Christmas Story

Christmas Story

The promotional brochure for the new development on the far outskirts of Pittsfield promised “the great outdoors, and the great indoors!” That may have been true of The Dakotas, but that’s not why they moved there. Ernesto owned a direct stake in these condos, unlike the unit they were living in before, so it was an unimaginative but necessary way to save on rent.

And for a time Ernesto and Consuelo were much happier at the new place because it was more spacious than the old cramped condo. It was night and day in that regard because Unit D where they lived now had vaulted ceilings and big bay windows. It made it feel like you had a direct connection to the outside with fresh air and delicate light. The fact that all of the walls were painted eggshell white in the new home only added to the effect that the present was possibly brighter and sunnier. Every day, they saw deer eating their breakfast in the grassland that surrounded the place.

Ernesto still got up at 6 a.m. everyday there, heading downstairs to the kitchen to beat three eggs into the glass he liked best to beat eggs in. Like an alarm clock, the dinging reverberated loudly off of the walls of the open floor plan. And like clockwork, Consuelo would march downstairs from their bedroom and demand that he stop. Ernesto would stop the dinging and then move onto his ritual of putting on Christian hymns on the small radio that was in the kitchen. He’d proceed with preparing his Southern red-eye gravy to go with his store-bought biscuit and eggs. “You’re killing yourself,” is what Consuelo would say when she later emerged from the bedroom again and saw the spread.

His wife was probably right but he had bigger things to worry about than his diet these days. There were more important questions of late: Like how much longer would it be before he had to move all of them down to Florida? He had already spent quite a bit of time thinking about a move to Miami. The cheaper parts of Miami. The part where his mother lived, in Hollywood. That’s where they would move to when it was time to pull the trigger. Dottie had a mind for business, which helped. And he was in a pickle.

His Pittsfield partner Abraham barely spoke to him by this point. And there was the way Abraham looked at him, like he was a dead man walking. Abraham wasn’t all wrong, he was definitely and maybe even rightly furious at him for the risks he had taken of late. There were the new stakes in developments that would likely never see a return — like the boondoggle of The Dakotas, where they were now. Half of the twenty five units sat empty. They had no real neighbors now, just the deer. General Electric had fled two years ago. Before too long there would be tumbleweeds on emptied-out North Street.

Still, things were now bad for a lot of people he knew, not that that was worth bringing up with anyone. Arthur Hayes was facing criminal charges for income tax evasion for chrissakes! Arthur’s daughter Becky went to Berkshire County Day School, same as Ethan. And he himself hadn’t filed his taxes in two years. It was a lot to worry about, and it had been a good idea to raise the credit limit on Consuelo’s credit cards months ago, and then use them on everything from gas to milk to Ethan’s tuition. The problem was Consuelo would eventually find out about that, and he had to have some answers before then.

Ernesto despite the recent setbacks still slept well, that hadn’t changed. A couple of vodkas on the rocks and a little college basketball on the TV had the effect of a reliable sleeping pill each night. His dream time was scheduled for 9 p.m. if not not slightly before. Ethan was jealous of that because when he came home from Lawrenceville for that winter break in 1990, he couldn’t sleep at all. It was the same torture every night, a special brand of torture, where he’d lie awake in bed in the spare bedroom in the new condo, and stare up at the eggshell white ceiling there. By 2 a.m. each night, he’d make his way down to the paisley couch in the downstairs living room, which was right next to the dining room, with no walls dividing the two. Ethan usually fell asleep for a couple hours at around 4 a.m. and thankfully he started sleeping slightly better after a week, but he couldn’t figure out what was keeping him up at all. Now there were a couple of candidates, to be sure. He didn’t have many friends at Lawrenceville, that was true. And the vague notion that his father was slowly going bankrupt was new. He had been in touch with Becky from BCDS. That is to say she wrote him one letter that she sent to his prep school; but that limited correspondence was enough to confirm the bad goings on in Pittsfield. Still, Ethan had his brothers, all three of them, coming home for Christmas and that thought slightly cheered him four days before Christmas.

The holiday was Ethan’s favorite and Consuelo went all out that year. She thought especially hard on how to decorate the new place. Ethan still fondly remembered the holiday seasons back at their old place, across town, in the actual heart of Pittsfield, when he helped his father untangle the twisted mass of tree lights dragged out of the basement. While they tested those out, Robbie would usually be sitting by the fireplace cracking open his pistachios, which made his fingers all red, throwing away each empty shell into the flames in the fireplace. On Christmas mornings, Jamie and Ron would assume their individual roles. Jamie helped put together his toys, and Ron would pick out the records that the Sanchez family would listen to that day.

Consuelo picked out the biggest fir she could find three days before Christmas. It filled the living room. And two days before Christmas, Ethan and his mother dotted the green giant with toy soldiers, white doves, and blue bulbs, making the already beautiful tree come truly to life. “We’ve never had a better tree!” Consuelo exclaimed when they were done. As a final touch, Connie put out her carolers, hand-carved wooden dolls on every available space she could find on the first floor, placing boughs and holly behind all of them.

But the trouble started when Ron and Jamie arrived at the condo on Christmas Eve. Ron arrived first, having flown into Albany from San Francisco, renting a car to make the solo drive to Pittsfield. Jamie got a ride from Providence to Pittsfield from a fellow ROTC cadet who lived nearby.

When those two arrived at the condo that morning, Ernesto and Ethan were away. Ernesto was playing squash at the country club’s racquet facility. The courts may have sounded fancy on paper, but they were really housed in something no better than an enlarged ski hut. It normally stayed ice cold. Like he had done lots of time before, Ethan watched his father play from the stands above the court that morning. He watched as Ernesto bullied around a seventy-five-year-old Hungarian obstetrician, who bitterly complained about Ernesto’s sharp elbows. “I won’t play with you!!” the man screamed after his father slammed the frozen ball into the small of his back for a third time.

Back at the condo at the same time as this was happening, Ron, newly arrived, was sitting on the paisley couch holding court with Consuelo. He put on The Carpenters’ “Christmas Portrait” on CD, and regaled Consuelo with tales of life back in San Francisco. She had a little trouble understanding what her oldest son did inside of the tower on California Street but just the fact that he worked forty stories in a building seemed impressive, and she smiled as he twice tried to explain what junk bonds were.

At about 11 a.m., Jamie let himself into the condo, walking into the living room and smiling at the pair seated on the couch. He dropped the green duffel bag whose strap dug into his shoulder, and he pretended not to notice as Ron stared holes through his grey sweatshirt that read “Army.” He kept smiling until the sides of his mouth started hurting. It was then that Ron called his brother a “jarhead.”

“Those are the Marines,” said Jamie, still standing in the same place as if he was stuck. “Are you still a thirty-year-old pothead?”

Ron laughed, putting down his glass of wine. He then squinted. “So, how do they train tin soldiers nowadays? They still wind them up and let ‘em go? All of it seems pretty brain dead to me.”

Jamie stared at Ron. “Good to see you, Ron. Hi, Mom,” he said. He then grabbed his bag and headed for Ethan’s room, where he was staying. Ron and Robbie were staying in a hotel downtown, which now seemed like a good idea.

“There is something wrong with you,” Consuelo told Ron, when Jamie disappeared from view and climbed the stairs.

“He’ll be fine,” Ron assured her. “He’s too sensitive, although his hat size now looks three times bigger.”

Consuelo continued to look at Ron. But then let it go, Ethan and Ernesto were back home.

While she tossed the salad in the brown wooden bowl later in the kitchen before dinner, Connie thought on it more, and she knew what was going on with Ron and Jamie. Or at least she thought she knew. Naturally, it was Ernesto’s fault.

The fights between her and her husband started from almost the second they were married. They were both Latin, both fiery. Ernesto developed such a good sense of timing over time, that he would know the second before he was about to get slapped, and that gave him time to remove his glasses. That was them, but it naturally didn’t end with them. It involved the kids from an early age, where Ron could always be counted on to take her side. He was the one to stick his neck out for her and he soon regretted it. “You’re a mean abusive asshole,” Ron had told his own father at twelve. His brothers joked that Ron was Consuelo’s “boy.” But to Ernesto, it was no joke. “You’re two perfect assholes,” is a line he used more than once. There were much worse things said, and Ernesto quickly turned Ron mean. The injustice he felt by simply sticking up for their mother was almost too much to bear sometimes. And the tension between father and son grew as the sense of injustice grew wider.

As he grew older, Ron assumed an alpha male stance with his brothers. If he was the only one who would back their mother in the Sanchez wars, his brothers either needed to back him completely or take a seat. He accepted no challenges. Robbie, a middle child, was kind of mellow and meek. Ethan was too little, an afterthought. But that left Jamie. Jamie was someone who marched to his own beat, and he wasn’t standing two steps back behind anyone. That naturally led to fights, some vicious, most often physical. Even so, when Jamie decided he would join the Army, he found it astounding that Ron mocked him for it. He figured it would pass. But it never did. Consuelo barely drank but she now pulled down a bottle of sherry from the cabinet where Ernesto kept his Popov. She needed something.

Consuelo was glad that Robbie was home, in the nick of time too, because he had held back Jamie who had knocked over a chair to get at Ron half an hour before dinner. Now everyone was safely seated at the old mahogany dining table that looked out of place in the new condo, but was the same table that the Sanchez family had eaten together at for years. But just because everyone was seated safely now, it didn’t mean that everyone was completely steady around the table. As she poured herself two more swallows of Chablis from the green bottle in front of her, she looked over across the round table and she thought Ron looked loaded. Just a little while ago, her son had almost dumped the seasoned, oiled, salted and baked new potatoes onto the kitchen floor. Leave it to Ernesto, to poison their oldest with Popov, to a degree where he was now practically cross eyed. And she was now freshly horrified by Ernesto’s latest great idea: To have Ron say grace for all of them before they began eating. Maybe Ernesto with his own bathtub of Popov had lost his own senses. Because Ron was now on his feet, barely, and she could have died on the spot.

Ron raised his glass of red filled high to the top, scanned the room, before his haughty gaze landed on Jamie. Not just on Jamie’s face either, which would have been more normal, but his fresh buzz cut, and then his broader shoulders that had grown substantially while Jamie had been away. Then he started.

“It’s so wonderful to be in this new home with family. And to see everyone — everyone but Michael. Because he is a jarhead,” said Ron, reaching down to try to slap his thigh with his free hand, but missing. Jamie wasn’t taking any chances, as he flipped the table over like a barbarian, making sure it toppled onto Ron. Consuelo actually saw the beautifully roasted chicken lying splayed on Ron’s face for a second before it slid helplessly onto the floor. Her mouth dropped open but no words came. She looked at Ernesto, seeking help from him, but he just sat there with puckered lips. Even the glass of vodka was still in his hands. That hadn’t been harmed at all.

No one went to jail, no one was even injured too badly, in the full on fight that took place in the chaotic aftermath of the thrown table. But that was because Robbie acted quick and jumped on Jamie, riding him down to the ground like a cow, before Jamie could destroy the furniture. And it was Robbie who had the foresight of calling the closest Chinese restaurant within minutes of the fight so that no one would starve that night.

In the years that followed, Ethan couldn’t remember at gunpoint what Chinese dishes they ate that night. What he mostly remembered of the rest of the night is that no one went to church. Robbie watched “Rich Man, Poor Man” alone in the living room until it was late. Christmas Day was also a blur. But on the day after, Robbie took him to the only department store left on North Street. While there, they spent one whole hour looking for the perfect pair of hockey skates. Robbie was amazed that no one had ever taught him to skate. He said that was an actual sin. And he promised to rectify that on the spot.

With the skates secured, they spent the rest of that cold afternoon skating on the frozen pond next to the club’s racquet facility, with Ethan trying to skate without falling on his ass every two seconds. Every once in a while, they could hear the sound of a squash ball smacking up against the marked up wall inside of the ski hut, while also hearing screams, cries, and muffled swear words. Their father was inside working. But when he was done working, they picked up Jamie from the Boys Club downtown. Ernesto said he’d pick up Ron later, so they left him at the bar. He said he knew his son and he just needed time to blow off steam. Everything would be back to normal tomorrow, he said.