A Christmas Memory, page 1
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
To Mr. Foster
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Usually when a writer bases a story on a life experience, it is the core of the story that is kept intact, while the names and details are changed. In a way this book is the opposite of that. While the main story is a composite of several of my childhood experiences, it’s the details that remain stubbornly intact, some indelibly scarred into my memory.
It’s not likely, in our day, that a young boy would be allowed to spend time alone with an older man without there being aspersions. Mr. Foster was, as I portray him, a kind, older man who, to my delight, had time for a lonely boy and also a seemingly limitless supply of Brach’s chocolate stars. I am grateful for that friendship. Mr. Foster died more than forty years ago. I dedicate this book to his memory.
PROLOGUE
As I grow older, I find that there are memories that my heart has sheltered, like an oyster around a pearl. It’s an apt metaphor, I think, as the oyster forms a pearl not to create something of beauty but to protect itself from pain. But beautiful the pearl is all the same. So are my memories. I’m old enough now to realize that the most meaningful experiences of my life aren’t always the ones I would have chosen to go through or would get back in line for.
One of those memories I hold particularly close. A Christmas memory of Mr. Foster. It’s one I’ve never shared with the world. I don’t know why, but in my mind, the memory still comes to me in black-and-white, like television was back then.
Caged memories do not sit well, and with each passing year, this one gnaws at me more and more to get out. Maybe that’s why now, at my age, I share the story I’ve hidden for so long, baring my soul in ink. What you do with it, whether you find hope or pain, is up to you. Do with it as you will.
CHAPTER 1
It was the summer of 1967. It felt to me like the world was on fire. Maybe it always has been. The Vietnam War was in full blaze. China was in the throes of a cultural revolution. America was in one of its own. Just two years earlier, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in a race riot just twenty miles from my home in Pasadena, and there were American soldiers in American streets. The riot was put down, but the rage continued to grow. More than a hundred riots broke out across the country that year, resulting in millions of dollars of damage, and almost a hundred deaths.
That death toll was nothing compared to the rising body count abroad. That year, the United States suffered its greatest number of casualties so far in Vietnam. In response to the rising loss of lives, the powers that be doubled down and called more boys to action—more kindling to add to that bonfire.
To me, an awkward boy of eight with Tourette’s syndrome, the fear was spread thick by grim newscasters and newspaper ink. The war had special relevancy to my family. My older brother Mark—my only sibling—was somewhere in the jungles of that godawful place.
There was a sizable age gap between my brother and me, more than a decade. I don’t know how that came about. In my early teens—after I learned how the whole baby-making process worked—I figured I might have just been an accident, though my mother denied it when I asked her about it. “We always wanted you,” she said, which didn’t really answer my question and, during some of those years, didn’t even feel quite true.
I suppose my story really started before that. I was seven years old when my brother left for basic training in Fort Polk, Louisiana. It was two weeks before Thanksgiving, but we felt anything but grateful. My mother lit candles around the house and kept playing a vinyl record of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” as she dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief that always seemed to be in her hand.
My brother, Mark, was quiet and easygoing. A peacemaker. He was a good brother and would sometimes take me to baseball games when my father wasn’t around, which was too often the case. He read a lot and shared with me his love for books, though it didn’t sink in for me until later in life.
The night before my brother left for service, I walked into his bedroom wrapped in a blanket and with tears streaming down my cheeks. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want him to go, but I couldn’t get it out. He sat down on his bed next to me and put his arm around me. “What’s the matter, pal?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. Finally, I got out, “What if you don’t come back?”
He pulled my head into his chest. “I’ll be back. I promise.” He held me for a couple of minutes, then kissed the top of my head. “Now go to bed. I still need to pack.”
I remember that night, lying under my blanket crying. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that just his saying so was enough to control destiny. But, in reality, it’s like people telling people to fly safe when they get on a plane, knowing there is absolutely nothing they can do to make that happen. Sometimes we just don’t hold the controls.
The next few months passed in a sort of limbo. “At least he’s still in the States,” my mother would say to us, mostly to comfort herself. But, inevitably, the day came that my brother shipped off for Vietnam. We weren’t happy to learn that he’d been assigned to the First Cavalry Division, one of the most decorated and bloodiest fighting units of the US military. The change of mood in our home was palpable. On top of the fear, there was a growing tension between my parents. My mother began voicing her disapproval with the war, though usually passively, by sharing negative headlines from the day, which there never seemed to be a dearth of.
The letters from my brother came less frequently, and, when they did, carried a new tone—a faux hopefulness as fake as a tin Rolex. The change permeated our home. Whenever a letter would come, my mother would carry it with her the whole day, occasionally reading or rereading from it. Sometimes she would read to me from his letters. Mark was always writing from places with names my mother couldn’t pronounce, towns like Bien Hoa and Khe Sanh.
Even more than what they said, I remembered the way the letters looked—the red-and-blue-bordered airmail envelope was usually smudged with dirt, which made it seem like he’d sent us a piece of the country, war and all. The letters were often stained with splattered drops, sweat or tears, I don’t know.
The days crawled and the months flew. Like most of the war’s conscripted, Mark was indentured for a one-year tour of duty. With just three more months of duty, his letters felt hopeful again. He began writing about the future and things he looked forward to, like my mom’s cooking. He asked about some of the girls he used to know. He promised to be home for Christmas. He kept his promise. Just not the way we hoped.
That was the day when the reality of that conflict reached our world—when the war’s suffering was not just borne by other people’s sons and brothers. That was a day I’ll never forget—the day a tall, wispy-haired man in an army uniform came to our door.
CHAPTER 2
THURSDAY, AUGUST 3, 1967
It was an uncomfortably warm Los Angeles day. Our little Pasadena home, surrounded by citrus trees and palms, was usually temperate, but that day the heat was spiked by the Santa Ana winds. Our home didn’t have an air conditioner and a chain of oscillating fans blew around the house with a steady buzz and whisper.
My mother was wearing a sunflower-patterned sundress that I remember with unusual clarity. I’ve discovered that in times of calamity our minds indiscriminately capture the mundane along with the traumatic, indelibly searing images of both into our psyches. That’s why people remember exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot or the Twin Towers fell.
It was supposed to be a good day. It was the last week of my summer vacation and that afternoon my mother and I were going on a special date, first to a Jack in the Box drive-in to get a hamburger, then to Penney’s to shop for school clothes. My mother was in her bedroom gussying herself up and I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing pictures of robots (I was obsessed with them) when the doorbell rang. I got up and answered it.
A man stood a few feet from the door. In spite of the warmth of the day, he wore a tie and jacket. He was gaunt, with a protruding jaw and round granny spectacles securely perched on his bulbous nose. The jacket he wore hung from his shoulders like it would from a department store coatrack. Parked in front of our house was a car with a gold US Army star decal on its door.
“Hello, young man. Is your mother or father home?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
My mother came out of her room. “Who is it, Ricky?” she asked brightly.
“It’s a man.”
“A salesman?”
My mother walked toward me with her head cocked to one side as she fastened an earring. I remember her smile vanishing when she saw the man. She looked past him to his vehicle, then froze.
His voice came sincere but rehearsed. “Mrs. Evans, I’m sorry to have to inform you—”
That’s all he could get out before my mother started screaming. “No! No! No!” I had never seen my mother in hysterics before and it frightened me. “Get out of here! Leave our house! Leave. Right now!” She swatted at him like he was a fly.
The man stood there uneasily.
Wh y isn’t he leaving? I thought.
“I’m very sorry,” he repeated. He looked down at me. “Son, is your father home?”
I shook my head, still not understanding what was going on. My father was never home during the day, often not even on weekends. My father was a midlevel administrator for a chain of convalescent homes (as they called them back then) and he spent his days driving between the company’s different facilities, from Bakersville to San Bernardino. He was gone a lot, which is why it was usually just my mother and me.
The man asked if we had a pastor or a family member he could call for us, but my mother just kept shouting at him to leave. Finally, he confessed his sorrow again, then dismissed himself, leaving an envelope in my mother’s hands.
My mother shut the door and, leaning against it, collapsed to the floor. It was almost a full hour before I understood why she was crying.
CHAPTER 3
Nothing in our home was the same after that day. I didn’t start school the next week. The routine of our lives turned to chaos. According to the information in the envelope, my brother’s body would be delivered back home within a week of notification, but I guess they had a lot of other bodies to send home right then, and it took longer than that. It took almost three weeks. It felt like forever.
The funeral was simple, courtesy of the US military, not that any of us would be sending them a thank-you letter.
My mother had six sisters, all of whom still lived almost seven hundred miles away in Utah, where my mother was born and raised, and when they got a final date for the funeral, all six of them crowded into an olive-green and beige Volkswagen microbus and drove to California.
The funeral for my brother was held on Monday, August 21, at the church in Monrovia that we sometimes attended.
There weren’t a whole lot of people there, mostly friends of my brother, a few neighbors, and my mother’s friends from the PTA. Outside of my visiting aunts, we had no other family.
People acted like they didn’t know how to act. There was an open microphone, which mostly remained unused. One older man wearing a World War II veteran cap got up and spoke about how my brother had died a hero, defending America and the cause of freedom. He meant well, I suppose, but somehow the words felt strange to me. Vietnam was such a small country and so far away; I wasn’t sure how it could threaten our country or our freedoms. I had felt much more afraid during the riots at home a couple of years before. But I didn’t understand the world anyway and left the reasoning to smarter or, at least, older people.
One thing I did know was that my brother didn’t believe in the war and didn’t want to go. It was a point of contention in our family, one my mother was quietly stuck in the middle of. My father, who had never served in the military, told my brother that he would be ashamed of him if he didn’t serve his country. In this way my family fought our own battle over the war.
Maybe it was familial or cultural pressure but, in the end, like thousands of others, my brother went. Back then people, for the most part, still implicitly trusted their country and the men who governed it. That decade was the time when the veneer started to peel from that trust.
The aunts stayed for a couple of days after the funeral, helping with meals and dishes and such, clucking and scratching about and doing their best to distract my mother from the reason they were there. One day they went to the beach, which was a first for all of them. They went in their Utah clothes and shoes and walked on the sand with as much wonder as the astronauts on their first moonwalk.
The next day, they piled into the Volkswagen bus and drove back home to Utah, their absence magnifying the vacuum of our new world.
After that, my father was around home a lot more, but, in a way, he was just as absent as before. He wasn’t the same. He kept to himself and lost his temper at the slightest things. Six weeks after the funeral, my father lost his job, which created a whole new set of challenges—money problems and my parents’ constant fighting. It felt like everything in my life was spiraling out of control, and I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t know it at the time, but my parents had decided to separate.
This was the same time that my Tourette’s syndrome first manifested. My first tic was a shrug. Not much was known about Tourette’s back then, and my mother just told me to stop doing it. I tried to obey, but the urge just kept coming. It was like an itch that needed to be scratched. It was just one of more than twenty different tics I would have throughout my life.
My aunts, aware of my father’s unemployment and our deteriorating financial situation, offered us a place to live for free: the old house in Utah that had been left abandoned after my grandmother’s death.
I never really knew my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had died before I was born, and I only really remembered being in Utah once, back when I was five. I have only hazy snapshots of memories of my grandmother—a corpulent, kind woman, smiling as she handed me a hot sugar cookie from a tray. I liked her. I knew my mother liked her, since they spoke nearly every day on the telephone. Unfortunately, life didn’t afford my mother the chance to see her often, since we only had one car and it was too expensive to fly back then.
My mother was planning a trip to visit her mother for her sixty-fifth birthday when, four days before our departure, my grandmother unexpectedly died of heart failure.
Another snapshot: my mother standing over an ironing board in the kitchen, crying. I asked her why she was crying. She said her mother had gone to heaven. I asked her if heaven was a bad place. She said, “No. It’s a good place.” Puzzled, I asked, “Then why are you crying?” She never answered me.
My father, mother, and I drove to Utah for the funeral, then drove back the next day. That was the last time we went back to Utah. At least, until we moved there for good.
CHAPTER 4
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
The FOR SALE sign went up in our front yard on a Saturday afternoon. I was sitting at a card table selling lemonade for five cents a Dixie cup. The sign wasn’t up very long. California was booming back then, and we sold our home in just five days.
The next Saturday we had a garage sale, and my parents sold off pretty much everything they could, including all my old toys and bedroom furniture. What we didn’t sell my parents left in front of the house with a sign that read FREE.
We rented a small U-Haul trailer, which my father hitched to the back of his olive-green Buick Riviera, then, with him in his car and my mother and me in our overfilled station wagon, we left our home in California.
We started out early in the afternoon, stopped briefly in Barstow, where we got a hamburger and 7 Up for dinner, then drove on, stopping for the night in Las Vegas—the halfway point to Utah.
It was a long and silent drive. I drew pictures on a notepad while my mother just followed the trailer in front of us. Every now and then I would hear a sniffle and I would look up to see her wipe her cheek.
We stayed in Las Vegas in a dodgy hotel that advertised rooms for nineteen dollars a night. The room had two twin beds. I slept in one with my mother. I didn’t think it odd that my parents didn’t sleep together, as the beds were small. I still didn’t know they were planning on separating.
The room stank of tobacco and other unpleasant odors. That night there was a lot of noise in the hotel’s parking lot. At one point my father got up and looked out the curtains, checked the chain on the door, then got back in bed.
We got up the next morning with the sun. Vegas was different back then—not the Disneyesque attraction it is today. It looked as hard as the people it drew and the casinos offered cheap meals to lure gamblers into smoky rooms that were gauchely decorated with metallic foil wallpaper and velvet wall hangings as subtle as an Elvis costume.
Just a half block down the street from our hotel, one of the casinos offered coffee and a three-egg, hash brown, and flapjack breakfast for just eighty-nine cents. That’s where we went.
A busty, frowning woman in an orange waitress uniform grabbed some menus and seated us at a table near the middle of the space. We were the only traditional-looking family in the dining room. The place was filled with truckers and salesmen and old people with cigarettes clenched between their teeth and a lever in one hand as they feverishly fed coins into slot machines with the other. Every now and then the room would ring with a siren or bell and the clanging sound of coins on tin.
