A few days before Christmas, I found myself with a slight case of Deadly Gut Wrenching Acidic Vomit flu, and my head was lodged so far down the toliet that I’m lucky that my skull wasn’t permanently embedded in the bowl. As I spewed forth stomach bile and what looked like partially digested waffles, I wondered if God must have been punishing me for double parking at Walgreens the day before. The Lord knew I needed tampons, however, as I had uttered, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!” while I waddled all the way down the feminine aisle, not caring at that point whether my horrendous parking job was preventing a busload of orphans and their nun caretakers to purchase cough syrup.
I rarely get sick. I believed myself to have a super-human immune system; the powers that be had chosen me as their healthy muse, meant to skip among the mere mortals, who were all sniffling from their colds, as an example of what real health looked like. I realized now that the same divine spirits of wellness were not protecting me from being ill, but were more interested in letting at least ten years worth of not being ill build up into one horrendous bought of puking up everything I had eaten since I was eleven.
My parents were pleased, then, when I came home early for Christmas, and gave myself a residency in the guest room bed.
“It feels so good to have my baby home!” my mother said, or, at least, I think that’s what she said. The upstairs bathroom has a terrible echo, particulary when it’s the sound of regurgitated split pea soup reverberating off the walls.
When I felt the danger of me throwing up on the neatly wrapped presents on the hearth had passed, I came downstairs and joined my family in the living room. My mother sat with her legs swung over the easy-chair. She had a cup of coffee in her hand. Still having an uneasy stomach, the smell nauseated me.
“I couldn’t have a cup of coffee if you offered me all the money in the world,” I said.
“The only time I couldn’t stand coffee was when I was pregnant,” Mom said. “Oh, Jesus, you’re not pregnant, are you? Why are you telling me you’re pregnant on Christmas Eve?”
“I’m not pregnant, Ma,” I said.
“Oh, we forgot,” my brother chimed in. “You’re a virgin.”
“There’s only one virgin woman in this house, and she’s sitting next to the donkey in the manager scene,” my father huffed.
My mother threw her head back and let her laugh ring throughout the living room. Her eyes shut tightly, and for a moment, my mind flashed back to the picture of her being rolled out on the stretcher only a few summers ago. I had been the one that found her on the floor of her bedroom, the color drained from her face, her stomach bleeding internally from a botched aneurism surgery that had been performed only two days before. When the paramedics wheeled her through the kitchen, I had pushed the antique table from my grandmother so hard out of the way that it scraped a chunk of red paint off the wall. It was still there, but covered by a floral table cloth my mother bought during my parents’ trip to Italy the next summer.
If my father ever thought about the string of days that my mother was kept alive only by breathing through tubes in the ICU - the days where we finally stopped answering the ringing phone because we couldn’t tell the story to one more member of the local pool club, or when we sat in the waiting room thumbing through outdated copies of Time magazine – he didn’t show it. He sat on the couch next to me, smilingly dressed in Family Guy pajamas, which my mother detested.
“A sixty-year-old man wearing Stewie pajamas,” she sighed.
“They say, ‘Born to Bad,” my father said, and wiggled his toes in his mocassins.
We sat in the living room together, and when the clock struck midnight, we distributed presents that we had gotten for one another. My mother gave me a teaset. My father gave me a pop-up book on the history of the bra. My brother and I sat on the floor and tossed ribbon at one another, and my dad giggled as he put on the Leon Redbone Christmas CD, and sang along loudly to Christmas Island, my mother adding in harmony in between sips of coffee.
When we were done, my mother looked dreamily out the window at the silent night that sat quietly on our porch and said to no one in particular, “We’re so lucky.”
My dad scratched his chest and folded his hands behind his head. “This has been one of the best Christmases since I found out I was coming home from Vietnam.” His medals were hanging on the wall behind him, the purple heart sitting center.
It was odd leaving the next day. Though I stayed late into the evening, my parents were reluctant about letting me go home.
“Don’t you want to stay one more night?” my dad said. “I’ll fix a good breakfast in the morning.”
I weakly protested, saying that I had to meet some friends for dinner that evening, but before my suitcase could hit the floor for another night, my mother sighed.
“You can go, sweetie,” she said. “It’s just that we like when you and Taylor are both home. It feels like normal. It’s hard having a daughter who’s all grown up.” My face flushed when I thought about the tupperware boxes of Christmas leftovers my dad made me, which I planned on feeding off of for long enough to save money on groceries.
“Never skimp on groceries,” my father had said when I first moved out. “You should always feed yourself properly.” I couldn’t tell him that I couldn’t afford anything not from a Kraft box.
“Drive save,” Mom said, and as I backed down the driveway, I watched the outline of my parents in the doorframe become smaller.
At 11:56 on New Years Eve, I was at a party with the usual crowd when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, and went into an unoccupied room to answer it. It was from home.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, babe, it’s Daddy,” my father said, his voice a little quiter than usual. ”Mama went to bed early, so I’m spending my first New Years alone. I have no one to kiss at midnight but the cat, and you know how much dander there is on the long-haired breeds.”
My first New Years alone. The words rang through the phone like a buzzsaw, and as the party swirled on outside the door, I remembered my father’s face when my mother was taken away to the hospital. He watched the ambulance back down the driveway, the gleam from the one of the side mirrors hitting his whiskered face. He turned to me. His bulldog mouth was tightened, and his eyes watered like blue glass. Then he got into the car to follow Ambulance 5 down the road to Chesapeake General.
“I’ll call you, baby,” was the only thing he said.
There we were, New Years Eve, both sitting in a room alone, while the rest of the world waited for 2007 to roll around and change things.
“Do you want to count down together?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t have a TV here,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” he answered, and described Times Square, its streets filled as they always were, and mentioned that Dick Clark was kissing on “some woman.”
“He’s always kissing on somebody,” my father noted. “The ball is about to drop.”
Not having a TV to look at, everyone at the party had already counted down, so my father and I were the only ones counting down to the ball dropping in Times Square.
“Alright, count with me,” he said. “Ten, nine…”
We counted down together, and I watched through the window to the outside. The streetlamp shattered down its light onto the road below, and its reflection bounced back on my face, which was illuminated with make-up and moonglow, the sound of my father’s voice counting the moments we had together until another year took its turn.
“Happy New Year!” my father exclaimed, in a voice that was so cheerful that I couldn’t help but have my heart burst a little inside of my chest. “It’s going to be a good one, I think.”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
Though I sat in the darkened room in a tangle of plaid bedsheets, Pink Floyd posters covering the walls and everyone on the opposite side of the house, I could say that I was many things – hopeful, afraid, grateful. But of all the things in the world I was, I was certainly not alone.
