she could come to Holly whenever she needed—
“I know! I know! Stop talking! I don’t want to hear about you! I don’t want to know about your mistakes! I’m nothing like you!”
For a terrible second Holly was sure that Tatiana would say the words she’d dreaded and expected all those years:
You’re not my mother.
But she didn’t. Not then. Not ever. Only once, when she was four years old, Tatiana had asked, tentatively, “Mom, do you know who my real mother was?”
To hear those two words together,
real
and
mother
, had made Holly’s eyes fill instantly with tears, the physical response happening before she’d even processed those two words in her consciousness.
But, as she’d always planned to do, Holly told Tatiana the truth—that she didn’t know anything about her biological mother. That, given the conditions in the town that Tatiana was born in, it was likely that her mother had been a teenager, maybe an orphan herself, probably very poor, very uneducated:
The whole area had been teeming with abandoned children. The orphanages, of course, were full of them, but there were also older abandoned children everywhere, who’d either never been institutionalized or who’d been released, and they rushed at the passersby at every bus stop and crosswalk, asking for money, or for something—your watch, your candy bar, your scarf—and running alongside you with their hands cupped, shouting into your face. Holly and Eric had been warned not to talk to these street children, and not, under any circumstances, to stop or give them money, that if you did so these children would steal your purse while you were fishing through it. Or worse. There was a story of one couple who’d gone to Siberia to adopt a baby and had been badly beaten by a pack of children in an alley after stopping to offer them food. The prospective mother had been permanently blinded by a blow to her head. The question Holly had wanted answered—did they still adopt the baby?—could, apparently, not be answered.
When they were still back in the States, being given these dire warnings by the adoption agency’s overseas travel director, Holly could not imagine hurrying past an abandoned child at a bus stop. But, as it turned out, it was easy. There were
so many
of them, so badly dressed, so filthy, so rude, that they did not seem like children. And this, it turned out, was the attitude of the Russians themselves toward these children—that they were not, exactly, children, that they were tainted by bad genes, even the youngest of them. It was an attitude that was held even toward
infants
, and it was the reason, Holly and Eric had been told, that there were so many available babies to adopt in Russia. Russians did not want these castoffs. Even childless, desperate Russians did not want to adopt these children.
“Russians are exactly like Americans,” the overseas director (who was Bolivian, herself) had told Holly and Eric, “except that they’ve been through centuries of pure hell. Like Americans, they’re affectionate and sentimental and egotistical”—at this, Holly and Eric had looked at one another, amused by this description of themselves, which was clearly an insult—“but not nearly as naïve. This is why it’s so easy for Russians to take advantage of Americans. They understand Americans because they are like them, but they believe that Americans will always choose not to see basic truths that Russians are born understanding.”
Of course, she did not tell Tatiana this, but Holly imagined that Tatiana’s mother and father could have been among those Siberian street children. Abortions were so common and so readily available as a form of birth control in Russia (there was, it seemed, no taboo against them, and they were offered so far into a woman’s pregnancy that, Holly had been told, some of the babies one found in orphanages were actually the result of abortions that didn’t “take”) that unless the mother was too strung-out on drugs or vodka to obtain the procedure, she might simply have been too young even to understand that she was pregnant until her baby was being born. And, since they’d been assured by the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 that Tatiana had no drugs in her system at birth, and clearly did not have fetal alcohol syndrome, it seemed that she could easily have been the abandoned child of one, or two, of those thousands of other abandoned children.
“We’ll never know,” Holly had told Tatiana of her birth mother. “But I’d be honored to always-always-always-always be your real-real-real-real mother.” She’d taken her daughter in her arms, and they’d stayed like that, with their faces pressed together, mixing their tears, and it had been, and would always be, the sweetest moment of Holly’s entire life.
AFTER THE DISHES
and the glasses and silverware were set on the tablecloth (Holly still planned to leave the arranging to Tatiana), she glanced again at the picture window.
Now absolutely everything out there except the snow itself had been erased by the blowing snow. Christ, Holly thought, this isn’t a
snowfall
any longer. This is a blizzard. There’d been no word about a
blizzard
on Christmas Day that Holly had heard. No weather warnings on the radio or the television at all. Until yesterday, when flurries had been predicted, they’d actually been suggesting that this year it might not even be a white Christmas.
Holly went to the kitchen island to pick up her iPhone and, just as she did, Dylan started singing his haughty warning again,
it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain—
all that foreboding captured somehow in a space as small as the palm of a child’s hand—and the screen lit up the name Thuy.
“Thuy,” Holly said into the phone.
“Holly,” her friend said. “Merry Christmas. But, Jesus, have you looked outside?”
“I know, I know,” Holly said. “I can’t believe it. Eric’s still on his way back from the airport with his parents. And I expected his brothers and their families to start showing up one carload at a time by now, but no one’s here except me and Tatty.”
“Sweetheart, they’ve closed down the freeway. If your relatives aren’t already in town, they won’t be showing up for
hours
. You’d better start making some phone calls. And don’t leave the house! Patty, Pearl, and I barely made it home from church. It took us an hour to drive ten miles. Pearl’s on her back on the floor right now, recovering. She was driving.”
Holly heard Pearl call out from some space beyond Thuy and her cell phone, “Tell her it’s one for the books.”
“Seriously?” Holly said to Thuy, not ready to fully believe this account of things. “I mean, where did this come from? I thought it wasn’t supposed to snow today.”
“Well, they started the dire warnings about six o’clock this morning, but it was still barely snowing when we left for church at eleven, and we thought, yeah, right, I mean, how much snow can fall during the span of an hour and a half? Well, let me tell you. A lot. And a lot more is on the way. You better turn on your radio.”
“Oh, God.” Holly suddenly understood what the implications of this were. She put a hand to her forehead and said, “Thuy, you’re not calling to say you’re
not coming
, are you?”
There was a silence, and into it Holly made whiny-puppy noises.
“Holly, there’s no—”
“Oh my God, you’re going to abandon me on Christmas Day! Rent a sleigh! I’ll come get you! I need my Thuy and my Pearl and my sugarplum fairy.”
Thuy laughed a little, but not much. They both knew it was only partly a joke, that not coming over for Christmas Day broke a tradition that mattered more to Holly than it did to them. Holly was trying, with the melodrama, to sound less desperate than she felt.
“Holly, there’s no way. Even if it stops snowing right this second, which it’s not going to do, the roads won’t be clear enough to—”
“I heard a plow!” Holly said. “Just, maybe, thirty minutes ago. I bet our road is clear!”
“Hon, that plow is a finger in the dike. No pun intended. And, besides, I couldn’t get Pearl off the floor and back into the car today if our lives depended on it.”
Holly heard Pearl call out, “Tell Holly we’re so sorry! We’ll bring over our presents and our sugarplum fairy tomorrow or the next!”