A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

  It wasn’t Elyon, though. It was Eggie.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said to him. “I’m already late for Thanksgiving dinner at Miz —”

  “Miz Eliza’s,” said Eggie. “I know, because she sent me over to get you. Though you’re not actually late. Turkey came out five minutes ago and she sent me to fetch you, because Elyon was vague about whether you really planned to come.”

  “I’ve never tasted Miz Eliza’s cooking, but I have witnessed Elyon’s dinner conversation, so I was kind of torn.”

  “He’ll be at the kids’ table,” said Eggie.

  “He’s a post-doc,” said Spunky.

  “The kids’ table is a huge honker of a banquet table where Miz Eliza’s children all sit, along with whoever they dragged along. Jozette’s the youngest, so I expect that her brothers will make Elyon’s meal a living hell.”

  “Or he’ll get talking about helicase and hydrogen bonds and leading strands and lagging strands and they’ll die.”

  “All Miz Eliza’s sons went to college,” said Eggie.

  Spunky couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “Jozette isn’t stupid, Dr. Spunk,” said Eggie. “Nobody in that family is.”

  Spunky grinned. “Well, you’ve got a point. Book-larnin’ ain’t everything, is it.”

  “I figure somebody who gets whatever she sets out to get, and then holds onto it, is as smart as she needs to be,” said Eggie.

  “The hard part is figuring out what you want,” said Spunky.

  “Well, get crackin’ on that, lassie,” said Eggie. “Time’s a wastin’.”

  “Oh, there’s a deadline?”

  “Santa Claus comes to the Christmas parade on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and if you don’t know what you want, he shines you on.”

  “Who plays Santa?” asked Spunky.

  Eggie raised his eyebrows. “‘Plays’ Santa?”

  Spunky gave him the chuckle he was asking for, and then said, “You called me ‘lassie.’”

  “Because you’ve called me ‘laddie’ a couple of times so I thought we were pretending to be Scottish.”

  “No, no,” said Spunky, laughing in embarrassment. “Just something in my family.”

  During this conversation, Eggie had been deftly closing up Spunky’s pens and now he was holding out her coat to shrug into. Then he opened her apartment door and closed it behind them.

  “Did you lock it?” asked Spunky.

  “I’m sorry, didn’t you know you were in Good Shepherd, North Carolina?” he said.

  “I can’t just leave it unlocked —”

  “All the expensive equipment is downstairs in Elyon’s rooms, but nobody wants to steal your stuff anyway. Where would they sell it?”

  Spunky held tightly to his offered arm once they got outside, because last night’s snow was of a loose, wet, and slippery variety.

  “So you don’t want to fall,” said Eggie.

  “That’s my plan.”

  “And you’re clinging to my arm because you are determined to fulfil your plan,” said Eggie.

  “I am,” said Spunky. “And I’m not letting go no matter how much you goad me.”

  “As long as I get my arm back when it’s time to eat, because I’m clumsy with a spoon in my left hand.”

  “I’ll change sides if you want,” said Spunky, “but I’m left-handed, and I’m not sure if I can rely on the combined strength of our non-dominant arms.”

  “What if I just promise that if you fall, I’ll fall down too.”

  “It’s not as humiliating if you do it on purpose.”

  “It’s not humiliating at all if I do it to impress a girl.”

  “Or to mock one by imitating her,” said Spunky.

  “No, that would shame me. So hold on tight, lassie, and tell me about this ‘family thing’ about pretending to be Scottish.”

  “My mother always wanted to travel the world,” said Spunky. “But there was never any money or any time, for that matter, so she read about other cultures. She had a brief Scottish phase, where she greeted us every morning and after school in a thick brogue that sounded perfectly authentic to me at the time. And when Dad finally got her to stop, my brothers and I had already picked up ‘laddie’ and ‘lassie,’ and we could all recite ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O what a panic’s in thy breastie!’”

  “That’s a pretty good brogue. A little thick, but Bobby Burns pours it on himself.”

  “My brothers only recited it to have an excuse to say ‘breastie,’ which they did not pronounce in the Middle English way, ‘bray-stee.’”

  “So your mother’s wanderlust only took her to Imaginary Glasgow?”

  “Oh, no. She collected sayings from other cultures. There was one from East Africa that became a catch phrase in the family. ‘The day a monkey.’ One of us would say it and everybody else would break up laughing.”

  “‘The day a monkey’ what?” asked Eggie.

  “Oh, it’s — well, when something’s going to happen, no matter what you do to prevent it, then in Swahili you’d say, ‘The day a monkey is fated to die, all trees are slippery.’”

  Eggie laughed. “Yeah, that’s good, that’s a good one. Has your mother got any others?”

  “She had hundreds, but we didn’t adopt them all as family sigils. Oh, here’s one. I say this one, too, when I’m not paying attention to the fact that it isn’t a saying in English. If somebody’s a complete screw-up — not clumsy, but grimly determined to do everything the wrong way so failure is guaranteed — then Mom would say, ‘Headin’ to the sea.’”

  “Help me make sense of that.”

  “We always shortened her sayings. The whole thing is, ‘He goes into the sea to get dry,’” or something like that. Farsi, I think, or maybe Turkish. She went through those at kind of the same time, which makes no sense except that they have Islam in common.”

  “And coasts on two different seas.”

  Spunky nodded and smiled. “I never thought of that as something Iran and Turkey have in common, but yes, though technically we could say that Turkey borders on three seas.”

  “Black Sea, Mediterranean ...”

  “Aegean,” said Spunky.

  “Show-off. Blathering post-doc. The Aegean is part of the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea isn’t.”

  “Iran coasts on the Caspian Sea but the Indian Ocean,”

  “The Persian Gulf,” said Eggie.

  “A gulf not a sea,” said Spunky in mock triumph. “And also a part of the Indian Ocean. Don’t ever call me wrong, laddie, because I will rub your nose in it forever.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” said Eggie. “I have no such fragile ego needs. I’m perfectly content to know that you’re wrong, yet never mention it again.”

  Spunky laughed.

  They walked in silence for a while, because the route Eggie was choosing involved snow on top of a muddy, rooty path for a while, with low branches that dumped snow down Spunky’s neck when she bumped into them.

  “Couldn’t help but see several charts laid out on your table,” Eggie said.

  “Are you serious that you don’t know what they are?”

  “I knew all the names instantly, so of course I knew. You’re charting all of our inbreeding.”

  “I am not,” said Spunky. “People always think that but come on. Demographically speaking, the entire world is inbred. Most people can’t go back six generations without having the same person pop up in two different places on their pedigree. Everybody on Earth is related to everybody else, and not all that distantly.”

  “I guess there’s nobody for us to mate with but other humans,” said Eggie.

  “Well, our first ancestors weren’t all that fussy. Everybody of European and Asian and Amerindian descent has a decent amount of Neanderthal
DNA. It doesn’t help us or hurt us, so it’s just along for the ride. Then the East Asians and Amerindians also have Denisovan DNA, so — two different groups of humans interbred with us.”

  “Still humans.”

  “A source of much argument,” said Spunky.

  “Among bigots who can’t stand to think we aren’t a different species from ‘cave men.’”

  “Nobody says ‘cave men’ anymore,” said Spunky.

  “Well, not after that Geico ad,” said Eggie. “But they still think it. I’ve heard of Neanderthals but they didn’t teach me about that other group back in school.”

  “Denisovan. From the name of the cave where their DNA was found. In the bones of a child.”

  “Not just eastern Neanderthals?”

  “We’ve sequenced enough different Neanderthals that we can say with some certainty that the Denisovans were their own branch-off from the parent stock that left Africa.”

  “I feel pretty ignorant, here,” said Eggie.

  “Was I supposed to make you feel smart?” asked Spunky, with chip-on-her-shoulder insouciance.

  “Hickety-heck no,” said Eggie. “It’s like with dinosaurs and planets and the names of countries. They keep changing them and I can’t keep up.”

  “I have a degree in economics but I have only the vaguest idea of what you did to make your killing on Wall Street.”

  “Oh, right. That’s complicated. Like a lot of people who make their killing on Wall Street, I made friends with an older guy with a lot of influence. He let me in on a couple of deals so that starting with no capital except a pittance of savings, I found myself as principal stockholder of a couple of firms. And because I knew how to convert those companies into moneymakers, I made that stock rise in value and then sold at a reasonable time and left.”

  “Your benefactor — was he miffed that you didn’t keep going?”

  “I went and saw him on my way out of town to take care of Dad,” said Eggie. “He said, Good for you, Bert — they called me Bert there — and he said, Wish I’d had the spunk to do the same. Enough is enough, but most people think ‘enough’ means whatever scraps you leave for the other guy.”

  “Come on,” said Spunky.

  “Come on what?” asked Eggie.

  “He didn’t say ‘Wish I’d had the spunk to do the same.’”

  “Oh. I think he did, but I don’t have an eidetic memory, and maybe having this beautiful brilliant slippery spinstery post-doc clinging to my arm made me replace ‘guts’ or ‘balls’ with ‘spunk.’ Cliffs of fall.”

  Spunky stopped abruptly, which almost made them fall. It took a moment to recover balance. “What?” asked Eggie.

  “Did you really say ‘Cliffs of fall’?”

  Eggie laughed. “Oh, yeah. Your family has its things, and so does mine. My father thought Gerard Manley Hopkins was the greatest poet who ever lived. ‘Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall —”

  Spunky finished the couplet. “Frightful, sheer, no-man-­fathomed. Hold them cheap ...”

  And Eggie joined her: “Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

  “That’s as far as I can go from memory,” said Spunky. “Don’t know why that stuck in my mind, but I could never memorize an entire Hopkins poem except ‘Margaret, are you grieving ...”

  And again he joined in as they recited together, “... over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves like the things of man, you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?”

  And suddenly Spunky couldn’t go on because she was weeping. Not little tear-in-the-eye stuff like at a sad or happy movie, but full on weeping, sobbing into his sleeve as she turned her face into his shoulder.

  “Wow,” Eggie whispered. “Poetry really gets to you.”

  “It’s about dying,” said Spunky, “written by a poet who absolutely believed in resurrection.”

  “‘It is the blight man was born for,” said Eggie. “It is Margaret you mourn for.”

  “But it isn’t,” said Spunky. “It’s my mother, making us memorize a poem every week. She got to choose the poet. My brothers all ignored her choices, though, so they recited perfectly awful stuff from Ginsburg. Or Herrick, ‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes.’”

  “I bet your mother just laughed,” said Eggie.

  “How did you guess that?”

  “Because come on, they found those poems on their own and then memorized them. What’s not to love?”

  “They found Dickey, too, because his name sounded schoolboy-dirty. ‘Warm in such braces, mentioning grasses, grinning disgraces.’ For a year after that, Mom called my brothers, individually and as a clump, ‘Grinning Disgraces.’ Spunky, would you call the Grinning Disgraces in for dinner?”

  “OK, that’s it. I loved my mother but can’t I at least pretend your mother was my favorite aunt?”

  “You may have her as your aunt because she had no nephews. Just sons.”

  “And now you’re through crying?” he asked.

  “So I’ll come in to Thanksgiving dinner with red eyes and wet cheeks and everyone will have to pretend they don’t notice —”

  “Have you forgotten where you are? They’ll accuse me of making you cry and call me Monster all day, and you’ll be something like Weepy or Boo-Hoo or Damsel.”

  “Now’s when all my sociological training comes into play,” said Spunky. “I’m going to own this and make it my own. Is that the house?” She pointed to a big ramshackle mountain of weathered wood just down a little more slope and past the end of the trees.

  “You guessed it,” said Eggie, “since after that house there’s a cliff and a rill and then it’s deer and bears and raccoons all the way to Tennessee.”

  “I also see that there’s a perfectly serviceable road that looks almost paved or at least macadamed, but you took me through the slippery woods instead.”

  “And you clung to my arm the whole time, keeping me warm. My folks didn’t have no stupid children, missy.”

  “Missy not lassie now,” said Spunky.

  “You go by Spunky. I can call you anything I want.”

  They were there, and Eggie just swung the door open, no knock or anything. Inside everybody was moving toward the tables, as if the sight of them through a window had been the signal for the feast to start.

  It was plain enough that the woman with a gravy-covered wooden spoon and a spattered apron and flour in her hair was Miz Eliza, and Spunky was not surprised at all that she greeted her — the first words the woman had ever addressed to Dr. Spunk — by saying, “What did our lazy alderman do to make you cry?”

  “Gave me an Indian burn on my arm,” said Spunky, filling her voice with outrage. “And a noogy right on the top of my head.”

  “So he thinks he’s your big brother,” said Miz Eliza. “Figures, with the dumb ones.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone cares to know what she did to me,” said Eggie.

  “Not a one of us,” said Miz Eliza. “And besides, you’re saying the prayer and we’re all hungry so do it. And remember that everybody in this room says their own prayers, complete with all kinds of thank-yous to the Lord of Hosts, so if your prayer could end while the turkey’s still warm we’d all be grateful.”

  “And if you’d stop raggin’ on me, thou importunate Vieille Dame, I could begin, which will certainly bring me closer to ending the prayer.” And right there in the doorway, which was still slightly ajar behind them, and with his arm still around Spunky’s shoulders, he launched into a prayer as sweet as any that Spunky had ever heard, ending with the words, ‘And let there be no more tears shed in this house today, except of joy in the fellowship of good souls and the memory of beloved ones who can’t be with us.”

  The room was filled with a strong “amen” from everybody — well, most people. Spunky couldn’t actually see Elyon, but it would be hard to imagine
him saying amen to any kind of prayer, least of all a Christian one.

  Then again, he did know his scriptures, in Hebrew at least, so maybe he bowed to local custom when he was among believers in the Book.

  The food was everything Eggie had bragged on and Elyon had promised, and as Spunky watched Eggie during the meal she kept forgetting to eat, because he not only knew everybody seated anywhere nearby, but also liked them and cared about them and asked questions about their lives and their relatives and their pets and their projects and their jobs. And then he listened to what they had to say, and laughed at their jokes, and a couple of times became grave when they spoke of things they had suffered.

  He was deft at comforting people. Not the way most people did, by trying to cheer them up, which is usually offensive to somebody who’s really down, because “cheering up” is about making everybody else feel better so they can ignore you again.

  Instead, to the boy who was clearly sad about losing the girlfriend that Eggie asked about — “Oh, she’s off to college, sir, and I don’t figure she’ll come back much from Boone, if she didn’t come for Thanksgiving” — Eggie only gripped his arm a moment longer, saying, “We’ll all miss her, but you’ll miss her most of all, I think.” And then the boy fled to avoid shedding any tears in front of everybody, but as Spunky saw it, Eggie had just validated him, had just said, You’re right to love her, and we who love you recognize your suffering and respect it. He didn’t offer stupid encouragement and he didn’t tell him he’d get over it and there was nothing about how many fish are in the sea or how the wounds of the young heal fast or gibes about how a bit of time under the mistletoe would cure what ailed him.

  Eggie’s genius, come to think of it, was in all the stupid things he chose not to say.

  And then Spunky thought of their whole bantering, flirting conversation as they walked here, and her sudden rush of tears when they quoted a poem that brought back all her grief over her mother’s death, and how kindly and gently he helped her become ready to face a house full of people.