Saturnalia

Chapter 2-1

Three years ago, Saturnalia gave way to morning. After Amparo came home from the emergency room, she packed an overnight bag and took a car to her parents’ house in the northeastern arm of the city. Amparo would stay there through Christmas, let her father wait on her and her mother cook for her. I knew all this without her telling me; I knew it from the rhythm of her limping steps and the slammed door’s echo.

I didn’t want to be in the apartment, either, but where could I go? Not home. I couldn’t play with my brothers’ kids, or wipe the kitchen counter, or make small talk with my mother, or watch my father endlessly work his remaining fingers against his remaining palm, like he was smothering a small but persistent memory. I couldn’t go to the Saturn Club, where the younger members were still drinking, eating leftovers, and gossiping – who danced with whom, who revealed a secret, who needed to be carried home, who went home together. I was jittery, exhausted; my whole body ached. I might tell everyone what I really thought of them or confess what I thought of myself. I might shriek or laugh manically or weep. But I was also afraid to be alone with my unendurable thoughts.

Then I remembered Max’s Blue Christmas party, the only thing he hosted all year. The solstice is also St. Thomas’s Day – St. Thomas, who doubted. If the second half of December is all celebration, a fight against darkness, then Blue Christmas is a few hours to honor night itself, a reception for the mournful and struggling. Max’s party is always the day after the solstice. People need a place to come down, he said. It was kind of him, providing a fellowship for the lonely. Clever, too. Collecting the vulnerable, listening to their sorrows, and earning their gratitude.

I dressed up even more than I had for Saturnalia: a tight skirt, mascara, glitter in my hair. I decided not to ask myself why – not to ask myself any questions at all. For instance, why I put a boot heel on the b****y mirror shard Amparo had left in the hall. I ground it to sand, a puddle of shining dust, blind and futureless.

A tube of Amparo’s Luxe Ruby lipstick was on the kitchen counter. I couldn’t bear to put it to my mouth. Instead, I stopped at a drugstore, opened a new tube, and applied it there in the cosmetics aisle before a grimy mirror. Under the fluorescent lights, I was ghastly – eyes black with makeup and blue with exhaustion; scarlet paint on my lips and rosy blotches on my cheeks. I smiled. That made it worse, but I took a kind of pleasure in it, how ugly I looked. I dropped the lipstick and kicked it across the linoleum.

It was bitterly cold outside, and my fingers were numb by the time I turned onto Delancey Street. The houses were lean shadows punctured by butter-yellow windows. The darkness made the lights burn brighter; the lights sharpened the darkness. This is what it felt like for the people who started Saturnalia – the world divided between safe hearth and the dark wild.

I stopped on Max’s front step.

East would likely be at the party. He would be in the living room, by the fire, telling a joke to the small audience circling him. He would catch my eye. He would laugh. I would throw a wineglass at him. Everyone would stare. The women would, one by one, hand me their glasses to throw at him. They would know, they would sense, like animals, what he’d done to me.

Or he wouldn’t be there, and I would stand alone, flinching every time the door opened, waiting for him to appear, and what would happen then? I would freeze again. I wouldn’t know what to say. But it would be okay; he would see me, and his expression would turn remorseful. I would look away but remain still, allowing him to approach me. I’m sorry, he would say, and put his arms around me. We would stand there, holding each other while the quiet party moved around us, and everyone would know, would sense, how much we loved each other.

The front door was unlocked, and I let myself in. The warmth was like a blanket placed over my shoulders, one that smelled like cinnamon. The wooden floor and curling banister glowed like honey in the low light. The coat tree was huge and shaggy, shedding winter coats and hats and scarves. I tossed mine onto the heap.

Max’s house was dressed for the season: lengths of fir around the table legs, white candles on the shelves. There was mulled wine in a pot, weak, what everyone wanted after a night of drinking – more drinking, but just a little, and warm in our throats. The music was low, the conversations quiet. I searched the parlor, the kitchen, the tiny courtyard in back, where I stood alone in the cold.

East wasn’t there.

I remembered, suddenly, that he had mentioned going to his sister’s house in New Jersey. I admitted, finally, that I had chosen my skirt and lipstick for him.

The screen door squeaked behind me.

‘It’s too cold out here,’ Max said, and handed me a coat – my coat. An attention to detail that felt like care, as did his presence, not so much taller than me but stronger, broad-shouldered, radiating a faint heat.

I shrugged it on. My teeth were beginning to chatter, and I thought of my mother, her molars worn down from worry for her business, her husband, her bills, her children. I wished I could hold her hand just then, but I had only my own two hands, pressing my jacket closed. ‘Thanks.’

‘Did you bring a ghost story?’

‘A what?’

‘We’re telling ghost stories in the parlor. It’s an old English Christmas tradition,’ he said. ‘I mentioned it last night.’

‘I don’t remember.’ A shiver of shame passed through me. I had let myself get so drunk; I had gotten so drunk on purpose. Maybe East hadn’t said he loved me beneath the Saturn statue. Maybe I said that I loved him. Maybe he was the one who felt violated, to be loved by such a disgusting creature as me.

‘It’s okay,’ Max said, as we went back inside. ‘I have books.’

A stack of them, old ones, with wobbly spines and linen covers. I leafed through them as others recited their tales. I didn’t hear a word, just the minor music of their voices: quiet gasps, subdued laughs, friendly silences. There were about fifteen of them, mostly Saturn Club members, mostly Max’s generation, a decade my senior. I shifted in the armchair. I was sore, a feeling I could ignore when I was moving around but now consumed my attention.

Then it was my turn.

The book in my lap was open to an engraved illustration of a horse emerging from a lake, two hooves on the rocky shore, its mane fanned out in motion, its body belted by concentric circles of disturbed water. The story goes like this: A troop of boys wanders too far from home and discovers a beautiful black horse in the woods. They follow it down to the lake, where it stops and acknowledges them, an invitation in its eye. One by one, the boys climb onto its back, and magically, the animal grows in length to accommodate them. When the last boy touches its neck, preparing to join his friends, he pauses at the damp, slimy hide; he notices that the hooves are turned backward. But it’s too late. His hand is stuck to the horse’s skin. His friends beg him to climb aboard, but their eyes are red, their voices flat. He struggles desperately to pull himself loose without success. Finally, the boy takes a small knife from his pocket and saws off his stuck fingers, one by one. The whole time, his friends wail as if they’re the ones in pain. When he’s free, the horse gallops off, his fingers still clinging to its neck. The demon animal leaps into the lake, and the child riders are never seen again.

When I finished the story, I looked up, and everyone’s eyes slid away from me, as if I was the monster, as if I had committed a crime, shame written in my eyes with burst capillaries and across my face in stolen lipstick.

Max cleared his throat and clapped. The group joined in. I put the book aside and went to the kitchen. Ladled hot wine into a mug and then poured it back in the pot. Wandered back into the parlor. I sat on the window seat, watching people pass under the streetlights, smart coats and hats and earmuffs. A few open umbrellas in the light snow.

At some point, Max was there with me, and our backs were to the window, our shoulders touching. The lights were dimmer, the music louder. The books were under the coffee table, replaced by a stack of pizza boxes.

‘So the Saturn Club party was a success,’ he said amiably. ‘Though I think I saw the pig’s body on Broad Street this morning. Were you taking notes?’

‘Why?’

‘Won’t you be on the committee for next year?’

‘I’d rather a horse drown me in a lake.’ The words came out too sharp. The little boy from the story carried a blade in his pocket and I carried one in my throat. I swallowed it down.

We sat in silence and watched the party. Blue Christmas was a different kind of party – it wasn’t a party at all. No memberships, no rituals, no hierarchy. Just friends, making a holiday of hiding from the cold. Max shrugged his shoulder against mine. Like I could talk to him or say nothing, and he would be there either way.

It was Max’s event, and people kept stopping to talk to him. He smiled and joked, and I smiled, too, or gritted my teeth in an imitation smile. I listened to my thoughts as if from a great distance. You’re very sad, I said to myself in cold wonder. You’re very sad and very lonely and it’s never going to stop.

‘I have to lie down,’ I said.

I had never been upstairs in Max’s house, and I went through the first open door – a guest room with a stiffly made bed and half-empty bookshelf. It wasn’t unlike my old bedroom in my parents’ house, the small one at the end of the hallway with a window overlooking the yard.

I lay on the blanket. The music and voices grew softer and softer, and I was asleep. The front door slammed, and I was awake. The moonlight rippled on the ceiling, and then grew dim, and I was asleep again.

‘I brought you a glass of water,’ Max said.

I was awake. He waited, a silhouette in the doorway. ‘I’m very sad and very lonely,’ I said, ‘and it’s never going to stop.’

He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘That… is a very intense statement.’

‘I’m very stupid, too.’

‘That is definitely not true.’

On my Initiation Night, we stumbled through the woods, blindfolded, toward Pineapple Hill Mansion. Rhea was leading East, teasing him, directing him into trees, laughing when he fell. Max walked beside me, an arm around my waist. He joked softly, It’s not too late. I have a boat by the dock. You can still join the Pan Club. You know they have their own box at the stadium? I had worked so hard to win the Membership Committee’s approval, to prove that I had a bright future ahead, that I was worthy of East’s and Amparo’s friendship, and Max’s, too. Max meant to comfort me, but he was mocking everything that was important to me, the idea that anyone might find it important. Yet, I laughed. Max always gave me that space – that Saturnalia space – to turn the world upside down, to be a person again, instead of a pledge or a member, a subject or a lord.