I loved Christmas. I loved the
rich colors of the lights in the darkness, I loved the old-fashioned music, I
loved the sense that inexplicably wonderful things had happened before, and
might happen again. Although I never
could manage to believe in God, or to give any credence to the Biblical account
of Christ’s conception and birth, I could not have been more devoted to the
pageantry that surrounded its celebration.
Each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I would assemble a small
plastic village on an old coffee table on what we called our front porch, a
long, narrow room stretching the width of the house. It also contained a scarred wooden desk, the
stereo cabinet and record collection, a coat tree, the telephone, and a rocking
chair. The telephone did not ring
much.
A few months before my tenth birthday, I had begun to set up the village when
the fish tank caught my attention. My
father had kept several tanks for a while, Guppies and Mollies and Swordfish, a
source of hours of entertainment for the cats.
We didn’t have the cats any more, though.
I peered through the dense green carpet of algae into the tea-brown water. An ancient crone of a guppy and her friend
the angelfish had been living alone together for years, long after the filter
and the enthusiasm of their human caretakers had given way. Eye to eye with the two ancient beings
swimming slowly, meditatively, back and forth, I felt a surge of
protectiveness. It seemed in keeping
with the Christmas spirit to give them a gift, too.
I scraped a good chunk of the algae from the front wall of the tank,
stirring up a typhoon of fish excrement and plant bits. The fish hid behind the rock that had been
placed in the back of the tank by my father, carted home from one of his trips
to the mountains.
I frowned, observing that the fish’s quarters looked even more unhealthy
than they had before I’d begun my mission of mercy. Walking into the kitchen, I fished around in
the cabinet for something with which to scoop water. I came up with a yellow plastic cup with a
smiley face stamped into it in black, along with the words, “Have a nice day.”
I didn’t like to drink from it because it smelled so strongly of plastic that
it made my Pathmark brand powdered iced tea taste bad. I figured that being dunked in the fish tank
wouldn’t make it any worse. The other
item that I brought back to the porch was the puke bowl. It was a turquoise tub meant for soaking
one’s tired feet, but we used it for situations in which a person might need to
vomit suddenly.
By the time I had filled the bowl twice, each with two dozen cups of
smiley brown water, I was tired of this project. The fish would peek out from behind the rock
periodically, looking alarmed. I filled
up the tank with bowls of water from the kitchen faucet—and only spilled a
little bit on the way through the dining room and living room—and stood back to
look with satisfaction upon my handiwork.
The fish ventured out, their gills heaving, startled by the sudden
influx of actual oxygen. I sprinkled
some food on the top of the water, replaced the hood, and turned my attention
to Jesus.
The coffee table, tucked into the far end of the room, was shielded from
the view of anyone entering or leaving the house. On this table I set up a little village,
complete with a few houses, a picket fence, a gas station, and a church. In my mind, a gas station was the essential
component of a town. My father was a gas
station auto mechanic. How else would
the fathers of the town make their living, if there were no gas station? There were no factories in Plasticville,
which seemed like a major oversight.
The smell of gasoline and grease that accompanied my father home meant
that evening had come. Later, when he
didn’t always come home, I marked the hours by the appearance of certain
television shows, a subject on which I was an expert. Their arrivals were much less likely to be
accompanied by unpleasant conversations, fights, or ominous silences than my
father’s.
In my coffee-table town, there were some free-standing plastic lampposts,
the kind that were reminiscent of gas lights, but the only real illumination
came from the church. The Plasticville
church came equipped with a clear C7 bulb on a wire, and a clip that held it
upright in the center of the church.
After dinner, I would slip onto the porch, plug in the church, and read
my Children’s Bible by its
dependable—if somewhat dim—light. I was
determined afresh each year that I was going to read the whole book, cover to
cover. An avid reader, I was certain
that I could accomplish this, and I went about it in the most sensible way that
I could: by starting at the beginning.
The problem was that I wanted not just to read it but to memorize
it. I had thought about that myth about
the man with the baby calf, who lifted it every day until it became a bull,
because if he started when it was small and each day it was only a few pounds
heavier, of course he could do it, right?
So, then, surely I could memorize the whole thing without much trouble,
if I would just stick to it.
I had a lot of ideas. Relatively
few of them reached any stage that could have been called fruition. I became very familiar with Genesis, but
whatever came after that was a little bit fuzzy. One year I did get to Joseph and his coat of
many colors, and I reflected upon how very much blood was involved in the
stories of the Bible. Admittedly, my
children’s version skipped much of the more tedious speechmaking, exposition,
and prophesying, focusing on the more colorful stories.
Still, I was giving it a shot.
Every night I knelt before Plasticville, humming “Silent Night” before
settling in to read. When I’d taken in
as much regurgitated revelation as I could stand, I opened the front door and
went outside. Leaning against the
American Elm tree by the curb, I considered my house, with its red candles in
every window, the string of large outdoor bulbs of all colors ringing the
doorway, and a red crinkled-cellophane dime-store wreath in each of the second
floor windows.
Then I would go back inside, put on a scratched 33 rpm record called The Sweet Voices of Christmas, and lean
up against the stereo cabinet, the black speaker fabric with gold threads
running through it rough against my cheek, listening to British children
singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
That was Christmas, for me. Not the presents, not the relatives, and
definitely not Santa Claus. The thought
of a bearded stranger entering our house unannounced always made me
uncomfortable. We didn’t have a
fireplace, and before I found out the truth, I worried that he would end up in
the furnace. Even though the idea of him
was kind of creepy, I didn’t wish for him to be broiled alive. I was assured that he used the back door, a
flimsy thing with louvered glass and a half-broken lock. Finding the price tag on that deck of cards on
the Christmas just before my fifth birthday set my mind at ease, and my mother’s,
too, I think. She didn’t like to lie to
me.
Christmas was about the possible—the light in the darkness, the
possibility of finding out that the night fears and the sadness and the unhappy
surprises were not all there was. It was
about trying to see the town by the light of the church, although the whole
not-believing-in-God-thing was problematic.
I kept trying, but I couldn’t. It
didn’t stop me from appropriating his imagery for my own purposes, and from
trying to see the world by the light of my coffee-table altar. The ancient gilled creatures were my witnesses,
remnants of Biblical times, a tiny living presence in the suffocating silence
of the house at night.
The next morning, I skipped in to inspect the transformation of ichthyological darkness into light. The guppy was
belly-up, and the angelfish was flat on the surface of the water, one eye
staring up toward heaven and the other down at the gravel.
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