One of Santa’s cookies had been bitten. June saw it when she trundled downstairs at 7 a.m. after a sleepless night-before-Christmas. Before bed, she’d perused her husband Andrew’s Facebook conversation with an ex-girlfriend from 28 years ago. A mistake as it turned out.
She picked up the plate for a closer look. It was a significant bite—a major snap, as though the cookie had been tossed into the air and someone, or something, had taken a champion hit. It couldn’t have been mice—the bite was too big. And it couldn’t have been Andrew, June’s husband, who had insisted on leaving cookies “for Santa,” even though their two boys were no longer living at home. All night, Andrew had been out as cold as their now dead downstairs fire. June had been awake through the night and into the morning. Over and over, she’d picked up her cell from the bedside table and re-read Andrew’s comment on a post by “Cheshire,” the derisive name she’d given his ex-girlfriend from 28 years before. “True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,” Andrew had written under a cartoon Cheshire had posted about Trump and a stripper.
What the hell had her husband meant?
If Andrew had risen and slipped downstairs or even rolled over hard, June would have known because she’d been wide awake on her back next to him the whole night, contemplating Cheshire’s toothy smile and trying to figure out Andrew’s weird comment.
Andrew hadn’t bitten that chunk out of the cookie. And look—the second cookie, the gingerbread man, that one had its head missing. Could she make the missing head into an omen, a sign? Had something dreadful happened to one of her sons? Jim, the older one by two years, was living in Brazil, John in London. Were they in danger? Maybe she would worry about them more if she really knew what they were up to day to day. Jim had won a social justice related fellowship to Brazil after graduating from college. Because of his almost fluent Portuguese, she guessed. Where her boys had gotten their ability to learn foreign languages, June didn’t know. Jim stayed in Rio after the year was up mostly because he’d fallen in love with a French-Canadian girl who was, June feared, more smitten with causes having to do with indigenous rights than she was with her son. And John, dear sweet John, was studying curating at the Courtland and was apparently Ga Ga (Jim’s word) over a Bangladeshi girl.
June looked down at Santa’s cookies and decided not to polish them off. She still cared enough about her figure so that if she ate them, she might just consider throwing them up. She sat on the couch with the cookbook, Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi. Reading recipes: her go-to when she couldn’t sleep. Jim had sent this latest book, through Amazon of course. He knew she’d like the complexity of the recipes and she did. John the one who was typically more attentive to his parents—to June, especially—hadn’t, it seemed, sent a present at all.
A car’s headlights from the side street intruded on her thoughts for a moment. She heard the refrigerator cycle on in the kitchen and turned the giant cookbook over on her knee.
It wasn’t as if June really cared about Santa’s cookies. She hadn’t wanted to put them out to begin with, not this year, the first year the boys were not coming home for Christmas. She and Andrew had argued over the amount of money each boy would get in lieu of presents and Andrew had wanted the amount to be bigger than she had. Had she wanted to punish them for not coming home? She’d offered to pay their way back and they’d very politely said No.
Andrew came downstairs wearing his red and white striped pajamas, which June hated.
“Hi Candy Cane,” she said.
It wasn’t fair and she knew it. For three years running she’d given Andrew pajamas for Christmas, and he’d refused to wear them. A month ago, he’d decided to start wearing them, though only the red and white stripers. He now moved around the house from computer to TV to books to yellow legal pad, conducting his (to June) slightly mysterious and still decently lucrative investment business wearing the stripes, like a merry jailbird. How could she tell him to cut it out? The pajamas had been her idea.
He let the Candy Cane bit go and nodded amiably.
“Santa seems to have eaten some of the cookies,” she told him.
He frowned at the plate. He saw the head that was missing from Mr. Gingerbread, the butter cookie angel with the bitten wing. “Wasn’t you?” he said. “Keeping trim and all.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Your women’s group didn’t come over in the middle of last night, did it? Did they nibble Santa’s cookies while they talked more about men and their many flaws?” He fake glowered, at her.
Twenty-five years plus of marriage and she wasn’t always sure how serious Andrew was. Her sons often hadn’t known either, like when they were five and four and he’d told them with a straight face that, If it doesn’t snow Santa will not show. Tears dropped from Jim’s eyes while John ran to the room the boys had chosen to share until they were teenagers. “What does Dad mean?” one or the other often asked her. Was never quite knowing what their father meant part of what had sent them so far away?
June was sure that Andrew didn’t think that her women friends—Sylvia and Anna and Sandhya—had slipped in on Christmas Eve and taken cookie bites. Maybe he was registering more displeasure about the women’s group. It was, she had to admit, meeting more and more lately. To discuss books, sure, but also men and their ascent (unfortunate), men and their decline (inevitable).
June liked irony herself but as the head of a small private pre-school, she couldn’t afford much of it. Try being ironic to a five-year-old. Not easy. Try being ironic to the five-year old’s parents on the subject of the five-year- old—even harder.
Andrew was still focused on the plate with the cookies on it. She watched him pick up the gingerbread person, study it two inches from his eyes—he likely didn’t have his contact lenses in yet. She expected him to say something—
“Merry Christmas to you too,” she said and turned the cookbook—so beautiful it was—back over as though she were going to read.
Andrew bit off a leg of the g-bread person and put the now headless, one-legged body back on the plate.
“Merry merry, merry,” he said, but muffled by his chewing sound. She watched him walk into the kitchen, saw him shrug his shoulders as if signifying that he didn’t care that the cookies had mysteriously been interfered with in the middle of the night. She heard the coffee grinder and a minute later the delicious smell of his pour over. God she wished she could drink the stuff.
Butternut squash with ginger tomatoes and lime yogurt, she read, running her eyes down the list of ingredients. She could make this to go with the rack of lamb she’d picked up yesterday from the new butcher on Main Street—she loved going in there—the young, strangely-bearded men, hipsters, she supposed though she hadn’t heard the word used much lately, as handsome and charming as her sons.
And then there was Andrew standing in front of her, still as striped as a barber’s pole, handing her a mug of green tea. She took it. He plopped himself down next to her, his god-awful pajamas actually touching her cashmere robe, her thigh to his thigh, his shoulder to hers.
“Just you and me,” he said. He took a slurpy sip of his brew, rubbing it in, her sensitive stomach: no sweets, no coffee, no fun.
“Maybe it was your girlfriend,” she said. It came out flat rather than ironic. Clearly irony wasn’t something you could use just because you liked it, just because you lived with someone who’d pretty much mastered it.
“My girlfriend? Oh, right, Cheshire.”
“Yes,” she persisted, “your girlfriend.”
“You’re my girlfriend,” he said, and gave her a nuzzle. She didn’t really want to kiss him. But she wanted to get closer to the coffee smell, the coffee taste, and something else too that she couldn’t quite name.
She kissed him. It was Christmas. He was the father of their children. But she had her suspicions. She broke away before anything more developed and he got ideas. Morning sex had always been her preference, not his. He looked at her, his lips glistening with her saliva, as if to say, Suspicions? But how could you not suspect somebody who couldn’t say things straight out?
The morning light was smoky and dull, like plain oatmeal. She reached back behind the couch to flick the switch controlling the colored bulbs on the Christmas tree. Purple, white, red, blue, pink and green splattered festively against one of the triple hung windows flanking the empty fireplace. June rose to adjust the arrangement of evergreen boughs on the Jeffersonian-style white mantelpiece. Andrew approved the new configuration by making a smacking noise with the side of his mouth, the kind of cheesy noise a different sort of guy might make to signify approval of, say, a woman’s ass.
“Look,” he said as if he thought he knew what she was thinking, “I must have bitten into Santa’s cookies during the night. I probably got up to go to the bathroom—“
“You’re fibbing Andrew. I’ve been up all night—“
“—worrying about the cookies, worrying that a girlfriend of mine snuck in and took bites. Jesus June. If I had a girlfriend she’d be someone who’d eat the whole thing.”
“I had insomnia. I didn’t know about the cookie attack at that point, but I’d have seen you get up if you had and you didn’t—you tossed a bit, and snored some, but mostly you were out.”
“Maybe you dozed off and that’s when I got up—“
“Nice try,” she said and tapped on her Apple Watch. “It records my sleep, my lack of sleep in this case. You want to see?“
“You and your watch,” he said. “All I know is that when people say they haven’t slept at all it’s almost never true. It’s hyperbole. It means they slept badly.” He got up and rubbed his hands together as if he were cold. He balled up newspaper, knelt in his striped pj’s, picked out kindling and pieces of firewood he had actually split himself—it calmed him to swing an axe in his free time, he claimed—and soon enough he had a fire going.
He came back to the couch for his coffee, she supposed, and he seemed to feel as easy as ever plopping his bottom down next to her again. His ridiculously flannelled knees were coated in creosote now and his thigh knocked hers just as it had minutes before.
“I’m sorry you didn’t sleep well—”
“—at all. I didn’t sleep at all,” she corrected.
“What if I told you you were practically snoring—you had your phone on your stomach and you were snoring without the snort.”
“I’d say you were making it up—“
“And I know you like your woman’s group,” he said as if he imagined her sleeplessness and her women’s group were somehow connected, “and I think it’s a great thing. I like all three of them, really I do. Even Sandhya, but Sandhya’s a trouble maker. If Sandhya had a husband, she’d make him get on all fours and function as her ottoman part of every day.”
“Oh stop it,” June said and stopped herself from scolding him for saying something that she knew might be racist.
“She thinks she should be Queen of the Ottoman Empire.”
“You’re unbelievable.” She shook her head. But there it was: he could make her laugh when she didn’t want to laugh. Laughter was an odd thing. It could make you dumb or it could make you see the other side. It could also suppress her otherwise strong ability to respond logically, aggressively. Only later when it was too late could she come up with the stinging thing she should have said.
Andrew downed the last of his coffee and held the mug over his crotch as if he were warming his penis, as if he were oblivious to the fact that she was almost angry over his stupid Ottoman comment.
“Admit it,” he insisted. “Sandhya hates men, especially men who are P-O-Ps, you know, POPs, and she’s jealous that you have a husband who, after 26 years of marriage mind you, still—well, look,” he said and lifted his coffee mug to show her what was happening beneath it.
“Wait. What’s a POP?” June asked. She hated that she had to know and so be more distracted from formulating the things she needed to say to set him straight, including that there was no possibility of morning sex.
“I’m a POP,” he said. “A dad. An in-okay-shape, aging, white guy with two adult children—with you.” He moved to kiss her again. But she drew away. Still the coffee smelled good, it reminded her of Morocco where they’d gone on a five-week backpacking vacation, before the boys were born, before they’d had jobs and had them longer, before their tall brick house in downtown Staunton was paid for and even before there had been a house. Before she had to give up coffee.
She moved to make him think she might kiss him back. “Just tell me,” she said. “Tell me before anything more happens.”
“Tell you what?” The business inside the candy stripe pajamas was getting more resolute, more soldierly. Once—was it in Morocco, she thought it was—he’d compared her to a snake charmer. And now, even now, she was charmed a little (just a little) by her charming powers. There was that and there was the coffee, the smell of a deep teak chest opening.
He had to pass just one more test—this man, this husband, this Andrew, who simply would not tell you what he meant, would not lay it out, who kept using his joie de vivre or whatever it was, his put-on superiority maybe, to refuse being literal.
“What the FUCK,” she screamed, “is a P-O-P, a POP?”
At the door, a young man who though he had neglected to buy a Christmas present had traveled a long way, heard June’s plaintive scream—the scream of someone desperate to know what was what. The scream that he’d heard so many times before from his mother and had bottled up in his own throat countless more. Perhaps that’s why he’d come home after all: to consider this man with fresh eyes, this father who’d been able to make them all laugh (and cringe or cry secretly). Perhaps now that John had more than a few times given in to the urge to tease, to let fly a distancing remark at the young Bangladeshis woman he was seriously serious about, it was time to take a sharp look at the man he might start to resemble if he wasn’t careful.
“A POP is a harmless person,” Andrew said to his wife softly. “A now unfashionable person. A Person of Palor. Tell Sandhya when you see her next that your POP is, in addition, a P-U-P, or PUP, otherwise known as a Pathetically Uxorious Person.”
“Yeah, right.” At least sarcasm was a note she could hit. And June melted five degrees and half-smiled. The soldier was still ready.
Absorbed as they were in the near inevitability of Christmas sex, neither June nor Andrew heard the muted clops of heel-toe on the front step as their visitor—late night cookie biter—made his way back to the rental car.
Hours earlier he had taken his shoes off and snuck, as gently as a robber who knew where the key was might, into the house through the back door. Whether his mother had been dozing upstairs or lying face-up beside Andrew on her side of the bed, eyes open with phone on stomach, John didn’t know. His cell had flashed 4 a.m. and he’d assumed they were both asleep. An almost full moon gave the tidy, well-known rooms he sock-slid through an idyllic, candle-lit glow that he wasn’t sure the rooms could live up to when daylight struck.
His plan had been to sleep on the couch next to the tastefully ornamented fir tree. He stopped himself from turning its lights on. Bending a bough, he sniffed with nostalgic satisfaction. When John saw Santa’s cookies, he smiled. That’s when he decided to give his father a riddle he wouldn’t be able to solve right away.
John bit a cookie, then another, put them enigmatically back on the plate, and returned to his rental car, buzzing the seat all the way back for a surprisingly deep and dreamless nap. At daylight, he would make an entrance. Surprise.
When John approached the front door three hours later, he heard the not unfamiliar sound of his parents arguing and turned back toward the comfort of the rental car. Oh for a cup of coffee. Nothing would be open on Christmas morning, he knew. He would bide more time parked in the driveway. He guessed it wouldn’t be too long until his parents were doing something he could comfortably break in on, like making pancakes together and, if he timed his entrance right, the surprise of a morning arrival at his childhood home would result in unprecedented warmth from his father and, for John and his mother, full-out joy.