Two Trees

The Christmas Tree

"Let's get a white tree!" I squealed, even though I wasn't supposed to act all excited about stuff now that I was a seventh-grader.

"A white tree! Let's get a white tree Mommy!" 8 year-old Little Chris called from the backseat.

"I know exactly the kind of tree I want." Big Chris said as she pulled into the space in the Albertson's parking lot. "I want a seven-foot Frazier Fir and I am going to decorate it with white lights, red bulbs and big red bows. It'll look beautiful in the new living room." It was our first Christmas as a family: Big Chris, Little Chris, my Dad, and me. My cheeks were suddenly hot.

"Aren't we all decorating it?'

"Of course. We'll all do it together." She set the brake and pulled the keys from the ignition. "But that's what it's going to look like." She flashed one of her diamond hard smiles and exited the car.

"But what about our Christmas ornaments?" We were in the grocery store now. Little Chris was out in front of the cart. I trailed Big Chris as she pushed.

"You mean you mother's ornaments? Oh, Kelly, those are so..." an ugly giggle escaped her throat. "I mean...you can keep those for when you have a tree of your own someday. Grab a couple of those, please." She pointed a manicured nail at the shelf above me. I felt the familiar hot stone forming in my belly as I reached down two boxes of Carnation Instant Breakfast and dropped them into the cart but I didn't push. Chris' voice had that "Don't fuck with me" edge in it. She was nineteen years younger than my father, curvy, shallow and bloodless. Dad never even considered taking my side. I had already learned the futility of resistance.

My mother had been dead 19 months. Right after her suicide, all of her belongings were either scarfed up by my grown siblings or sold by my father to pay the estate taxes. There were no pictures either. Mom had destroyed those in the last week of her life. The family albums were a macabre patchwork of random blank squares and photos with holes where mom's face had been. She'd tried to erase herself but hadn't quite succeeded. I had her Christmas ornaments. The big cardboard boxful had somehow escaped the tide of family greed and now rested safely on the top shelf of my closet. When Dad and I took our tree down the previous Christmas he'd told me to keep them for us.

Mom's last Christmas had been the best in memory. It came at the end of a year that saw her and my father separate and reconcile. The separation had changed her, propelled her out of the house where she had spent two reclusive decades mostly reading and cleaning and occasionally visiting with my aunts. It had pushed her into the world where she got a part-time job in a gift shop. She and the owner, another woman in her forties, became fast friends. Our house, formerly an immaculate museum of travel souvenirs, crocheted toilet roll covers and furniture store knick-knacks, was quickly populated with fancy silk flower arrangements and potpourri. The "If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie wipe the seatie!" sign above the toilet was replaced with a china dish filled with tiny rose-shaped soaps. The hand-stitched felt cow on the fridge with the bubble reading, "Holy Cow! You eatin' again?" gave way to glossy, sculpted dough magnets of miniature pies and loaves of bread. Mom went to lunch with friends, started seeing a psychiatrist and Saturday afternoons found us at matinees of, The Good-Bye Girl and You Light Up My Life, where she cried through the credits in the dark of the theater but later, recommended the movies later to everyone she knew. In December Dad moved back in. Mom celebrated by taking Christmas up a notch.

My parents governed with a combination of violence, bribery and exasperation. This was ineffective and family life was dicey, but they were both incredible at Christmas. Dust-bowl survivors who migrated to California as children, they saw to it that their own kids wanted for nothing on December 25th. Mom's newfound happiness was poured into the holiday. In lieu of 'just stockings' she filled big brown paper shopping bags with small brightly wrapped gifts and our favorite Christmas candies. This was in addition to the always ridiculously huge pile of presents from "Santa". The biggest change was the tree. Out went the clumpy strands of gold tinsel, the wrinkled wads of silver icicles, the scratched metallic bulbs, and the giant colored indoor/outdoor lights. When the night came to decorate the tree she ordered us out to the car to bring in box after box of brand new decorations. She'd been gathering them for months and had kept them hidden in her trunk. As we opened them, the thought she had put into them became apparent as each of our favorite hobbies, colors, shapes and designs began to populate the tree. When I opened a box containing a dozen tiny copper and brass instruments Mom sprang over to my spot on the carpet to coo over each one. She smiled brightly and her dark eyes, (eyes that had been more often sad in my lifetime, than anything else), lit up as she plucked a steel string on a perfect miniature violin. "Isn't that sweet?" She asked as the silly twang petered out. " I chose the instruments for you."

"Thanks Mom! They're so cute!" I took the violin and played the strings while I searched out the just-right spot on the tree. That night we made s'mores in the fireplace and slept in sleeping bags beneath the tree.

Big Chris bought her tree and we decorated it as instructed: While Little Chris and I sat carefully sipping low-cal cocoa she readjusted all our decorations so the tree would be "balanced". My stomach burned and my cheeks were flushed but I said nothing. Dad was still overseas working and wouldn't be back until Thanksgiving, a couple of weeks hence. It wasn't like he would intervene, though I couldn't imagine he would think much of this tree either.

Over the next week I tried several times to change Chris's mind.

Monday it was, "What if we just pick a few of our ornaments and a few of your ornaments and add them to the tree?"

"No."

Tuesday it was, "What if you pick the ornaments that we get to add?"

"No."

Thursday I tried "What if we just get a little table-top tree for the den and put some of our favorite ornaments on that?"

This time Chris looked up from the magnifying mirror where she was layering her mascara.

"I said 'No' and I mean 'No'! Ask me again and you will be in your room for the next week. Do I make myself clear?" She glared through the mirror at me with her huge wet, brown eyes.

"Yes." I slunk down the stairs defeated.

The weekend before Thanksgiving I found her flipping through a magazine in the master bedroom loft. The ocean was stormy and gray through the glass doors behind her; the shining waves of her long brown air fell forward across her arm.

"Um Chris?" I called from the landing.

"Yes?" She didn't look up.

"I was wondering..." I lost my nerve and was about to retreat.

"What is it, Kelly?" she asked, the edge creeping into her voice. It was now or never.

"Okay!" Here goes "What-if-I-bought-a-tree-with-my-own-money-and-put-in-my-room-so-you-wouldn't-have-to-see-it?" I stood frozen awaiting my punishment.

She sucked her lips into her clenched mouth and gazed coolly up at me."

"Fine, but I'm not driving you."

Meredith, the nice neighbor across the street who often paid me to sit for her son, and who genuinely thought the world of me, happily drove me to the Albertson's parking lot where I picked out all the tree my thirteen dollars and sixty-seven cents would buy. It was a five-foot blue spruce with about two thirds of its original needles. Meredith didn't mind that another third of the needles littered the floor of her trunk by the time we got it home. I stood it in my room on its X-shaped wooden stand and started in. As I reached the pastel light strands around the curling branches, I remembered how my mother's eyes had sparkled in their glow. As I placed the ornaments one by one: My sister Cheri's wee tennis racket, my brother Steve's pink '57 Chevy, Sandy's pink-nosed mouse I saw Mom's auburn hair shining in the warm light, her smile, so big and her face so bright and animated, she vibrated with happiness and hope. I finished but for one ornament and sat back on my bed to admire my handiwork. The tree sat near the glass doors looking bald and crooked and dark against the fading gray light from outside. No amount of beloved ornaments or fond memories would perform the Charlie Brown miracle tonight. Had I thought it would? I was disappointed but it wasn't just that. In bygone seasons, decorating the tree had opened the gates of to the flood gleeful anticipation upon which we bobbed and whirled our way to Christmas morning. But that had not happened this time. I had only succeeded in opening a fresh cut in a lingering wound. I thought about the tree in the living room so empty, impersonal and crisp, a perfect mirror of my stepmother, and I stared at the little tree in front of me. The single string of working lights I had been able to find had not been enough. The backlit ornaments were just shapes in silhouette, their vibrancy and color lost in the fading light. As I lay there, it occurred to me that I could not remember the sound of my mother's voice nor could I recall her face in motion. When was it that she had become a series of silent stills? I lie across the bed watching the pastel lights gradually brighten as the dark overtook the world outside and crept slowly into my room. The tiny violin lay quiet in my hand.