LIGHTS
By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo
Sammy looks forward to Christmas like any other six-year-old does. She loves the tree, the lights, the presents.
Oh dear, the presents.
Sammy is trying to figure out how to give her sister and brother and mother and father presents when she has no money. She considers drawing pictures for them, but Sammy knows she is lousy at drawing. She dutifully makes the Christmas crafts that her first grade class is working on, but they are only allowed to make one, and the styrofoam ball with glitter on it that is supposed to be an ornament just seems kind of dumb. Giving one ugly glitter ornament to five people will make Sammy feel dumb, too. This is the first year she has seen and understood that people give presents as well as get them, and she is frustrated. She wants in on the giving part, she has seen the look on one persons face when they have been given a present and they just love it. She has also seen the opposite - a person getting a present they hate, and watching them force a smile and stammer out how much they like it when it is so obvious that they don’t....that worries Sammy. She does not want to give a gift that is wrong, and then have to endure watching someone grimace out a smile and blather nervous fake happy thank you’s. Sammy watches people closely, and seeing them making pleased expressions for something they do not like makes her feel sick to her stomach.
Sammy sees that expression a lot in her family, and it is not just at Christmas, or when somebody is opening a gift. She cannot quite put her finger on it, but she sees it pass between her mother and father almost all of the time, she sees it in her brother and sister over lots of things, but what is most disturbing is that Sammy sees it on her mother’s face when her mother is looking at Sammy. Her mothers lips, while stretching upwards into a smile, get very thin, and her eyes are either distant, or worse yet, when her mother really focuses in on Sammy, disturbing colors flare up in her eyes. Sammy sees orange rage, cold white, brown disdain and black hatred stab like lighting coming up from the ground.
She stays on that thought briefly, but moves on, because although she is only six, she knows to stay out of her mothers way, and not just because her mother is in a bad mood. Her mother can be in a good mood, and the sight of Sammy can cause her mother to instantly be angry, so Sammy decided some time back that it was a good idea to stay out of sight as much as possible.
She would love to give her mother a present for Christmas, but she is afraid. It is one thing to stay out of sight and pretend that she is someone else living a life somewhere else, but to make the approach bearing gifts.......Sammy turns away from the thought and focuses on the more manageable yet impossible problem. How is she going to get anyone a gift?
Sammy’s father, Will, is an odd guy. He comes home usually being loud about someone or something, he yells a lot, but he doesn’t really seem mad at her. He pours himself a brown drink from a pretty diamond looking bottle and then he calms down pretty quickly, and then often he will do something unexpected and silly if Sammy is in the room with him.
“Come here, Mouse,” he will say, picking her up and dancing around the room with her, a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Will is the only one who looks at Sammy and sees her, she thinks. Sometimes what she thinks she sees in his wild blue eyes is a kind of sadness that even he does not know about. She is not sure why. And when he gets mad at her, if her room is messy or something, he yells but to Sammy it is like he is exploding, and her messy room doesn’t have much to do with it. His explosions are huge, but they don’t have hatred in them, at least not towards her. Still, they make her cry, because when he is not exploding he has fun with her, and she worries that he will get mad and go away and she will be all alone. She hates it when she feels like she wandered into the wrong house by accident. Her brother is fourteen and her sister is twelve, and they are aliens with their record players and their incense and their cool older friends who ride motorcycles.
So the problem is back. It has gone beyond how is she going to get anyone a present, it really comes down to what would she get them, if she had the money and could manage to get them anything? She doesn’t really know them.
Sammy lies on the couch in the dark, a quilt covering her, staring at the Christmas tree. Draped around it are the thick, opaque flame shaped colored lights where one will occasionally lazily blink in no rhythm with anything except itself, and the ornaments and tinsel are shadowy outlines next to the glow of the bulbs. The hi-fi is on, with soothing music coming from the tweed covered speakers. They are Christmas songs, but they are playing in a way that sounds sad to Sammy, but it makes her feel at peace, as if she were not the only stranger in her house tonight. She can hear her family going about their business at the far end of the house, and she wonders briefly if she disappeared, how long it would be before anyone noticed. She was pretty sure Will would be the only one upset. Her mother would pretend to be scared and upset, but at her mother’s core, there would be dark blue waves of relief. Sammy accepts this sometimes, but sometimes she wishes things were different. Perhaps if she gave her mother a Christmas gift that her mother liked, her mother would like her, if only for an instant.
“Oh Sammy, how beautiful!” Her mother would exclaim, hugging her close. “I love them! How did you know?”
It would just be Sammy giving her mother a gift. Everyone else would be around the tree watching. Will would drink his brown drink and love her no matter what, and even her brother and sister would be quiet for a minute, they might even notice that they had another sister.
Sammy dozes off under the glow of the Christmas tree lights with this fantasy, a smile on her normally wary little face.
It is many Christmases later, many gifts later, that Sammy’s fantasy comes true. ear after year.
Her mother opens the quarter carat ruby earrings and gasps, “Oh Sam! They’re gorgeous! How did you know?”
Her mother unwraps the wooden triangle Zen alarm clock. “Oh Samantha, I cannot believe you got this for me, I love it, honey, just love it!”
But her mother’s embrace is stiff, her love is for the gift, and that hard calculating distaste for Sammy’s presence is only momentarily hidden by the surprise and happiness in her mothers voice and expression.
It has taken years for Samantha to understand that the sound of joy in her mothers voice, the words, “How did you know? and I can’t believe....” really mean,
“Why would you? I don’t like you, never have. Why do you keep trying?”
After 40 years, Sammy quit trying. Now at Christmas she sits in her window seat looking out at the lights on the houses, teeny tiny ones that blink so frantically they give her a headache, she misses Will, who died four years ago, and she wonders how her own relief at walking away can cause her more sadness than staying and trying to make her mother love her.
She wonders why people send Christmas cards that say “Peace On Earth” while they stand in line and shoot each other to buy the latest, most expensive video game player. Peace was on the couch thirty-four years ago, and, just like now, no one really seems interested. But they send them anyway.
She wonders often about the world she lives in, especially at Christmas, when things made more sense when she was six than they do now.
She wonders if she will spend her life unable to grasp the real world, and wander around thinking "Why?"
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Define A Wasted Day
By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo
I don’t know what happened today. I knew that vacation time was over, but that was fine - I did not put a lot of money or expectation into the vacation. It was just a respite from all of the subjects that like to march front and center to torment my mind around the holiday season. Actually, that is not true. They like to torment me all year round - they just manage to be more persistent and persuasive during the holiday season.
So, I took a vacation. I knew that when it was over, the same old shit would still be there, but that was okay. I just wanted to get through the end of the year.
So, I fell asleep hard last night, and woke up hard this morning, hearing the phone ring, hearing that Goran's freelance job is calling him in for an emergency session.
I am so paralyzed between sleep and caffeine that I can only move my neck towards him as he walks back in, talking. I know what he is saying, but I fall back asleep, the last I see of him is a fuzzy frame of a tall man pulling on a pair of freshly washed black jeans.
“I will call you when I am finished” I hear in my ear.
I am awake again, and manage to croak out a ‘goodbye’ and a ‘drive carefully’.
Then he is gone, and I am gone.
When my dreams become too hectic for sleep, I reach for my glasses and am shocked to see, on the digital clock across the room, that it is 11:30. I pull myself out of bed, and stagger through the usual routine, aware but not overly concerned with the screaming guilt that it is almost noon. I am too tired to feel guilty. It will show up at some point.
My brain feels slow, sluggish, like it has been in an accident.
I laugh. Maybe it has. I am certain that squeezing through the birth canal does some sort of permanent damage to everybody’s brain but nobody seems to want to admit it. We don’t need therapists, we need neurologists.
I manage to get out of my pajamas and into clothes. Goran calls, he is finished, he is on his way home -- I slept through the whole working part of his day. That fact tries to kick-start the guilt, but only winds up causing more disorientation.
I look a few things up on the Internet, check my mail.
I think of people I don’t think of very often.
I find a poem about being middle aged and being grateful to have lived long enough to see and appreciate a beautiful sky. It makes me sad. I start to cry.
Even the eternal sad inside raises it’s head to tell me what an ungrateful bitch I am. I stop crying. I hate that voice, because I agree with it.
I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to cry useless maudlin hysterical tears over who-knows-what, who cares, conjure up something to cry about, I Just. Don't. Want. To.
I would rather sleep.
Goran arrives home, I have been lying on the couch, he brings Taco Bell and beer, he has filched a few old rag-mags from work, we talk for a bit, he knows me well. Even though it is true that my eyes have been watering, I have managed to not burst into full tears, yet.
It bothers me that I cannot figure out why I am a half-step away from bawling. I cannot cry until I know the reason.
We eat our food, relaxed in our spots. He is on the long oxblood red leather couch, so old but so comfortable, a gift from a long ago friend, I am on the Sears HomeStead brand love seat which also has a deep blood red pattern, the only reason I bought it. That and at the time I had a Sears credit card.
The easy silence between us is no reflection on my mood. I crunch into my taco, who’s afraid of the big-bad e-coli?
“Do you think if my father knew he was going to die at 71, he would have thought he was middle-aged at 32?” I ask, letting one of the clamoring little voices escape my head and breathe oxygen. Little fucker. It won’t shut up now. It’s like having too many kids. Who can remember their names? And all they do is talk talk talk.
Goran looks at me as if I were a new, undiscovered specimen of bug. It’s a better look than being regarded as the same old garden variety ant or fly. I am pleasantly surprised. My inner voice has gotten so boring I am about to shoot myself.
“What an interesting thought,” he says, before he gets up to go into his studio to work.
I pick up the Special Double Issue People Magazine Sexiest Man of 2006 issue and continue to scrutinize it. It is hard to read, because of the light, winter sunset is darker in some rooms than others.
I read about a person’s first apartment, that person is very famous now. The picture of their long-ago apartment has bars on the windows. Their first apartment looks a lot like my first, second, third, and fourth apartment. Fifth and sixth, too.
In fact, it occurs to me that where I live now, there are no bars on the windows. Anywhere. How strange that I have lived here two years and just noticed that.
It crept up on me, just like being middle aged did.
Perhaps the tears are because at my age, I have been told so many times that one should not waste a day in sadness.
This advice irritates me.
At my age, am I not allowed to waste a few? Do nothing, feel whatever, not be so insistent on the reason why, just let myself float through the day without anything dramatic or something I feel needs to be analyzed from every single angle.
Oh, raise a glass! Happy New Year! Do what you will with your days, be them spent joyous and singing, or crying in your cups, rejoice your days for what they are, because, really, they are few, no matter how long they may sometimes seem.