TREYF by Elissa Altman Page A

their children, watching the Christmas lights flicker over The Champs-Élysées Promenade.
    Once the ham was eaten and small bowls of vanilla ice cream topped with maraschino cherries were sucked down, Buck, Darleen, my father, and I bundled ourselves up and took the dogs out for a nighttime walk. While my father held the leashes of all four dogs, Buck bent down at my feet and zipped up my Mighty Mac, gently tousling my hair when he reached my chin; I loved him for his tenderness, but stopped myself from telling him so.
    â€œIt’s
f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g
—aren’t you cold, honey?” He fake-shivered, and helped me into my mittens. I wanted to fling my arms around his neck, rest my head on his shoulder and never let go.
    Buck picked up the Chihuahuas and set them down on a threadbare blue towel draped across Darleen’s lap, and I pushed her along in her wheelchair, her motionless legs pointed straight out in front of her. My father and Buck followed slowly behind us as I struggledto maneuver my friend’s leaden weight into the promenade and up to Austin Street. I wheeled her past John’s Candy Store and Tess’s Dry Cleaning towards the Associated grocery at the end of the block. We stopped, alone, under the glare of a streetlight, as though it were any other ordinary winter evening, and I pulled the brake lever on Darleen’s wheelchair. Austin Street was like a barren Hollywood back lot: there was not a single holiday display coloring the cold gray sky. The dogs perched on her lap, Darleen looked forward with an unsure grin, wide-eyed and unblinking, as if to the future and towards something only she could see. Our fathers came up behind us, talking about Long Island—the South Shore versus the North, where the better school districts were—and who would be able to move their family out to the suburbs first to get away from the griminess and danger of the city.
    â€œWe can go anytime,” I heard Buck say to my father, who stopped to light two cigarettes, one for each of them, in his hand cupped against the cold.
    I waited for them to catch up to us, their only children and their dogs, and I reached forward to gently touch the back of Darleen’s head with a gloved hand; even through the wool, her dark brown hair felt delicate and silky, like an infant’s. She was fragile and suddenly, I knew, somehow, that she would die. My throat clutched the way it did when I was about to weep, and something warm climbed into my chest towards my heart, and engulfed it.

6

Christmas
    E very night, there is another celebrity Christmas special to watch on television: The Osmond Brothers, singing carols from Temple Square in Salt Lake City, enormous flakes of snow settling down on their thick, gorgeous Mormon eyelashes. John Denver, wearing a metallic silver, yoke-front Western-style shirt, performs from inside a heated glass geodesic dome atop a mountain in Aspen, while Annie Denver and a group of their hippie friends watch contemplatively through matching round granny glasses. There’s
The Andy Williams Christmas Show
and
The Partridge Family
,
The Brady Bunch
, the Carpenters, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin, who sings
Ave Maria
. There’s Perry Como, who my mother swoons over, and when Bing Crosby sings
The Little Drummer Bo
y with David Bowie, I yell for Gaga, who is frying potato latkes in our kitchen.
    I am not allowed to have a Christmas tree—my father believesthat it’s symbolic of everything Christian and pagan, and it would certainly kill his Orthodox father if he ever found out about it—even though my mother had one as a child. She grew up in Williamsburg among a sea of Catholic neighbors, like Grandpa Phil’s best friend, Sister Redempta, who ran a parochial school for orphaned boys.
    â€œIt was really just a holiday bush,” my mother tells me and my father while we drive home from a shopping trip to Macy’s, where he lets me pick out Hanukah gifts