The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

I spent a week getting ready. I scrubbed the baseboards on my knees. I polished the silver, Tom’s mother’s silver, until I could see my own tired face bent up in the bowl of every spoon. I ironed the good white tablecloth and the seventeen napkins. I wrapped a gift for every single one of them, and I wrote out the name cards, and I filled the stockings, and I did all of it the way you build a case, laying down piece after piece of evidence that I had gone right on loving these people the whole time they were forgetting me.

And then I sat in that green dress in the candlelight and no one came, and the furnace creaked the chair, and my heart jumped, and it was nobody, and at a quarter past midnight I blew out the candles.

There in the dark of my own dining room I finally let myself say the true thing, the thing I had known for years and would not look at. My children had not forgotten me. Forgetting would have been a kindness, an accident, something you could forgive. They had not forgotten me at all. They had simply decided, each of them, in their own comfortable houses, that I mattered only when I was of use. When there was a casserole to receive or a lawn to have mowed for me or a grief to be seen managing at the funeral where the whole town was watching. The rest of the time I was furniture. I was the drawer where the will was kept.

What they never bothered to ask

Here is what my children did not understand, because they never once thought to look past their own arithmetic.

The widow they could not be bothered to visit still held all of it. Every bit of it. They had spent ten years treating me like a ghost, and the whole time the ghost was the one holding the keys.

The house was mine, free and clear, the house Tom and I bought the year Paula was born. The land around it, the good corn ground we had bought parcel by parcel over the decades and rented out to the Vandenberg boys, that was mine. Tom’s investment accounts, which he had tended as carefully as he tended his tomatoes, and which had grown into a number that would have surprised my children very much, that was mine. And the lake place up at Clear Lake, the cabin Tom bought before we even had children, before we had two nickels really, the place where every one of those grandchildren had learned to swim off the end of our dock. That was mine too.

They knew it was there. Oh, they knew. They had counted it many times. I could always tell when one of them had been doing sums, because the phone would ring and the concern would be very warm and it would arrive dressed up as love.

“Mom, have you gotten your will updated lately? You want to make sure everything’s in order.”

“Have you thought about who’s going to take care of the lake house? It’s a lot for you to manage alone, Mom.”

“You really ought to get all this settled now, so there’s no confusion for us later.”

For us later. Not one of them, in ten years, ever asked me what I needed. What I wanted. Whether I was lonely out there, whether I was eating, whether the winters were hard. They only ever wanted to know what would be left over, and how soon, and whether I had arranged it so the leftovers would fall to them without any fuss.

That night, standing in the dark with the cold turkey and the sixteen empty chairs, I made my decision, and it was not made in anger. I want that understood. Anger burns out. This was cooler than anger and it has lasted. I decided that if my children were going to treat me as though I were already gone, then I would simply go, and I would take my life with me, all of it, and I would not leave it lying around for them to inherit like a lamp.