YET ANOTHER CHRISTMAS STORY

(With apologies to sensitive readers: COVID referred to in a humorous manner. Derisive comment regarding overeating.)

In New York, they said that introverts had been practicing all of their lives for the lockdown. How had they guessed? It was as if they knew her personally.

In these recent times, for Lynette, even Christmas meant solitude; for two years out of necessity; now, maybe out of habit. So, no cacophony of loud gift bags coughing red tissue paper set clustered on the floor, holding presents for friends. No sparkly holiday cards, past and current, glittered from the mantle. And no angel lights, appearing to hang in magical suspension, beaded the windows today.

One tradition hung on. Last night as every December 24^th, she cracked open her wide children’s–edition of A Christmas Carol. And she did not scoot it back onto the shelf until she read the final line: “And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” The happy survival of Bob Cratchit’s little boy always heartened her. She was a fan of the socialist Dickens but more and more, she identified with his capitalist protagonist. Scrooge’s only problem was that he hated poor people when he should have hated everybody.

An old boyfriend from the 90s had called her “detached,” and winced as he’d said it. She’d been flattered. And soon after that, she completely unattached herself from that clown.

Observing CDC guidelines came naturally to her—respecting personal space, automatic; avoiding muddled crowds, innate; and washing her small hands, reflexive. She’d rather kill herself than tolerate a dot of dirt beneath a thumbnail.

All of her life, she’d been sliding her chestnut-colored fingers and pink palms beneath any sink’s hottest water as soon as she stepped in from the outdoors mingling with the microbes of sundry non-handwashing others. Decades ago, after reading the stats, she’d sent a “letter to the editor” about this public hygiene matter. It appeared in the local paper in the era before Internet platforms exalted the unsubstantiated lollygagging of anybody with access to a keyboard, but of course, probably influenced no one.

Men were the worst. Back then, the vast majority didn’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. So, among the other countless flaws of humanity, people—even in the United States of America—were literally the unwashed masses.

When Lynette was young, she told a friend she wanted to marry a doctor. “At least they have to wash their hands,” she’d said. “Not at home,” the other girl countered. Lynette had cringed. Who knows? Maybe that’s why she never married.

Or possibly her work syphoned her energy. Plus, so much time flowed into travel; every summer except the last two, ended with her checking off another destination.

“You’re a vagabond spinster like me,” her Great Aunt Anna had said. Lynette remembered her aunt’s voice frequently so that she would never forget it as long as she lived. High pitched, it hit the ear as a sort of lively, cheerful song.

She swore her niece hung the moon. She’d said, “The way I talk about you, folks probably think you’re going to be the next president.”

Lynette had laughed. “So, you’ve made me famous there in Chicago.”

“Haha. Could be. Anyway, everybody’s famous to the people who love them.”

In April of 2020, hoarseness replaced musicality in that voice. Aunt Anna wanted to say as much as she could—while she could—but it became a choice between talking and breathing. The next day, a cousin called with the news. She’d said, “At least it wasn’t prolonged. I think it’s because she told them no ventilator.”

The world’s uncontained geyser of evil had washed away yet another innocent. Nightly Lynette began sitting with her arms tightly crossed, eyes narrowed, witnessing on public TV what she thought of as “The COVID Death Show.” Maybe now the damn fools will wash their damn hands, she thought. And stop eating so damn much.

COVID had legitimized solitude. But as with any other season in life, it could not give without taking.

She was grateful that she could do her job remotely. Two weeks ago, her history 102 students’ squared faces appeared online for the last class. One young Asian woman in a second-row tile said what a good experience it had been. Then they lifted their hands to their chins and all applauded. Hell, back in her school days, Lynette would have applauded too if college had been this easy.

A generation ago, she’d dashed across the paper-chase finish line and grabbed a terminal degree in poli sci from a first-tier Midwestern university but stumbled into a hobbling career at a state college here that accepted 93 percent of freshman applicants. She’d always wondered who did they reject—the ones who typed “prolific school shooter” in response to the question about their plans for the future?

She could not make the work rigorous nor at all challenging. They’d give her low evaluations and she’d get fired. Most enrolled only to get the two duhs—“duh diploma and duh job.”

But occasionally an outlier popped up—a student who did actual college-level work or at least aspired to. One South African kid had told her he grew up speaking isiZulu and struggled writing in English. A few days before it was due, he turned in his paper on the schism between the abolition and suffragette movements, asked for feedback. She sent it back feverish with red corrections.

He shot over his work this way throughout the semester. He’d always incorporate her changes and send notes of profuse thanks.

He asked her to recommend novels for he found those more accessible than nonfiction. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye became the first of several. It was an easy read but harbored deep meaning, little Pecola, more put-upon than Tiny Tim and forever unspared. The more Thato read, the better he wrote.

At semester’s end, he’d sat in her office, his shiny near-black face lit with pride and close to tears. It was his first “A.” He confessed that though he knew she was “the greatest of professors,” he thought of her as “Auntie.” He lowered his eyes, looking down at the floor and then up at her. “Where I come from that is a title of respect.”

Her friends teased her, saying her students were her substitute children and her job, a kind of husband. She said she sought to fill the vacancies in neither category.

She’d guarded the respite of space in her life, weaving a mosquito net of excuses to would-be suitors. Back around 2005, she told a man she was too upset about the results of the presidential elections to have dinner with him. “But that was a year ago,” he’d said. “You see what I mean?” she’d said. 

And how many times had she said she was married? One nitwit asked whether she was in an “open marriage.” She replied yes, if he caught her cheating, her “husband” would open it up and kick her out.  As she snatched up her knapsack, she’d once told an idiot, harassing her in the library, that she needed to rush home to feed her six kids. 

While she didn’t particularly wish for stomachs to fill, on this third empty Christmas, it would be nice to have someplace to rush to. She looked out the window. Rain drops lightly pelted the snow, slowly graying the winter wonderland produced by a soft blizzard the previous day. She could see the complex’s playground where a woman took smartphone-pictures of a man and a hooded child flanking a slush-marred snowman.

At her office desk, she flipped her laptop open. Only one cineplex still ran The Woman King. If she hurried, she could make the next screening. She tugged on her boots, wrestled on her long puffer and remembered the umbrella.

She opened it outside though the rain had grown light. On its big canopy, a rendering of Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day” ballooned out with its imposing Parisians moving down pinkish cobblestone walks under blue gray umbrellas.

Holiday visitors made conveniently close spaces impossible to find in the parking lot of the vast building complex she lived in. She mumbled curses and stamped through the graying snow toward the end of the property where her car was parked.

Suddenly a little red mitten grabbed the hand with which Lynette held the umbrella stem, squeezing it in a death grip. And she saw the outstretched arm of a tiny girl, her butterscotch face illuminated with delight and amazement. A man’s voice said, “Yes, it’s pretty but that belongs to the lady. You can’t have it.” A woman, her damp sheath of dark hair plastered to the sides of her cheeks, gently tugged the child’s arm until the grasp relented.

This was the family she’d seen at the window. Her eyes stayed on the child, who didn’t appear at all upset. “It looks like we have the same taste in art.” The little girl stood grinning as if she’d somehow staked a claim, captured the umbrella and its owner no matter what.

Lynette was about to tell the parents that they could probably order a miniature version over the Internet when she looked up. “Auntie! Professor!” the man shouted.

It had been ten years. Time had a way of making her feel so outdated. Thato introduced his wife and four-year-old.

He asked her where she was headed. “Are you going to see friends there?” he said. When she told him of her plans for a simple solo trip to the movies, he said, “No, no, you mustn’t.”

She should come with them, he said, pointing to a specific structure ahead among the complex’s identical buildings. He explained that his parents had flown in from Cape Town and there was plenty of food to share. “I have told them about you. They will really like this. It will be as if they’re meeting a celebrity.”

He said, “Come. We must get out of this weather.” His wife was from Mexico and, like him, not fond of winter here, he told her. They all walked forward wedged under the umbrella, the African, the Mexican, the American and the child, sheltered by the Parisians. Thato soon knocked on a door, called, “it’s us,” and the family stepped to the side, so that Auntie could be the first to come in from the cold.