O Holy Night

Tim shoved a giant box through the front door. It rasped on the floor and caused Tim’s wife, Laura, to start from her position reading a book on the couch.

“Ooo!” she said, smiling. “Who’s that from?”

“Aunt Too,” he grunted. He pushed the box one more foot and closed the front door behind him. “It’s annoyingly heavy. A good metaphor for her.”

“Oh, come on, she’s not that bad,” Laura said, walking over. She bent down by the box, took her keys from the doorside table, and sliced the tape on the box with her big back door key. Inside was a large package wrapped in pink paper with all sorts of little pinwheels and frilly doohickeys all over it.

“You want to open it?” said Laura. She didn’t have to ask twice. Tim knelt down and began tearing at the paper, the rosy gold pinwheels fluttering through the air. Inside, a box bearing a photo of a bassinet revealed itself. By the photo was a single word: SNOO. Tim cocked his head, aware of what a bassinet was, but unaware of a SNOO as a general concept or a real product. Laura, on the other hand, made a noise halfway between a shriek and a moan and threw herself on the box.

“Oh, my god!” she yelled. “This is the most – this is – this—” She could barely form coherent sentences.

Tim gazed at the photo on the side. “Is it a – a bed?”

“It’s a SNOO!” said Laura as she used her key to slit the tape on the top of the box. “It’s the highest-end bassinet you can buy anywhere! Breathable mesh walls, soothing sounds and motions, the best motor available on any premium bassinet!”

“Good!” said Tim. “We needed a good one. That piece of shit we inherited from Joann wasn’t going to last long.”

Laura made a dismissive sound. “You can put that one out with the trash tomorrow, Timmy. This—” She caressed the top of the box. “This is everything that you would want for a baby.” She touched her swollen belly where, deep within, slumbered a baby the size of a grapefruit whom they had named Noel after Laura’s late father.

Tim put his hand over Laura’s and said, “Okay, baby. I get it.” He pushed the SNOO into the corner by the couch.

That night, Laura put her head on Tim’s chest, her eyes closed, and said, “That is the most amazing gift, Tim. Your aunt is really—” She yawned broadly. “—generous.”

Tim raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Oh, sure – very generous.”

**********

They drove across the prairie – deep amethyst branches of little bushes craggling out of the earth, dim emerald and orange-edged strands of high grass flapping in the considerable wind, evening sun peeking above the horizon – toward Cedar Rapids. Tim had the accelerator down flat and the car flew along at ninety miles an hour. Laura read a book. She had never been able to read in the car before her pregnancy. Reading in a car, whether book or phone or back of sugar packet, had always nauseated her. Now, with baby Noel four months old and snoring audibly in the backseat, it was as if her experience of pregnancy had altered her vestibular system such that she was able to consume anything – books, newspapers, pamphlets, phone screens – while driving.

“How long now?” she asked Tim.

“Couple hours. We should get there around seven or so.” Tim’s line set back in a thin line.

“You okay, babe?” asked Laura, closing her book.

“Yeah,” Tim said. “We just haven’t done Christmas with my family in a while. I’m—” He cocked his head. “You know how they are.”

Laura snorted. Yes, she knew. Tim’s Uncle Peter, a tall, mawkish bachelor with bald pate and a stoop and a lack of awareness of spatial boundaries, particularly with woman. Tim’s Uncle Leo, who was married to Aunt Yorinda – dear God, the most awkward, stamp-collecting, yogurt-slurping couple she had ever met. Tim’s mother and father, whose house they hurtled toward: the less said, the better. Tim’s mother, Blythe, was a silent, staid person who deferred to Tim’s father, Brock, a pent-up, red-faced dictator, whom one could immediately tell resented every single other member of the immediate family and spoke sharply to child and elder alike, even when he was happy.

And then there was Aunt Too – the infantilized name of Tim’s mother’s sister, Dorothea. When she was little, Tim’s sister Clara could not pronounce the highfalutin name and had called her and continued to call her – and had influenced the rest of the family to call her – Too. One might assume that this babyfied nomenclature was related to a deep love for the woman, but this was not the case.

“You have to be careful around her,” Tim had told Laura once, seven years before, when they had first started dating. They had been lying in a king-sized hotel bed – Egyptian cotton, plush pillows, a smoothly cool duvet that Laura had pulled all around herself when they finally went to sleep, remote-control lights at reasonable distances from their heads – in a tucked-away Greenwich Village bed-and-breakfast a day before Tim’s cousin Owen’s wedding.

“Why careful?” Laura said as she maneuvered herself back on top of Tim.

Tim made a gleeful sound, but tried to keep his face serious. “She finds fault with everyone. Not just people in the family, but people outside the family, people in coffee shops, people in the street – everyone. You need to keep a low profile – Jesus, honey—” He looked up at her appreciatively. “Just don’t let her pump you for information and don’t find yourself alone with her.”

Laura had always remembered this, both for the pleasure of the wedding getaway, but also because of the ominous nature of Tim’s warning and how truthfully it had borne through. Aunt Too drew you in with her intellect, her charm, her apparent interest in all matters related to your life. She gave you time to bare yourself irrevocably. And then, subtly at first and then with venom, she laid siege to your idiosyncrasies and faults and launched an attack that was first designed to give her entertainment, but ultimately was meant to indicate your abased social situation in relation to her own. She was above you and always would be.

Laura shuddered a little. Aunt Too had given them such a nice shower gift – by far the most expensive, by far the finest quality – and Laura wondered whether this was a change in habit or propensity, or if it was a Trojan horse she had not recognized.

All of a sudden, she drew in her breath.

“What?” said Tim, looking concerned. He had taken the bowed highway as they approached Geneseo a little faster than he had meant to and thought Laura was reacting to his driving.

“We never sent Aunt Too a thank you note,” Laura said.

“Oh, I’m sure we did. You sent out a bunch and I—”

Laura’s voice was calm, but poked icily up into a menacing tone. “You sent thank you notes to your college friends, no one else. I did all the other peoples’ notes.”

“Babe, you probably wrote a hundred notes. I’m sure you wrote one to—”

“I didn’t.” She folded her hands over her book. “I didn’t.”

Tim was silent. The road bent away to the west, toward the darkening sky.

**********

Uncle Peter opened the door and extended his bald head out into the cold air like a turtle moving forward to tuck into a pile of greens.

“Hi there,” he intoned. “Tim.” He looked first at Laura, looked at her breasts – looked at them for several moments too long – and moved his face down to hers to kiss her cheek. “Laura.” Then he noticed the squirming baby she was holding. “Oh, look – the little buddy. How’s he doing?”

“He’s great, getting more interesting every day,” Laura said. “Though right now he’s doing a good job taking a giant poop.”

“Where’s my mom, Pete?” Tim said casually.

“Hanging over the lil smokies.” Peter made a drinky-drinky motion with the hand that wasn’t holding a beer. “She got started early.”

Tim and Laura passed through the crisply yellow-wallpapered foyer into the green-wallpapered living room with its blown-out davenports and sofas occupied by relations near and far holding paper plates laden with cocktail wieners in sauce, Parker House rolls, cole slaw, and some sort of indefinable cheese-and-potatoes thing that one cousin or another always brought and called “au gratin potatoes,” but which more closely resembled porridge than potatoes.

They went under the low arch at the back of the living room that led, down a couple steps, into a kind of family room that was teeming with Tim’s relatives. By the framed poster of a reproduction of Van Gogh’s irises were Leo and Yorinda, Leo gazing with frankness at a blonde woman neither Tim nor Laura knew, but whom they assumed was another in a line of Tim’s brother Ben’s girlfriends. Behind Leo and Yorinda were three of Tim’s boy cousins, who shoveled tiny sandwiches in their faces and talked in harsh, hooting voice about everyone they laid their eyes on. They could not control the pitch or volume of their voices. Tim wondered if he had talked that way at an earlier time of his life and could not for his life remember. Tim’s father stood in the middle of the room, tipping a bottle of beer into his mouth, not talking with anyone, wondering when all this would end, his dark eyes burning a hole into the air before him.

At the back of the family room was the Franklin Mint commemorative plate-festooned doorway to the glassed-in back porch his father had grudgingly built on some years previous. Laura thought she saw Tim’s mother standing near the doorway and nudged Tim.

“She’s back there, babe,” she said. As she said this, and as Tim walked away toward his mother, a hand caught Laura by the elbow that was under Noel’s head. Laura felt the skin at the base of her back prickle and the prickling spangled across her back and into her arms, and she pulled her elbow away at the same time that she arced around to look at who had touched her. There, before her, was Aunt Too. A long caftan masked the entirety of Aunt Too’s form, except for her head and neck. These two appendages extended forward to press against Laura’s face in a pantomime of kissing, but which was just a cheek pressed to a foreign cheek. Aunt Too’s face was velvety in its hairiness, her cheek soft and a little too yielding.

“Laura, darling,” Aunt Too moaned. She looked at Noel. “Oh, the sweet baby.” She pitched her voice up in an infant-loving falsetto. “Hello, precious, hello.” Then in her normal voice. “He is so beautiful, Laura.”

“Thank you,” Laura said. She looked for Tim, but he was not visible, hidden as he was by the sweatered shoulders of brothers and cousins and the heavily sprayed hair of cousins and sisters. Laura was alone with Aunt Too.

“How have you been?” said Aunt Too. She pulled heavily on her glass of wine, taking it from nearly full to two-thirds gone. Laura noted that Too’s voice sounded a quarter-turn louder than it normally did during social occasions.

“Just fine,” Laura said. “This boy has been taking up a lot—”

“Did you receive the bassinet?” Aunt Too asked as she looked askance. Her eyes appeared to be focused on a window to the left of the bookcase, a window where there hung a number of regularly-affixed Christmas lights, some big and chunky and parti-colored, others small and modest and Catholic-white.

“Yes, ma’am, I did,” Laura said in a choked tone.

“Oh good. It’s the best, Laura, as I’m sure you know.” Aunt Too nodded. “I hope the little dickens has been able to pass some quiets nights in there.”

“Yes, of course.” Laura raised her eyes to Aunt Too – she had been looking at Noel – and saw that Aunt Too’s eyes gazed steadily into hers. “I want to make sure that you know—” she began. But Aunt Too immediately turned her eyes to someone across the room.

“Darling!” she called in a booming voice, and vacated the space in front of Laura.

Laura closed her eyes. It was at that moment that Noel woke up and begin to cry.

**********

Tim opened the trunk of their car and pulled out the two compact pieces of the SNOO – the bedlike upper portion and the understand that supported it when fitted into the top piece. Snow was just beginning to fall all around him, the night seeming to clench in as the flakes fell on his face, his hands, and the two halves of the bassinet.

Laura had come to him as he stood by his vertical but nearly dead-drunk mother and whispered, “He’s awake. Please please please get the SNOO.” And her beautiful face turned up to him had been a rictus of anticipation and nerves.

“What happened?” he had asked.

Laura had gestured into the other room with her exquisitely sculpted chin, whereupon Tim’s eyes had turned and fallen upon Aunt Too speaking to Tim’s cousin Stephen, a minister, who, despite his pastoral tolerance and genial mien, had looked as though he wished he could jump up through the ceiling. From across the room, Aunt Too had turned her head, in mid-conversation, and looked into Tim’s eyes – bored into them, seemed to take the back of his head and pull it through to the front of his head and let it go in a great boing that made Tim start.

“Shit,” Tim had said. “She’s pissed.”

“Do you think?” Laura had hissed. “Please go get the goddamn bassinet, Tim.”

Now Tim brought the two pieces of the SNOO into the house, shook off the snowflakes from its soft interior and his hands and arms, and went to the family room to find Laura and little Noel.

“Just put it there,” Laura said, and gestured to the corner of the family room with her elbow. “He’ll fall right back to sleep. If I take him somewhere else, who knows what the hell will happen.”

Tim put the stand down on the ground and placed the bed portion onto the stand with a satisfying chonk. Then he plugged in the stand and flipped the switch at the top of the cord. The SNOO burred and vibrated and floonced and fleered. Even without a baby in it, it was as calming and rest-inducing a thing as a wide and supple bed of down feathers.

As Laura set Noel down into the SNOO and swaddled him with the built-in swaddling mechanism, she smelled something acrid. She straightened up and looked around. She saw other people wrinkling their noses, looking for the source of the smell.

“What is that?” she asked Tim.

But Tim did not answer. He was looking off into the glassed-in porch, where others were also looking. They were all watching a billowing plume of smoke waft out from the porch. At the base of the plume was Aunt Too, a cigarette in her hand.

“I haven’t had one of these in twenty years,” she said loudly. Her volume, her presence, cowed and quieted everyone around her. They stood with their drinks and sagging plates and watched her stride forth. “It feels so good. Now I know why I started.” She drained her glass of wine and shouted laughter and slapped an older relative on the back with her free hand. The relative seemed to crumple a little with the contact.

Laura moved closer to Tim. “She’s going to wake up Noel,” she whispered.

“Hold him,” Tim whispered. “Get him out of there.”

Noel was whimpering, even as the SNOO burred and sluiced and flanged and glonked to make him sleep. The noise and smell were too much for him, as it was for everyone. Laura wrenched him out of his swaddling and held him close to her breast.

Aunt Too, cigarette between her fore- and middle fingers, gestured with it toward Tim and Laura. “I just don’t know, Timmy—” She walked closer. “I just don’t know why – WHY—” She shouted the word. “I don’t know why you would accept a $1700 gift without as much as a phone call, without a text, without a word to let me know you got it. It’s just—”

Laura seemed to bow. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said. “We got busy, I got a little sick, and—”

“I WAS SICK FOR TEN MONTHS WHEN I WAS PREGNANT,” shouted Aunt Too, advancing on her, “AND I STILL FOUND TIME TO SAY THANK YOU FOR WHAT PEOPLE DID FOR ME.”

Tim put his arm across Laura and Noel. “Now just hold on—”

“And you,” Aunt Too said, approaching him to within a few feet, her breath reeking of low-grade Zinfandel, “you’re the worst of all.”

With that, Aunt Too flicked her cigarette. It flew from her hand, described an arc along the wall by the family room couch – the very one that Tim had steam-cleaned for his mother just a year ago – bounced off a sconce, and fell upon the SNOO. Instantly, the bedding ignited with an orange puff of flame. The swaddling mechanism – chenille embedded with copper heating and cooling wires – sizzled into a plain of fire. Yellow, green, and blue flames licked from the bedding into the mesh sides of the SNOO and the whole popped into a bowl-shaped torch that engulfed the bassinet utterly.

Tim’s family stood mute as the SNOO was consumed in fire, some thinking idly that it resembled nothing less than a yuletide plum pudding set aflame on a Christmas table.