Preparations and Changes
Ashes fell from her hand as she shook it violently in pain, the dead match flying across the room in her anguish. I watched in silence as she walked over to the match and threw it in the wastepaper basket in between the couches. It was a violent shade of orange and filled with cigarettes. I stared at it, even after the match had disappeared among the debris.
“Well?” she said, her hands on her hips, drawing out the vowel with an artistic slide. “Aren’t you going to help? Why don’t you go see if the cookies are done?”
I stood up and walked down the hall to the kitchen. It was warm and smelled rosy, the smells of Christmas dinner mingling with slapped together lunch leftovers. I reached for the oven mitts she had thrown next to the sink and pulled out the cookies from the oven. She had come into the kitchen by the time I found a place to put down the hot sheet. She bustled around neatly, cleaning off the stove and tasting a few sauces still bubbling. I started back towards the living room while she shouted chores I could be doing at my back.
“And for heaven’s sake!” she yelled once I gotten down the hall, “Be cheerful, it is Christmas!”
I reached for the ancient paper basket to take it outside and empty it into the garbage. Then decided against it and retraced my steps to the bathroom. Armed with the toilet brush, I dove in, drowning out her cheerful singing with the sound of running water. I could still smell the sugar cookies through the odor of bleach. She stopped singing to get the telephone. I left the bathroom and put away the cleaning supplies but before I had reached the safety of the couch, she called out to me, her hand over the bottom speaker of the receiver:
“Charlie, go help your father shovel the walk.”
He isn’t my father—I wanted to say. I went back into the closet to retrieve my coat and walked down the four flights of stairs to the street. There wasn’t any road for all the cars lining either side of it, but the sidewalk was glistening from the lights hanging from the Victorian eaves in the apartment buildings. He was busy with the main sidewalk, tipping his hat to any couples walking past him and wishing them a merry Christmas. He smiled at me when I came out and then went back to work. I detested the scraping of metal shovel on pavement, but there wasn’t much sidewalk in front of our building that he hadn’t already cleared. When we were finished he patted me on the head and then took my shovel back inside with him not waiting for me to follow.
If I had stayed out much longer, some relative of mine would have asked me what I was doing out there and whether I was going to come in for dinner, so I followed him in. He walked up the four flights of stairs to our door, inserted his key in the lock, and then walked into the apartment. Heat from the kitchen billowed out the door. He yelled hello; She yelled hello. She ran to greet him and give him a kiss. I slipped into the hall and then into the living room.
The candle she was trying to light was still cold on the mantelpiece, the book of matches lying next to it. I picked one up and lit it, touching it gently to the wick of the candle and then blowing it out. I quickly glanced over my shoulder—she hadn’t caught me doing that—and then flicked the match into the garbage can before slipping off my boots and putting them in the spot she hates: behind the couch. But I stopped before I could walk away and took my boots to the closet with my coat.
I wasn’t giving in to her demands; I was respecting them. It was little, but it made all the difference in the world.
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.