What Child Is This?
My sisters and I were not invited to the Christmas Party. Never mind that it was happening the Saturday before my 6th birthday. Never mind that it was happening in our house. “This is a childless event,” my mother insisted. We were not to show our faces downstairs for any reason at all - not for food, not for water, not for a broken arm. Emergencies could wait. It didn’t come as a surprise - my mother was a No-Sand-In-The-Beach-House kind of woman. All of our homes followed a strict Leave-No-Trace policy, which is weird when you live there, I see that now. But at the time, we all accepted it. She sought perfection. She wanted to be unimpeachable in the court of social opinion.
The plan: Me, my two older sisters, and the three dogs would be boarded in the third story playroom for the evening. Angie, our faithful teenage babysitter from the country side of town, would keep watch over us. In addition to being my favorite member of the family, Angie was a hypochondriac. One time she ate two Flintstone vitamins instead of the doctor-recommended one. When she realized her mistake, she went pale and began to sweat. “Y’all, I think I’m gonna pass out. Maybe we should call your dad,” she shivered underneath three blankets. Angie was big on getting things right, mostly out of fear of what would happen if she got them wrong. Fainting and death were common possible side effects of just about anything. We’d be in good hands.
I was 5 years old when we moved from our 70s rancher on Ursuline Drive to our You-Could-Get-Lost-Here-If-The-Floor-Plan-Weren’t-So-Open house on 21 Turnout. My dad should’ve been an architect, but he went into medicine in large part to reduce the amount of conversations he’d be forced to have. Less talking, more surgery. Designing this house alongside the professionals was his way of reconciling the path he didn’t choose. He and my mother deliberated over every detail, from the width of the window panes to the gloss on banisters. This house exhibited the entirety of his self-expression. It was three stories high and had more bedrooms than family members. There were two living rooms, and nobody had to share a bathroom. It was an upgrade.
We were dwarfed underneath the 24 foot vaulted ceiling that canopied the vast interior. Exposed beams the color of slate ran across the pitch of the roof. They matched the railing of the stairs and the second story balcony. Contemporary rugs that looked like Rothko impressions were smeared across the various rooms. They indicated a separation where there was otherwise none. Instead of walls and doors to show that you’re now in the foyer, it was the plum and red Christopher Farr carpet. You know you’re in the dining room when you’re standing on the buck-colored rug with amorphous powder blue hunks. The living rooms were tied together with Le Corbusier sofas and Wassily chairs. The rosewood coffee tables had smooth rounded edges and sliding door compartments that held nothing. You couldn’t drink coffee on them, of course, because the rings might stain the finish. Our greyhounds, Eva, Cupcake, and Zoe, were adopted based foremost on their compatibility with the furniture, and second on their docile personalities. My parents collected works by renowned Southern folk artists. Our walls were adorned with gigantic Ida Kolmeyers in minimalist frames. The end tables propped up Howard Finster Angels and Coca Cola cutout boards. His Baby Elvis preached to us from the ambrosia maple credenza. The chef’s kitchen - also doorless - was organized around a long white leopard granite counter island. They’ll tell you themselves that they chose this pattern so that it could be one of the few usable surfaces in the house. It hid crumbs and other signs of life quite well.
It was the house of a family with a Norman Rockwell allergy. The blond birch floors and the exposed brick did something to warm things up, but it would be a challenge to achieve ’cozy’ and ‘Christmasy.’ I could sense my mother developing stomach ulcers trying to figure out how to transform our Scandinavian Modern Museum into an Inviting Winter Wonderland.
Though I was too young to feel the friction at the time, we had a complicated relationship with most of our neighbors. My parents had spent several years building a house that would have looked a little insane in any suburban town, but it especially didn’t fit into this one. It belonged in Architectural Digest, not a country club community in Mobile, Alabama. Passersby would rubberneck around our hairpin curve to take in the asymmetrical anomaly that spat on the plantation sensibilities of the Deep South. Which is exactly why my mom volunteered to host the Pinebrook Christmas Party that year. Let them see.
We were not a Gather-Round-And-Deck-The-Halls kind of family. We didn’t roast marshmallows and sip cocoa and take turns hanging baubles from branches. Dressing our department-store-sized tree was a perilous task that required surgical precision, construction ladders, and a spotter.
I knew it was decorating day when I heard cardboard boxes sliding across hardwood in disharmony with the exasperated sighs of my mother. Coils of white lights and rounds of garland were strewn about. Somewhere near the pile sat the portable phone for quick access to 911.
One of my greatest achievements up to that point was being born so near to Jesus. I had a special connection to the holiday, which is why I was most easily suckered into being my mother’s unlucky little helper.
Amy Grant’s Home for Christmas oozed through the surround sound speakers like virgin eggnog. My mother’s favorite song of the season was Amy’s darkly cinematic, “Breath of Heaven.” The verse situates you in the tension of a pregnant Mary, burdened by the fear of not being good enough to host the lord baby Jesus Christ. I have traveled many moonless nights, cold and weary with a babe inside. The piano tiptoes through a suspenseful minor scale before resolving into a gentle chorus in which Mary prays to Heaven to breathe on her. She sounds relieved until, oh no, here comes the next verse, and she is once again wrestling imposter syndrome. Do you wonder as you watch my face, if a wiser one should have had my place?
Burdened with responsibility she didn’t ask for, Mary trudges through the cold desert night bearing the weight of the world. My mother could relate. Consciously or not, she identified with martyrdom. She’d die before admitting it, but her taste for other hysterical women, like Tori Amos and Jewel, gave her away. Sometimes she’d loop “Crucify” 15 times in a row and cap it off with 6 rounds of “Who Will Save Your Soul?”
Like her music choices, her Christmas aesthetic was also severe. Stunning, but not remotely jolly. The only festive ornaments were the DIY macaroni portraits every kid makes in kindergarten, which were not prominently featured. The Fraser fir twinkled with cold white lights and earth-tone garlands. It hummed with soft brassy blown-glass pieces that mingled with custom ecru ceramic eggs and turtle doves sculpted by Frank Fleming. It dripped with taupes and coppers and translucent tear drop pendants. The finial d’arbre was a phantasmagoric angel. Her bronze wire mesh skirt belled and swooped over the apex of the evergreen. She looked more like a gesture than a physical object. She brought the tree to a whopping 16 feet. It lorded over us like a Suburban shrine. This year it would lord over the neighbors too.
A week before the big event, we had a dress rehearsal. With her charm turned up to 100, my mother elegantly dictated instructions to the bartender, caterer, and servers, breaking character only to hiss through her teeth for us to “git outta here.” Angie shuttled us all upstairs with our plates of ‘Angie Dinner’ (Kraft macaroni, Tyson chicken nuggets, and Green Giant lima beans) while my mom directed a dry-run with the crew. Now that things were getting real, I was feeling even more sour to be missing out on the party, but I resigned myself to spend the entire night in the kid’s room, playing Monopoly with my sisters, and cycling through holiday movies. I wasn’t sure that it could compete with the fantasy I had of twirling through the foyer, jeté-ing to “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” stuffing my face with pecan cheese straws while the neighbors cheered adoringly, but it would have to do.
The big night was here and the scene was nearly set. Garland spiraled around every banister and beam in the house. A Very Jazzy Christmas wafted through the speakers at a conversational volume. The caterers scurried about the kitchen plattering smoked quail sausages, crab-stuffed mushrooms, and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. Champagne flutes and crystal tumblers clanged against top shelf liquor bottles. The bartender for the evening was Old Robert, the salt-and-pepper black man who’d been working at the country club since the Jim Crow era. As I fluttered around like a seagull collecting scraps, I pestered Robert for a maraschino cherry. He winked and slipped me two. Both fireplaces were ablaze - one electric with almost believable logs meant to protect the Christopher Farr rug from flying embers, the other wood-burning, meant to protect the family from the sterile reality that they were growing up in an art institution.
As the catering staff pinballed around his masterpiece, my dad shifted nervously in his three piece suit, roiling with strong opinions that he was too shy to assert. He handed me a raspberry lemon bar and told me to, “Git outta here before your mother sees.” I heard the quick clicking of her heels on the other side of the house, and I broke for the stairs. Once safe behind the closed door of the playroom, I plopped down on a beanbag chair.
The playroom was the only room my parents officially yielded to mediocrity. They’d sound-proofed it with a thick bland speckled carpet that was impossible to ruin on account of it looked dirty by design. They filled the cabinets with board games and art supplies, hooked up a separate phone line in case of emergencies, and gave it over to the kids. They categorically avoided the area, unless one of us left the lights on.
I slid the Home Alone VHS tape into the mouth of the VCR knowing that any minute now, my sisters and Angie would join me. They wouldn’t mind if I started the movie without them. But as the crazy antics of Kevin McCallister drew to a close, I looked around wondering, where was my worried family? I glanced longingly at the unfinished game of Candyland on the carpet and sighed. I fed the VCR Home Alone 2, and continued to wait for them.
As Kevin and I mad-capped our way through New York City, it started to dawn on me that maybe we had more in common than I thought. This wasn’t the first time either of us had been forgotten. As the credits rolled, reality rushed in. They weren’t joining me. I am waiting in a silent prayer. But if they weren’t here, where were they? I am frightened by the load I bear. And weren’t they wondering the same thing about me? In a world as cold as stone. How would they find me without being seen or heard? Must I walk this path alone? Panic set in. The playroom was big, but profound boredom was triggering claustrophobia. None of the games in the cabinet were single-player, and the third Home Alone wouldn’t be out for years. It was just me, my barbie dolls, and a Nordic Track nobody had touched since the day it was assembled. Any exit strategy I could come up with would break the main rules of the night. I couldn’t call the downstairs phone line without shattering the ambiance, and I couldn’t leave the playroom without being spotted by my parents. I needed help. I needed an extraction. Even if I had the guts to venture out, the bottom of the steps had been cordoned off with garland. They said it was to keep the guests from wandering upstairs, but we all knew it went both ways. Breath of heaven, hold me together.
Paralyzed by fear, I sat alone in the playroom hoping any minute now the Breath of Heaven would pour over me and I’d be rescued from my lonesome, boring hell. But no one came. Fearing disgrace, I stayed put like a good girl.
It might as well have been the next morning when the door to the playroom swung open. My dad swayed a little, his tie loose. We looked at each other - me relieved, him puzzled.
“What the hell are you doin’ up here?” he asked.
I later learned that the others had made a last minute decision to board in the master bedroom two stories below, probably for the bigger T.V. Angie was too afraid of my parents to come looking for me. My sisters assured her that I was engrossed in some elaborate play-pretend, like coordinating a wedding for my beanie babies, or performing every number of The Nutcracker to an audience of Cabbage Patch Dolls.
I’d love to tell you that my parents enjoyed the party. That the neighborhood saw their humanity, and that great connections were forged by the warmth of the multiple fireplaces. But when I interviewed my mother about the event, she wasn’t able to clarify any details before huffing, “All I can say is that it was an equally miserable event in my life.”
Needless to say, it was the first and last annual Christmas party. We didn’t have the neighbors over again. We went right back to being the slightly antisocial family with the weird house. Only now everybody knew exactly how weird it was. Their gossip could move from speculative to specific, and that was the goal.
My dad’s response was a little different, but perhaps more defensive.
“What party?”
