Anyway, that was the end of the parties. But we set up the village, in our new apartment. The Christmas village. Actually, if you want to know, Mother put a board over the black metal bed frame in her room. A big pine board that she found in the parking lot behind our new apartment complex, that was better, she said, than our old house, because it had a pool and a community game room, and she set the village up on that, on the board I mean. We sprayed the board white one afternoon, soon after we moved in, and she brought out the Christmas box as a surprise and set up the little houses even though it was July, and said, See? We can live like we want to now! We can do anything! Anything is possible now. Now that we are here. We slept in sleeping bags together underneath the bed with the Christmas village on top of it for months and months and months. We even left the lights on in the houses all night long so they would speckle the dark walls in the new apartment. We loved to fall asleep to the whirring of the ceramic children skating on the plastic ice. We were waiting you see, for everything to happen.

You mustn’t imagine, my mother said to me once from our hiding place under the Christmas bed, you mustn’t imagine that I’m not any fun. You mustn’t imagine that we can’t now have wonderfully good times right here. I can remember her voice, the way she said it to me. The way it sounded exactly as if she was asking me to give her something back.

There’s something about December for me I suppose, it seems like a place, an island maybe, and January means leaving and February means having left. And here we are. I only wanted to tell you I suppose, because of that.

It seems silly, to talk about Christmas parties, about my mother. Maybe you think so too. Maybe you think it’s quite silly. I tried to tell the doctor about the Christmas parties, about my mother, the village, the dress, but he wouldn’t listen. I said, and I was trying to be funny, But aren’t you supposed to talk about your mother in places like this? But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t laugh so much that it was the opposite of laughing. What is that? I can’t think of the word for it, for the opposite of laughing, but it’s something isn’t it, that leaves one quite alone. He said, clicking his black and gold Montblanc pen, that there were other things to talk about and I said, I was only making a joke! And he said this is not the place for jokes and I said, Honestly! And he said, Honestly.

11

I had the gift for the baby on the table by the door. The gift was just right. M would be home after dinner tonight, I could feel it. I was so certain that he would.