The boyfriend performed his cat wrangling responsibilities before leaving town, and arrived home too late to see the mysterious woman in the field. After dinner, he fussed around his easel without ever lighting in a chair, and eventually preparations were made for bed.
A knock came from the living room while rinsing his toothbrush in the bathroom sink. This disturbance was consistent with wind pushing against the makeshift door stop blocking the front door, and was not unexpected. When a nod was paid to his medicine cabinet mirror, a shadow was spied creeping across the fireplace mantel through the doorway behind him.
He reacted coolly, without suddenness or alarm, on finding a young woman examining his shelf of snow globes. A serene countenance was imagined in the turned-away face, one suitably connected to a pleasing outline, and delicately cantilevered to the straight line of shoulder length auburn hair.
Stupefied, Liam waited on an acknowledgement, and after a beat the trespasser turned toward him with the most perfect of repoussé smiles. “I knocked, but I think you did not hear me.”
“This house makes plenty of noises,” he replied hesitantly, casting a look around the room to appraise the appurtenances of his peculiar life. (This was something he had rare occasion to do.)
She introduced herself. “My name is Eva. Maxfield got away from me and ran up the road. Passing your house, I saw your door open and thought maybe he barged in.”
“Maxfield is your dog?”
“Oh!” She blushed before laughing. “I should have said that first!”
“He could be in here somewhere,” the homeowner supposed, meandering in a half circle.
The woman did not seem to be in a hurry to commence a search, but continued to pursue his museum of holiday absurdity: A layer of dust covered what it did not permeate through and through.
Liam had a ready explanation for his lack of housecleaning, although this was unlikely to be expressed. As he aged, he came to realize his chief occupation, going forward, was to husband diminishing resources: to converse better, and to expend smarter. This is something a young woman may not relate to as a brilliant scheme.
“This is a happy place,” she confessed cheerily. “From seeing this house outside, I knew you must be a kind fellow.”
“Eccentric more than kind.”
She eyed him curiously, giving a look out of an old magazine advertisement: one where a beautiful gamine, styling improbable pearls and a lingonberry shade of lipstick, winks coquettishly at the reader. “Are you not what you appear to be?” she probed youthfully.
He clarified, “What I mean to say is that my attraction to a holiday does not necessarily reflect my disposition.”
“All this must say something about you?”
“I like bright color,“ he replied. “I am a painter.”
She spied a stack of canvases alongside the unused fireplace. “I did not imagine those were for kindling.”
“Are you an artist?“ came his lilting question. “You seem artistic.”
He had not intended a flirtation, but it came out that way; and it was in this way the remark was received. “Why would you think that?” she laughed.
Liam had voiced more a wish than an educated guess. His amendment was not a full retreat. “You might be an artist’s model… You could be an artist’s model.”
“That much is true,” she confessed. “When I was in college, I earned extra money posing for drawing instructors. I did take several art history survey courses, although my major was English. That’s like saying I went along for the ride of higher education. Did you attend college?”
Liam, hesitating, blurted, “My first day of grade school was the worst day of my life. That was the end of my education—or at least delayed it by some years.”
Examining the sediments of decoration, she observed, “The best never grow up, so I’m told.”
Encouraged by her approval, he asked innocently, “Would you care for some cookies and peppermint tea?”
“That sounds like the opening line from a children’s book,” she proposed with amusement.
His presumption embarrassed him.
Seeing his reaction, she asked, “Christmas cookies, I hope?”
“Shortbread,” he answered confidently. “Snowman-shaped, with sprinkles.”
“And a little milk in my tea?”
Liam put a kettle on the stove, groping in the pleasant brume that overtook him. His guest was less unsure, and settled into the décor like an unboxed porcelain figurine. He heard her winding something, and knew from the clockwork action she toyed with the mechanical Nativity scene on the coffee table. “That has not made a peep in decades,” he explained.
Eva smiled at length before returning the object to its dust imprint. “I am given to futz, and am an irredeemable snoop.”
The curator handed her a saucer of tea and shortbread and, in taking his offering, it was assumed that one of her adorned fingers bore a wedding band. It only made sense. He could not envision a scenario by which an attractive young woman, hungry to be adored for the treasure she was, should come to a forsaken prairie landscape except by legal instrument of marriage. The twenty-something was better suited to a bohemian cafe than to the Christmas tree skirt-draped sofa of a recluse. Her finding him was as unsettling as it was unlikely, and as unlikely as it was welcomed. Was he advertising for company with his show of lights and canned snow? Was he some outlandish male bird making an exhibit of extravagant feathers for a purpose he could not envision? With Margaret in the back of his mind, he never supposed it.
The hot refreshment was set on the table in front of her, and centered it on a coaster depicting a lapidary snowflake carved in a sapphire tile. (This was the kind of detail he had long stopped seeing, yet everything was abruptly unfamiliar to him.)
Eva, bundled in a thick crimson sweater, unwrapped her ochre scarf and revealed a camisole under warmer garments. She sank easily into the needlework cushions, content and arguably blissful.
Though he had closed the front door before brewing the tea, chill lingered in the room to excite his sense of smell. Her scent might have been hand moisturizer, or orchidaceous perfume.
Her thinking mirrored his. “How did you wind up here?”
“This,” he started optimistically, “is an open question.”
“Were you drifting along in the wind and caught on a bush?”
The analogy was apt, although required explanation. “I like to think that, wherever I am, I make the most of an opportunity.”
Eva observed, “Opportunity a nice way of putting it.”
Liam followed with, “What opportunity do you seek to exploit here?”
For a faltering moment, the woman seemed uncertain how to respond. “I see every situation that emerges in my life as a test. I am not sure if I seek a challenge or merely to be contrary.”
“Then you do not choose your circumstance?”
“Doesn’t circumstance choose us?”
“I guess it is in how you look at it,” he reasoned. “One person’s free spiritedness might look like another person’s desperation.”
“Do I strike you as desperate?”
He doubled back. “I speak for myself. I have no idea how this house appears to someone driving by on the road. They might construe the pageantry as a cry for help.”
Eva smiled to dissuade his fear. “This is not the home of a fatalist.”
“There’s possible virtue in it,” he ventured. “Maybe an airplane pilot will find my festive lights useful in an emergency landing one evening.”
“I saw your lights.”
“Do you have an emergency?”
With each smile Eva offered, she disappeared behind another mask. “I lost my dog,” she reminded him.
Liam, incapable of relaxing, leaned forward in his chair, thinking his guest was about to restart her search. When she did not stir, he gestured at a string of petrified popcorn entwined around one holiday tree. “It’s like creating white noise,” he embellished. “My decorations provide constant and reliable stimulation. They keep my mind from wandering off into the desolation. It’s like the pleasant bustle of a Christmas store, providing I can control the volume of the busyness.”
“You find no peace and quiet in this landscape?”
“I prefer wind to quiet,” he argued. “Quiet is like throwing pebbles into a well and never hearing them hit bottom. You listen and listen, but the splash never comes. I can’t stop anticipating sound. It’s always in my mind, unless I give my mind something to occupy it.”
Eva weighed the admission. “You are perhaps not well-suited to this environment. You should move to a city, and live in a walkup studio apartment overlooking a green grocer. That’s a cozy picture.”
“At first, it was like I freely chose this life because it pleased me,” he informed her, “but now I realize I was bound to end up here in Christmas Town, or somewhere like it.”
The visitor returned her cup to the ceramic snowflake, beside the untouched wedge of shortbread. She stared at her host like a social worker sent to evaluate his ability to live independently.
Liam had unwittingly dimmed this brightest ornament in the room, so sought to restore her mood. “I played a rock in a Christmas play once, in grade school,” he announced.
“A rock?” she chortled. “Was there a rock at the first Christmas?”
“In this retelling of the Nativity Story, one was necessary.” (Elements of the story were mapped out.) “Mrs. Spaulding was in charge of assigning roles, and gave the major speaking roles, including wise men, manger animals, and the holy family, to the most popular children—obviously Naomi Briars played the Virgin Mary.”
“Obviously,” she chimed.
“The remaining children divided between angels and shepherds, even though there were not enough robes and wings to go around. Hastily two clouds and a rock were added to the pageant to achieve full participation. My older brother, Lucien, sported pillow stuffing glued to poster board, so was one of the clouds. He wanted to be an angel, and resented how Daryl Cole, who was not popular, was given the role of archangel.”
“How did Daryl land the plum role?”
“He was handicapped. Angel wings were taped unconvincingly to the back of his wheelchair, which convinced my brother the invalid was better suited to be a cloud, or the rock.”
“But you were the one that wound up at the bottom of the roster?”
“I didn’t mind,” Liam said. “The costume was incommodious: a boulder made of gessoed newspaper covering a chicken wire cage. My sole duty was to sit under it and do nothing. I was where I should have been. An exiguous slit allowed me to breathe and peek out at the other children. I saw little of the action because Trey Merrill, who played the donkey, mostly blocked the view.”
“Could you see Naomi?”
“Enough of the back of her cloaked head to justify my lot.”
Eva chuckled warmly. “Then you were a fly on the wall?”
“I was no burning bush, to be sure, but it was hard not to be self-conscious, even where I hid in plain sight. I imagined parents and teachers preoccupied with how still and rocklike I could be. I kept losing my place in the muffled dialog, and worried I would either exit the stage before the play ended, or everyone would leave me behind in a locked building.”
“You still feel like you’re keeping track of the world from under a rock?”
“I feel like I need to pay attention… to something.”
A lull in wind and words briefly overlapped; Eva seized it. “I was in a school play myself, once. A Thanksgiving play.”
“Were you a pilgrim?”
“Pocahontas.”
“Then you would have been Naomi!” Liam exclaimed. “And I would have been…”
“A turkey?”
“No,” he answered, demurring. “Plymouth Rock.”
Her gentle laugh continued to enlarge their company.
“Holiday pageants have become relics,” Liam observed. “There is nothing salvageable in them now. At first it was a show of tolerance to give away all the rituals that allegedly offended, but we’ve put nothing in their place.”
It was too serious a digression, and the curse of his age; but Eva was not unduly put off by it. “Are you a religious person?” she asked.
The question was fair, but it was not one Liam naturally connected to himself. “Not overtly, but it’s in my background.”
“This place is a reconciliation of the artistic and the spiritual,” she proposed. “Romantics never escape the defect of their personality.”
“Do you have a defect?” he inquired too plainly.
Her smile was delayed. One side of her mouth followed the other reluctantly. “Does your TV work? Do you keep up with the world?”
“I watch old movies.”
A stack of aging VCR tapes sat nearby; all appeared holiday-themed. “Perhaps this is one of Santa’s outposts,” she reasoned. “Perhaps you are lying in wait here, waiting for the word to come down from the North Pole to spring into action. Maybe you are like Rudolph the reindeer waiting for your one moment to shine.”
Liam grinned solemnly at the suggestion.
The visitor reached into the pocket of a roomy sweater. He heard the clink of a leash, which was not produced. “May I have another cup of tea?” she asked.
Liam dashed off to fetch a second tea bag from the cabinet, and poured what remained of the hot kettle into her cup. The situation was evolving, despite his clumsy attempt to sabotage it.
Eva stirred her tea before laying her spoon aside. “I was terrified on Santa’s lap as a child,” she volunteered. “A grown man wearing red felt pants struck me as strange.”
“Not the white beard?”
“I remember that part being like a cloud. Like your brother hovering over me, I guess.”
Her lilt struck a note, reminiscent of one of his bell ornaments, even if the motivation behind it originated from guarded tristesse. “Do you like Christmas movies?” he inquired.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.”
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.