The following entry is an original story submitted by a dear friend and a wonderful writer, CJ Miller. It's the prefect story for the season! We are lucky to have it - and her!
Broken Angels
By CJ Miller
The smell floated up through my nostrils like some long forgotten memory creeping back into my head. Mildew, sawdust, pure age, floating up from the metal crate.
“Come on, Christine, bring it upstairs. Don’t stand there staring at it,” my mother growled, not unfriendly. It was, after all, Christmastime, and we were getting ready to decorate the tree. The annual pilgrimage downstairs to the cellar to unearth the dusty ornaments wasn’t exactly cause for an argument. Yet.
“Be right there,” I mumbled, shutting the tin lid with a loud bang. Once I heard her terrycloth slippers shuffle up the cement stairs, I quietly opened the lid again.
I had to find it. I knew it was in there, wrapped in tissue paper, segregated from the other ornaments probably for its sheer ugliness. I rifled quickly through the boxes of glass balls, their shine dimmed by years of handling. As a tot, I’d always managed to anger her by sticking my chubby fingers through the ones with the concave kaleidoscopes, trying to chase the rainbows, wondering how far back they went. All it ever resulted in was a hole in the glass and a sharp smack to my hand. The rainbows ended up strewn all over the floor.
Sifting through the tissue paper, I could hear the kitchen floorboards creak above my head with her impatient pacing.
“Chris - TINE!” she bellowed from atop the rec room stairs. People wondered why I never liked – or used - my whole first name. It always amazed me how she could make it sound like an epithet, or an insult. “Get up here with that box NOW!”
I sighed and smoothed over the faded red and green tissue paper, hoping to cover up the evidence of my hunting expedition. Gingerly, I lifted the tin box, carrying it sideways up the stairs. The smell of Christmases Past lingered in my nose. I stole a furtive glance at the shelf where my father’s tools were stored. I’d have to sneak back down later after he went to bed to empty the last bottle of E&B whisky into the toilet.
“What took you so long? We have to get this done before dinner,” she said, scowling at me, this time in earnest. “Do I have to do everything around here myself?”
I had done it again – her bad mood was set firmly in place against the backdrop of our little plastic Fraiser fir. For emphasis, she shoved my father’s feet out of her way as he lay snoring in his favorite tan leather chair. He snorted, stirred briefly, and continued his long winter’s nap.
Amy wandered downstairs, her long dark hair trailing in unruly waves down her back. She’d been upstairs in her usual position, lying on her bed, trying to ignore the looming argument. Giving up, she came down to help my mother decorate our tree – her special talent was stringing the lights. Nobody was better at it than my middle sister, not even my perfectionistic mother. I smoothed back my short, mousy brown strands and silently hated her for the thick dark hair that was always perfectly in place.
“Mom, can I help with the lights?” Amy asked sweetly, her voice still groggy from her interrupted nap.
My mother glanced up from rummaging through the ancient cardboard boxes, wiped her short, coarse blond hair out of her eyes with one arm and said, “Sure, honey, just make sure they’re all untangled before you put them on the tree. We don’t want a mess.”
My mother loved that little tree. It sat faithfully every year in the corner as far away from the fireplace as the cramped living room would allow. She lived in fear every year that my dad would set it on fire while he was loading up the fireplace with logs and newspaper. I preferred the pungent, outdoorsy perfume of a real tree, its sap oozing down the trunk and making for a wonderful, fresh smell. So did my dad, which is why my mother’s answer was always no.
“This one’s fine, it’s a cute little tree, And it won’t shed all over the rug,” she reasoned, glancing meaningfully from my prone father to the fresh black-ringed cigarette burns in the blue pile carpet near the stone hearth. I sighed again. It wasn’t worth the argument.
Amy began her annual ritual, the appeasing of my mother’s flaring temper, stringing the lights neatly, branch by branch. She was good at so many things I had absolutely no talent for. She could always color in the lines – my pictures were hopelessly messy, crayon marks straying well outside the confines of the coloring books. We took the same art class in high school once – quite by accident on my account – and Amy’s red felt poinsettia, beautifully set on a square piece of burlap, was so perfectly executed that the teacher held it up for all of us to see. My painstakingly constructed multi-colored flower received no such accolades. I did like all the different colors, though.
My mother turned her attention back to the tin box, pulling out ornaments wrapped in tissue paper, one by one. My little sister Jenny even came down to help. Now was the fun part – hanging the ornaments on the tree. We tried to muster up a little Christmas spirit before my father woke up.
“I know it’s in here somewhere,” my mother mumbled to no one in particular, shifting through the crate. “I think I used the green paper…here it is!” she exclaimed, triumphantly holding up a wad of shredded green tissue with two wings sticking out. I cringed. Dammit. Why couldn’t I have found it first?
Amy and Jenny stopped what they were doing and crowded around my mother, her joy apparent as she unwrapped the grisly treasure.
That angel was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen. It had been my late grandmother’s, and like her, it was from Germany. Its martyred expression was cracked with age, the porcelain skin glowing in the twinkling tree lights. It had curly brown human hair, whose origin I dreaded even thinking about. Its wings were crooked and bent with age, but that wasn’t the worst thing about it.
Its legs had long ago broken off halfway up to the knees, leaving fiberglass stumps exposed beneath it. With its faded pink lips curving up in a beatific smile, it looked like some tragic celestial amputee.
I couldn’t bear to look at it. I quickly knelt before the tin box and buried my arms in up to my shoulders, pretending to search for more ornaments.
My sisters oohed and ahhed over the horrible denizen of heaven as my mother proudly hung it on a high branch right in the front of our otherwise pretty little Christmas tree.
“This was your Grandma’s,” my mother said softly, the creases from her frown melting into what could pass for a nostalgic smile. “She loved this angel. She put it on the tree every year.”
I swung around and glared at her, still up to my armpits in ornaments.
“Why, Ma? That is the ugliest angel I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s disgusting,” I said.
My sisters turned in tandem and glared back at me in disapproval.
“Shut up, Christine,” Jenny said in her childish lisp. “Mommy likes it.”
My mother turned from admiring the legless angel and patted her luxurious blond curls. “Don’t listen to her, Jenny,” she said. “She doesn’t like anything of Grandma’s.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Every time my grandmother came to visit, I vacated the house for the length of her stay. She smelled like mothballs, vinegar and musk; she wore a curled blond wig over her real hair, and she slipped pictures of the Virgin Mary into my underwear drawer. She emanated an air of dissatisfaction and Catholic guilt, which enveloped everyone who got too close – something I tried never to do. I told my mother if she ever ended up like Grandma, I wouldn’t ever speak to her again.
“It ruins the whole tree,” I grumbled. Everyone ignored me.
I hung a few of my favorite ornaments, trying to make up for the abomination dangling from the uppermost bow. I loved the reindeer and the Hallmark Santa the best – the lighted one of him tiptoeing off, candle aloft, to finish the Christmas cookies. We each had giant glass balls my mother had made with our names on them, etched in silver glitter – Jenny’s was green, Amy’s blue, and mine, of course, was red - my least favorite color. I hung them near the front of the tree, near the wretched angel. They weren’t big enough to obscure it as it bounced tauntingly close to my red glass ball. My father stirred restlessly in his chair.
When the table was cleared of dinner and the pall lifted from my father’s silent presence as he stumbled upstairs to his room, we pried open the cookie tins filled with my mother’s homemade German lebkuchen and settled in front of the TV for an evening of Christmas specials. I looked forward to them every year. Many were older than me and brought back so many memories of the best Christmases, the ones when I too young to know what Daddy’s snoring meant or why he constantly traveled up and down the cellar stairs, his gait increasingly unsteady with each trip. It was always a relief when he finally shuffled off to bed for the night. I knew there would be no more arguments – just the peace and quiet of the television, the soft glow of the chipped colored lights around the manager he built so many years ago, and my mother’s gentle snoring as televised Yule Log burned. No one understood how I could sit there and watch the WPIX Yule Log for hours on end. That was my favorite part of Christmas – the peace that descended, the silent night, where I could be with my mother without fighting. It was as close to having a real family as I ever felt.
After she fell asleep this particular year, however, I got up silently and tiptoed toward the twinkling Christmas tree. Amy and Jenny had gone upstairs and were giggling quietly in their room, and I knew my mother wouldn’t wake up. She’d long ago finished the port in her wine glass, her spectacles slipping further down her nose with each slow, deep, even breath. Mrs. Santa Claus was clearly out for the night.
I eyed the angel warily. It smiled its cracked porcelain smile back at me, suspended smugly from its perch. I snuck into the kitchen, grabbed a paper towel and headed back into the living room, startled by my mother’s sharp intake of breath as she pulled her robe more tightly around her, still asleep.
Once again, I came face to face with the enemy, its blond curls bobbing gently with the gentle sway of the tree branch. Not wanting to touch it with my bare hands, I wrapped it quickly up in the paper towel and yanked it off the tree, scattering tinsel on the faded blue carpet. My mother stirred again, mumbling softly in her sleep. I ran down the cement stairs to the cellar and tucked it away, down against the cinder block wall behind my father’s long wooden tool bench. I’d bury it in the backyard tomorrow. It would have a decent funeral in its paper towel shroud.
The next morning, we opened presents and waited for my aunt to arrive with her shopping bags full of gifts on the bus from New York City, My father’s trips to the cellar were more frequent on Christmas Day. My mother made scrambled eggs and glared silently at his disappearing back as he shuffled back down the stairs in his new tan chamois slippers, already stained with the poisonous brown contents of his hidden liquid stash.
She never mentioned the missing angel. No one ever brought up its mysterious Christmas Eve disappearance. It got lost in the shredded wrapping paper and the anger and disappointment that arrived, like Santa, with every Yuletide.
The angel remains buried with the rest of my mother’s hopes and dreams, underneath her favorite lilac tree in our old backyard.
It’s more than five Christmases ago now since she stared malevolently up at me from her wheelchair, an amputee herself after losing her own legs to a diabetic infection, stubbornly refusing to let me cook her one last Christmas dinner.
I think about her broken angel now and wonder if she finally got her wings.
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