Come on, I know the tiny people aren’t really alive. They sit there or stand there for hours waiting for the train, sometimes fall over from waiting so long, but where they are this morning is about where they were last night. Within an inch.
Besides, Lewis doesn’t even have a passenger car, they’ll all have to get into the caboose—if the train comes, if they could really move.
More things Lewis doesn’t even think about, he’s just mad at his engine and me until Dad says not to be trusted and I think he means the engine but Lewis says he means me and I’m not to be in the basement alone. Again. Ever.
Oh yeah? How’s he gonna stop me?
See, he got a new engine for Christmas with a light that goes faster than his old engine that’s suddenly stopped going anywhere at all (it’s in a box in the furnace room, I can make its wheels go around)—
He’s just mad because I poked out some of the windows in his train station. It’s cardboard and the windows are shiny and glued on from the inside (I guess) but you can’t see through them, I thought maybe there would be something to see inside. Benches. More little people. How’d I know?
But mostly Lewis is mad because last night after dinner he had us all come downstairs to the basement and watch and wait for his new engine with the light to go around with the light and come out of the tunnel with the light. Light not as bright as a Christmas Tree light even.
Of course we had to stand there in the dark the better to see the light.
And then it went past the station and up the hill and into the tunnel and—stopped.
Must have slipped off the track.
Mainly mad because the only way to get his engine back is to cut open the side of his mountain.
“I told you—” Dad was saying, how Lewis hadn’t put “walls” in the tunnel, the engine fell off and fell a foot to the board beneath.
Mad at himself because I think I could glue windows back on the station from the outside and it would look almost as much like windows as the windows really didn’t look like windows in the first place.
I haven’t offered to do this yet.
Christmas is all over but my mother read in the paper that we could still see The Ford Rotunda, Santa Claus had gone back to the North Pole so maybe the lines would be shorter. Big, round building that looked like a giant cupcake still in its pleated wrapper, orangish on top so the frosting wasn’t white or chocolate.
The line was the longest line I ever saw.
Did everybody read the same paper?
“Don’t touch that!” my mother said. “There are signs posted not to touch the snow.”
I didn’t see any sign. Besides, I can’t read.
Snow? Fine, long, stringy FUZZ. Or “Angel Hair.” And I only leaned down and pinched a piece to see what it felt like. Not cold. It felt like fine, long, stringy fuzz.
But OW! Now I had a sliver in my finger, a sliver I couldn’t see, a invisible sliver that only hurt when I pushed on it but I had to push on it to find it.
“It’s made of fiberglass,” my father informed me. He couldn’t see my sliver, either.
Glass? Hair? Boy, Heaven must be really tricky—see-through tricky. Which is why you can’t see it, see? You look up and all you can see is clouds. Or planes. Or birds. Not people with white, stringy, glass fuzz for hair.
But we were moving along coming to this two-story dog house that I‘d heard banging and whizzing since about the last turnaround corner of this endless pathway.
“It’s Wee Willie Winkie,” my mother exclaimed.
“Who?”
“In his nightgown.”
“Who?”
“Watch.”
Bang! The door of the dog house swung open and this stuffed doll in a long dress on a pole in a slot in the floor came speeding by and disappeared somewhere too fast to see where and five minutes later ten feet farther along there he was in the top of the dog house with a plastic candle and a tiny light bulb swirling, sinking to BANG! Come out the door again.
One doll or two? Because the doll that came out the door didn’t have a candle.
“Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Up stairs and down stairs in his nightgown—“ My mother recited, she must have read it on another sign.
Five or six times we got to see this. Bang every time and the whizzing came from below, wherever that pole went to. My mother loved it. She’d never seen so many mechanical figures move their heads before.
Pretty jerky, if you asked me.
I think my mother is not to be trusted too, but my father never says, “Honey, you’re not using your head” to her. She supposedly already knows better, what “flue” and a “damper” are. (I can only tell you a damper doesn’t make a fire wet.) Anyway, twice she’s started a fire in the fireplace and set the mantel on fire too, and filled the house with smoke, and had to repaint the mantle white—
Because something wasn’t open first.
Something certainly was open the day the squirrel came down the chimney and out into the living room. And all over the house, all of us running away or after or trying with cushions and dining room chairs lying down to get it to go out the door.
Finally out the upstairs door to the upstairs porch.
You’d a thought the squirrel was Godzilla. I sort of did. A small version.
Finally in the big room where they closed the doors and we had to wait for the show and I couldn’t see it (too many people), something like cardboard boxes painted to be the buildings of Detroit, high up on a ledge, Old Detroit, New Detroit, Detroit when it was a fort, Detroit when it was only trees and wigwams, Detroit burning (that’s the one I most wanted to see—but not a real fire), all popping up then sinking down one historic scene replacing another.
Interesting, I guess. Too many tall people in the room.
Outside though, up the hill on the way to the car, a fenced-in yard with “Santa’s Reindeer.” Almost nobody else looking at them. Too cold and it was dark with no lights and starting to snow.
Reindeers are BIG and shaggy and I can’t picture them flying. Why would they stay huddled together in one corner if they could fly? “Can’t reindeers fly over fences?”
“Reindeer,” Mom corrected me.
“But—there’s more than one.”
“It doesn’t matter, the plural of reindeer is reindeer, no S.”
“Oh.”
The snow was blowing in my eyes, but I could tell these creatures would never never get off the ground. “And—do they fly?”
“Sometimes.”
“Some can and some can’t,” Gary said.
“On Christmas Eve they can.” Obvious from Lewis’s tone of voice, he was amused at my not knowing this, he thought I didn’t remember the book Mom read us.
“Dad,” I called out, “Can these reindeers fly?”
“No. These aren’t from the North Pole,” Dad explained.
“What?”
“These reindeer came here from Scandinavia.”
“Oh. How did they get here?”
My older brothers, my mother and father–nobody knew?
But the oddest thing, I could tell they were pretending not to know, they were keeping a secret. Why? What?
Now my whole family was not to be trusted.
—