The Last Noel by Michael Malone Page A

dial to the Motown station where the Drifters were singing “White Christmas.” He shook out one of his grandmother's aprons, held it so the sunflower spread across his chest. “Outta sight. I’m telling you, slap these sunflowers on wild-color T-shirts, you can sell ’em, make some bread.”
    â€œYou can sell ’em,” agreed Parker. “Every jive turkey in town be wearing a big yellow flower.”
    â€œFlower power to the people, Grandma. Later.” Kaye tossed the apron back on her table and pulled Parker with him across the room.
    â€œKaye! You come back in here and put on a coat. It's cold out there. Kaye!”
    The door slammed as she turned up the radio. Tat yelled, “I can’t hear my program in here,” and turned up the television. A TV voice was singing, “Here comes Google with the goo goo googly eyes” about that horrible chocolate and vanilla peanut butter that Tat would eat right out of the jar with a spoon.
    Amma turned off her music and went back to work. She pinned a sunflower onto an apron bib, smoothed the cloth under the foot pedal of her sewing machine, and looked out the window at Heaven's Hill where all the lights were still on.

    At Moors High School gym the spinning planets were deflating and the sparkle lights were blinking out in the fiberglass snow of the Stardust Court. Hands held tightly between them, Noni and Roland were slow-dancing to the last dance, John Lennon's “Imagine” without the words. Inside her head Noni was singing the words about imagine all the people living life in peace, while the outside of her head was pressed into the silky lapel of Roland's tuxedo. She could feel his warm breath in her hair as he whispered, “You’re the most beautiful girl here. I’m a lucky guy.”
    This conjunction, or disjunction, between imagining world peace and feeling Roland's breath was symptomatic of how Noni had felt through the entire Christmas dance—Stardust on Mars, it was called—as if she were looking at the gathering through peculiar binoculars that caused her to see completely different scenes through each of the lens, one far away, one very close. Far away, the dance looked like the tacky Snowland at the mall, a row of cheap plastic Christmas trees in front of which children got their pictures taken with Santa, with the odd addition here in the gym of a solar system of painted balls hanging from the ceiling representing the planets (in the wrong order). Far away, girls without their dance partners lookedmiserably perky laughing together in corners, while the boys who were supposed to be dancing with them ran outside to drink or do drugs; teachers didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Far away, Noni could imagine Kaye's look of exaggerated comic horror at the poor dancers, or the talentless band, which played everything from David Bowie to the Allman Brothers in the same thumping style. Far away, she could imagine the speech on archaic sex roles delivered by her best friend Bunny Breckenridge, who had gone tonight to see The Garden of the Finzi-Continis with “The Outsies,” the group of self-described hippies and nerds with whom she and Noni had picketed the Moors draft board to protest the Vietnam War.
    But close-up, Roland Hurd, who would never picket anything, was leaning down to kiss Noni sweetly on the face and then on the lips. “My dad's so right,” he whispered. “You’re the best of the best.” Close up, other senior boys were cutting in on Roland to dance with her. Senior girls ran over to ask her where she’d bought her dress. Roland did, well, not real dance steps like the ones Kaye and she had choreographed together, but Roland moved his body in ways that felt very pleasant. He had no doubts when he danced, which made it easy to give in to him.
    Indeed, Roland Hurd appeared to have no doubts about anything in the world, including facts that Noni was