The Christmas Strike

Sure enough, Jeremy was still in his flannel pajama pants and an old football jersey, slumped on one of the two matching sofas, his bare feet up on the coffee table between them, his eyes glazed over from watching too much daytime television.

“Jeremy, we need to talk,” I said.

“I’ve already applied every place I can think of, Abby,” he said dully without taking his eyes off the television.

“I know that and that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about anyway.”

His eyes drifted toward mine.

“I just think that maybe it’d be better if you got dressed every day and did something around here. Even just one thing. That’s all I ask, Jeremy. ’Cause I think you’re slipping into a depression.”

This brought his spine upright. “Oh, I can just guess who the topic of conversation was down at the diner this afternoon. I’ll hang the damn Christmas lights, okay?”

“That would be a start—”

His jaw worked, but I’d known him since he was thirteen and first started hanging around on my living room sofa. He was the boy who had cried when he’d lost a wrestling match in high school. The boy who had looked at Natalie with such love in his eyes as she’d walked down the aisle toward him when she was already three months pregnant with Matt. Jeremy could work his jaw all he wanted. It wasn’t about to make me back off.

“—but that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about.”

He looked wary but defiant and I saw my grandson Tyler in his face. How could I not love this man, even if I sometimes felt like sending the sofas out to be reupholstered just to see what he’d do?

“So, what do you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

“Ma—come on—what were you thinking?” Natalie demanded when she got home from work a few hours later.

“It’s just that my business is going well, I could use the help and it would provide a little security for you and the kids. Since the two of you have been married, Jeremy has been laid off four times. Aren’t you sick of worrying about layoffs and plant closings? Can’t you see how each time it happens, Jeremy finds it harder to deal with?”

“Of course I can see that, Ma. That’s one of the reasons I’m pissed that you talked to him without discussing it with me first. It’s bad enough Jeremy has to depend on his mother-in-law for a roof over his head right now. How do you think he’d feel if you were his boss, too?”

I leaned against the kitchen sink and watched the kids out in the backyard tumbling around in the snow in the glow of the back porch light. A good four inches had already fallen. It didn’t seem to be hurting Jeremy’s manliness to not be out there shoveling snow. I wisely decided to keep that observation to myself.

“So, I’ll sell him part of the business. For heaven’s sake,” I said in exasperation, “the point is, he’d be making money while in training and you wouldn’t have to worry about layoffs and plant closings ever again.”

My daughter Natalie, as usual, looked both sullen and beautiful. Her long sandy hair was tangled, her pale skin was bare of makeup so the sprinkling of freckles on her nose showed. She was as tall as me—five foot ten—but finer boned, leaner, less bosomy. She really took after her father more than me in looks. Of my two daughters, she had always been the more openly rebellious one. Her three kids had come so quickly that Nat still had some growing up to do. But she had a big heart and, in her own way, she was a terrific mother. But, as far as I was concerned, she was still too stubborn for her own good.

“Yeah, Ma, every out-of-work guy wants to be trained by his mother-in-law.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a tad overprotective here?” I pointed out while I picked up a wooden spoon and went to stir the pot of chili on the stove. “He’s got a family to help support.”

“Ma—I do not want to talk about this now, okay?” Nat said through tightened lips. “Jeremy is upstairs taking a nap but he could be down any minute. I’d like to get through dinner without a scene for a change, if you don’t mind.”

I bit my tongue so hard to keep the words down that I was surprised I wasn’t on my way to bleeding to death. I’d had enough scenes in the past months to last me a lifetime. I wasn’t sure which was worse: listening to Jeremy and Natalie fight or listening to them have makeup sex. No wonder the man needed so many naps.

The three kids came tumbling in, cheeks rosy from the cold, trailing snow, spilling milk and getting more chili on the table than in their mouths.

I loved them. I did. But afterwards, as I stood in the middle of the ruins of dinner on the big, square oak table and looked at the puddles of melted snow on the parquet wood floor, I couldn’t help but ask myself isn’t there someplace else I’m supposed to be?

When had this new restlessness started? Was it after Nat and her brood moved in or had it been there all along? And if this wasn’t where I was supposed to be, then where did I belong?

I got out the mop and told myself to get real. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Where I’d chosen to be. Life wasn’t so bad. So Nat and Jeremy had had to move in for a while. It was happening all over the country. The boomerang generation, they called it. It’d only been a little over three months. And surely having the grandchildren here would rekindle my Christmas spirit eventually, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Besides, things could always be worse. At least Gwen wasn’t coming home for Christmas this year.

Not that I didn’t love my oldest daughter, Gwen. I loved my daughters equally. Enjoyed being with them equally. I even fought with and was irritated by them pretty much equally. They were only a little over a year apart, but they were as different as peanut butter and steak: both of them delicious, but I’d prefer not to eat them at the same meal.

Nat and Gwen didn’t share the sisterly bond that I imagined I would have shared with my sister if she hadn’t been so much older than me. Basically, my daughters bonded by bickering. It was going to be a relief not to have that added to the cacophony that had become my auditory life. The bonus was, I didn’t even have to feel guilty that Gwen wouldn’t be here. Her husband, David, was taking her on a holiday cruise. Everyone was winning as far as I was concerned.

I’d always known that Gwen was the kind of girl who would grow up to marry the kind of man who could afford to take her on holiday cruises. Not to mention buy her just about anything she wanted. Gwen had lived her life toward that goal since she’d first discovered that she was not only smart but pretty, a phenomenon that had occurred to her around the age of twelve. Cheerleader. Prom Queen. Scholarships to good schools. A career in the city in banking that led to the kind of social life that got her invited to the right parties where she’d meet a man like David Hudson, an architect who was already making a name for himself at the age of thirty-five.

On paper, thirty-year-old Gwen read like the kind of young woman a mother never had to worry about. Yet I worried just as much about Gwen as I did about Nat. They were just different worries. For instance, I sometimes worried that Gwen loved her husband’s money and family connections more than she loved her husband.

David came from a family of old banking money, although both he and his father were architects. I didn’t know much about architecture, but even I had heard of Cole Hudson. I’d met him only once—at Gwen’s wedding in Chicago last spring. Once was enough as far as I was concerned. He was one of those arrogant, larger-than-life types. Full of himself. Very different from David, who was kind and sweet and loving—and easily wrapped around Gwen’s finger. I couldn’t imagine Cole Hudson letting any woman wrap so much as a strand of his hair around her finger.

There was a sudden crash from the living room and Ashley squealed, “Give that back to me!” Then, “Mom!” I sighed. One thing I’d never have to worry about was Gwen moving back in. I was pretty sure she’d jump from its balcony before she’d give up the high-rise condo near Chicago’s Loop—unless, of course, she’d be giving it up for a mansion on Lake Michigan.

I was finishing up the dishes while the kids were in the living room with Nat, who was checking over their homework before letting them watch TV, when I heard a plaintive voice behind me say, “Mother?”

I spun around. Gwen stood there with a look of such raw pain on her face that my heart immediately opened to her. “Honey,” I said as I moved toward her, “what is it?”

“My marriage is over, Mother. I’ve left David and come home for good.”

CHAPTER 2

Through the kind of sobbing that turns into hiccups, Gwen told me that she’d just found out that David never loved her.

“He doesn’t want to be with me, Mom,” she wailed as I took her into my arms.

“Baby, I’m sure David loves you. He’s always loved you,” I said.

She shook her head vigorously. “No. I just fit some kind of ideal that he wanted in a wife. It’s not me he loves. It’s his work. I was just—just arm candy!”

A tiny pinprick of guilt poked at me. I’d so recently wondered the same thing about Gwen’s feelings toward David and now here she was, my brokenhearted daughter, feeling loved only for her facade.

“Oh, my God. What happened?” Natalie said from the doorway.

“David doesn’t love me,” Gwen blubbered.

Natalie shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans as she came all the way into the room. “Oh, come on. We all know David is nuts about you.”

Gwen sobbed more. “I don’t think he’s ever really loved me.”

Compassion was one of Natalie’s more endearing qualities, but she didn’t usually waste it on her sister. Now it warmed my heart to see Nat take her hand out of her pocket to smooth Gwen’s long, expensively maintained, blond hair back from her face. “Come on. Tell us what happened.”

“I just feel so betrayed,” she said in a shaky voice.

Over her sister’s head, Natalie mouthed the question affair?

I shrugged, but, given how crazy David had always been about Gwen, I thought it highly unlikely and I wasn’t going to ask. Not now, anyway.

Natalie had no such compunction. “Did he cheat on you?” she asked.

The question brought Gwen’s head up with a jerk. “What? Of course not. Why would he cheat on me?”

“Then what happened, for heaven’s sake?” I asked, starting to lose patience.

Nat stepped closer to Gwen and put her arm around her shoulders. I hadn’t seen them present anything like a united front since they’d both campaigned to skip school to go to a rock concert in Chicago when they’d been sixteen and seventeen.

Gwen, always the more delicate looking of the two, was only five six to Nat’s five ten. She easily leaned her head on Nat’s shoulder and gave a long, shaky sigh. “He—” she sniffed “—he canceled our cruise!” she finished with a wail.

Nat leaped away from her like she was going for the long jump in the Olympics.

“What?” she bellowed.

“He canceled our Christmas cruise because of some project that’s in trouble. He’s so selfish. That’s all he thinks about is work. I spent months shopping for just the right clothes and then he—”

“Wait just a minute,” Nat demanded, putting her fisted hands on her hips. “You’re pulling this scene because your cruise was canceled?”

“You don’t understand. We haven’t been on a trip since our honeymoon in Hawaii last spring.”

“Aw—that’s real rough,” Natalie said, her compassion morphing quickly into ridicule. “Boo-hoo.”

“Nat,” I warned.

“You don’t know what it’s been like,” Gwen shrieked, totally undeterred by her sister’s mocking. “He works all the time. We haven’t even been out to dinner in over a week.”

“Oh, really,” Nat said as she cocked her hip out aggressively and crossed her arms over her chest. She’d been taking the same stance since she was just a toddler. Right after Charlie was killed, the smart-ass started to sprout out of her like someone had fed her liquid fertilizer. “My heart bleeds. Too bad Jeremy’s unemployment ran out or we could take you to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.”

Gwen abruptly stopped crying. “I simply will not take this kind of attitude from you,” Gwen said with all the dignity of a royal. “Not when you’re taking advantage of Mother the way you are.”

Natalie shifted her weight to the other hip. “Excuse me?”

“She’s practically ready for retirement and your whole family is living off of her,” Gwen told her.

Ready for retirement? I was fifty-two. There was still time. I could still buy a pair of leather jeans and go out and get a life.

“Mom invited us to move in—and we pay our own way as much as possible,” Nat said. “It’s not Jeremy’s fault he’s out of work, you know.”

I could see that Gwen was winding up for a retort that would wound. It was time for some mommy intervention.

“Okay, girls, enough!” I yelled. “Everybody has problems. And everyone’s problems are important—if only to themselves. So let’s show each other a little respect.”

Natalie looked even more sullen, as she always did when she knew I’d hit the mark. Gwen sniffed and started crying silently. The phrase award-winning performance did come to mind. But still, she’d just left her husband. Being self-absorbed didn’t mean you were protected from pain.

“Gwen, honey,” I gently asked her, “are you sure this is what you want?”

“What she wants is for David to come running up here and beg her to come back to him,” Nat said. “Oh, and maybe buy her another hunk of expensive jewelry.”

“Natalie,” I said sternly, even though I knew there might be more than a kernel of truth in that statement. “Please.”

“You can be such a bitch,” Gwen said before she blew her nose loudly into a big wad of tissues she’d pulled from her Dooney & Bourke handbag.

“Look, I’m stuck here living under Ma’s roof again, trying to hold it together with three kids and an out-of-work husband. And you’ve got the nerve to come in here crying because David had to cancel your cruise? Give me a break.”

Maybe Natalie was saying all the things to her sister that I wish I had the guts to say but I was too busy thinking about Nat’s choice of the word stuck. Is that how she felt living with me? I knew it wasn’t an ideal situation, but still the word stuck—well, it hurt, damn it.

“Mother, are you just going to stand there and let her talk to me that way?” Gwen demanded.

Right now I wasn’t sure what was upsetting me the most. Gwen’s self-absorption or Natalie’s anger. I searched for the right words to say. “You know, Gwen, Nat’s going through a hard time right now,” I began.

Gwen dashed tears from her cheeks with an angry swipe of her hand. “Like I’m not? At least she knows where her husband is.”

There was a burp from the doorway. We all looked up. Jeremy stood there, bleary-eyed, scratching his stomach with one hand and brushing his hair back with the other. “Did I miss dinner?” he croaked in a sleep-roughened voice.

“Oh, good,” Gwen said, recovering rather quickly from her last outburst. “I’m glad you’re here. I need help with my bags. If you’ll follow me—”

“You bet, princess,” Jeremy said as he rolled his eyes at us before following her.

“Look at that,” Nat muttered. “She’s taking over already.”

“Nat, come on. Gwen is hurting.”

“I’ll tell you what Gwen is doing. She’s finding a new way to make Christmas all about her. Like the time she had the chicken pox. Or the time she broke up with that guy she thought she was so in love with. She spent the entire holiday season crying her eyes out and refusing to eat. By the time Christmas break was over, she had a new boyfriend and claimed she’d never been so in love in her life. She does this kind of stuff on holidays, Ma. Haven’t you noticed?”

Did she? I knew Gwen could be manipulative and maybe just a touch narcissistic. But chicken pox? “Nat, I don’t think even Gwen could will herself to get the chicken pox.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Nat said as she headed for the front hall. Seconds later she yelled, “Hey, Ma! You gotta come and see this!”

There turned out to be ten pieces of luggage. All matched. Pink crocodile. It made quite an impressive pile in the hallway. I was a little impressed to see Jeremy actually breaking a sweat for a change, too, as he hauled it all in.

“Last one,” he said as he rolled in a suitcase big enough to hold a drum set.

“Mother, which room will be mine?” Gwen asked.

“Well, the only room free is the guest room off the kitchen.”

“That’ll never do,” Gwen said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It’s barely big enough for my clothes.”

“Well, you’re not getting our room,” Natalie said.

I totally agreed. It would really be starting off on the wrong foot to kick Nat and Jeremy out of the second largest bedroom in the house to give it to Gwen. And we certainly couldn’t have any of the children sleeping downstairs by themselves. So that left—

Me.

“I’ll take the guest room, Gwen. You can have my room.”

Gwen took it like it was her due. “Jeremy?” she said, then picked up the smallest case and started up the stairs.

“If she offers me a tip,” Jeremy muttered, “I’ll kick her in her bony ass.”

“Let’s all help with the luggage,” I hastened to suggest, grabbing a suitcase and starting up before anyone could argue with me.

Later that night, as I lay in the narrow single bed in what my mother had always referred to as the maid’s room even though we’d never had a maid, I could hear Nat and Gwen bickering over the bathroom and, just like that, fifteen years peeled back. It was worse than déjà vu. I mean, I was actually going through it for the second time. But I had been younger the first time, I said to myself as I rolled over and pulled a pillow over my head.

I was feeling a little used and abused. And a whole lot sorry for myself. So Nat felt stuck. How did she think I felt? Did she think this was the life I’d planned to be living when I reached my present age? And Gwen was acting like a child throwing a tantrum. And even though I felt like kicking her in her bony ass myself, I had to be supportive, didn’t I? Wasn’t that part of the deal that came with motherhood?

Frankly, I wasn’t feeling all that supportive of either of my daughters right now. I’d been a widow already by the time I was Gwen’s age. At least she still had a husband who would eventually take her on a cruise. And Nat had Jeremy and the kids. I flopped onto my back again and tossed the pillow aside. The problem was, I wasn’t supposed to be alone in this bed mulling over all this stuff by myself. Charlie was supposed to be here with me. To talk to. To hold me if I cried. To laugh with me over the absurdity of life. Was the restlessness I’d been feeling just a newly resurrected anger at the injustice of it all?

Charlie, always a careful driver, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d been on his way home to us from a conference in Green Bay when a semi had gone over the center line. It had happened too fast for Charlie to even react, the police had told me. I could hear the words like they were said just yesterday. “It’s likely he never knew what hit him, ma’am,” the cop had assured me.

Well, I knew what had hit me. Widowhood. Single motherhood. It was as if my life as me, Abby, had just stopped. By now, at the age of fifty-two, I’d thought I’d have Abby back again. But as I listened to the girls still squabbling overhead I knew that my time wasn’t arriving anytime soon. In fact, I was pretty sure the train hadn’t even left the station yet.

“Look,” I said the next morning after listening to my daughters complain about the house having only one bathroom, “we’re just going to have to start making a schedule for the bathroom in the morning and at night.”

“We were here first,” Natalie said tightly. “Let her go to a hotel. She can afford it.”

“That’s not fair! My marriage is crumbling and you want me to go to a hotel? Why shouldn’t Mother be here for me, too?”

“Yeah, your marriage is crumbling because your husband put off a trip to the Bahamas to make another million. Excuse me while I don’t cry.”

“You are such a bitch!”

“Hey—little pitchers,” Nat said sternly as she nodded toward her trio of minors. They were watching the sisters with their mouths dropped open nearly to the table.

Suddenly, Ashley jumped from her chair and ran up to me to clutch my leg. “Why are they yelling?” she whispered as she peered anxiously up at me. “Do Mommy and Auntie Gwen hate each other?”

I smoothed her hair back from her little concerned face. “Do you hate your brothers when you yell at them?”

Ashley solemnly shook her head. “Not really.”

“Then I guess your mommy and your auntie are just acting like children.”

“Would it kill anyone to try to see my side of things, here?” Gwen demanded before she flounced out of the room.

By now the kitchen table was a mess of cereal, spilled milk and whatever other chaos grade school children can cause in a kitchen on a Saturday morning. I went over to the sink and turned on the faucet, waiting for the water in the old pipes to get hot. The kids must have sensed more trouble brewing because they soon drifted off to wreak havoc in the living room.

I shot Nat a look. “You know, you’re not helping matters any.”

She had the grace to look shamefaced, something that always raised patches of bright red on her pale cheeks. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s just that after losing your house it’s a little hard to have sympathy for someone who has to postpone a cruise.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Honey, I know. But this is still real to her. She feels let down by her husband. She feels—”

“Abandoned,” Natalie finished for me. “I know. But she’s not the only one who lost her father, you know.”

I squeezed her shoulder. “We all deal with things differently, Nat.” Was now the time to reminded her of her overprotective-ness of Jeremy? Probably not, I decided.

“Mother?”

Gwen had quietly come back into the kitchen. In her long rose-sprigged flannel nightgown with matching robe, her hair in a tangled mess and her eyes red from crying, she looked so much like the girl she’d once been. So when she asked in a small, plaintive voice, “Would you make me some pancakes?” I, naturally, said yes.

She smiled weakly. “I’ll have them in my room.”

“Oh, brother,” said Natalie.

“So you’re late for the Prisoners of Willow Creek Enrichment Society outing because you were serving your daughter pancakes in bed?” Iris asked. “Your thirty-year-old daughter, I might add.”

I grimaced. “You might, but I wish you wouldn’t.”

Iris dipped the tip of her brush in pink paint. “Aren’t we supposed to be escaping our bondage?”

“Yes, of course—”

“Well, I’m seeing you pretty tethered to the ground, honey,” Iris said.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“Kick them out on their asses and tell them to grow up?” Iris suggested tenderly.

“It’s just not that easy,” I whined.

“Oh, don’t pay any attention to her,” Jo said. “She’s never had kids.”

“Making me the smartest woman at this table,” Iris stated.

We’d driven an hour in the snow to sit in the back room of an overheated ceramics shop and paint designs on large coffee cups. I was starting to think that none of the women at this table were very smart.

“This is a stupid way to spend a Saturday,” I blurted out.

Some women at the advanced class’s table who were working on painting little elves swung their heads our way, their faces registering disapproval.

“You trying to get us beat up or something?” Jo hissed.

“They do look a little hard-core,” Iris said.

I started to giggle at the thought of hard-core ceramic junkies. More disapproving looks came our way. I wasn’t sure if it was our conversation or the fact that none of us was wearing a sweatshirt with a barnyard animal, a snowman or sprigs of holly on it.