TWIGMAS by Ben Miller
I.
With Christmas just days away, and each passing minute resonating in our woolen caps like Poe’s tintinabulating bells, the issue of the treeless living room had to be pushed. Six children surrounded the recliner and beseeched the spread smoking newspaper for a simple answer to a simple question. “When are we getting a tree? They’ll be gone if we don’t go tonight! Time’s running out!” Being the oldest and the most needy – an outcome of continually doting on the curious desires of others – my voice was the loudest, half-screech and half-gurgle, song of a psychotic drain. “The Wiseman lot is open till ten! We won’t fight over which one is best! I’ll pick the tree out and carry it so you don’t hurt your hip more!” Tan slacks extending across the upraised leg rest seemed appreciative of that offer, shifting just a bit, but an important bit, as it would take many incremental shifts like that for the stiff man to rise off the upholstered bier and enter our lives again. “I’m gonna pick it out. Not you, FATSO!” cried enemies too many to name. From the dining room table came the hee-hee-hee of mother giggling over a lewd gossip item in an old Cosmo magazine snatched from the library free box. At her elbow was a beloved poinsettia: green plastic pot, red leaves like open wounds. That morbid plant must be kept away from heat blasting through copper wall grates and breathing odious life into couch stains and carpet cat dung and damp tennies draped over the hot current along with soaked bobby socks worn as mittens since none could be found in the crazy kitchen box full of scarves, galoshes, combs, crusts. “There’s no place for Santa to put presents if there isn’t a tree! WE GOTTA GO TO THE WISEMAN LOT!” A sudden forest on a playing field, blue snow crunching underfoot, carols blasting from speakers atop light-strung poles, entrance shack with the Kiwanis Club logo, and Santa cap Gary sipping grog from a styrofoam cup, counting cigar box proceeds destined to buy gruel for famished Bangladesh. Smoke compiled above the Metro Section, gray ghost of a snowcapped mountain range that swelled until an avalanche occurred. The paper slid down aching legs that had not been right since a teenage injury. Revealed was a buzz cut encased by ice-white fumes. And below: black glasses framing reddish-yellow eyes, pale bulbous nose, fat puffing lips, sagging stubble-darkened cheeks and thick neck pouring into the undone collar of a catsup-splotched Van Heusen shirt tucked too deeply into a thin belt threatening to lasso pointy tits. Our father, in early decline, hallowed be his agony. We cheered. Beauty being in the eyes of those who behold someone who can give them what they must have: a Christmas tree! He smirked and snorted – cruelly, I thought then – but not now, understanding he must have been as desperate and frazzled as us – if not more so. Surely more. For there was no money for a tree from the Wiseman lot and he was up against a mob that would get limbs, one way or another. With an awful twisting effort he wrenched a crisp hankie from a pocket and expectorated: GRRRSPLAT! I glared at his slippers – old leather distended, scuffed. Howard stared at the cracked ceiling plaster that told our urban Iowa story in Chinese. Elizabeth pinched a too fat forearm. Mitzi considered those male breast pillows perched on the belly shelf. Tiny Nate and Nanette blinked at each other. No money for a tree? Had the year been that bad? So worse than all the others when there was a tall winking tree? It had – said the next sad cough. But how were we to know? There was cash for bologna, spanish peanuts and a poinsettia. It came from Grandpa Stanley across the river in Rock Island, Illinois – listing drunken Grandpa whose bathrobe was a plaid flannel bank full of crumpled bills. After cussing at you for an hour then he’d cry, want to make up, stick a five in your paw. Why not go over to Grandpa’s and beg the money? What about that? Father failed to appreciate the suggestion. If I made it. Maybe I just thought it with my chapped lips. Anyway, he crammed that crusty hankie back in his pocket, twisting like a patient being turned by an invisible nurse and scowling that arrogant Miller scowl that looked like a major stroke – mouth eyes lips attempting to crawl past the left ear lobe. Beg? I’m Dr. Miller’s son! I don’t beg! That’s right, I wanted to reply, because we do it for you. Then his grim pudding face got slacker, more shadowed, rabbit-toothed dreamy. Dangerous dreamy. The mawkish sort of dreamy that had bred all the unpublished novels in the basement: Nicholson’s Last Game, Osage Orange . . . , and the abstract oil hanging crooked above the couch, blue splotch, green splotch, yellow splotch. I balled my fists. Tire chains rattled up Crestwood Terrace. Santa’s helpers in white to cart him off to an asylum for Scrooges who deny kids Christmas trees from the Wiseman lot! No, the vehicle rattled around the street’s river-like bend, and through the rugged geography of exhaled smoke wafted a charred but slightly melodious voice – faint echo of the gifted tenor featured at high school graduation. “I’ve a better idea, gang!” “WHAT!?” He snuffed, he puffed and came out with it. Since “your old Dad” did not have to go into “the office” tomorrow – the bank building suite where napping was practiced instead of law – well, cough, exhale, that meant he could use the long-handle shears from Sears to cut down a tree in the backyard. Silence. No trees grew on the narrow frozen terrace. More silence. From the dining room, mother chortled: “Don’t dare touch my lilac bush, Dave! Leave the trumpet vine alone too!” (Last time he grabbed the Sears shears – two years ago – he had vengefully chopped her bush and vine down to nothing, only to watch them grow back wilder than ever). “AW, GO ON WITH YA! I’M AFTER A TREE!” And he really meant it, we found out. Next morning, after a vaporous breakfast of Camel cigarettes and Hills Brothers coffee, he buttoned an ancient black coat that dated to a flirtation with seminary school and donned matching gloves plus a tight elastic neck warmer called a “dickie” that quite resembled a python. Then he extricated that stick with snipper tip from the roach-infested basement mess and awkwardly attacked overgrown hedges next to a cement wall supporting the terrace above, where a Santa blinked on a sill and homebound Mr. Hickey sat at a little table, sweater vest and red bow-tie, contemplating a LOW SODIUM can of Campbell’s soup, a dietary plunge to be, or not to be, taken. “What the H‑E double toothpicks is Dad doing?” snapped Elizabeth, second oldest, at a porthole rubbed in kitchen window steam. “THIS IS AN UTTER OUTRAGE!” One of mother’s stock phrases, aimed at store clerks five times a day. “HE’S OUT OF HIS MIND! SHRUBS AREN’T TREES!” Genies of breath swirled around the oblong bristle-covered head of the hulking shrub harvester. Each time he leaned to reach a frosty branch, a long straight leg rose behind him above the humped coat back. It was like watching a big rusty shears badly operate a small shears. He had no touch for bladework, yet kept buying special blades, including hair shears he butched us boys with, and the reaper scythe obtained after neighbors called the police to report the ten-inch length of our lawn. Mother theorized that the obsession had to do with Dr. Miller – quack surgeon who had set this son’s broken leg wrong – so it never healed right. These blades were scalpels gone wrong! “JESUS! HE’S GATHERING BRANCHES! WHAT FOR?” We found out when he got the bough bundle inside and wired it to the old tree stand to form a monstrosity quickly christened “TWIGMAS!” by Nanette, five years old, who did not know enough to be appalled by every new thing she saw. As soon as she said it, the atmosphere lightened. The name was perfect – cute and funny and full of a dumb love that conquered us all. Nanny had saved the season that belonged to her, born on December 11th and found in the newspaper on December 12th, head sticking out of a Christmas stocking. All hail “TWIGMAS!” Anyone could have a tree from the Wiseman lot, but only we had a tree from our lot. Father really was trying to tie the season together for us. Bless the attempt, it did count. Laughter, singing, more cries of “TWIGMAS! TWIGMAS! TWIGMAS!”
II.
Mission accomplished, our lumberjack collapsed behind the Quad City Times, and stayed there, taking surprisingly little credit for his triumph. Whenever Nanny tugged the newspaper, he groaned: “Not in the holiday spirit yet, goozie. A long way to go . . .” Above the smokey mountains, on a fireplace mantle cluttered with junk mail and poetry anthologies, stood a sticky table radio tuned to KRVR, an easy-listening station that employed no announcers, playing the schmaltziest Christmas music around the clock. He himself put the radio up there to jump-start his stalled spirit, although asking me or Howard to kick him in the chest would have been wiser. The songs sounded like they had been arranged by a sanitation worker for a garbage compactor choir, droooooone of a season disposed of, liquified. It made me wonder: what depressed father most? Money problems? Marriage problems? Fighting kids? The fact that he had broken his leg around this time of year, pushing a friend’s car out of a snow bank, a rather minor injury that became major when that bone was mishandled by his father, due to anger or incompetence? Or were all those realities swirling bluely inside him like cigarette smoke, one trouble obscuring another, a blinding blizzard of misfortune that usually paralyzed, but every so often inspired stunted heartwrenchingly crude expressions such as Nicholson’s Last Game and Oil Painting #1 and Twigmas? The very ineptness of that pine contraption protected it from insult, provoking waves of tender empathy for the unfortunate misguided creator. Dr. Frankenstein could have done no worse with his demonic instruments and sewing kit! Father had taken the sacred central symbol of American consumer Christmas and done a job on it that the Grinch himself would envy! Six shaggy drooping moping limbs, each pointing a different low direction at room shadows that no joy could ever penetrate! And he had had such a whistling good time slapping the malformation together that I half-suspected there was the cash for a real tree in his thin wallet, this another wanton attempt to prove he was an “artist of the beautiful” who could weave life’s raw materials into meaningful new forms. Anyway, the latest mockery of nature really impressed mother, a sick satirist who for once had been topped. “Oh, Dave! It’s beautiful! How inventive! Now let’s DEH-CORE-ATE!” Frayed bowl-cut bangs were plastered to the forehead sticky from being rubbed by fingers that spent the day unwrapping hard candies culled from the Woolworth bag that had been stepped on and – treadmarks across plastic – placed in the half-off bin at the front of the store. “Who wants to DEH-CORE-ATE!? ’Tis the season to be merry!” Scared squirrels retreated up the chimney, scratch scratch scratch, dropping nuts into hearth litter. “It’s a holly molly folly jolly Christmas!” The month-long sugar high made looking into her eyes like visiting a bowling alley, black balls rolling toward white pins. The rest of her rippled and jiggled, barely contained by the tight blue wool dress even stickier than her forehead, covered with feline fur, candy cellophane, newspaper shards. Howard, Elizabeth, Mitzi disappeared. Nanette and Nathan were clapping, hooting. “Come on, Benji Angel! Help me bring down the decorations!” No Twigmas branches looked strong enough to support an ornament, let alone a string of lights, but decorate we would; I heard it in her voice. “HO HO HO MISTLETOE!” A white plastic spoon, actually, but it worked just the same. She smooched me. We mounted carpeted stairs, stomping dirty laundry that had not made it down to the basement washer and dryer. The boxes were in the attic where my cat Whitey turned an awful yellow and died of liver cancer in a shoe box. I did not like to visit the mephitic stench of death poop fur dust mixing with the chemical odor of fiberglass insulation loosely installed by father. The ceiling vomited pink fluffs. A bare dangling bulb cast cruel interrogative light on overturned boxes spilling coats, cords, gossip mags. “There’s a box!” I cried – eager to leave before ceiling fluffs joined together to form an abominable fireproof snowman. “There’s the other box!” wailed mother. Tinsel tentacles trailed from both boxes as if they were octopus traps. We holly jolly sang our way down dark stairs to the darker stinky second floor room – father’s – where he went to sleep but did not sleep, awake under stale blankets of smoke, dirty coffee mug and ashtray on the table by the head that glowed like a big ivory castle, turreted with snorting defensive features. The upstairs hallway was brighter, thanks to light that had crawled up the stairs from the landing window that offered a view of Mr. Hickey’s side hill not bathed in sunshine but sewn into it, needle-like white rays darning rugs of pale glimmers. Symphonic coughing greeted our return to the messy living room, followed by aggressive Sports Section rustling that translated: Leave me out of this new holiday nonsense. I’m not in the spirit yet, and might not ever be. “Who wants to DEH-CORE-ATE besides Benji!” In the end, everyone did – a little. Howard kicked off the festivities in criminal fashion, throwing a gold thread ball at Twigmas, then petrified gingerbread, then a tennis shoe. “RASCAL!” wailed mother. “LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE!” He fled to the black bathroom, his porno reading room. We surrounded the victim. Twigmas had survived! Toppling but losing none of the vital branches wired together by a master of domestic bondage, The Man in the Ink Mask. He grunted along with the KRVR music disposal: Awaaaaay in a maaaaaanger, no crib for his bed, the little lord Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus lay down his sweeeeeeeeeet head. Mother and I righted Twigmas. Hooraying Nanette danced. Elizabeth whispered in my ear. It’s not the worst I’ve seen in the living room. The worst was that Donald Duck baby pool that Dad put under the bad ceiling leak. I nodded, good point. Mitzi tugged the spread newspaper, asking: “Are you in the Christmas spirit yet?” “Afraid not, goozie! Not nearly!” father barked, overjoyed by his gloom. Then I closed my eyes and sniffed Twigmas and reported “IT SMELLS LIKE A TEN FOOTER!” Miracle number one. Then KRVR broadcast a ten minute calliope version of “Silent Night” proving that carnival instrument belonged both in heaven and hell. Then Elizabeth hung aluminum balls at equidistant lengths on the haggard boughs, and Twigmas did not collapse! Miracle number two. Then Nate ate tinsel. Then Nanette and I wrapped a green aluminum garland around and around and around and around the corroded tree stand, totally hiding it. “What a wonderful job!” crunched mother, mouth full of candy ribbons. “But we’re not done!” I admonished. Twigmas had no star, nor any lights. Elizabeth cradled Twigmas while I tried in vain to find a place for the cardboard star. Poor Twigmas had no defined top, way wider than it was tall, branches forking in more directions than a compass could point. “Forget the damn star!” advised my sister. “WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE!” wailed mother, who never swore, only bent everything you told her into a shape that matched her view of the world as a lonely and degraded place where exhibitionism was the only acceptable lifestyle. “OH, GO WASH YOUR HAIR!” Mother giggled to show she had no feelings, could not be hurt. I cast the star aside, but lights Twigmas must have or our Christmas would not be plugged into the Christmas the rest of the nation was celebrating while lamenting. How would we get the lights to stay on those frail limbs? I swiftly formed a cockamamie Rube Goldberg notion of hooking a clothes hanger above the trunk of bundled twigs and winding the string of bulbs around the wire, but such acrobatics were not necessary because those heavy lights – weird as this might sound – wanted to be hung after a long depressing year in the attic. Right, they simply refused to slip off after being gingerly wrapped around Twigmas by four decorators holding their breaths. Miracle number three. “IT LOOKS SOOO BEEE-YOUUU-TIII-FUUL, KIDS! Elizabeth, turn off the overhead light! Benji, plug in the string!” I located the socket – zzz: ouch! – and Twigmas throbbed like a discombobulated neon tavern sign – red, green, blue – filling the room with something blessed it had lacked before: energy not our own.
III.
The obvious connection between this emaciated pine and Charlie Brown’s unfortunate tree lot pick was not voiced by anyone. Or, I should say, could not be voiced, lest we admit our life was a cartoon, and ridiculous as circumstances were, always, on some level, they remained very serious, very solemn. This was the life we had been given to lead, the only existence, and thus priceless, whatever the markdown on reality’s tag. “Five cheers for Twigmas!” I shouted after the lighting, and everyone agreed: it was a miracle that blinking bulbs and decorations were hanging from flimsy wired-together limbs severed from backyard shrubs. Twigmas tilted, on the brink of tipping over, but Twigmas did not tip, rooted – I had to think – by our deep desire for the tree to work out, since it really was the sole option on this lean year. “That’s blinkin’! Wowsa wowsa wowsa!” yelled father, lowering newspaper to nose level. Other lame phrases from the 1950s followed, a few warped by suffixes of his own invention. A horrendous decade for a boy with sensitive ears to grow up in. “Right-a-roonie! Beautissimo! NUTS! SPILLED MY COFFEE! MOTHER, A WET RAG!” She yanked one out of the patent leather gullet of Moby Purse, flopped next to a vent. “BLAST IT! A CLEAN RAG! THIS ONE SMELLS LIKE – ” just what he could not say, the fifties being bereft of truly guttural lingo. “LIKE – LIKE – AW! GEEZ! – FORGET IT! TO THE DEVIL WITH ALLA YOU WISEACRES!” Satan’s street address must be somewhere in that gargantuan purse, but there were other better places to go on this day. Piling out the frosty screen door onto the back stoop, led by that Moby-dragging candy-munching soiled sack dress orchestrator of Yuletide mischief, I was struck not just by Howard’s elbow but also by the fact that the lack of a genuine tree from the Wiseman lot had barely slowed the holiday’s momentum. Miracle number four. Twigmas had already sharpened our appreciation of the unchanged elements of Christmas. Better make the most of those familiar rituals before they vanished also, possibly taking the entire season with them! Already I had opened the last two doors of the advent calendar given to us annually by pious Aunt Carolee, the wife of mother’s sacrilegious brother Uncle Bob, who called this time of year “the festival of blights.” Behind the December 24 door were camels. Door December 25 revealed stars glowing above a manger. Whoopee-do. But getting the boring stuff done with made lots more room for excitement. The old car wheezed worse than father. The car died. Then we all stomped on the floor and the engine came to life and mother imitated Jackie Gleason, yodeling “Aaaaand awaaaaay we go!” while angling the dented boat out of the garage cottage and down down down the steep alley to the ice skating rink called Jersey Ridge Road. We almost hit a telephone pole. Bald tires slid onto River Drive and spun along the wide Mississippi that became a giant jigsaw puzzle in December, massive ice slabs stacked and pushed around by the frigid cocoa current that was still absorbing icky run-off from the Hostess Twinkie factory and Robin Hood Flour plant. From a distance the gaunt skyline of downtown Davenport promised nothing sweet – but don’t be fooled, below were riches untold. First we reaped tiny candy canes from a bachelor bank teller behind the green drive‑up window that made his bony hands look like crabs crawling across the ocean’s bottom. Father had no active account at this bank, but mother – in her genius fashion – had long ago sensed this shivering teller was vulnerable and befriended him through the speaker, netting the fantastical information that this pallid fiftyish gentleman, who appeared joyless, in fact got so excited during the Christmas season that his tummy-tum-tum hurt. “FEEL BETTER, MR. KRILL!” she spat into speaker holes. Behind the aquatic glass, Mr. Krill waved weakly and patted his forehead with a folded hankie. It was a time of great illness as well as great cheer. Flu. Colds. High blood pressure and heart attacks. Harpsichord overindulgence syndrome that prompted choir soloists to hyperventilate. To say nothing of morbid thinking inspired by long dark nights. Few people shopped downtown now that glittering Northpark Mall had opened on the modern outskirts of the old musty city, but between beribboned lamppost wreaths were a pair of haunted ambivalent bag toters, one scratching his sweater, another leaning against a brick wall, both consumers white with thoughts of death and what came after. Should I be buried or cremated or both? Top half buried, lower half cremated? Vice versa? Suggestions welcome! ‘Twas the season when normal people came close to resembling our diseased parents, paralyzed yet restless, always searching for new ways to be stuck and lost. “Look for a parking space kids!” There were hundreds. What was the problem? “Yell if you see a space!” We all yelled, pointed. She drove past our choices, convinced that parking downtown could not be easy. “Guess I’ll have to drive around the block!” More circles that would get us nowhere but back to the sad place where we started! Each day was full of circles! Circles around dead ghostly blocks where nothing lived, circles around a secret loss she had endured long ago and now coveted. Though bursting on the edges with supernatural energy – spouting false news and suspect opinions and misquotations and personal info with a ribald verve not encountered again until the dawn of the Internet – she was sparkless in the center, too tired and weak to resist the despairing choice to buy into her spiritual destruction, wanting the relief of conclusion, a release from responsibility, more than any chance to crawl forward if the weighty grief dispersed, leaving her exposed to clear skies, open road. It hurt to see – every second hurt – when you were not laughing to keep from hurting! The car rumbled by the big fancy main library partially paid for by our overdue fines, Simon and Landuer Men’s Wear, Woolworth’s, the art deco bank building where father had his swank office with the vibrating recliner from Sears. In front of Shannon’s Cafeteria stood a decorated tree – tall and full! – but with my x‑ray glasses I spied a Twigmas hidden in the center of the greenery. “THERE’S A PLACE! RIGHT IN FRONT OF PETERSON’S CHRISTMAS WINDOWS!” We had seen these displays ten times but must walk past them again, followed by well-wrapped long-lipped elderly downtown residents complaining of lumbago. We gasped as the single moving part of each scenario performed with astonishing grace. Scarved skater skating. Sleigh gliding into the snowy village. Toy shop elf hammering and Santa’s belly rolling and twelve reindeer soaring. The department store St. Nick was off-duty, recovering from injuries incurred when all six of us sat on his lap last week, but waxed aisles were crowded with temporary red-nosed employees in ill-fitting suits. They offered large candy canes to good boys. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” and “Greensleeves” seeped from hidden speakers, my favorite songs of the season – melancholy in a rich way, summoning ye olde visions of top hat men rushing over cobblestones and woody taverns with horses stomping outside, exhaling long dresses of breath. I hummed softly. Mother ranted about Rudolf overpopulation. “Half those reindeer should be shot!” A clerk heard her, shuddered. I shrugged emphatically – you pull the trigger, not me. Her next target was “That awful Andy Williams Christmas Special! At eight tonight!” Goony smiles, red v‑neck sweaters, fake snow falling on a decrepit crooner backed by a eunuch choir, fireplaces roaring as if not just roasting chestnuts but also immigration papers of the nonwhite people this American tradition excluded, except during the silly tap dancing segment. “Then comes Perry Como who’s even worse!” He was, though it was hard to finger why. She squeezed my shoulder to remind me that I was her one and only Benny Angel. I wrestled free and approached a transparent counter tree strung with costume jewelry. When father had a secretary, she put a tree like it on her desk and hung foil-wrapped chocolate ornaments. We got to visit the eleventh floor office and each pick a shiny treat as regal Mrs. White looked on, white-haired and frowning.
IV.
Rethinking the Twigmas memory, I realize a mistake. During that holiday we were not quite as young as depicted! But isn’t it the way? Christmas evokes the child in us. Bells ring, channels are changed to tune in passions old for having been young so long. I would have been a thin fifteen-year-old junior high student that bleak year – literally half the fat mother’s boy I had been at eleven, due to a starvation diet. Nathan, the youngest, would have been a freckled five (already having had his stomach pumped after eating a poison poinsettia leaf), and Nanette a nine-year-old pixie a bit closer to fulfilling her shocking destiny: homecoming queen at Davenport Central High School. But the house was the same disaster scene, and all else is accurate as far as I can recall, with one notable exception. We had no car. We had no car for a year, right after father declared he was going to specialize in “bankruptcy” law, and mother, also the owner of a law degree, began desperately volunteering at the Legal-Aid office in the Putnam Building, trying to start her career 20 years late. (And this she accomplished, earning a paid Legal-Aid position or new pulpit from which to spread her bitter bizarre gospel). During that carless period, the family walked, took the bus or were given rides to places we needed to go – Grandpa Stanley’s hellish brick bungalow across the river, Bishop’s Cafeteria and National grocery store on Middle Road, and the dusty rusty Shangri-La of downtown Davenport. Things proceeded pretty much in the usual confused and melodramatic fashion, just as if we owned a sputtering Ford with a loose bumper and busted power windows, which is why I’ll not delete the car. Had you questioned the family at that difficult time, some ashamed members might well have insisted there was a junker in the tilting garage. Such was the power of fantasy at 15 Crestwood Terrace! Avid dreaming allowed we Millers to tolerate an unacceptably harsh – yet inescapable – existence, warping the most obvious facts or briefly trumping them to create a fraught series of fairy tales that were lived as sure as Mr. Hickey lived the quiet life of widower and retired real estate agent. Twigmas was a perfect case in point. Less than two days after the crushing news that there would be no tree from the Wiseman lot, those six gaunt sagging branches had become towering proof that this holiday was destined to be the most special of all! The money saved on the ten foot tree would be added to money saved on engine repairs and leaded gasoline, and money saved when dignified Mrs. White was let go, and money saved on a demolition crew when Uncle Bob ripped out roach-filled cupboards for free, and money saved on kitchen cupboards when we started storing boxed goods on the upright piano and dining room buffet . . . a fortune in savings to be spent on – what else? – cool presents on our lists! A set of subversive John Lennon solo albums for myself, who had gone on that hunger strike to show mother that Benny Angel was no paragon of loyalty, but a human being in such need of space and privacy that he was willing to starve her beloved appropriated fat boy to death on an apple a day, although really all that melted away was the blubber, everything else about me remaining unwieldy: my hopes, my sympathies, my conflicts. Yes, I would get Mind Games and Imagine and Somewhere in New York and Plastic Ono Band, slogan-soaked people-empowering music that scratched at ears like a rabid cat! And Elizabeth, the first chair flute virtuoso, would finally get her shimmering piccolo. And Howard, the pot smoking lady-killer, a cashmere sweater. And boy-crazy Mitzi, a pearl necklace. And Nanette her pink Schwinn bike and Nathaniel those Rock’em! Sock’em! Robots! Little did it matter that on Christmas Eve there was but one present under Twigmas – a postal carton containing wool socks from Aunt Francis who lived on a dirt road in Kentucky with her miner husband, Chet, and never forgot the northern relatives that never remembered to send her anything. It must be the calm before the gift storm. The less we had, the more it added up to! That was Miller arithmetic, Miller logic! The sack dress Santa had skeedaddled – a good sign. The worn slippers protruding from the pulp tent were ticking like a metronome, keeping time with the KRVR carol drone. “In the spirit, Daddy?” asked sweet Nanette, tugging the Travel Section. “Can’t say that I am!” father cried, playing hard-to‑get. “Your slippers have the spirit! Why not you?” He washed that brilliant question away with a cough from the phlegm aquarium. Then he yowled: “MIDNIGHT MASS! THE POPE LIVE FROM THE VATICAN ON W.O.C.!” Yelled it as if he meant to stay up that long, when in truth his great enthusiasm for the ancient ceremony was easily topped by his eagerness to be upstairs long before eleven, wedged on the edge of the bed wedged in the little room, eyes and boxers sagging, puff puff puff dreaming up new escape plans involving newspapers and smoke. Our parents – this ungenial unit – they were always there to not be there! The living room smelled like coffee, cat litter, cigarettes, plus butter, cereal, steak sauce: ingredients mother had dumped into a garbage bag and shaken to create a huge batch of TV mix before running off to meet a city bus or Aunt Carolee on an icy corner. Where was she now? She was at Kmart or Target, lecturing a scared male clerk or the stunned deli lady who had nothing but ten identical fatty ham blocks to slice, wailing in many octaves about the poetic plays of Eugene O’Neill, wild marriage of F. Scott and Zelda, candle burning of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Nobody in Davenport could kill time like mother, each sentence wandering in a fascinating new direction that led nowhere. The only thing that shut her up was a trip to the cemetery in Dixon, Illinois, where unfortunate Stanley relatives were buried, one shot to death, one drowned in booze, another the victim of spinal meningitis. The unearthly peace of that graveyard was unshatterable. She bowed her head there and tried to pray, instead of play around with the minds of relatives and strangers wearing red or blue nameplates. What was she killing time for? She was killing time until the store manager blinked and dropped the prices on bikes, sweaters, piccolos, pearls, Lennon solo albums! This year it would happen, unlike past Christmas Eves when I had been out with her, walking miles of aisles on both sides of the river and finding nothing. This year was very different, thanks to dear old Twigmas! Excited brothers and sisters – dressed and half-dressed – circulated through the living room, slipping on magazines, squashing paper plates, squealing horrific accusations of theft and abuse. “Mitzi stole my sheet music!” “Nanny hit Nathan!” “Howard’s been jacking off in the bathroom for three hours!” “Elizabeth hid the last of the broom stick cookies from Grandma Verna!” The antic action halted only when Twigmas exerted its magnetic pull on a rowdy reveler, quieting him or her. Eyes then swiveled toward the amputated shrub limbs dressed in silver tinsel, golden thread-covered styrofoam orbs, red aluminum balls. The light string blinked as if Dr. Frankenstein were in the house, trying to bring the cold season alive with frantic jerks of a laboratory switch. Colored shadows flashed across the cracked plaster wall covered with faded pastel graffiti: rainbows, suns and peace signs drawn years ago. Behind Twigmas was the cracked glass door to a built‑in wooden bookcase flanking the fireplace and that mantle cliff strewn with junk mail, snapshots, notebooks, corn curls, Signet classic paperbacks. The pine boughs were shedding needles onto the battered box from Crittenden County. Playful kittens from Moonbeam’s latest litter had partially unraveled the green garland wrapped around the tree stand and also knocked a few bulbs into the shadowy corner. Gazing seriously at Twigmas was to have your gift delusions vanquished and face the brutal reality that tomorrow morning could only bring the worst that discount barns had to offer – gaudy plastic crap that broke before being touched, brand new garbage. But the dose of soberness also granted your eyes power to see the sagging branches for what they were: a window into the deepest part of a distant man. Tangled fragment of immense fatherly wreckage that a crisis had raised to the surface, lifted out of the dark sea of sadness and placed in the living room for us to prop up, festoon, cherish.
Ben Miller’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Salmagundi, Raritan, AGNI, and The Best American Essays.