But the cheer of the season is out of keeping with what's going on at our house. Christmas carols and a recording of the Messiah in which the needle sticks in a certain groove and endlessly repeats the same three measures. Our beautiful tree, tilting loopily or, as it did one year, crashing down as my father lurched into its branches, leaving him lying in a glittering mess of broken ornaments and strings of blinking lights. One terrible night, during one of my mother's Princeton trips, two policemen show up to tell my sister and me that our car has been left in the middle of the road with the headlights on and the motor running. This is a small town, in the sixties.
Policemen still look the other way about certain people's tendency to tie one on now and then.
They pull our Buick into the driveway for us, since neither Rona nor I is old enough to drive, ourselves. Twenty five years later, my sister names that night as one of the reasons she didn't get a driver's license until past her fortieth birthday. My sister is long gone by now, married and living in Canada. I'm a junior in high school. It was all those years you left me alone with Daddy.