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The Painted Table(39)

By:Suzanne Field


Saffee doesn’t understand what good it would do to dispense with pretty lights in order to remember tragic fires, but she also knows it will make no difference what she thinks. Joann’s ideas quickly fossilize.

April says, “Mommy, I’ve always liked Christmas lights.”

“A little sacrifice might be a good thing for people nowadays,” Joann says. “In fact, this might catch on like wild . . . I think I’ll dash off a letter to the Gazette.”




The day before Christmas, Saffee swishes a dusting cloth over the living room’s built-in bookcase. One shelf holds a few knickknacks, always arranged just so. A sunshine-yellow dancing girl lunges diagonally from the right corner as if with rapid dash she will thrust herself to center stage. The ceramic figurine has been on display since Saffee can remember and, for some reason, seems to convey more significance in the room than its five inches would indicate. Always running, never arriving, her gown revealingly presses against her upper body. She carries her yellow skirt high with outstretched arms, creating wings of perpetual flight.

Saffee has never liked the piece. The form-fitting gown is immodest. Early in their marriage Nels had purchased the unabashedly seductive piece as a gift for his wife, the dancer. Nels’s “two left feet,” and Joann’s encumbrances, emotional and varicose, had eclipsed their dancing together long ago.

Saffee has memories of her nightgown-clad mother during the St. Paul years, swaying, swirling, twirling alone across the living room, dream-like, as Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald belted, “O sweet mystery of love at last I’ve found you . . .”

“Dancing embraces the light fantastic,” Joann would gush. “It’s so romantic.” To Saffee, it seemed like carrying on. To young April, it was an invitation to mimic her mother until she collapsed with laughter onto the carpet. The gray Gulistan carpet.

During their first weeks in the new house, veins and emotions permitting, and with the phonograph on high volume, a seductive dance from the second act of Carmen could still lure Joann into its spell. The staccato rhythms and frenzied climax rewarded her with delight. Saffee chose not to observe these “performances.” In her bedroom, trying to ignore the music, she wondered if there had ever been another mother like hers and thinks that if anyone found out about Joann, she would die. But Joann’s car accident, coupled with her increasingly pesky veins, knocked the dance right out of her.

Saffee returns the figurine to its place. There has always been a kind of paradoxical exhibitionism in Joann that makes Saffee uncomfortable. Although her mother is increasingly fearful of people, when given the opportunity, her posture continues to tease, “Look at me. Please look at me. See how well I’m built.” There is much about Joann, and her own discomfort, that Saffee does not understand. All she can do is accept things as they are.




Joann slides a red curly ribbon from a small package and drops it into the reuse bag. She lets the wrapping paper slip to the floor, then scrutinizes a three-piece manicure set in a cellophane package: scissors, cuticle nipper, and file.

Saffee watches her. As a rule, she and April don’t buy Christmas presents for their parents or each other. It has never been expected. But now that Saffee is fourteen, it seems right that she should try her hand at gift giving. She nagged her dad for an increase to her twenty-five-cent weekly allowance, keeping it secret that she planned to buy gifts.

“What?” he teased. “You’re overpaid already!” In the end, he gave her three dollars. She added the bills to her savings without a thank-you, frustrated and angered by his teasing.

After purchasing a pair of socks for Nels and a book for April, with four dollars remaining in her billfold, she went to Walgreens and spent over forty minutes trying to select the perfect gift for her mother.

Now she can tell by her mother’s upraised brows and downturned mouth that she had chosen unwisely. “I already have a manicure set,” Joann declares. “And it’s a far cry better than this one. These scissors couldn’t cut a thing.” She turns over the package. “I could have guessed,” she says. “Made in Japan.” She sets the gift aside and rolls her eyes. “Where’d you get it, Saffee? I hope you saved the receipt.”

“Aw, Joann. It’s Christmas. The first one in our new house. Now don’t go ruinin’ it.”

Saffee bends over a good-size box on her lap and fumbles with its ribbon. She is glad her dad has spoken up. Still, she wants to throw him an accusing look because he had not supplied enough money to buy a better gift for her critical mother. Looking up would reveal her tears.