Tidings

That Christmas, Nicole started insisting we’d ‘fucked up’ her life. I guess all parents are shocked, concerned when one of their children comes to feel this. But having evolved from difficult backgrounds ourselves, Lor and I’d convinced each other we’d honestly tried not to do just that. It’s so hard to show love, especially when you really love, respect and admire the loved one. It’s almost as if they want you to violate them, force them to behave by some standard of your own not related to their desires. Maybe they want a chance to manifest their love for you by submission. I don’t know. It’s beyond me.

So, there, in the pleasant dark, I reaffirm my determination to listen, not to be provoked, to make the most of this which, I’m convinced, will be our last Christmas together. I feel a pang again because Mike won’t make it, but then again, we can’t have everything.

Before going to bed, I heat some water and scrub myself thoroughly in the washbowl. I stink from nervous perspiration and it’d be no fun for Lor sleeping beside someone who smells like an escapee from a metro or a zoo. I even shave. Ben sets up his bed before the fire, then when everybody’s settled in, I blow out the candles and crawl into bed.

As I’m going off to sleep, wrapped close to Loretta’s back, I think again what a big mistake our species made when we started building houses with sleeping, eating, cooking, washing, all separated into different compartments. Virtually everybody in this village lives as we do, in one room. It’s surprising how comforting this can be. I won’t try to defend that one with the girls. There’s no reason to.

I wake at about seven thirty for a pressing morning piss. I don’t usually take a diuretic before sleeping, but last night I did, along with my usual Valium. I could feel signs of elevated blood pressure, a slight tightness under my left arm, a throbbing in the temples.

Two good things came of my medicating. One, I got up twice during the night and each time threw a good-sized log on the fire to keep it going, so now it’s burning merrily. Starting a new fire in the ashes on a freezing morning with cold, damp wood is not my idea of a great way to begin a winter day.

I let my eyes drift around the room, enjoying peace and the coming dawn.

The second good thing is the blood pressure is down and I’m feeling very content, undisturbed inside, in tune with the world. I run through again what has to be done, as I see it, and my only concern is for Lor. But it’s a concern, not an anxiety.

For me, Christmas Eve day is even more important, more exciting, than Christmas Day itself. The sense of anticipation, of expectant readiness, is magic. I hear, feel, Lor breathing beside me. Ben is stretched out, overlapping his cot by the fire, arms hanging over the sides. He sleeps deeply, calmly, no tossing, no teeth grinding, no startled nightmares, no thumb or finger sucking. We like to think it’s because we never let him cry himself to sleep, never left him alone in the dark when he wanted to be with us. Until he was seven, he spent at least half of each night in our bed, usually cuddling with me. I didn’t mind, I liked it; I don’t think sleeping alone is natural. With our first three we were young and foolish enough, vulnerable to rigid conditioning theories then prevalent, to insist they stay in their own beds, so now each is an erratic sleeper. I myself only became capable of deep, full, refreshing sleep when I was about forty. I can’t always manage it, now, even with meditation or Valium, but then things have been hard lately.

The skylights in the ceiling are beginning to lighten. It almost looks like blue sky, clear, behind tree branches hanging over our roof. The room is starting to quicken with light.

I ease myself out of bed, slide my feet into cool slippers, adjust for the failing clasp on my pajamas, turn the butane heater up to high, fill the tea kettle with water. I love filling this kettle through the spout, might even be a sexual thing, some compensation for my failure as a lover to my loved one.

I light the stove and put on water for washing. I sneak past Ben, turn over the log burning in the fire and jam another log next to it. I check the inside temperature, fourteen Celsius, we should have that back up to twenty within the next hour. I go to the door and pull back my thick red drapes so I can look at the outside thermometer.

I’m startled by a white, just lightening sky over the frosted trees, blending to a fragile, transparent white-blue overhead. I’m transfixed in wonder.

I break my eyes away enough to look at the outside thermometer through the frosted window. Twenty-two degrees below freezing. The sun still hasn’t risen. I’m torn between waking Lor and Ben or enjoying this special moment to myself. They’ll be up late tonight with the Reveillon at Madame Calvet’s, plus all the excitement of the girls arriving; they need their sleep, so I take the selfish decision.

I dress quietly, turn off the stove under the hot water, slip on boots, jacket, gloves, wool knit cap. I carefully open the door, let myself out, then pull firmly so it latches behind me.

I look left and there is magnificent ice sculpture from the falls. Every splash, every flowing current is frozen in twisting glossy forms like transparent, clear toy candy. The ivy growing along the sides of the sluice gate is wrapped in ice, inches thick, drooping gracefully with the weight of each leaf captured green in transparent ice cages. There are giant icicles, four feet long, three inches thick hanging from the stone, temporary stalactites. I walk across the frozen, ice-creaking wooden porch, up the slippery steps onto the dam to look out over the pond.

It’s frozen absolutely clear without a ripple. If you didn’t know it was winter, if there were green leaves to reflect on its perfectly calm surface, you’d think it was five thirty in the morning of a June dawn; halfway around the calendar from now.

The glow of the sun is still hidden by the eastern edge of our valley-bowl. There are no clouds. It’s so empty, one could easily wonder if there ever had been, ever would be a breath, a breeze again.

I do my usual thing, the summer ritual, standing on tiptoe, reaching up high as I can, pulling myself out of myself, trying to let some of that glorious empty sky come into me. In the interest of my sleeping family and the neighbors, I repress the desire for a grunting howl.

With one boot toe I kick loose three small, flat stones from the dam surface, two smooth, one ragged. I pick them up; they feel like ice even through my leather gloves. The first, the ragged one, I throw full-force directly down at the ice. I’m standing now on the small wooden platform from which, in summers, I slip quietly into the water for my after-run-before-breakfast swim.

Those summer mornings, I slide in quietly so as not to disturb the fishermen halfway around the pond. This morning, the platform glistens with ice crystals, but doesn’t seem slippery under my boots. The stone glances from the ice, making a small crazed dent, then bounces and skims another thirty or forty feet. The entire pond surface screeches and echoes from edge to edge, hallowed, hollow, deep-throated. A scientist friend told me once how the crackling howling sound is due to ice cracking along the surface faster than the speed of sound, so it causes a minisonic boom. That’s hard to believe, but it is a magic sound.

Holding onto an overhanging tree branch, I ease one foot over the edge from my platform to test the ice. It cracks slightly, the cracks spread crazily in all directions away from my toe. The ice appears to be about an inch or so thick. I take one of the smooth stones, cock my arm and skim it underhand across the incredibly water-clear ice. It bounces, slides; almost without friction, seemingly endlessly, accompanied by echoing reverberations of the ice. It continues, until, almost out of sight, it enters the cattails, marshland and reeds at the far end of the pond, then stops against one of the domed muskrat dens out there.

I’m about ready to skim the last stone, feeling it icy cold, smooth, sucking heat through my gloves, when the sun begins to glow white fire over the eastern edge of our valley. It shines almost pure white, like a communion wafer painted by a Spanish eighteenth-century painter.

This is time, happening. I can feel it passing through me. When one thinks about time, and I do too much; it’s part of what makes me a philosopher I guess; but when one thinks about it, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon we know.

We try to define it with clocks and calendars which are, more or less, based on movements of sun, earth and moon, but that’s only measuring. All we can really guess about time is it’s probably related to space and matter, whatever they are. If space and matter just became, it’s when time began. But time can’t begin because ‘begin’ is a time word, beginning-ending.

But this sun seeming to come over those hills, time or not, is practically pure light, cutting through ninety-three million miles, the source of virtually all earth’s energy.

I feel it already warm on my cold face before it’s halfway over the hill. It lights my soul. I put the last stone back in my pocket, take off my gloves, allowing my hands to be healed by these magic rays. I close my eyes, face the sun directly. I can feel, see, the red insides of my eyelids lighten; redden; warm with the blush of life. I want to hold my breath or sing; dance; something, some way to say thanks.

Instead I put my gloves back on, open my eyes and watch till the sun is finally detached from the earth, free-floating, a heavenly body again, giving us all for nothing. I vow to express my thanks by showing love for my loved ones. I wish I could somehow transmit to Lor, to the kids, my intense joy in them, the way they are. But dumb events, happenings, keep getting in the way, blocking my true feelings. But I’m going to try.

But first I want to walk, to hear, feel the crunch of frozen grasses under my feet. I walk around the pond toward the Rousseaus’. The trees are coated with ice, thick, clear, natural varnish, crackling in the sunlight as rounded prisms, a myriad of colors reflected from hoarfrost on the ground.

Last year’s blackberries, most still unpicked, now dried, hardened on the frozen bushes, are, each one, surrounded, enveloped in an irregular-shaped, perfectly clear ball of ice, like insects caught in amber. They hang their heads the same as they did in summer when filled with sun-sweetened purple juices.

I turn and look back over the pond to see our mill reflected, frozen, in the still ice. Even on a perfectly breezeless day in spring or summer it is never so completely mirrored. It has the look of someone in a tintype, long dead.

I stare transfixed by this temporal transmutation, then stamp my chilling feet and start back, jogging lumpishly along the top of the dam to our mill. I’m ready for this year’s Christmas Eve washup. I’m having my two daughters arrive today, I want to look my best, which isn’t much, but what I’ve got, what I am. Oh how I wish I could be different, be what Lor wants, what the kids want. It’s a terrible feeling inside when you’re seen as a ‘flake’, a ‘wimp’ by others when you’re personally convinced you’re not one.

Everybody’s still asleep. I turn up the water to heat again. I strip down to my long johns. The water, already warm, heats quickly. The room temperature is now seventeen degrees. I pull back the drapes on our east window to let in the sunlight. I pour hot water into the washbowl, regulate it to just right with cold water from the pitcher. I wash my face, scrub soap into my hair. I hang my head over the sink, pour the rest of the cold water from the pitcher over my hair to rinse it. If I weren’t completely awake, aware, before, I am now.

Then I strip off the top part of my long johns and do a good soaping and rinsing off of my whole upper body, not just under the arms. I scrub up a good lather in the hair on my chest, arms and back.

I dry vigorously with a towel, then strip off the bottoms to the long johns, scrub all my vital parts. I actually lean over the bowl on our table to let them float in the water so I can do the job properly. I think this part of a man has less density, floats more easily, than other parts. It should, there are no bones, despite romantic claims to the contrary. I stare at these complicated organs of mine and wonder what music they should play to be heard. I rinse and towel myself off again, pull the long johns back on, mostly for Ben’s sake. He’s at an age where nudity bothers him. He even goes into the cold toilet room to dress. The new heater in there might save him from pneumonia.

Now I put the bowl on the floor and the towel beside it. One at a time, I carefully wash my toes. No wonder the washing of feet is such an intrinsic symbol for so many religions. There’s such comfort in it.

I resist overstimulating a minor case of athlete’s foot on my left foot between the little and next toe. No sense starting something.

I carefully dry each foot and slide on the socks, the ones I washed last night, along with my underpants. I’d hung them on the mantel to dry. They’re somewhat crinkly stiff, but still soft and warm. There are some small luxuries in life, hard to describe, but which give it texture, and for me, having washed the socks and underwear by hand, myself, drying them by a fire I kept burning all night, makes it a better, deeper experience. I’ve got to be careful not to try forcing the ones I love to love the things, the ways of living, I love. It’s an easy mistake to make. It might be called the philosopher’s folly, or maybe everybody’s folly. It would be so great if we could show our love by enjoying those we love for what they are, not what we want them to be. It would be the ultimate mutual emancipation.

I’m just exploring that thought, pulling my dark blue Shetland wool sweater over my head when I hear Lor waking up; yawning, mmmning, lip sucking. She gave me this sweater for my birthday, she knows the kinds of things I like. She should, after thirty years, but some women wouldn’t. I don’t really know what she wants sometimes; I hope she really wants the girls here for Christmas. I hope she even wants to be here herself. She has every right, every reason to want to be somewhere else right now. But it all came about so fast.

‘What time is it, dear?’

I look at my watch tipped sideways on the table, beside the bowl of dirty water.

‘Quarter to nine. Wow, is it ever beautiful outside, Lor. Look at that sunshine, and it’s twenty-two below! Everything’s frozen. Except for the sun coming up, it’s almost as if time’s stopped.’

Lor rolls over on her stomach, props her chin on her elbows, looks past me out the new washed window into the icy world. I think there are tears on the outsides of her eyes. It could only be from sleep or the strong light from the window. She quickly wipes them away with the backs of her wrists.

‘You should have wakened me. What a beautiful day. Happy Christmas Eve day, darling.’

‘Happy day to you too, Lor. There’s still plenty of hot water to wash up if you want.’

I look at the inside thermometer.

‘It’s between eighteen and nineteen now, practically like California.’

She’s turned over and is sitting up; spreading covers, making the bed as she slides out. She’s wearing a dark blue flannel nightgown. Sexy sleeping gowns are not her thing. Lately Lor has been much more sexy in the clothes she wears and the way she makes up and does her hair, but she still sleeps in old-fashioned flannel, usually dark blue.

‘Not quite California, dear. I’m not complaining; I think it’s wonderful how you keep this place warm but for a Californian this is Arctic hardship. Gosh, I wonder how the girls are going to manage? I did tell them to bring plenty of warm clothes.’

I dump my bowl of dirty water into the sink, wipe it out with a paper towel, fill it with steaming hot water and some cold, while Loretta makes the freezing trip up to the toilet. I stretch out on the made bed. She doesn’t have time to unplug and plug heaters, just one quick morning piss, or maybe with a woman that’s pee. I know a man’s piss and a woman’s pee sound different; in a toilet bowl anyhow. It’s amazing how much stronger piss smells in the cold. I wonder if she notices that too, probably it’s in the great area of things too vulgar to discuss.

When she comes back, she walks past me, pulls her nightgown up over her head, splashes water over herself, toweling dry as she goes. I try not to let her know I’m watching, but this is one of the best parts about being at the mill. Her skin is still smooth as when we married, transparent pink, no moles nor warts, her stomach bulges slightly under the belly button from four kids but her body is odalisque, especially her back. Ingres, Matisse, Cézanne would love to paint her. Our relationship is such that I find myself more aesthetically pleased than sexually aroused. I don’t know why. I don’t really think either of us wants to rock our boat; broad-beamed, slow-moving, hard to tip over, or at least I always thought it would be hard to tip.

I’ve come to believe nothing fouls up a successful long-term man-woman relationship more thoroughly than rampant sex. One or the other, or sometimes both, sooner or later, get to using withheld intimacy, physical satisfaction, as a weapon; sexual blackmail. Even now, with everything that’s happened, I still feel that way. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with me.

At school, over the years, I’ve had many chances at flirtations with students and fellow teachers. I always back off, the rewards don’t seem to match the involvements, the complications, the expectations. I just don’t seem to have the sexual drive needed. I’m much more the romantic than the stud.

Lor squirts herself with deodorant and starts dressing. I get up, push logs around on the fire, then snuggle another one in. We have enough logs cut to get through the day but not enough for tonight. It’s probably time for me to induct Ben into the art of hauling and cutting wood. It’s a very Christmasy thing to do. I hope he’ll see it that way.

Behind me, Ben has wakened. He reaches for his glasses on the table beside him and looks at his digital watch, also on the table. He’s very nearsighted. When we go back to Illinois next time we’ll try fitting him with soft contact lenses.

He’s weird with his watch and his sense of time. He has a flat credit-card size combination computer-watch. He can’t even tell time with a regular handed analog watch. Don’t ever tell him it’s quarter to three instead of 2:45. That’s sacrilege.

Ben swings his feet out of bed and slides them into his slippers. These slippers are the largest size made in France. He stares into the fire. He’s a slow waker, coming from some deep place of rich, imaginative dreams which he’ll sometimes share with us at breakfast, but not now. We all know better than to try much communication with Ben at this point. He told me once he doesn’t mind getting up but he hates to stop dreaming.

‘Morning Ben, have a good sleep?’

‘Uh uh.’

‘It’s a beautiful day out, clear and cold. The pond’s frozen.’

‘That’s good. Did it snow?’

‘No. It’s too cold to snow now.’

‘Uh huh.’

Ben’s a bit of an old man in his ways. Each night he carefully folds his clothes and stacks them on a chair beside him. It’s hard getting him to surrender clothes for washing. He’s not enthusiastic about change of any kind, even changing his socks. If happiness is being satisfied with what you have, then Ben’s the happiest person I’ve ever met.

He gets up, stretches, pokes the fire with his favorite stick poker, gathers together his pile of clothes and heads up the small, steep, four-step stairway toward the bathroom.

‘Ben, you can turn on the heater in there if you want, I’ll turn this one off here.’

‘Thanks. That’s all right. I don’t get cold.’

But I turn off the heater anyway. With the fire blazing away, we’re almost up to twenty. Lor’s dressed. She dumps her water into the sink, wipes out the bowl, puts the bowl and pitcher on the dresser.

‘Dearest? I wish Ben would wash in the morning. He’s beginning to smell like a dog kennel from playing with all those dogs in the village. That, combined with his own smell, it’s enough to turn anybody’s stomach.

‘I snuck in new socks last night. It was one of the times you got up and went to the toilet. What’d you do, take a diuretic and your Valium? Is it that bad?’

‘Not really, just getting ready for the onslaught; bracing myself, packing in reserves of passivity, nonresistance, paternal permissiveness, mellowness, coolness. I’m okay. What’re we having for breakfast?’

‘How about pancakes? I have syrup already made and there’s Roland’s honey. How’s that sound?’

‘Great. I’ll straighten things up and sweep while you’re whipping them together.’

I’m tempted right here to reveal the Christmas waffle iron. Waffles would be great this morning. I roll up Ben’s sleeping bag and spread it at the bottom of our bed. I haul his mattress up the stairs and tuck it in his old toy corner out in the upper grange. I come back and fold his cot, store it under the stairs going up to where the girls will sleep. I guess I should wait for Ben to come back. He always puts his bed away, carefully, slowly, but I’d like things cleared away for breakfast.

Actually, the stairs are more a ship’s ladder than a staircase and not so sturdy at that, but they’ve lasted almost fifteen years now.

I built the first step two feet off the floor so Ben couldn’t climb up it when he was little. I’ve been meaning for the last seven years to put in this missing step but never have. It’s little things like that I tend to let get by, or maybe it’s because putting in that step will be one more proof we don’t have a baby any more, aren’t going to have any, any more.

The grandchildren thing doesn’t look so hot either; both Mike and Nicole say they’re not going to have kids and Maggie seems in the process of terminating the father of the one she does have. I’m not about to wait for Ben to come through; although he’s physically precocious in his sexual development, he doesn’t show much interest at the functional level. The things young girls do to attract young boys all seem silly to him. He told me once he’d really like having an interesting girl to talk with but the girls at school are only boy crazy.

‘They aren’t dumb, Dad, they just act that way.’

Could be in his genes. Maybe we’ll have a sequel, ‘Son of the Vanishing Man’. This is one of Nicole’s inventions that caught on. She claims I’m really invisible sometimes, that when things get tough, I turn off my mind and vanish inside myself. She could be right. I don’t know.

But I’d probably better nail in that missing step anyway; the girls would appreciate it since they’ll be sleeping up there.

Lately, I’ve been trying to work out some semantic progression through all the steps, conditions, below satisfaction. Right now it goes something like: acceptance, tolerance, accommodation, acquiescence, resignation, resentment, surrender, revolt. I’ve been practicing, trying to figure out just where I am.

I’m not sure that last one belongs there, but building that step on the stairs fits pretty well with accommodation or maybe acquiescence. I do actually have to build the step, find the wood, nails, hammer, saw; cut the wood, fit it, hammer it in place. Accommodation. Yes, we have accommodations. Or, ‘No, we have no accommodations, you may sleep in the stable.’

I find our broom and start sweeping over by the firewood corner to the right of the fireplace. Loretta’s pouring pancakes on the griddle, the smell of them fills the room. She talks to me over her shoulder.

‘Dear, could you hold off sweeping until after breakfast?’

‘Honest, Lor, I promise I’ll just take little six-inch strokes; I won’t raise any dust at all. Promise. Besides, Maggie’s even worse than you are about dust; if I don’t get it done now, we’ll be walking around in dust up to our ankles before they leave.’