TREYF by Elissa Altman

Chiclet teeth, which he would have cleaned monthly at the dentist whose office was on the ground floor of The Brussels, Buck was a math teacher at a local Catholic boys’ high school and utterly devoted to children and their well-being.
    As much as Buck loved children was exactly how much Velma loathed them; their daughter, Darleen, born with spina bifida, seemed to exhaust Velma with every pull and drag of her child’s heavy wheelchair, her every need to be tended, morning and night. Over a pizza and Tang dinner one night at their powder blue apartment when I was ten, I caught Velma glaring at me across their mahogany dining room table after Buck and my parents had stepped outside onto the terrace to have a cigarette.
    â€œWhat?” I whispered to her across the pile of oil-stained pizza boxes, while Darleen, sitting next to me on a square couch pillow, played with her food.
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
blared from the abandoned television in the living room.
    â€œNothing, Elissa,” Velma sighed. She shook her head, pushed herself away from the table, stood up, flattened out her apron, and slunk into the bedroom, alone; I heard the click of the button in the doorknob.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    V elma had moved to New York from eastern Kansas in 1954 to launch an acting career that never took off; instead, she was relegated to odd jobs as a hand double in short television commercials for second-tier products, like Rinso Soap, the camerastopping just north of her slender wrists
.
Ten years later, she met Buck at a party—recently divorced and handsome beyond her wildest dreams—married him, gave birth to Darleen, and spent most of her time dressed in a flowered cotton apron in their kitchen in The Marseilles, turning out breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her new family: her freezer was stockpiled with Swanson frozen dinners—honey-fried chicken, the complete turkey dinner, Salisbury steak, Welsh rarebit—for every occasion. The only time she actually cooked anything from scratch was at Christmas, when she produced a ham for me, my parents, Buck and Darleen, and the Hoffmanns, as a show, she announced, of Christian goodwill. The size of a beach ball, it was served studded with cloves and canned pineapple rings held in place with red- and green-dyed toothpicks that bled into the meat while it sat roasting for hours in their Caloric oven. When it was ready, Velma dragged it out and onto a mottled-glass cutting board while my parents, Inga, George, Tor, Eddie, Darleen, and I played with the three Berkowitz Chihuahuas and helped Buck unpack cardboard shoeboxes filled with plastic Victorian carolers in top hats and bonnets, their tiny red mouths shaped into perfect Os.
    â€œBuck!” Velma would bleat from the kitchen. “Have them set up the carolers on the mantelpiece!”
    Buck lifted up the white plastic fireplace that had sat propped against the living room wall since Thanksgiving, and hung it off two small metal picture hooks. One by one, Eddie and Tor and I took turns positioning the tiny carolers on the fake mantelpiece. Switched on, the fireplace played an endless loop of Mantovani Christmas music while a small fan blew three orange velvet ribbonsagainst a hard plastic backdrop onto which was painted a flaming Yule log. Darleen, sitting in her wheelchair and dressed like a much younger child in a red velvet jumper flecked with tiny green reindeer, her legs encased in white Danskin leotards, howled with glee and applauded. Buck scooped her out of her chair and bounced her and her rubbery toy Rudolph over to the fireplace, where she stood the reindeer up in the middle of the arrangement and cooed.
    â€œJust like Tiny Tim!” Tor shouted.
    â€œDon’t be an
asshole
,” my father mumbled, grabbing Tor’s collar and pulling him away from the fireplace while George and Inga huddled together on the terrace, away from the festivities, their backs to