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Sound 6c

I’m putting up parts 6c and 6d, which together form the end of part 6, in rapid succession this evening; combining them would make for an insanely long post, but this is all of a conceptual piece—well, in my head it is; who knows if the connections actually connect, or if I’m really just hitting every point with a too-wordy hammer. Trying to do both too much and not enough? Anyway, I wrote some things down. Cf. Soon, as well as part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5a, part 5b, part 5c, part 6a, and part 6b of this.

Also a PSA: Tumblr friend @shipsbecomearmadas is working hard to raise funds for the Kaleidoscope Youth Center (http://www.kycohio.org/), which serves LGBTQIA+ kids in Columbus, Ohio. The group is trying to get Ellen’s attention, and you can help by tweeting or blogging about the center and tagging it “#4Ellen”. (I’ll mention too that wherever you are, if you have a local youth center, they most likely could use any help you can give.)

Sound 6c

Myka had never bothered much with Christmas when she lived alone; she was content for it to be nothing more than a quiet day. Very near silent, and possibly even holy, though religion had, and has, occupied her thoughts only when relevant to translation or teaching. Abigail, who has apparently (and incongruously, as far as Myka is concerned) gone to church every Sunday of her entire life, takes great delight in calling Myka a godless commie. Pete doesn’t call Myka a godless commie, but he does go with Abigail to church now, her interdenominational Chinese Christian church in D.C. “They look at me like I’m a zoo animal,” he once confided to Myka, and then he said, with slight puzzlement, “Weird to be the different one. But I guess I do look like a zoo animal, sitting there with everybody. Probably sound like one too; you know I can’t sing, but Abigail pokes me when I just mouth along with the hymns. I think she does it so they’ll laugh at me and not hate me.”

“Is it working?” Myka asked.

“Well, they laugh. Real quiet, but they laugh.”

“Is that okay with you?”

He frowned, just a little. “Course it is. What kind of guy am I if it’s not?”

“A not-Pete kind of guy,” Myka had assured him.

Pete’s on her mind this afternoon because she’s wrapping his Christmas present: a New York Mets baseball cap. Christina has decided that the Mets are her team, given that last year was their first year in the league and it was also her first year paying close attention to baseball, so Pete takes her to games whenever he and Abigail visit New York during the season. When Myka had wondered aloud what to get him, “a Mets hat” had been Christina’s immediate suggestion.

“Will it be okay for him to wear a New York hat in Washington?” Myka asked.

“The Senators left, so I bet nobody there even cares about baseball anymore. But also I bet it wouldn’t matter to Pete anyway.”

Of course it wouldn’t. Because Pete is a Pete kind of guy.

To wrap the present, Myka is sitting on the floor, next to the tree, because Christina is taking up most of the table with the newspaper. Christina generally doesn’t have time to read the paper before school, so that is one of her rewards for finishing her homework in the afternoons. But while she’s always intent, she isn’t always as intent as she is this day, this unremarkable, not-yet-Christmas Tuesday. She has the newspaper open in front of her, and she’s gone to get the dictionary too; she is on her knees in the chair, her whole body hunching over their small table as she reads, consults the dictionary, then reads some more.

Myka doesn’t begrudge her the table space, because she is enjoying being near the tree, breathing in green and outdoors; while she can’t imagine ever calling Colorado home again, this pine scrapes with familiarity through her lungs. They don’t have enough tree here for the smell itself to go deep, but she’ll take shallow, because it signifies her having won once again an argument she and Helena have now had for three Christmases: Helena says she wants to buy one of the popular aluminum trees, and Myka objects, based both on Colorado and on “where could we possibly store it?” Then Christina tells her mother that it’s an aluminum tree, not an aluminium one, because they are Americans now; Helena objects that she is not in fact an American, so she will continue to say “aluminium tree”; and Myka says it doesn’t matter how anybody pronounces it anyway because it isn’t a tree.

The first time Myka won this argument, in 1961, Helena had stepped back and regarded their newly decorated, blessedly nonmetallic tree. She had at that point declared that if there was no chance of real modernity, she would at least like said tree to be flocked. “Fake snow,” Myka had sighed, “on a real tree?” But the next day Helena brought home an aerosol can of the stuff, saying that Myka did not need to trouble herself over it, that she herself would deal with the application. “Tomorrow, though,” she’d yawned.

Myka had been the first one up and out of bed the following morning. She walked into the living room and caught sight of the tree. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes, then blinked again. But no, the sight stayed the same: the bottom two-thirds of the tree—the still-decorated tree—seemed to have been dolloped with melting strawberry ice cream. She stood in front of the tree for some time, trying to formulate a thought.

“Helena, could you come here?” she called.

Helena grumbled, from their bedroom, “I don’t want to get up yet.”

“I really would appreciate it if you would come here and tell me what you see.”

She emerged, buttoning her robe, muttering “fine, fine,” blinking. She leaned against Myka, nuzzling brief and warm into her neck. Then she stood straight up, facing the tree. She blinked some more. “You want me to tell you what I see.”

“Yes and no,” Myka said, “or maybe I mean yes or no. Depending on what you tell me.”

“Hm. I see that I have made two errors.”

“Two errors, you say.”

“Yes. First, I failed to attend to the color of the spray I purchased. In my defense, I don’t suppose I had any idea it came in colors other than white.”

“It’s fake snow,” Myka reminded her. That was met with a heavy sigh that did not do much to disguise an underlying growl, and Myka chuckled. “And your second error?”

“Second—well, technically first, chronologically—I had a child. Who I believe is now lurking in the hallway, and who might as well come here and regard, with shame, what she has inflicted upon our tree and ornaments.”

Christina walked to the tree and sighed. “I wanted to surprise you.” This said with remorse, but also with something a little like pride.

“You did do that,” Myka had to concede.

“Quite successfully,” Helena said. “And you managed to do this in the night without waking us, which is also a bit of a surprise.”

“I didn’t turn the light on. So I guess I couldn’t see the color in the dark. Also I couldn’t reach all the way up the tree either. Are you mad?”

“About your not being able to reach all the way up the tree? Actually, I’m not at all angry about that, because at least some of the decorations were spared a pinkening.”

Myka said, “I wonder if it comes off. The pinkening, I mean.”

Christina pulled a formerly shiny gold metal ball from the tree. She rubbed at its dried pink drips of flocking with her thumb.

So yes, Christmas was once a quiet day, a day with which Myka never much bothered. But now Christmas is something else again, something that is signified, for her and for Helena and especially for Christina, by the removing of pink-encrusted ornaments from their various protective boxes and newspaper swaddlings and the placing of them, as the finishing touches, on their tree.

Myka raises a hand to the ornament nearest her, a plastic Santa who looks as if he’d been minding his own business on the sidewalk, only to be splashed by a taxi driving through a puddle of melted cotton candy. His pink imperfection clashes terribly with his red coat, and Myka feels more than a little silly for how that makes her heart swell. He’d look even more ridiculous if he were hanging from an aluminum—or aluminium—branch... but Myka suspects her heart would swell just the same.

“Myka,” Christina says from the table. Her voice is querulous, a little jar to Myka’s Santa-inspired sentimentality.

“Christina,” Myka answers back. She will later reflect that she should somehow have known what had Christina concerned, but fate had made her take just one glance at the newspaper that morning. She’d glanced at it again, just the front page, just above the fold, when she arrived home. She hadn’t known. She couldn’t have known... but that was no excuse.

“You and Mom.”

“Yes.” She doesn’t see what’s coming.

“Are you sick.”

“Sick. Sick?” And still she doesn’t see what’s coming. “We had those bad colds, but that was last month.”

“No. Not colds. Sick with.” Christina looks down at the paper. “An incurable, congenital disorder.”

Myka stands up, walks to the table. Christina has the paper open, but now she flips to the front page—the front page, it’s below the fold, but the front page—and reads the headline out loud: “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” Christina stumbles, just a bit, in that out-loud reading, over the “sexuality” part of “homosexuality.”

This is the kind of situation Helena was made for, as a parent; she would know the right words to say to either defuse it or dismiss it entirely. Myka is... not a parent, so she cannot have been made for any situation as a parent. But her footing is in any case far less secure, not just because they don’t talk very much about this with Christina, not directly, but also because Myka herself tries not to think about it very much. Not directly. Except when she’s forced to. Except when things happen.

But all right, this newspaper article has now happened. Myka reads the front-page portion. It doesn’t seem so bad, despite the headline; it’s about the state liquor authority revoking licenses of so-called “homosexual haunts.” She nods and Christina turns to the continuing page—and there the article seems to go on forever, columns upon columns. Christina points to a particular section: “Out of the Shadows,” the subhead reads, and Myka braces herself. She scans the text there: apparently the best argument that the “organized homophile movement” can muster is that, just as Christina had quoted, homosexuality is “an incurable, congenital disorder”—which in turn would mean that homosexuals should be considered “just another minority.” Analytical psychiatrists, on the other hand, say it’s the result of “ill-adjusted parents.” Which for some reason means it can be “cured.”

Myka asks, “Have you read the whole thing?”

Christina nods.

“Will you give me a minute to read it too, so I know what we’re talking about?”

Christina nods again. It isn’t her fully nervous nod. Myka takes that as a genuine okay for her to go ahead.

But as Myka starts to read, Christina executes a seemingly aimless wander over to the record player. She puts on... she puts on the Drifters. Their 1962 LP, the second side, and Myka now knows that Christina is more upset than she wants to say out loud, because if she is starting with the second side? Helena plays on every track, and the songs themselves do not matter in the slightest: what’s important is that Christina knows she is hearing her mother.

She comes back to Myka, who is now sitting at the table; she stands behind Myka’s chair and drapes herself over Myka’s shoulders. “It’s okay,” Myka says, and Christina nods against her neck. She doesn’t move away, though. At no point while Myka reads does Christina move away.

The article deals mainly with men, where they go, how they talk to each other, why they act as they do. Women are worth almost no mention, and Myka comes close to convincing herself: This is not about me. This is not about Helena. This is not about me, and it is not about Helena. It is not about us.

But one section, despite its male focus, rips the ground from under her tentative self-persuasion. It’s subheaded “Impossible Dream.” It begins, “Many homosexuals dream of forming a permanent attachment that would give them the sense of social and emotional stability that others derive from heterosexual marriage but few achieve it.”

It is the kind of bald statement that she seems always to be trying to tell herself is untrue, but here it is, in the newspaper. Everyone in the entire city read this today. Everyone in the city read that her life and Helena’s, their life together, is impossible... the ten-year-old who shares that life, she is a warm mantle of worry still clasping Myka’s shoulders but now slipped down, plastered against her side, as Myka looks at this newspaper on this table at which they impossibly eat breakfast, lunch, dinner.

“Okay,” she tells Christina when she’s through. “I read it. What are you thinking?”

“You’re not sick,” Christina says.

“I don’t think so.”

Now the words tumble out. “Okay, but then the people in the article who say you’re not sick, the ones who say it’s just that you have weird parents, if your father is hostile and your mother is... I can’t remember what it said about mothers, but they say you can be cured, but how can you be cured of something if you’re not sick with anything in the first place? That doesn’t make sense.”

She really is a very smart girl. “Not much sense,” Myka agrees.

“But do you want to be?”

“Want to be what?”

“Cured.”

How to explain the difference between what you want and what you want? Not that Myka can even explain that to herself, so she goes ahead with the response that had jumped into her head: “But that would mean I wouldn’t love your mom anymore.”

“I know what it means,” Christina says, with a hint of resentment. “Is it what you want?”

Smart girl. Discerning girl. “I want to love her forever,” Myka says. It’s as true as any of the other contradictorily true things she could say, but she does have to stop herself from adding “in an ideal world.” There’s only so much truth you can tell a ten-year-old. Even this ten-year-old.

“Forever?”

There’s both hope and certainty in that word: “do you mean it” crossed with “of course you mean it.” Myka has heard the same collision in Helena’s voice. She’s never known how to give Helena the right answer, and she has no better intuition here. “I do want to,” she tries.

“Is that what Mom wants too?”

“I hope so.”

“Me too.” Christina tightens her grip on Myka, a dramatic grasp of a hug, then lets go. “I think I’ll go read now.”

“Okay. What are you reading?”

“I’m not sure. I have about three or four library books.” Feigned disinterest, a lack of precision: she’s finished talking about this. But then she cocks her head, listening to the music. “Rudy isn’t sick either.” Most singers and musicians with whom Helena works, Christina can take or leave. She’s polite to all of them, of course, because Helena would never let her get away with anything less. But a select few—and this seems to have nothing to do with how famous they are, or even how talented—she adores. Rudy Lewis is among those select few, and in this case, the devotion is mutual. He always asks after her, and when he sees her, he declares “there’s that baby!”, which never fails to accelerate Christina’s usually slow smile.

“Rudy isn’t sick either,” Myka says. “Rudy is as sweet to you as I’ve ever seen anybody be, plus he sings like an angel, and he gets a huge kick out of your mom. I don’t think anybody who does all those things could be sick.”

“And he doesn’t want to be cured either, does he?”

“I don’t think so,” Myka says, but here, she is skirting an outright lie. Because Rudy might not be sick, but he does have his problems. And some of those problems do arise from the fact that he... isn’t sick. But here, too, there’s only so much truth you can tell a ten-year-old. Myka suspects that Rudy, as well as most of the people she knows who aren’t sick, would not volunteer to be cured. But she does wonder what they would say about it, what she herself and even Helena would say about it, if they woke up one morning and found themselves cured—or rather, found themselves not like this. Like everyone else instead.

“That’s good,” Christina says. “I wouldn’t want him to be different. I really am going to read now. I have A Wrinkle in Time again, and I got Ice Station Zebra and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for the first time.” Over the summer, she had developed a fondness for spy thrillers, in spite of needing to look up what seemed to be every other word. Myka and Helena both found this new preference a little alarming, but it sent Abigail into hysterics. “Like mother, like daughter... no, I mean, like this person, like this person’s kid!” she had chortled.

Now Christina takes the dictionary from the table, tucking it under her arm. She likes to read books in her room. Newspapers on the table, books in her room, and she leaves Myka sitting there, still staring at the columns upon columns of the article.

She can’t decide how much to tell Helena about it, or even if she should bring it up in the first place. Given how invested Christina had been, she most likely should tell it all, including about their conversation, but on the other hand, Christina seems to have wanted to put the issue to bed. Although that may have been just with Myka... but of course it isn’t as if the problem won’t come up again in some other equally unexpected way...

Helena opens the door to the apartment, interrupting Myka’s choice-making. She sets her violin case and handbag down, and then she asks, with a twitch in her voice, “Did Christina read the newspaper today?”

“You know she did. She always does.”

“Did you?”

“I hadn’t. But then she asked me whether you and I are sick.” Helena’s posture slackens. “So yes, then, I did.”

“Lovely.” It’s a sharp word. Helena comes to the table, looks down at the newspaper, doesn’t touch it. In fact she crosses her arms at it. “Why is this necessary?” She might be asking the paper itself, interrogating it about its unacceptable behavior.

“Part of it is news. About the State Liquor Authority.”

“But why the rest of it.”

“You don’t really want an answer.”

“I’m not really asking a question.” She directs her attention now at Myka. “And I hope you bear in mind: not impossible. A dream, yes, and every now and then a nightmare, but not impossible.” Because of course she would know which part of the article had threatened to overpower Myka. And maybe it had had that effect on Helena too, at first, but now her shoulders are square: that’s anger, not hesitation or doubt.

They both notice that Christina has slunk up the hallway and is hanging there, uncharacteristically reluctant to interrupt.

“Come here, you,” Helena says, and Christina flies at her. She used to wrap her arms around Helena’s legs. Now, taller, she hugs Helena around the waist. Shoulders will be next... when she grows, it’s fast. Dramatic spurts, just like Myka remembers from her own childhood. Helena asks her, “Are you all right?’

“Mostly all right. But.”

“But?” Now Helena does sound a little uncertain, and Myka, too, braces for Christina’s answer.

“I’m too old to go to Macy’s and sit on Santa’s lap tonight like we were going to.”

Helena breathes a bit. Then she says, “You had hardly any Christmas at all for the first five years of your life. Please indulge me.”

Christina sighs. She says, “Okay, Mom”: not fully graceful in her acquiescence, but graceful enough. She is showing that she is all right.

“You’re the one who likes tradition,” Myka tells Christina, this perceptive girl who knows her mother well enough to know when she, too, needs reassurance... in fact Christina may have objected to the excursion just so she could acquiesce.

“Myka, I’m ten,” Christina groans. Well, then again, maybe not.

But everything is all right. They eat their dinner—fried eggs, bacon, toast, because eating breakfast at night is different, but it binds them together in its difference—atop the opened newspaper, making a mess of it, dropping crumbs, letting yolk dribble, setting bacon down just to watch the fat-stains blight the type.

Then they go to Macy’s. It’s as overwhelming as it is every year; this year, though, the fact that they are just three small parts of the teeming crowds and silver-belling holiday racket seems to mean they could be any three people at all. That they can be any three people.

But at a certain point, Myka turns to say something to Helena, and Helena... looks odd. There’s a little dampness at her temples, and her breathing is a strange not-quite-pant. Some sort of delayed shock reaction? “What is it?” Myka asks.

“Winter wonderland,” Helena says.

It takes Myka a second or two to realize that that carol is drifting through the bechristmased store. “What about it?”

“That’s the song. Well, not this version of course, but—on Phil’s Christmas record, I told you. I played it over a hundred times. And listened to it... uncountable. I can’t stand it. I need some air.” She bolts away, saying, “I’ll meet you outside.”

Christina looks at Myka, and Myka reads that look immediately. “Oh, no. You’re talking to Santa so we can tell her that you did.”

“Can’t we say the line was too long?”

“Only if it is. But you know she wouldn’t believe us anyway, so you’re stuck.”

“I’m ten,” Christina insists, but that’s the last objection she offers.

When Myka and Christina emerge onto the sidewalk, Helena is clapping her hands against the chill of the evening.

“You could’ve come back in,” Christina informs her, as they begin to walk toward the subway. “The song ended.”

Helena ignores this. “Did you ask Father Christmas to bring you anything in particular?”

“I asked Santa. Because I’m an American. I asked him for a Vac-U-Form.”

Myka says, “He was a little confounded. Apparently she’s the first girl to ask for one.”

“I don’t see what joy any boy or girl would derive from what is essentially a plastic foundry. And why on earth do you continue to want toys that will burn the house down?” Helena asks. But she puts her arm around Christina and drops a kiss on her head.

“It’s not even really a toy. Like you said, it’s a foundry.” Christina utters the word with evident pleasure. “Besides, the only thing I’ve ever burned is my own hand, with the sulfuric acid. And only one time.”

Helena declares, “That is, from my perspective, a distinction without a difference. Certainly in terms of damage.” At which Christina sighs.

Myka would put her arm around Helena and drop a kiss on her head, but she settles for laughing at her. “Never let it be said that you avoided hyperbole. Nobody was happy about that burned hand, but I think from almost everybody else’s perspective that’s a distinction with a pretty big difference. Even in terms of damage.”

“My hand did hurt though,” Christina says.

“I know it did,” Myka assures her.

“Hyperbole,” Helena huffs.

The subway is warm. On it, they are just three people.

****

Myka and Helena put Christina to bed together. Most nights, one or the other will take the lead, but tonight they are together.

Christina says to her mother, in the middle of the yawn that followed her insistence that she was not tired, “Myka says she hopes you want to love her forever. Do you?”

Helena says, “Of course I do.” She is all business, as if no more factual a statement could be issued. Christina relaxes—she’d been holding her head a bit up, off of her pillow, but now the feathers give way with the tiniest of exhalations—and Myka wishes that she too were ten, to be able to hear that voice and believe in its infallibility. “Now,” Helena says, with no change in tone, “are you still concerned about that ridiculous newspaper article? Tell me the truth.”

“You’re not sick,” Christina says.

“Not to the best of my knowledge.”

“But Immigration might feel like they have better knowledge. Right?” She doesn’t say this with any guile, but Myka suspects she’s been thinking it out for some time.

“You’re very clever. All I can tell you is that some people hold certain misinformed beliefs. Where those come into conflict with ours... well. We will face what we must, if and when we must. In the meantime, shall I let you know if I begin to feel ill?” Again, the tone says do not concern yourself, and again Myka wants to believe her. Christina believes her enough to nod. “All right, then,” Helena says. “Myka and I will retire to our bed that is not a sickbed, and you will sleep well.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You say that as if you are addressing someone in this room, and yet I see only Myka and myself.” She leans down and kisses Christina’s forehead, then takes Myka’s hand and kisses it—and that too says do not concern yourself. “Vac-U-Form. What are we to do with you?”

“Make sure Santa knows I want one.”

Helena’s tone doesn’t change, but her smile deepens. “I don’t know who that is either, so I could not possibly convey the message.”

Myka laughs. “See, knock-knock, that’s why we had to go to Macy’s.”

“I’m ten,” Christina insists, but with little force. She blinks a very slow blink. She yawns again.

TBC

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#part 6c

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#part 6c