Our Christmas tree dinner was the happiest dinner we’d had since Willie’s death. There wasn’t the heavy tension and sadness invading every sentence and battling back every smile. Count Piro ate better than ever, and faster, too, because he wanted to get back to the trains. Grandpa and Dorian talked more about their pasts. They were so into their conversations that sometimes it was as if they were alone at the table. We did talk more about Thanksgiving and Christmas, which started Dorian describing some of her happier holidays. I realized that she, too, was still often mourning the loss of people she had loved in her past.
“Love has a way of making memories sticky,” she said, and Grandpa laughed. I began to suspect that what she and Grandpa Arnold were sharing of their pasts was bringing them closer to what might be their future.
After dinner, I returned to the living room and helped Count Piro work the trains and maneuver some of the toy people that I gave names to, just as I did when I played with Willie. Dorian and Grandpa sat together on the sofa enjoying an after-dinner cordial and watching us, but I sensed that they were really more interested in each other. I was still a little jealous, but I had to admit that Dorian was making Grandpa more mellow.
When Dorian thought it was time to take Count Piro up to bed, I returned to my room and started to do some of my homework just to keep my mind off everything else, but it proved impossible. My eyes drifted from the pages I had to read, and I read and reread the same sentences. Finally, I put it all away and took out my stationery.
Dear Willie,
So much has happened so quickly since I visited you at the cemetery. I didn’t want to like the poisoned boy, and as you know, I hated that he was using and enjoying your things. But I keep remembering how happy you were sharing your toys with friends. I’m sure now that if you were here, you would be friends.
He’s very sad and helpless, Wil
lie. I think he misses his family as much as you might be missing Grandpa and me. Grandpa is trying to find his family again. I hope for the boy’s sake he does. Everyone should be with his or her family, don’t you think?
But until then, don’t be angry at me for pretending at least that I’m like his older sister. I’m sure now that it will help him get stronger and better and maybe even walk again. Just because bad things happen to you, that doesn’t mean you have to be mean. Right?
Most of all, Willie, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of being alone, afraid of not having anyone to love me.
Maybe that’s why the boy is the way he is, Willie. He has the same fear.
Clara Sue
As before, I folded the letter, stuck it in an envelope, and put it in the drawer with the others. Then I went to bed, and somehow, despite the roller coaster of emotions I rode all day, I fell asleep dreaming of my family together on a Christmas morning years and years before even the thought of any sadness was born.
In the morning, My Faith went off to work at her church, and Myra and I started on breakfast. Dorian, who had gotten the Count up and dressed, joined us to help cut up fruit. He watched us from the doorway. While they made the pancakes and eggs, I set the table. Grandpa came down and was pleased to see Count Piro sitting with us again. While we ate, we planned what we would put out for Christmas decorations. Although everyone agreed we should have some, there was the sense that we would be more subdued than usual. Grandpa said he would take us shopping before Thanksgiving. He and Dorian planned on speaking to the doctors about Count Piro going along. I wondered, If Grandpa gives him money to spend, will he think about his lost family and reveal more, or will it make him sadder?
Afterward, I did work on my term paper, but Lila, who had gotten up late, called to give me her blow-by-blow description of Vikki Slater’s party.
“Now, I can’t swear to what happened,” she said when she got to Aaron, which was her whole purpose for the call, “but he and Sandra disappeared for almost an hour, and she looked like the cat who ate the canary when she and Aaron came back.”
“You have it wrong. He was the cat. She was the canary,” I said.
“What? Oh,” she said, and laughed. “I’m sorry. Are you very upset about it?”
“Only at myself,” I told her. She didn’t understand, and I didn’t feel like going into a long explanation. I changed the topic to our homework, which ended the phone call quicker.
For a while after, I sat thinking about Aaron. Should I be upset only at myself for being innocent and trusting? Should I forgive him? I wasn’t very nice to him. Didn’t I drive him away after all? Wasn’t I the one giving mixed signals, encouraging him to help me get Count Piro out of our lives and then resenting him for planning how to do it?
It wasn’t hard to see why he might have thought I liked him much more than I had liked any other boy, why I was promising to be special, too, being more intimate with him than I had been with any other boy. Or was that really something special to a boy like Aaron? If he had done it with Sandra last night, was doing it as special to him as it would be to me? Should I be the same way he was, casual, almost indifferent about sex?
I heard Dorian in the hallway and looked out. She was starting away from the Count’s room, her head down. She looked a little tired, but I stepped out impulsively and called to her. She paused and looked back at me.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
I nodded.
She smiled. “C’mon,” she said, holding out her hand. “We’ll talk in my room.”
For some time, I hadn’t been in the room my parents always used. It was easy to picture them there. Sometimes when Willie was still just a baby and we were visiting Grandpa and Grandma Arnold, I would rush to them and crawl into the bed to lie between them as soon as I woke up. Those were precious stolen moments before Willie would wake and command my mother’s full attention. For those minutes, I was like an only child again.
Wasn’t that what I was now?
“So,” Dorian said, sitting in the antique gray wingback chair Grandma Arnold had bought especially for this bedroom. My mother enjoyed sitting in it and reading one of her magazines or a novel, especially on rainy days. “What’s troubling you, Clara Sue?” she asked softly.
“At what age were you no longer a virgin?” I asked. The abruptness of my question and my standing there with my arms folded under my breasts, stiff-postured like an attorney cross-examining a witness, stunned her for a moment. I thought she would get angry and order me out or something, but instead, she smiled.
“Things were different when I was your age. You’d never know it from the way women my age behave nowadays, especially when it comes to their own daughters. You’d think they were living in the Victorian age. Anyway, by 1928, I was seventeen. That was what people often refer to as the Roaring Twenties. Yes, hard to believe, I know, but I was a flapper, to my mother’s displeasure, I might add. Women had gotten the right to vote, and there had already been something of a sexual revolution going on. We had romances, but for the most part, my girlfriends and I didn’t, as you guys say, go the whole way. At least, I didn’t until I was in my twenties and it was my first real hot-and-heavy romance. I thought it was inevitable that we’d get married.”