At first, they lived on bagels and cream cheese, and tomato sandwiches in the summer when they grew them in a small backyard garden. In the early years they snuggled close and talked of a farm in the mountains with barns full of tractors and animals and a house full of children. graduated from college first and worked, so that Jack could finish his degree in business. A new department opened up in the college business department, computer science, and before his four years were finished there, he’d helped lay the line for a new kind of computer in the basement of that building. In two years he’d gone from keypunch computing to basic programming. In three he’d started working overnight doing data entry at a local corporation. In four years he went from blue jeans and flannel shirts to suits and ties. His future changed their dreams.
They rented a mill house from her dad. The four-room house with two front doors was built by the cotton mill in the forties. Two doors meant the family could enter one side of the house without waking the people who worked third shift on the other. Four rooms and a porch where the kitchen was. The room slanted down and out because before it was a kitchen, it was a porch, and the rain had to run away from the house. The stove was balanced on shims, but still she had to lean over the boiling pots and one morning, the flame licked out from under the pan and set her housecoat aflame. She ran screaming to the bathroom where he sat bathing in the clawfoot tub, but by the time she arrived, the flames were out and a smoking hole remained where the flame had been. He reached for her with wet arms and pulled her into the water with him, his naked flesh against her robe, and he held her whispering cautions that next time, she shouldn’t run because the flames jumped higher and burned harder when she ran.
Christmas came to the four room house. They drove to the country, walked a railroad and found a perfect cedar tree, round at the bottom, conical at the top and sticky like a cactus . She thought it was the best tree ever and popped popcorn to string with cranberries to lop across the front. One little drummer boy from her childhood, glass balls she’d bought the year before and a small elf she’d bought weeks ago. He’d fussed when she brought it home. Four dollars? Four dollars they didn’t have and she spent it on a wooden decoration for a tree that would be gone in a week’s time. What made him so angry? She asked why. She had yelled back, it was four dollars, our first Christmas, one ornament. She shouldn’t have talked back. It made him so angry that he chased her through all four rooms, screaming, chased her into the one closet in the back room and slapped her, slapped her so hard that her jaw hurt for days, but she’d never been slapped before and didn’t realize the source of her pain. That first slap was a warning that the next time his arm was raised she should listen and be quiet. The chance was too likely that Christmas night she sat on the floor next to his chair while he smoked a joint and looked for the envelope her brother had given her that morning, an envelope with a twenty dollar bill, a huge present in a time that she never spent more than forty dollars on groceries a week. She wanted to look at it and think about what they’d do, maybe go out to eat or see a movie, but the envelope was empty. She looked up at him surrounded by smoke and said, “the money’s gone.”
“Yeah, I spent it.” He didn’t look up from his reading.
“You spent it? On what? What did you do? That was my Christmas present.”
He looked at her and took a hit. Looked at her and said, “It was for both of us, and I spent it.” Then she remembered when he’d left earlier in the afternoon, Christmas afternoon, and now he was back, smoking twenty dollars that could have filled a gas tank or paid for a meal. Twenty dollars wasted just like he was.