SNIPPINGS by Dawn Abeita

          When the phone rang early on Christmas morning,  Calvin knew it would wake Kathryn.  He picked up the phone in the kitchen.  “That was Joelle,” he said a few minutes later when he appeared in the bedroom doorway.  “I thought you were still asleep.” 

“Well, she’s up early,” said Kathryn. 

“It’s not early there,” he said.  “Remember?”  Their daughter had moved to New York nearly a year ago and Kathryn was not adjusting to the time difference very well. 

“She says it might snow and that her cat tore her only present to shreds during the night.  Not counting the money we sent her, of course.” 

“It’s what she wanted,” said Kathryn.  She sat up in the bed and propped some pillows behind her.  A few years before, she had stopped dyeing her hair the rich red she’d always kept it.  It spread across her shoulders coarse and gray.

“You’ve never been content with merely what someone wanted,” said Calvin, but Kathryn didn’t rise to the bait.  They used to have terrific conversations, long debates that lasted for days and ended up far from where they’d begun, ones in which the bait was always taken. 

“I wonder what the present was,” she said.

“She said she thought it had once been something knitted by her friend Jean, since what was left was just yarn.  She said she didn’t like the yarn anyway.  She said it was mauve.” 

“Mauve,” said Kathryn.  She looked out the window at the fog that was always present this time of day and this time of year.  The old Kathryn would not have approved of mauve.  She liked only purples, reds, rich greens and golds, like a gypsy. “Is there coffee yet?” she asked. 

“Sure shootin’ ,” he said.  “With or without a booster?”

“With,” she said. 

Calvin went back to the big kitchen where the coffee had finished perking.  He poured some into a cup that Kathryn had made years ago when she was into pottery.  That was an interest he thought would never die, that and the garden and the demonstrations and the party giving.  Kathryn had always been so full of interests, burning interests: political, social, artistic.  But ever since she’d turned seventy in July, she’d dropped them all.  Now, she listened to the news with indifference, and the asparagus in its garden bed was allowed to grow thick as candles.  She did not telephone what friends they had left. Instead she would sit by the window with an old stack of magazines snipping out pictures and parts of articles.  He tried to find some theme in what she’d snipped, something that would suggest that she had a project in mind, or something that would give him some Freudian peek into her psyche, but he could detect no pattern at all.  Sometimes she cut right through the middle of words, the middle of pictures.  She did not seem concerned with anything but the act of cutting. 

He opened the gift box of Irish Cream they always bought for themselves this time of year and poured a portion into each of their cups.  It was a tradition left over from their days of merriment.  Many a Christmas Kathryn had declared that his only present from her was herself, and then she’d put on some music and strip for him or wrap herself in tinsel or some such, and he’d sip Irish Cream and watch a while until he could stand it no longer.

When he carried the mugs back into the bedroom, he found the bed empty.  He could hear water running in the bathtub.  He knocked on the closed bathroom door.  “Your coffee will get cold,” he said.  “Want it in there?”  She did not answer, so he put the coffee cup on the bed table and went away.  He had learned lately not to expect a response.  Sometimes when she was snipping from her magazines, she hummed random, straying notes.  They had no tune.  They reminded him more of the wind than of song.  It was almost as if she were mesmerizing herself into a state, like Hare Krishnas banging their drums, jingling their bells.  It made him feel very alone, as if she’d accidentally left to wander into the foggy forest and then got lost.  This big house with all its years of shared experience, with all the scars they’d left on it, with their pictures on the wall, now seemed merely haunted and patiently waiting for him to leave too. 

He went back to his workshop in the back of the house and turned on the lathe.  He was making a bowl for Joelle.  It was one of a set of bowls each of a different rare, though naturally deceased, wood.  He had a friend from their old beatnik days who now worked for the forest service and who brought him the wood.  The bowls were to sit snuggly inside each other like a family of Russian dolls. He had to pay very close attention to the wood as the lathe swiped it.  Its imperfections had to be carefully ushered in order to get a smooth surface.  His coffee sat waiting beside him.  The phone rang again, but no one answered it. 

At least an hour had passed when he suddenly felt her presence in the room.  He felt confused for a minute because he didn’t know how long she’d been there, and because he realized he’d forgotten to drink his Christmas coffee.  He switched off the lathe before he looked at her.  He wanted to be able to hear what she said.  “Hurry,” she said, and he turned her way.  She was standing by the door, leaning her old body provocatively against the frame, wearing nothing but a dress that seemed made of tiny strips of paper folded intricately together a bit like the long chains of gum wrappers Joelle used to make.  “I wrapped your present,” she said. 

He rose slowly and went toward her with a patient smile on his face just as if he was trying to please a difficult child.