The Holiday Read online

  ‘I do too, Reilly.’ At the stroke of midnight, I leaned in to kiss my husband and wished him a happy new year, then sat back and enjoyed the rest of the taxi ride home.

  Mistletoe and Holly

  LIZ IRELAND

  Chapter One

  I may be twenty-eight, but I’m a five-year-old when it comes to Christmas. The sight of a trimmed tree fills me with unrealizable expectations of holiday bliss, an affliction I blame on overexposure to those schmaltzy TV commercials and Christmas movies. Though I might gripe about all the over-the-top hoopla, I secretly look forward to it. Put it this way: I am not 100 percent certain what a sugarplum is, but for a few weeks every year I’ve got visions of them dancing in my head anyway.

  And, then, sometime between December 26 and January 1, the festivity ends and I straggle back to my apartment feeling exhausted, broke, and somehow lonelier than before. This is when I start wondering if it might not be better for everyone if Christmas were an event staged every four years, like the Olympics.

  But by the next time the holidays roll around I think, this year will be different.

  This will be the year when I’ll look like I belong in that Christmas picture my sister, Maddie, sends me every January – the one taken with her elaborate, spendy camera equipment. (Dad always brags that Maddie could have been a professional photographer if she hadn’t settled on medical school.) In the picture – which is always the same, every year – everyone is smiling deliriously in front of the nine-foot Douglas fir that sags with decades of accumulated holiday gewgaws. In it, my mom and dad lock arms in a way they never do on any other of the 364 days of the year. My button-downed, razor-jawed brother, Ted, with his beautiful wife, Melinda, a former Pilates instructor, hover over their two daughters, blond cherubs who strike adorable poses without being coached. Then there is my little sister, Maddie, the star of the family, who is always with her boyfriend of the moment – always an overachieving Ivy Leaguer like herself. She’s seen planting an extravagant smooch on his cheek, or jumping piggyback onto him and beaming over his shoulder. They’re usually dressed in matching holiday sweaters, which Maddie says is so dorky it’s cute, when really it’s just dorky.

  And then there is me, the one with the game but shell-shocked look on her face, a smile that says, I’ve drunk way too much eggnog. For a year I’ve known this moment was coming, but inevitably something on me looks askew. My hair is sticking up funny, or my cardigan is sagging off one shoulder, or static cling has caused my skirt to crawl halfway up my thigh. Typically I’ve just had to hop out of Maddie’s way as she streaks from her tripod and leaps into the arms of her significant other, so in some of the pictures I’m little more than a blur trailing off the edge of the frame.

  Every year as the holiday season bears down, I think, This is the year I won’t be on the fringes. Through some unexplainable holiday magic, I will suddenly come into my own and no longer be the black sheep of my family. I won’t feel the crushing pressure of my father’s disappointment in me, always couched in terms of going to grad school. And maybe this will be the year the sibling rivalry I’ve always had with Maddie will evaporate, along with the inadequate feeling I get when I compare my life with my CPA brother’s well-ordered, fault-free life.

  Most of all, I think that maybe, just maybe, this won’t be another year when I skirt uncomfortably around that ubiquitous sprig of mistletoe Mom tacks up every year, glaringly aware that I am the only adult in the family not in a position to take advantage of it.

  Most of the time I’m just kidding myself. But last year was different. Last year, I found Jason.

  What can I say about Jason? He was absolutely everything – absolutely adorable, charismatic, available. Absolutely perfect. Which is surprising, because I met him in a bar. It was just before Thanksgiving. He was there with guys from his Wall Street office, and I was there with Mary Beth, a friend who gave up teaching high school economics for a six-figure job selling mutual funds. (Go figure.) I was just getting the slightest bit bleary-eyed listening to Mary Beth’s office gossip when I happened to catch the gaze of this incredible guy, this Adonis, on the other side of her. The spark in those baby blues of his was like a shot of adrenaline to my system. One look and I was in lust with the man. One conversation (Mary Beth who?) and I was over the moon. One date and I was sure I had found the one.

  Christmas was galloping up on us, and on our second date the subject of what we would do came up. ‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘I mean, to my parents’ house.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘The DC burbs – Arlington, Virginia.’

  When I first moved to New York City, this was a point of conflict with my folks. They wanted me to settle nearer to them, like my brother, Ted, did – or at least somewhere nice. For instance, Maddie lives in Boston, which is farther away than NYC, but she has an adorable little apartment in the stuffy Back Bay. But in recent years, I’ve noticed that they want me to move less and less. I suspect they look upon New York City the way people in the old days viewed secluded mountain sanitariums – a good place to park those more troublesome relations.

  ‘And Christmas is a big deal?’ Jason asked eagerly. He seemed genuinely interested.

  ‘Think MGM extravaganza.’ I tried to explain the madness that seemed to take hold of everyone, starting the morning of the day after Thanksgiving, when my normally sedentary father, a history professor, risks life and limb to swath our Cape Cod-style house in lights and plant a trio of wire reindeer on the flat roof over the breakfast nook. In our yard, any protuberance natural or man-made gets ringed in lights, or at least has a giant bow slapped on it. In addition, last year Dad purchased a nine-foot inflatable sledding polar bear to display next to the garage.

  And that’s just the outside. Inside, each room is testament to my mother’s shaky grasp on mental health when it comes to collectable Christmas tchotchkes. She has two separate and almost complete snow villages – collections of miniature houses, churches, and stores that rest on cotton wool snow artfully arranged on bookshelves and side tables. One village has an alpine theme; one is a Dickens village. Each scene has miniature people one can accumulate – action figures for holiday-obsessed adults. You have to be careful around these things, though. One year I thoughtlessly used the frozen pond by the alpine village for a coaster and ended up decapitating a tiny ice skater with my coffee mug.

  The snow villages are just the tip of the iceberg. There are other displays everywhere you turn. Santa and his reindeer charging across an evergreen-festooned mantel. A crystal angel votive holder choir singing in the bathroom. Monk figurines sledding down a Styrofoam hillside on top of the baby grand piano. For several years, my mother was in thrall to little people fashioned out of nuts (walnuts, primarily) and raisins, so that any flat surface in the house not occupied by other Christmas ephemera is now the domain of the walnut people. There are walnut carollers, a walnut Santa with his walnut elves, a walnut man in lederhosen feeding two peanut squirrels and a Brazil nut raccoon. (Feeding them nuts, presumably.)

  And then there are all the rituals. At my house, Christmas offers about as many surprises as a TV Yule log. The arrival and emptying of cars of their gift-wrapped loot, the drive around the neighborhood to eye competitively everyone’s lighting displays, the little speech my mom makes during the big Christmas Eve dinner to say how glad she is we are all together, shivering through midnight mass at National Cathedral, the orgy of presents, and then the culminating second feast centered on a very large ham my brother prides himself on bringing each year – it all proceeds according to the same set script each year.

  As I described it all to Jason, I started to feel a little self-conscious, as if I were an escapee from a Norman Rockwell painting. It all sounded so bland, so predictable, so hokey.

  But Jason’s eyes were glazed over in a dreamy, almost envious way, and the only times he interrupted me were to ask for more detail. The wire reindeer have lights, too? Your nieces are how old? Present
s on Christmas morning or Christmas Eve?

  ‘What do you do for Christmas?’ I asked him when I was finally talked out.

  He raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘It depends. Last year I went skiing but …’ His eyes seemed anguished, and a little muscle in his jaw hopped. ‘Well, you see, I don’t have what you would call a real family.’

  I was a little taken aback. Jason DeWitt looked like the kind of man who had been to prep schools. His appearance was so impeccable, his manners so flawless, I’d pegged him for the silver spoon type, with family lined up all the way back to the Mayflower.

  ‘I was raised in foster homes, mostly,’ he confessed.

  And then his life story spilled out, holding me rapt for an hour. He was an orphan. It was like something out of Dickens: Poor boy works his way through college waiting tables. He quickly climbs the corporate ladder and acquires all the accoutrements of success but never finds real happiness, or love …

  It was heartbreaking.

  And then he dropped a hint. Had I ever brought anyone home for Christmas?

  No, but I was going to. This year. As soon as I came out of my swoon.

  I pictured us in matching holiday sweaters under that damn mistletoe sprig, or strolling mitten in mitten down to the little park not far from my house. Most wonderful of all, I envisioned the shocked looks on my family’s faces. You mean you actually found someone normal? those not-so-subtle glances would say.

  Oh, my imagination was racing. Maddie would flirt like mad with Jason and profess jealousy of me. Dad would probably just look relieved … yes, I had gone to a second-tier state school, run away to New York and become a schoolteacher, but at least I wouldn’t be a spinster. That musty old nugget of a word still resonated with my dad and my brother. Every time I had seen Ted lately, I could detect pity in his eyes, because my life would obviously never be as perfect as his wife’s.

  I was beginning to have doubts myself.

  Then Jason had fallen into my lap. It was a Christmas miracle.

  For weeks afterward I was walking on a cloud, unable to grasp my good fortune, and yet, at the same time, clinging to it for all it was worth. Jason and I did all the seasonal stuff that I had given up hoping ever to be a part of, except maybe as a spectator in a movie theater. We bundled up and ice-skated in Rockefeller Center and watched the lighting of the tree there. One Saturday we braved the department stores to do our shopping together. (Jason might have been an orphan, but he had a gift list a mile long – a million people at the office, innumerable friends, his UPS man, and the nice lady at the dry cleaners who did such a great job on his shirts. He didn’t want to forget anybody.) The next night we went to see The Nutcracker.

  It was pinch-me-I’m-dreaming time. And the most amazing thing was, Jason was a gentleman. Really a gentleman. I had almost forgotten what that word meant. For him, a relationship wasn’t a race to get a woman into the sack. Every date was a new milestone to him, and kisses weren’t just preludes to something better, but wonderful events to be savored for their own sake.

  It was a revelation.

  It was also so damn frustrating.

  For the first time, I was the one who was in a hurry. Not that I wanted to appear too pushy … but, you know, I sort of wanted to have sex again before the AARP found me.

  ‘I don’t want to rush things,’ Jason would say as he deposited me at my stoop. Then he would bestow one last sweet, agonizingly brief kiss on my lips. Which always left me in a puddle of embarrassingly acute lust. Would I ever be able to seduce him, or would we just spend the next ten years making (chastely) merry?

  Then it dawned on me: Christmas was my ace in the hole. He was so excited about going to my folks’ house. I would just have to bide my time and let him be seduced by all that familial Christmas madness. Maybe Perry Como on the stereo and a few walnut people would do for my sex life what weeks of pouncing on him in taxis would not.

  To that end, I started readying myself. I indulged myself in facials and manicures, treated myself to a $200 haircut, and began buying and squirreling away sexy lingerie so I would be primed for the big moment.

  When it came time for our private gift swapping, I was in a stew. When you’ve only known someone four weeks, haven’t slept with him, but are pretty sure you’re in love with him anyway, what do you buy? I agonized. Did I go straight for the luxury goods – a new watch, say? Or something more modest, or meaningful?

  I thought about sexy gifts. Novelty holiday boxers and the like. But in the end, I sensed Jason would have considered these in questionable taste. I wanted something personal, something understated.

  Then, during our shopping expedition, Jason admired a scarf. It wasn’t just a normal scarf, but an extravagantly long piece of soft wool woven in a blue and burgundy stripe. A Fifth Avenue update on the old 1920s collegiate scarf. It was outrageously expensive – more than I had ever dreamt of spending on a cold weather accessory – but I sneaked back and bought it for him after work the following Monday.

  Then I agonized more. Was I insane? I had just bought the man of my dreams a muffler.

  But he had really seemed to love it.

  But it was a muffler.

  I kept the receipt.

  My friends, who had all suffered through my periodic heartbreaks, embraced Jason in a way that surprised me. All but one friend, that is. My best friend, Isaac. And even Isaac withheld his opinion until he began viewing Jason as an obstacle. A transportation obstacle. Isaac wanted a ride home for Christmas.

  In Virginia, Isaac’s family and mine were practically neighbors. My mother has known his mother for ages through the local mah-jongg circuit. But I didn’t meet Isaac until I was twenty-five and already living in New York.

  Three years ago my mother called me up and delivered the most chilling words that had ever rattled over a phone line into my ear. ‘Holly, I’ve just gotten you a date!’

  She sounded so proud, too. As if she had achieved the impossible.

  I repeat, I was twenty-five at the time. Twenty-five. Though I’m not sure I would have been happy to hear those words at fifteen, or any age. Especially when followed by her next sentence.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Leona Millstein …’

  For a moment I had a vision of Mom trying to set me up with Leona Millstein. ‘I know I’ve been unlucky in love, Mom, but I haven’t decided to change my sexual orientation just yet.’

  My mother clucked at me angrily. ‘Leona has a son, Miss Smarty Pants. And he lives in New York – Brooklyn, just like you!’

  ‘What a coincidence.’

  Despite my lack of enthusiasm, Mom was full steam ahead. ‘And guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a high school teacher!’ She giggled. ‘He teaches chemistry.’

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mom said, switching into that carefully exaggerated tone that always heralded a joke was on the way. ‘Except that I was thinking that if you’re lucky, you two will go out and learn something about chemistry yourselves.’

  A cold shiver went through me. Chemistry with Mr Millstein. How was I going to get out of this?

  Luckily, I didn’t have to. Leona Millstein’s darling boy called me the very next evening and immediately put me at ease. ‘This is the call you’ve probably been dreading,’ he announced.

  His dutiful long-suffering tone touched just the right chord. I laughed.

  ‘My mother has the big idea that since we’re both from Virginia, and you’re living in Brooklyn and I’m living in Brooklyn –’

  ‘And you’re a teacher and I’m a teacher,’ I added.

  His deep chuckle rumbled over the wire. ‘Yours too?’

  ‘I tried to tell Mom that two teachers do not a great relationship make.’

  ‘Right. More like the opposite. What would two teachers talk about all the time? School. Two people griping about school wouldn’t go over so swell at parties.’

  ‘A social
Titanic,’ I said.

  We discovered that Isaac lived one F train stop up from me on the yuppie corridor. And though neither of us harbored any intention of making our mothers giddy with happiness, who doesn’t need another person to have coffee with?

  And that’s how it went for three years. A couple of times a week, we’d meet up on Court Street for coffee, or to go to the bookstore, where we both spent more of our paychecks than we should have, or to splurge on a great Italian meal in Carroll Gardens. When Isaac was so sick he couldn’t drag himself out of bed, I showed up at his apartment to heat up cans of Progresso soup for him. During the last blizzard, he slid down to my place with bags of Chinese takeout.

  We had a lot more than just school in common. We both loved books and movies, armchair traveling, and food. Centering a weekend around going to a place in Park Slope that deep-fried Snickers bars seemed normal to us. We could spend entire days just strolling around New York looking in shop windows, poking around Russian grocery stores in Brighton Beach, or people watching in Prospect Park.

  Did we ever feel that spark of chemistry that my mom had so hoped for? For my part, I have to admit, yes. Sometimes. It would be hard not to be sort of attracted to Isaac. He’s six feet tall and has big brown eyes and laughs at my jokes. And he’s one of those people who can’t hide anything. When he’s sad, every facial feature below his beetled brows sags. When he’s happy, the whole world knows it by the lift in his puppy-like demeanor. He’ll start swing dancing with you on Flatbush Avenue, or anywhere else. Even if you don’t know a fox-trot from a rumba. (He doesn’t, either.)

  Every time he was in between girlfriends, which was often, I could feel a little tug. I wouldn’t have called Isaac great looking – he was too much of an inveterate waffle fan and too gym-o-phobic to have a bodybuilder physique. But he was one of those guys you might meet at a party when you’re alone and think, ‘He’d be fun to go out with.’ At moments, it struck me that it would have been so easy for one of us to lean over our favorite wobbly coffee shop table and change everything.