Four. Checking WebMD to Find Out If Visions of Sugarplums Are Fatal
Four
CHECKING WEBMD TO FIND OUT IF VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS ARE FATAL
“And then Santa breaks into your house and leaves you presents!”
My nephew, Henry, has been explaining Santa to me for the last half hour, and between the months of surveillance followed by a night of multiple home invasions, his Santa Claus sounds like he has a lot in common with the Golden State Killer.
But Henry is cute and sweet, and as we sit on the floor coloring together, I’m relieved that his company has spared me from having to talk about my job with my parents or my brother and his wife.
The only bad thing about sitting on the floor is that Alfredo, my mom’s cat, has easy access to me.
He hates me. Every time I reach for a new crayon, he pounces at me and scratches.
Alice stomps in, her feet encased in moon boots my brother says she won’t take off. “It’s a chimney, Henry. He comes down the chimney.”
“We don’t have a chimney!” Henry counters. “He has to break into our house.”
“Santa wouldn’t do that!” Alice swings a foot toward him but topples over before she can make contact.
Henry points his red crayon in her face. “I’m Tiny Tim. I should know what Santa does!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” My brother’s wife, Rachel, jogs in from the kitchen, her braids swinging, and crouches down to mediate the debate happening between her kids.
She slips a look at me that suggests I could have broken up this fight instead of curiously watching to see where it was going. “Santa has his ways.”
“I’m hungry,” Alice tells her.
“You just ate two granola bars,” Rachel reminds her.
“We still have the cookies you decorated,” Mom calls from the kitchen.
“Cookies!” Alice and Henry launch themselves up from the floor and almost trample their mom in their race for the cookies. Rachel tries to hide her What the fuck are you thinking with cookies, lady? expression, but I catch it and try for a sympathetic smile.
“It’s the holidays,” she says resignedly, the way it seems everyone is required to say, as if it’s both an excuse for all indulgences, however ill-advised, and a limbo-esque time period that can only be endured with help from said indulgences.
“Aunt Jill, you have to eat the messy Santa!” Henry calls out to me.
The messy Santa is the cookie that both Alice and Henry decorated for me, swirling colors of icing and piling on sprinkles and candies until Santa’s face looked like something Hunter S.
Thompson would see on an acid-filled North Pole reporting trip.
Also, eating the messy Santa sounds like a particularly lewd sex act, and I start trying to figure out what debasements it would entail, but my private thoughts are interrupted by my dad’s bellow.
“Alfredo, not the tree!” I hear a hiss, and my dad mutters, “Fucking demon cat.”
The cat is inside the tree, finding a way to climb up despite the fact that the branches look crispy and needles fall everywhere. Alfredo yowls as my dad lunges toward him.
“Goddammit, stop scratching, you little monster,” Dad yells. Then to my mom, “Helen, that cat needs an exorcism.”
I should help, but an angry Alfredo is certainly not going to listen to me. I stand up and poke my head out the back door, where Brian is shoveling the walkway to the garage. “You might want to help with this.”
Brian runs up the steps. The good child, always there for his parents. He shoots me a look that says, Couldn’t you do this? and I shake my head no because I’m not touching the situation. Brian slowly approaches Dad. “A fistfight with the cat is not a good idea,” he says.
That’s my cue to back out of the room and into the kitchen, where my niece’s and nephew’s faces are smeared with frosting.
“I get to give it to her!” Alice says.
“No, I do! I made it,” Henry shoots back.
“We both made it!” Alice says. She pulls off one of her moon boots and lobs it at his head. “And I stepped in yellow snow with that.”
“Dad, Alice threw a pee boot at me!” Henry screams.
“Shit! Dad, the tree!” Brian is shouting in the other room. “It’s tipping! Leave the cat!”
“And take the cannoli.” My dad, like all dads, can’t resist a Godfather reference.
“Not funny! Grab the trunk,” Brian yells. I hear ornaments clinking as the tree shifts. Alfredo issues a scrabbly meow.
I turn back to my niece and nephew, who are egging me on with the gross cookie on a plate between them. “Aunt Jill, eat the messy Santa!”
“Yeah, eat the messy Santa!”
“Don’t copy me. I’m mad at you.” Now Henry kicks Alice.
Rachel leaps in and pulls Henry away from Alice, hoisting him up by the waist. As she does, Alice keeps her grip on the plate, shooting Henry a victorious smirk.
“Henry, we don’t kick our siblings,” Rachel says as she sits him on the counter for a talking-to.
Alice skips into the room with the plate, which Rachel takes from her with a stern look.
His mom’s ire doesn’t stop Henry from leaning over Rachel’s shoulder and jabbing his pointer finger in the air at me.
“Messy Santa! Messy Santa!” he starts chanting with glee. Alice runs up to stand near her brother and hops from foot to foot, joining in. “Messy Santa! Messy Santa!” She clutches her crotch with both hands and keeps singsonging.
“Alice, maybe you should use the restroom,” I say.
“After you eat the cookie,” she says as she wets her pants.
“Alice!” Now Rachel gives me a look, as if I’m an accomplice to the chaos.
I’m almost grateful when my mom hands me a cup of milk and the plate bearing the messy Santa.
Somehow oblivious to the noise, the chaos, and the urine she then bends to clean up with a dishrag, she says, “Aren’t they the sweetest things? ”
She’s talking about Alice and Henry. Or maybe about the capsules of Christmas Valium she must have popped half a bottle of to be so serene.
“Eat it! Eat it! Eat it!” Henry sings as he hops down from the counter while his mom tries to drag a wet Alice from the kitchen. But then Alice starts up the chant, too, and Rachel death-glares at me, like, Eat the fucking cookie so we’re done with this .
I take a big bite, and the messy Santa tastes exactly like a cookie designed by two sticky children.
I smile at the kids as I choke down the cookie, and to Mom I say, “So sweet,” as Rachel finally succeeds in luring Alice from the room, while Henry follows her, screaming, “Santa saw you pee on the floor!”
“They bring so much joy to the family,” Mom adds.
I cringe. Not because the statement is cringeworthy but because I can feel my mom sneaking a secret message into her comments the same way Brian and Rachel have to puree veggies to hide them in the kids’ mac and cheese.
The message is, of course, that I should have a family.
That it doesn’t matter if I’m great at my job—or would be great at my job if I had one—if I don’t seed the world with more of our DNA.
Like I said, I never perceive my mom judging anyone, but I’m her daughter and she makes an exception for me.
Now Henry runs back in.
“Aunt Jill, aren’t you going to finish the cookie?” Shit. I pick up the Santa for another foul bite, overwhelmed by the seemingly thousands of sugar crystals smeared across the messy Santa’s hat. One particularly sharp one slices into my gum.
“Mmm,” I say, wondering if my mouth is bleeding. “This is fabulous.”
Henry keeps watching me. He wants me to finish it.
“You’re so good with them,” Mom says. She finishes swabbing up the pee and goes to wash her hands.
For a split second, I warm at the compliment, but I cool off quickly.
I know it’s because I want her to compliment me on something I already have.
I also know the fact that I don’t have any of the things I left Powell Park to get—the things I wish I could be complimented on—is what’s really bothering me.
In the next room, I hear the unmistakable sound of the Christmas tree crashing to the floor.
“Fucking hell!” Dad yells.
I choke down the last of the Santa and realize I have to get out of this house before I say or do something I’ll regret. “I just remembered a gift I want to buy,” I say.
It’s not a total lie. I almost bought a total middle-school-teacher sweater for Brian at the Century City mall, but my sudden unemployment made the West LA prices out of range.
“Oh, okay, well if you’re going into town, can you pick up two dozen cookies at SweetHart’s? The cute ones?” Mom asks.
SweetHart’s Bakery is another place I’d love to avoid. It’s not a Grant-level avoidance, but it’s a six on the one-to-ten scale of places I’d rather not go. Corey Hartwell’s family owns it, and I really don’t want to run into my former high school crush.
“What about these cookies?” I point to the others that I decorated with the kids. But I already know why not those cookies. The messy Santa may have been the worst of them, but his subsidiary cookies aren’t much more appetizing.
“I can go,” Mom says. It’s three words of speech with about three pages of subtext. The subtext is that I haven’t done shit to help out since I showed up.
“No, I’ll do it. I’m going out anyway,” I say.
From the living room comes the sound of a light popping. “Dammit, Alfredo! There go the lights.”
“Right now,” I add. I slide on my giant sunglasses, grab the keys, and leave.
SweetHart’s Bakery is predictably busy. As the last family-owned bakery in Powell Park, it does big business during the holidays. Everything else is a Dunkin’ or a Starbucks.
It doesn’t hurt that their products are good.
Even though I mostly avoid Facebook, preferring to doomscroll elsewhere, the few people I follow from high school have shown pictures of kids’ birthday cakes bought at SweetHart’s, and a while back, a woman who’d been on the school newspaper with me tagged Corey Hartwell in a local news story naming SweetHart’s one of the best bakeries in Chicagoland.