Chapter 8 #3
Billie and Jason’s plane landed at JFK with a light snow falling.
It looked like a Christmas card, and reminded Billie of Boston.
Jason felt invigorated just knowing he was home.
He kissed Billie as they landed, and they headed for baggage claim with the other passengers, and then went outside to find a cab.
The snow wasn’t sticking yet, but it looked pretty as Billie had a frost of it on her hair and eyelashes, and Jason couldn’t wait to get to his parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue.
It was the same apartment he had grown up in, and the treasures of his boyhood were still in his room.
His mother was putting him and Billie in one guest room and his sister and her boyfriend in the other.
Their childhood rooms remained as shrines to the past, with all their mementos and souvenirs, trophies and photographs.
His sister Emily’s blue ribbons from her horse shows, his baseball and basketball trophies.
The apartment had a view of Central Park and by the time they got there, the trees were turning white.
“Do you skate?” Jason asked Billie in the cab, and she nodded enthusiastically.
“I love it.”
“We’ll go tomorrow if we have time,” he promised.
They chatted animatedly in the cab, both of them excited about what was going to be a wonderful Christmas, better than Billie had ever known, among people who loved each other, were intelligent, and had meaningful jobs. It was the world she belonged in now.
It took them an hour to get to the city. The snow hadn’t slowed the traffic down yet. Shoppers and theatergoers and people going to Christmas parties had added to the usual traffic, but the whole city seemed festive to Billie and Jason, coming from L.A. where it didn’t look like Christmas at all.
When they got to the building on Fifth Avenue where Jason’s parents lived, the doorman recognized Jason and was happy to see him.
A porter helped them get the two bags upstairs.
Jason didn’t have his key with him and he rang the bell.
His parents were waiting for them and his mother opened the door.
She was a trim-looking woman in her mid-sixties with attractively dyed brown hair, and was wearing the black suit she had worn to the office.
She had rushed home to be there to greet Jason and meet Billie.
Jason’s father was at home too. He looked very much like Jason and was equally tall, with a thick head of white hair.
Jason carried their bags to the bedroom, and Marta, the housekeeper who had worked for them for thirty years, came out of the kitchen to hug him.
There were delicious smells emanating from the kitchen, and the table in the dining room was set for four.
Jason’s sister was arriving the next day from Vermont, so he and Billie would be alone with his parents for the evening.
They looked like people in a movie to Billie.
There were warm greetings and hugs, the same housekeeper who had taken care of Emily and Jason when they were children.
There was stability and warmth, kindness and comfort evident in every fiber of the tapestry of their lives.
They were the kind of family Billie had dreamed of and had never belonged to.
She had gone to college with people like Jason at MIT, but she had never been one of them.
She had been an outsider wherever she went.
She had been considered a freak in Iowa, in a poor farming town where her classmates still married straight out of high school, didn’t go to college, and started having babies immediately.
Her hunger for learning and books and wanting an education had set her apart from them all her life, even from her own father who had been a stranger to her and treated her like an intruder from another planet.
To people like Jason and his parents, she was an outsider too, having grown up poor in a farming town, with a father who ran a dairy farm, and she had none of the sophisticated, educated background they did, traveling around the world and working as doctors and lawyers and publishers.
Whichever way she turned, she was out of step.
She felt as though she didn’t belong anywhere, and was standing out in the cold, looking in through a window.
She never belonged with the people she was with.
Billie was quiet as she tried to adjust to her surroundings, and Jason looked at her when they were alone in the pretty guest bedroom with a blue satin bedspread, antique furniture, and flowered chintz curtains in the same blue as the bedspread.
He could suddenly sense how out of her element she felt.
She had the right credentials to be with them now, but she came from a place that was foreign to his family, and her whole upbringing was shocking by comparison.
She couldn’t put words to what she was feeling, but Jason could see it in her eyes.
She felt like an orphan again. And she was much younger than Jason, which set her apart too.
He put his arms around her and held her for a moment.
“Just breathe,” he said to her quietly. “I know everything is new, and you don’t know anyone here, but they want you to be here, they’re happy to meet you.
You’re safe and welcome here, and I love you.
Nothing bad is going to happen. They’re not going to send you away.
The mean girls are all gone, even your sister, who made you feel like you didn’t belong.
You belong here because I want you here, and I’m so proud that you came home with me.
Take off your coat, and relax.” She was still standing in her coat, and he understood how she felt without her having to explain it to him.
She hadn’t felt that kind of kinship and bond with anyone since she was a kid lying out in a field looking up at the sky with Tom, or by the river with him in the summer.
They were the only two people in the world they lived in who spoke the same language.
And now she felt the same way with Jason.
They were best friends as well as lovers.
She took off her coat, washed her face and hands, brushed her hair, and put on decent shoes instead of running shoes, and they went back to the living room to talk to his parents.
She was surprised how easy it was, and how welcoming they were.
Jason’s father, Robert, was funny and told her stories about Jason getting into mischief as a kid, about the science experiment that had nearly blown up their house in Connecticut, and the time when he and Emily built a tree house and it turned upside down.
They were silly stories but they put Billie at ease, and the love among all of them was tangible.
It was a living, breathing thing that bound them to each other.
She told them how much she had loved Boston and had wanted to stay there, but couldn’t find a job, so she wound up in L.A.
with her sister, and had met Jason. Robert said his brother had gone to MIT and had become an engineer, and he said it was a great school and he used to visit him there when he was in high school.
Robert had gone to Princeton instead because their father had.
They were part of the boys’ club that had attended MIT and the Ivy League colleges in the old days, and now the student body was more diversified and included people like Billie.
“That’s why I went to UCLA,” Jason intervened. “I didn’t want to go to the schools my family did. I wanted to do something different. I only applied to schools on the West Coast.”
The conversation at the dinner table was lively.
Robert talked about some of the authors his firm published, and told funny stories about them.
Jason’s mother, Valerie, talked about a challenging case she was handling, which put ethics in question at the highest corporate level.
It was an intelligent exchange among educated people, whose education and interests were similar to hers, and Billie discovered that she did fit in after all.
They weren’t snobs, they were good people, and by the time she and Jason went to bed in the guest room she felt at home among them, and couldn’t wait to meet his sister and her partner.
They had talked about Emily’s newest book, which was enjoying a modest success, but her parents and Jason thought it was very good and had real merit.
His mother gave Billie a copy to read if she wanted to, and she was intrigued, and eager to read it.
When they woke up in the morning, the city was blanketed in snow, and Billie and Jason went for a walk in Central Park after his parents went off to their offices.
They went skating as Jason had promised and had fun.
And afterward, they had lunch at a famous deli, and took the subway to SoHo and walked around, and then went back uptown.
An hour later, Emily and Thad arrived. She was almost as tall as her brother, and had been the captain of the women’s basketball team of her high school.
Billie felt tiny among them, but comfortable in their midst by then.
They had hot chocolate with marshmallows and delicious homemade cookies in the kitchen, just the way they’d had them as kids and still loved them.
Billie enjoyed talking to Thad, who had done his residency at Mass General and loved Boston too.
He had gone to the University of Vermont, and then got into Harvard Med School.
After dinner, the four young people went to a favorite bar of Jason’s on Third Avenue. They walked through the snow to get there. The atmosphere was festive and fun, and they got back at one in the morning, fast friends by then. Billie was the youngest in the group and they teased her about it.
At the end of the week, they went to the Bells’ house in Connecticut, which was rustic and cozy, with a big fireplace in the living room. It was an old colonial farm with small outbuildings around the property. It was the perfect place to spend Christmas.
Billie had brought small gifts for each of them.
Jason’s mother had given her a white cashmere sweater, which fit her perfectly, and Emily gave her a signed copy of her book, and his father had brought her several books he had published that he thought she would enjoy, including a biography of Marie Curie, which Robert said he had found fascinating.
They went to church together on Christmas Eve.
It reminded Billie of her mother. She sat between Jason and Thad at the service, and they sang all the familiar Christmas carols that she loved.
When they got back to the house, the two young couples had a snowball fight, and pelted each other with snow, while the parents went inside to light a fire to get warm.
Valerie served them hot rum drinks when they came in, covered with snow like little kids, their faces wet and red, their cheeks burning, and laughing as they took their snow-coated coats off, and got warm by the fire.
It was a storybook Christmas for Billie.
Thad talked about how his parents had gotten divorced when he was young, and were still at war with each other thirty years later, which had made every Christmas difficult.
So not everyone had a rosy history like the Bells did.
They were well aware of it, and grateful for the family they had, and generous about including others like Thad and Billie.
They spent Christmas Day relaxing and walking in the snow.
They cooked a turkey together, and the men were better cooks than the women and teased them mercilessly about it.
But everyone made some part of the meal and the results of the joint effort were delicious.
They had dinner in the dining room, and it was a warm, congenial meal.
Jason’s mother, Valerie, watched her son with Billie, and noticed how kind he was with her, and how protective, as though he wanted to shield her from anything that could hurt her.
Emily and Thad had a strong, equal partnership.
Valerie and Robert watched their children with their partners and were happy to see that they were both with good people who suited them.
As far as they knew, Billie was the first girl that Jason had been serious about, or that they had met anyway.
She was the first one he had brought home to the family for Christmas, and she was a good addition, helpful, intelligent, fun, and very mature for a girl her age.
She had been through painful things in her youth and had had to grow up quickly.
Billie called her father on Christmas morning, he sounded hungover and got off the phone quickly after she wished him a Merry Christmas, and she sent Mickie a text on the boat and she sent back an emoji of Santa Claus.
Emily and Thad left a few days after Christmas.
They had to rescue their large dogs from their neighbors.
Jason and Billie left on the thirtieth, to spend New Year’s Eve in L.A.
He had to be back at work the day after New Year’s.
He wasn’t looking forward to it. He and Billie had had such a nice time with his family that they hated to leave and go back to the West Coast. Valerie and Robert hugged Billie and their son when they left, and told her they hoped she would be back soon.
“It’s beautiful here in the summer,” Valerie said, smiling warmly at her.
“Take good care of each other,” she said, and both his parents stood in front of the house as they drove away, and as Jason and Billie turned in the car to look at his parents, they saw them kiss and go back inside with Robert’s arm around Valerie.
It had been a perfect Christmas, and it had been wonderful to see the family that Jason came from, and how close they were.
Billie snuggled up next to him in the Uber, and they held hands all the way to the airport to fly back to the world where they lived and worked.
It had been a Christmas Billie knew she would never forget, and she would cherish the memory forever.