Chapter 2 Consequential Christmas #2
“I joined up in forty-three,” he told her. “Two days after my seventeenth birthday, me and a bunch of my friends from high
school. The recruiting officer knew we weren’t old enough but was willing to look the other way. A lot of us didn’t make it
back. Some that did won’t ever be the same. Guess I’m not either, if I think about it. I was never much of a student—valedictorians
don’t lie about their age to join the army, you know? But now, I just . . .”
He spread his arms to encompass the books piled around him like the walls of a fortress, while smiling and turning his head
from side to side as if greeting old friends.
“Well, I just want to read everything and learn everything and do everything. Don’t know if I’m doing it for myself or the
guys who never got to. I only know things are different for me now. Doesn’t make sense, I guess. But there it is.”
Walt shrugged, dunked a cracker into the pool of ketchup, and took a quick bite, as if suddenly afraid he’d said too much.
But Margaret understood. The war had changed a lot of people. And there were worse things than returning from combat with
a hunger for life and knowledge. Margaret held out half of her ham sandwich.
“Here.”
“You sure?” he asked, accepting the sandwich when she said she was. “Thanks.”
Most everybody at Ohio State was on a budget, and Walt wasn’t the only student to take advantage of the free crackers and condiments.
But Margaret had never seen anybody make a meal of them and supposed he must be well and truly broke.
She nodded toward the empty cracker wrappers. “End of the month?”
He shook his head. “Saving up for a guitar. If I only eat one meal a day, I’ll have enough by the end of the term.”
“You play the guitar?”
“Not yet,” he said, grinning as he wolfed down a bite of the sandwich. “But I will.”
She married him two years later, when she was twenty and he was twenty-five.
The guitar was still with them, stashed in a corner of the garage. But Walt never played it or read for pleasure anymore,
and the curious and handsome young man who smiled easily and talked too much was gone. She was grateful for the man he’d become,
of course, and the life he’d made possible for them. If not for Walt’s cautious self-discipline, they’d still be renters.
But sometimes she missed the boy—the odd, hungry, indecisive, far-too-impulsive boy.
* * *
Margaret swung open the station wagon’s rear gate and began pulling out branches just as Viv, whose blue, split-level ranch
house stood kitty-corner, was carrying out the trash.
“What is all this?” Viv asked, coming to stand beside her after jogging across the street.
“I’m making garland!”
“How much? You’ve got enough greenery to decorate the whole neighborhood.”
“I’m just going to wrap the banisters. It always takes more than you think.”
“Maggie, I don’t know where you get the energy.”
“Don’t be too impressed,” Margaret said, piling more boughs into her arms. “Not yet anyway. I’ll have to get a wiggle on to finish before the kids get home from school. Hey, can I borrow your punch bowl? Ladies’ Home Journal had an eggnog recipe I want to try.”
Viv ran ahead to open Margaret’s door and stepped aside so she could pass.
“Homemade garland? Homemade eggnog? Tell me you baked a gingerbread house, and I’ll slash my wrists with a rusty frosting
palette. How are the rest of us supposed to compete?”
Margaret frowned and turned sideways, squeezing through the doorway.
“It’s not a competition. I just want things to be nice. For the kids. And Walt.”
“No, I get it. I feel the same way. But sometimes I wonder . . .” Viv tilted her head to the side. “Do you think anybody really
notices?”
* * *
As it turned out, no one did.
Later that afternoon, moments after the kids got home from school to start the Christmas vacation, Suzy vomited onto the freshly
waxed parquet floor. All three of them came down with the flu. Margaret spent the holiday bouncing between their bedrooms,
bringing crackers and ginger ale, buckets and mops, and words of comfort. There’d been no time to cook Christmas dinner, which
was probably just as well. In her rush and enthusiasm to make the garlands, she’d forgotten the turkey and left it sitting
in the station wagon for hours. The bird might have been all right, but it wasn’t worth taking the chance, so she tossed it
into a pot, boiled the bejeebers out of it, and made soup.
After the kids fell asleep on Christmas Day, Margaret and Walt ate the soup with some of the corn bread she’d planned to use
for stuffing, then sat down on the sagging sofa they’d inherited from his parents, careful to avoid the sprung coil in the
center, to exchange gifts.
Margaret gave Walt a new cigarette lighter and a set of gold-plated cuff links.
She could have used her weekly household allowance to buy them, but that felt like cheating, as if Walt would have been paying for his own present.
Instead, she traded in her hoard of S&H Green Stamps, the underground currency of American housewives.
Every purchase at a participating store or filling station earned stamps that could be pasted into booklets and traded in for all manner of merchandise—dishes, toys, appliances, sporting goods, and even furniture.
“Weren’t you saving for lamps?” Walt asked, slipping the links through his cuffs.
Yes. One more book would have done it.
“The lamps can wait,” she said, proud of her small sacrifice.
“Well, these are great.” He raised his wrist to admire his gift. “Makes me a little embarrassed about my present though. Didn’t
have time to wrap it. Hope you don’t mind.”
When Walt pulled the envelope from his jacket, Margaret felt a thrum of excitement. Because what else could it be besides
money, or maybe a check, to buy furniture? What else would one put in a plain white envelope at Christmas? She worked her finger under the flap, then pulled out a postcard printed
with the image of a delighted-looking woman wearing heels and a polka-dot housedress, and effusive red script that said: “A
Gift! For YOU!”
“I know how you love your magazines,” Walt said. “I spotted this one in the dentist’s waiting room and thought you might like
it.” He shifted his weight to one side and pulled an issue of A Woman’s Place out from under the sofa cushion, where he’d hidden it. “This’ll hold you over till the subscription starts. It’s only been
read a few times.”
As Walt talked—seemingly oblivious to her disappointment—the empty, vacuous sensation that spread through her upon opening
the envelope balled into a hard, heavy, and palpable ire, a stone she could not help but throw.
“You shouldn’t have,” Margaret said.
“The dentist won’t care. He’s got plenty more.” Walt slid a Pall Mall from a pack stored in his shirt pocket. “Anyway, you’re welcome. It’ll be like getting a present every month.”
He flipped open his lighter and positioned the cigarette tip in the flame. Margaret stared at him, resentment growing as she
counted the seconds it took him to feel the smoldering heat of her gaze, finally look at her, and see how badly he’d blown
it.
“Walt,” she said, her voice brittle. “You shouldn’t have.”
He thought she was being ridiculous and ungrateful and small.
“When I was growing up, Christmas was for kids. In forty years, my parents never exchanged gifts! Why can’t you give me a little credit? At least I got you something! And you like magazines!”
Yes, but that wasn’t the point. His gift seemed like an afterthought. Was she an afterthought too? Had he not been stuck in
the dentist’s waiting room, would he have gotten her anything at all?
Walt stormed off to sleep in the den with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to keep him company. Margaret climbed the stairs and slammed
the bedroom door, feeling furious but also foolish.
And yes, small. Lonely and small and less. Just less.
* * *
The day after Christmas, Walt went to work early, mumbling something about “last hired, first fired.” Margaret phoned the
pediatrician, then went to Mayer’s Drugstore to pick up a prescription.
Barb Fredericks was coming out as she was going in. “Grab a magazine,” Barb advised, knotting her scarf under her chin. “Must
be twenty people in line for the pharmacy. Half the town is down with the crud.”
Barb was new to Concordia—everybody was. Yet she seemed to know everyone in town, and their business.
“Clark, Wilkerson, Trowbridge,” she said, ticking the names of infected families off on gloved fingers.
“Bitsy and King are okay, but you’d expect that, wouldn’t you?
No kids, no germs. Oh, guess what? I saw a moving van parked in front of that new Nottingham model.
Think I’ll pop over later, invite her to the coffee klatch. Well, I should scoot. Happy New Year!”
After wishing her the same, Margaret entered the drugstore, walking to the center aisle and sighing at the length of the line.
She didn’t like leaving the kids alone for very long, but there was no help for it.
Margaret took her place at the end of the queue behind a bareheaded woman with a mass of reddish curls who was smoking a cigarette
and wearing an exquisite mink coat that fell to her ankles. Fur coats were a status symbol, the sign of a man’s success and
a woman’s too. They measured her ability to support his career so well that he could afford such luxuries, and please him
so thoroughly that he wanted to spoil her—at least that’s what the ads said. A few of her friends had minks, but none as fine
as this, and they’d never have worn one to run errands, not even on a cold day in December. Margaret moved close enough to
feel the silky luxury of the woman’s pelt as it briefly brushed her forearm. It was so soft!
Oblivious to Margaret’s presence, the woman let out an impatient sound, somewhere between a growl and a sigh, and reached