Zanna's Gift- a Life in Christmases Read online

  The signal was given from the door, the wedding march started, and the parade began, with Hal and Zanna watching from behind.

  When the bride and her father had gone, Hal stepped forward and caught the door. For a moment he and Zanna waited, watching Betty and Bug go up the aisle. You had to be watching for it to know Betty had a limp. Though of course, Zanna realized, that very thought meant that she had been watching for it.

  “I just had a terrible thought,” whispered Hal. “If kids don’t change when they grow up, what about Todd?”

  “Todd’s turned into a human,” said Zanna. “That was just a phase.”

  “I’ve read Wind in the Willows. I know all about Mr. Toad.”

  “Todd will turn out all right. He’s Bug’s son, isn’t he? And my nephew.”

  “Make sure you tell that to the judge at the sentencing hearing.”

  “You’re evil, Hal,” said Zanna. “Now let’s make our humiliating dash up the aisle and see if we can get into our seats before anybody says ‘I do.’ ”

  The wedding was lovely—none of that hippie nonsense about saying made-up vows and reciting bad poetry. If Betty had been that kind of young woman, she would never have brought this party to her grandparents’ church.

  After the ceremony, by the time Hal and Zanna had suffered through all the teasing about their late arrival, the painting had been removed from the foyer so it wouldn’t get knocked over, and they didn’t see it again that day. Betty’s new husband was an athlete, by the look of him, and after she threw the bouquet, he scooped her up, dress and all, and ran down the church steps, with Sylvia screaming, “Don’t drop my baby!” while everybody else laughed and cheered and threw rice. Then he set her, gentle as a rose petal, into the passenger seat of the convertible they had borrowed for the occasion, and with a few happy tootles on the car horn, they were off.

  The picnic was the next day. It was just like always, except Sylvia was a little teary-eyed during the cutting of the cake, and Bug looked a little dazed.

  Then there came the time, into the summer evening, as the sun was nearing the horizon, when everything was packed up and loaded into cars and the families began the drive from the park to the folks’ place, as Grandma’s and Grandpa’s old house was called. Only, again without a word being said, the cars all took a side trip to a cemetery where they parked, and most of the adults began the quiet walk to the well-known gravesite.

  Mother almost never cried during these visits, so it was a real surprise when she burst into tears this evening. It only lasted a moment, but she seemed to feel she owed an explanation. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just couldn’t help thinking how much I wish I could have seen Ernie walk up that aisle. And then wonder what his children would have looked like. Really, I know it’s silly of me, and now I’ve spoiled everybody’s day and . . .”

  Father silenced her with an arm across her shoulder. “Nobody minds. We were all thinking the same thing. It doesn’t spoil anything, to miss the ones who aren’t here.”

  Zanna had been thinking the same thing, only about her twin, and remembering that there were things her twin got to do that she had missed out on. So maybe it all came out even in the end.

  She couldn’t say that to anyone, though. She just held Hal’s hand and smiled at her mother when she looked her way.

  It was Sylvia who made Mother feel better about having cried. “I know it’s not the same thing, Mom,” she said. “But there was somebody else missing at today’s wedding.”

  Everyone waited for her to say who.

  “We had her portrait on an easel in the foyer.”

  Mother and Davy and Lucy all started to protest, but Bug silenced them with a gesture. “We know Betty’s the same girl,” he said. “We know that. But she led a different life. She had a different childhood. That’s all Sylvia meant.”

  Then Sylvia, tears in her eyes, walked over to Zanna and clasped her hands. “That picture has meant so much to us, I hope you know that. And it was Betty who insisted on showing it. We meant to keep it private, but she said you wouldn’t mind. She said, After all, I was standing on top of a picket fence in the front yard when I threw that stone. I meant to be seen by everybody!”

  They had a laugh at that.

  And then Davy said, “It’s not the same thing as losing a child outright, like you did, Mom and Dad. Or having a child go through such suffering as Betty did. But Lucy and I were saying to each other, how much we miss the little ones, now that they’re growing up. Every stage of their lives, from scraping poop off their butts to putting Band-Aids on their knees, it goes by so fast, and you can’t hold onto it, it’s just there and gone. And just because you miss the child that’s gone doesn’t mean you don’t love the woman or man that’s still with you.”

  There was a long moment of silence after that. Then Father said, “Well, I’ve had about all the wisdom I can take for one day. Who wants to go back home with me?”

  He led the parade of children back toward the cars, and Lucy and Sylvia and Hall soon took over the shepherding, and in a few moments Father slipped back, and there they were, just the five of them who had known Ernie, gathered around his grave and the grave of the baby sister that only Ernie, of all of them, had ever had a chance to know.

  There came a time like this at every family gathering—in a hot summer evening after the picnic, or on a crisp Christmas night, when Davy, Bug, and Zanna gathered with their parents at Ernie’s and Dianna’s graves.

  Sometimes they spoke cheerfully of their memories of Ernie, and of each other as children, all their past brought together into the present moment, being there with the people who had been with them then.

  Sometimes they said little.

  Sometimes, like this time, Mother wept.

  And one time, years later, when he was very old and had been brought to the gravesides in his wheelchair, Father wept too.

  “It never fades,” he explained. “You don’t think of them as often, but when you do, it’s like an old injury that aches when the weather turns.”

  They murmured their understanding, and it was true, they did understand. Not because their own feelings for Ernie were as sharp as their parents’ feelings, but because they had children of their own, and they knew.

  Father added, as they wheeled him away from the graves: “Won’t have to miss him much longer.”

  And he didn’t. The next family gathering was only a few months later, and this time there were three graves. Mother had arranged for Father’s tombstone to include her name and date of birth and even the dash before the space where her death would be recorded.

  “But Mother,” said Bug. “It’s morbid. As if you’re just waiting to die.”

  “I am,” she said irritably. “You think I can’t read a calendar?”

  “Well, don’t be in a hurry about it,” said Davy, putting an arm around her.

  “I can be in a hurry if I want to,” she said. “Oh, your father can wait—he spent half his life jangling the car keys, waiting for me, so he’s used to it. And Ernie—you think I don’t know he’s been busy, wherever he is? That wasn’t a boy to sit still. But that girl Dianna. I don’t even know her. Did you think of that? I don’t even know her, and I’ve waited a long enough time, I should think!”

  But she had eleven more years to wait—long enough to see all three of her children become grandparents in their own right, and to have pictures taken of her holding each of five different great-grandchildren, along with the baby’s parents and grandparents. She loved the pictures. “There it is, right in that snapshot—a whole genealogy, a family tree! And I’m the root. Don’t you forget that!”

  Then she, too, was laid in the grave that waited for her. The family plot was complete now; when it came the others’ time to die, they would be in their own family plots somewhere. Only the children who died without families of their own needed to lie where their parents lay.

  The family reunions ended then. Without the folks’ place to gather at, t
here seemed little point in it. But from time to time, when they had a reason to be near, Davy, Bug, or Zanna would take a side trip to that cemetery in the town of their childhood, and lay flowers on the graves, and speak to beloved parents and long-lost siblings.

  What they didn’t realize, but would have been very glad to know, was how many of their own children also found at least one chance, in their comings and goings through the world, to visit those graves, and lay flowers there. For even though they had never met these children whose names were now so weathered on the stones, they had been part of their lives all the same, part of what it meant to be a family, part of their understanding of that vague and difficult word love.

  12

  Suzanna Pullman was in her sixties when, to her great surprise, she became famous, in a smallish way. She had never painted as a career, because by the time she got to college, it was clear that the only way to get the approval of the art faculty was to paint things that nobody could understand.

  And if there was one thing Zanna was determined never to do, it was to paint something that would prompt someone to ask, “What is it?”

  So, ignoring the orthodoxy of the painting world, she created landscapes and portraits and still lifes and the kind of romantic art that she had come to love. She liked to tell people that she had learned painting from dead forgotten artists, and when they pressed her for a list, she would list her mentors: Chase, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Poynter. People would look at her blankly.

  But she placed some of her canvases in a local gallery, and they all sold, sometimes within days, sometimes after a year or so, but someone would value her work and ask about her. And the money came in handy—they liked to say that Mom’s art put all her kids through college, though sometimes Hal would say that he’d rather have used the money to put in a pool.

  Then, in her old age, the fashion suddenly changed and her list of mentors was on everyone’s lips and serious collectors began to take notice of paintings by Suzanna Pullman. The gallery put another zero on the end of their asking price.

  People bought her work all the more quickly.

  There was a write-up in an art magazine, and an interview on NPR, and then a piece of hers on the cover of Time. (But not her face—she absolutely insisted that her face had nothing to say, it was all in her art, and refused to let them point a camera at her no matter what excuse they fed her.)

  There was money, then, and her grandchildren were surprised to find that Grandma was cool. She only wished her Hal had lived to see it; but he had been carried off by a cold that turned into pneumonia so quickly that he died in the emergency room, gasping for air. She grieved for him but also thought: So much better to go that way than to linger with some painful disease, or with Alzheimer’s, or crippled by age. Good old pneumonia. But of course that was self-deception, except that she wasn’t even fooled. She missed him every day.

  Then it all settled down again and life was normal and Granny Zan was still Granny Zan, a tough-minded old lady who was always happy to have a visit as long as you didn’t make a sound outside her studio door between six and eleven A.M. “I have to make hay while the light is right,” she’d say.

  Only a few of her grandchildren had any particular interest in the arts, and most of them were performers, some with music, one on stage. There was a boy who dabbled in sculpture. A girl who tried her hand at watercolors but lost interest when it was clear that she wouldn’t instantly become as famous as Granny Zan.

  The arty ones weren’t her favorites anyway—they always seemed either self-centered or overly competitive and she found both attitudes boring.

  Her favorites were the grandchildren who would spend the afternoon in the kitchen with her, baking. “Talk about lost arts,” she’d say. “My mother baked bread or something almost every day. I grew up surrounded by cookies and cake and homemade bread and biscuits and pan-fried scones, and no packaged mix ever crossed my mother’s threshold. I’d be ashamed to see the Pillsbury Doughboy’s squishy little butt inside my pantry, and as for Betty Crocker, she’s such a gossip and she has been known to use powdered eggs in her cakes.”

  It was one of those favored grandchildren who stopped by her house at Christmastime, planning to make it just a quick visit as she drove on to her boyfriend’s parents’ house in another state in time for Christmas Eve. It was only coincidence that her name was Diana—she was named for her mother’s mother, and not for Zanna’s twin, as the missing n attested. She was clearly in love with the boy who had driven her here, a half-shaven starved-looking boy named Jake, which to Zanna sounded like what you’d call an outhouse when she was a girl. But he was kind and attentive to Diana, and for that reason Zanna gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  She showed them through the house and then let them sample the cookies she was baking for the neighbors. “I tried making my mother’s date bread, but nobody knew what to do with them. Exotic baked fruits just can’t compete with Chee-tos and Fritos and Doritos and Tostitos, I guess. And I can see from your faces that you are both oh so grateful that you didn’t happen to come by on a date bread day, but you needn’t worry, I don’t force my treats on anybody, any more than I make anybody take my paintings who doesn’t want them.”

  They answered her by rhapsodizing over the perfection of her cookies and they had spent the whole afternoon together before anyone looked out the window and realized that it was snowing heavily.

  “Well, I don’t like that,” said Zanna. “Not a bit.”

  “We’d better get going,” said Jake. “There’s a mountain range between us and home and it gets nasty in a storm.”

  “Indeed it does,” said Zanna, “and now I want to ask you, Jake, which would your mother rather have? A living son who is a day late getting home for Christmas, or a dead son who proved his love by trying to go over the pass at night, in a snowstorm?”

  Zanna held up a hand to silence her granddaughter. “I already know what your mother would prefer,” said Zanna, “and that you won’t pay the slightest attention to me once your mind is made up. But Jake here is much more sensible than you are—and he loves his mother more than you love yours, so you don’t even get a vote here. Well, Jake, what is it? Over the mountain, hurrying home, and your mother spends all the remaining Christmases of her life weeping over a grave? Or do the two of you stay here, have Christmas morning with me, and then go over the pass after the snow has stopped and they’ve had a chance to plow the roads?”

  Jake looked at Diana, who was shaking her head grimly—determined to go on, of course, being the girl she was.

  “I’m not going to pretend here,” said Zanna. “I’m old-fashioned and you two aren’t married, so if you stay with me it’ll be separate rooms.”

  Diana blushed and Jake protested. “We aren’t sleeping together.”

  “Not everybody does that, you know, Granny Zan!”

  “Well, good, so that’s one less reason for you to try to get out of my house before Christmas.”

  In the end, they stayed, and Zanna liked the way Jake teased Diana into not being mad about having things not go her way. Yes, this boy could marry Diana without having her run him around on the end of a stick, and that meant they’d both have a chance for happiness. Don’t let go of this one, you stubborn girl. Even if he doesn’t have the tiniest shred of a hope of a career, at least so far.

  Zanna was untroubled by the fact that she hadn’t bought them anything for Christmas. She dug out some old Christmas stockings and safety-pinned their names to them and hung them beside hers over the fireplace.

  “All I ever get is coal,” she said, “and after I bullied you into staying here Christmas Eve, it’s bound to be anthracite for me again this year.”

  She left them watching television and went to bed before them. At three A.M., just like clockwork, she woke up with her bladder ready to burst and so thirsty she could hardly swallow. Of all an old woman’s bodily functions, why did her kidneys have to get more efficient as she got older?<
br />
  But once she had gone to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen to sip a little cranberry juice, she walked around the house. Being human, she had to check on the children, and was pleased to see that they had not only gone to bed in separate rooms, they had left the doors ajar so she could see for herself.

  What she was really doing, though, was searching for gifts to put in their stockings. She was old enough that she had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of possessions, and now it was time to start parting with some of them, when the right person came along. Indeed, long before he died, she and Hal had started giving nothing but food as gifts. “No reason to clutter up people’s houses with things they can’t get rid of for fear you’ll come to visit and notice they didn’t keep it,” they said to anyone who asked. People got the idea, and stopped giving them things—though few were brave enough to bake for them, and so what they got were bookstore gift certificates or donations to some cause in their name.

  Still, that didn’t mean she didn’t have a house full of knickknacks in true grandma fashion—it just guaranteed that all of them were old.

  For Jake, she chose a porcelain of a haughty-looking woman in a Marie-Antoinette dress, all lace and very intricately painted. She would tell him it was to remind him that when a woman got too proud, there was always someone ready to cut off her head.

  And for Diana, she took her ancient copy of The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport and inscribed it, “This book was at the heart of my childhood. Keep it for a child of yours someday, and if you don’t have one, then read it yourself and think of Granny Zan.”

  Then she filled several plastic sandwich bags with cookies and biscuits for the road, and of course a couple of apples because that had been an inevitable part of Christmas stockings when she was a girl.

  When she came into the living room to fill their stockings, she was surprised to see that there was something in her own—and when she felt through the sock, she could tell it wasn’t coal after all.