TREYF by Elissa Altman Page B

for Tor and Eddie and Darleen. On our way out of the store, my parents plunk me down on the lap of the store Santa and snap a picture. In it, I am smiling and looking away coyly while Santa asks me what I want for Christmas and I say
A Christmas tree
and my father grabs my hand and yanks me out of the store and out to the car.
    Gaga comes running down the hallway, nearly tripping over the dog, and her eyes grow misty when she sees the actor and the rocker—Bing in a blue golf sweater, Bowie in a tight shirt, a massive gold cross dangling around his neck as though he himself might be crucified. They’re standing on a set decorated like an empty parish house attached to a very old church, with a piano and a Gothic window behind the two singers.
    â€œMy favorite song,” Gaga says wistfully, standing over me in my bedroom with a Teflon spatula in one hand and an oily kitchen towel in the other. We watch the little Sony Trinitron television that my parents have given me for Hanukah; she begins to croon in a low, guttural mezzo-soprano with one of the most bizarre duets ever assembled for modern television, between a 1940s movie star with a strong religious, right-wing streak anda space oddity who sometimes goes by the name of Ziggy Stardust and apparently likes boys. And sometimes, girls.
    Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum.
    Gaga loves this song; she’s loved it since she first heard it on the radio in the late 1950s, alone in her Williamsburg apartment while my mother was out of the house and singing on network television, and Grandpa Phil was working at his furniture store down the street, supplying most of his neighbors and Sister Redempta’s orphanage with the mundanity of life—the dour mahogany beds, chairs, desks, tables that reeked of utility and plainness. It’s Christmastime and I imagine that Gaga’s Italian neighbors have decorated their windows with wreaths and tinsel, and tied balsam roping around the banister from the ground floor all the way up to the roof. Sweet, yeasty clouds of baking panettone slither out from beneath her neighbors’ doors, and Mrs. Lambiazi, who lives two flights below her, comes up to borrow extra egg whites for the torrone she’s making for her son, who is coming in from Providence with his new wife and baby. By the twenty-third, Gaga tells me thirty years later, the building begins to smell like a fish market: her neighbors are making baccalà and scampi and fried eel, and there’s so much pounding and chopping and shouting in Italian going on in the other apartments that she turns on the radio to calm her nerves, and sits down at her kitchen table to listen, alone, and hears, for the first time,
The Little Drummer Boy.
    Gaga longs to cook great, immense holiday meals that herfamily—her four sisters and their husbands and children, her own daughter and husband—will love and look forward to every year. But her sisters have scattered, some to Florida, some to New Jersey, and her daughter is afraid of food and starved herself to lose weight so that she could be on television; her husband can’t keep weight on no matter what she feeds him and treats food like the fuel he pumps into his Plymouth. So Gaga makes her weekly chicken soup, and her weekly blintzes, and her weekly brisket as if it was nothing more than a chore. It is eaten by her, by her husband, by her daughter, mechanically, angrily, on the run, and entirely without pleasure. Gaga finds her peace and contentment, instead, in the thrice-weekly, middle-of-the-day trips she makes to Leroy Street in Greenwich Village, to see her beloved lady friend Norah; Gaga cooks what she knows Norah loves, and they’ll be together through the afternoon, drinking strong tea and sometimes sherry, until Gaga has to take the L train from Fourteenth Street all the way east through Manhattan and across the bridge back to Williamsburg, before Phil comes home from the store, before anyone