Of Mice and Nutcrackers: A Peeler Christmas Read online

  The spoon clatters across the floor, ending up by the stove. Before any of us can move, Grandma’s foot flashes out. She steps on the spoon, then, slowly, bends down and picks it up. She holds the spoon where we can all see it, and opens the cupboard under the sink – that’s where we keep our kitchen garbage. Our jaws drop. Her face is as still as stone. She drops the spoon into the garbage, and closes the cupboard door.

  The potatoes are a bit pasty, and the brussels sprouts – they were in the big smelly pot – well, they’re brussels sprouts. Not my favorite food. And the ham is dry. But nothing is horrible. For one of Grandma’s meals, it’s a triumph.

  I’m surprised Bill isn’t eating much. He likes plain meat and potatoes.

  Grandma doesn’t ask us how our day went. I tell her anyway. “Guess what?” I say. “The basketball coach was being really mean today.” I tell her about the fight with Mr. Gebohm.

  She snorts. “He sounds like a real dastard.”

  “Better be careful of old Gebohm,” says Bill. “He’s mean. David laughed at him when he was showing us how to do a layup, and missed. Gebohm turned all red, and started shouting.”

  “Yes, he did that this afternoon,” I say.

  “And then he made David do push-ups for the rest of the period. Whenever he sees David now, he makes him do more push-ups.”

  “Are you going to eat your ham, William?” asks Grandma.

  “I’m not really hungry,” he says.

  She reaches over with her fork, spears his meat, and puts it on her own plate. “Well, I’ll take it,” she says. She doesn’t seem too upset.

  Dessert is burnt pudding – doesn’t taste very good. Bill finishes his. So does Bernie. I eat a few bites. It would probably taste better with my favorite spoon.

  After dinner I go to my room, and start on my homework. I see a note to myself from last week. 1950s ARTIFACT. Drat.

  I haven’t thought about it at all. Just a little something. A diary, maybe; or a souvenir from that time. A piece of history, Miss Gonsalves said.

  “Dad?” I call out. “Do you –” then I realize he’s not here. Maybe Mom can help.

  I go downstairs and find her and Grandma in the family room.

  “Mom, do you have any artifacts from the 1950s?” I ask.

  “What?”

  I repeat my question. Mom frowns. She’s thinking of something else.

  Bill comes in from the kitchen. He does his homework there. “David has a gun from the 1950s. A pistol. It’s in a case. He showed it to me.”

  “A pistol? How come he has a pistol?”

  “It was his grandfather’s. David’s grandfather was in the Israel Defence Force in 1956. He fought in the Sinai campaign. He met Moshe Dayan.”

  Can I hand in David’s grandfather’s pistol as my artifact? I don’t think so.

  “David is named after him,” Bill goes on.

  “After Moshe Dayan?”

  “No, his grandfather.”

  “His grandfather is named after Moshe Dayan?” I’m just kidding; I know what Bill means. And he knows I know.

  “Shut up,” he says.

  “You shut up.”

  “No, you.”

  “I knew a man named Moshe once,” says Grandma. She looks a long way back. Some of the wrinkles in her forehead smooth out. “Before I met your father,” she adds to Mom.

  “I’m going to check on Alex,” Mom says.

  “You want me to get you some dinner?” Grandma asks.

  “No. I’m, uh, not hungry.” Running past me and up the stairs, Mom looks very young, a little girl caught in a white lie.

  I sleep badly. In my dream I’m wading through mud. Thick mud that clings to my dress, to my hands. I’m running away. The seven-headed Mouse King is after me. Every one of his heads looks like Mr. Gebohm. I trip and fall, making a big crash. King Gebohm comes closer. He’s holding a scepter in one paw. I start doing push-ups in the mud. He hits me with his scepter. I don’t feel anything, but I hear the thump of the scepter hitting me. I cry for help. Usually when you cry for help in your dream, nothing comes out. Nothing comes out this time, either. Then Mr. Gebohm opens his mouth, and lets loose a high-pitched squeak. It echoes across the muddy field in my dream. He hits me again and again. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  I wake up. The thumping is real. It’s coming from downstairs. Is the squeaking real, too? I can hear Grandma, but she’s not squeaking. She’s swearing.

  “Come back, you little dastard!”

  And another thump.

  I put on my slippers and go to the hallway. There’s a crash, and some more swearing from Grandma. I run downstairs. The lights are on. Grandma’s in the hallway with a broom in her hands, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and a wild look in her eyes.

  “I’ve chased him all around the downstairs,” she says, panting.

  “Who?”

  She points down at the floor. “There! See him?” She swings the broom in a vicious arc. Thump.

  So that’s the noise I heard.

  “Missed! Son of a….” Grandma runs down the hall toward the kitchen. I follow to the doorway, and stop there to stare.

  The kitchen is a mess. The cupboards under the sink and counter, where we keep the pots and pans, have their doors open. The garbage can under the sink is on its side, and there’s garbage everywhere. The toaster has fallen off the counter. (Was that the crash I heard in my dream?) It’s on the floor, its cord stretched taut back to the wall.

  “Got him now!” says Grandma. “He’s trapped, the little devil.” She stands near the toaster, with her broom raised in both hands. I walk closer, and hear, very faintly, a high-pitched squeaking.

  I begin to have a suspicion.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” asks a weak but familiar voice from behind me.

  I turn around. “Daddy!”

  He smiles at me, but it looks wrong somehow. Empty. It’s his smile, but there’s no him behind it. A scary sight. Even scarier than Grandma swinging a broom in the middle of the night.

  “Alexander!” Mom is right behind him. “Get back to bed. You’re sick. And what are you all doing up, children? You go to bed too.” I didn’t hear my brothers come downstairs but there they are in the doorway, hopping up and down, trying to see.

  Mom doesn’t tell Grandma to go to bed. “What are you doing, Mother?” she asks.

  Grandma turns the toaster right side up. It’s still plugged into the wall above the countertop. The broom is poised in her hand.

  “He was hiding in there. Now I’ve chased him back.”

  “Who was hiding, Mother?”

  “He thinks he’s safe, but I’m going to smoke him out.”

  Grandma pushes down the knob that starts the toaster.

  I don’t know what is going on. I really don’t. And yet, maybe because of the dream, maybe because of what is going on at school, I suspect…. No. It can’t be. And yet there’s Grandma, poised, ready to pounce. She looks like a tough old tabby waiting in front of a …

  Could it be?

  We wait. The coils inside the toaster glow. Grandma smiles.

  “I think,” says Dad, “that I – oh, no!”

  He jumps. I jump too. We all jump. None of us as high as the mouse trapped inside the toaster. He – or she, I never do find out – jumps three or four times its own height. Its entire body is visible in the air, well above the dented chrome crumb-strewn top. Its tail flails back and forth.

  Dad darts forward. Grandma swings her broom like a baseball bat. She’d hit a home run with the mouse, only Dad gets in the way. The broom hits him in the leg. Thump. He winces. She draws back and swings again, but she’s too late. With a clearly audible squeak, the mouse scampers under the refrigerator.

  She swears. “After all this chasing. You know, I found the ham thing inside the toaster. Two inches away from my face.”

  So my suspicions are right. There really is a mouse in the house. I must have known all along. That’s why my dreams were all con
fused, with the Mouse King and the squeaking. Was that the reason for the bowling? I shudder, thinking how close I was, that time in the basement in the dark. Mice.

  I wonder what Grandma was doing, two inches away from the toaster late at night.

  “Was that a mouse?” asks Mom. “A mouse in our house?” She sounds like she’s reading a cute little picture book.

  “It’s gone to the basement,” says Bernie. He’s standing at the top of the stairs.

  “Good,” says Grandma. “That’s where I set the traps.”

  “Traps?” Bill turns on the basement light. “Can I see?”

  “Mousetraps? There’s mousetraps in our house?” Mom’s cute little picture book takes a surprising turn. Not too often that you get a cute little picture of a mutilated mouse. “Where’d the mousetraps come from?”

  “Grandma,” I say. “Grandma, you did it. That’s why you wanted to know where the hardware store was.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me, Mother?”

  Grandma doesn’t reply. If anything, she looks embarrassed.

  “Because she didn’t want to worry you,” I say.

  Dad isn’t paying any attention. He’s on his hands and knees, picking up apple cores and uneaten bits of sandwich and throwing them back into the garbage container. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he says. “Look at all this mess.”

  A mouse in the toaster. I swallow unhappily, thinking back to the toast I’ve eaten over the past week. Mouse toast. Yuck. I think about sailor Bill, and all his hard tack.

  “Hey!” says Bernie.

  “Go to bed, Bernie,” says Mom. “You too, Jane and Bill.”

  “I’m not going to bed before Bill,” I say. “Hey!” says Bernie again. He points at the toaster. “It’s on –”

  “Fire!” says Bill.

  If you’re trying to get someone’s attention, it’s much better to say “fire” than “hey.” Everyone shuts up and stares.

  The toaster is smoking even more than usual. And a small tongue of fire pokes itself out of the slot the way you might poke your tongue out to lick around the edge of your mouth.

  Grandma acts first. She drops the broom and reaches over to unplug the toaster. “Do you have an extinguisher?” she asks Mom.

  We do. Before Mom can answer, I scramble onto the counter and open the utility cupboard. We keep all the dangerous stuff up here, out of Bernie’s reach. Drain cleaner and floor cleaner and turpentine in case he swallows them and poisons himself. Plastic bags in case he puts them over his head and suffocates. Picture wire in case he – I don’t know what – strangles himself, maybe. Cough syrup. Pills. More plastic bags. More medicine. Somewhere at the back is a portable fire extinguisher.

  “Be careful, Jane!” calls Mom.

  Dad is washing his hands in the sink – his hands and what he’s holding in them. “Who threw this out?” he asks, drying it carefully on a tea towel. “This is my favorite spoon.”

  The fire seems to be dying on its own, but there’s still lots of smoke. I find the extinguisher. Mom leads Dad out of the kitchen, calling over her shoulder for us to come too. “In a minute,” I say. I can’t get the extinguisher to work. Neither can Grandma.

  Bill jumps from foot to foot. Grandma squeezes the extinguisher trigger again; and again; nothing. There’s less and less smoke.

  “Let me try,” says Bill.

  “And me!” says Bernie. “I want a turn.”

  “No, let me,” says Bill. “Before it’s too late.”

  “This isn’t a ham game,” says Grandma.

  The fire burns out. There doesn’t seem to be any smoke at all. Bill sighs.

  Grandma lifts the toaster off the floor, turns it over, and shakes it into the sink. No mouse inside, thank goodness. Nothing inside but toast crumbs. Quite a lot of crumbs, actually.

  “Just as well we didn’t use the extinguisher,” she says. “That chemical foam is just shell to get off. Now the toaster’s as good as new.”

  “How did you know we had a mouse, Grandma?” I ask. Bill and Bernie are in the basement, checking the traps.

  “Mice,” says Grandma. “No one has one mouse, unless it’s a pet.” Grandma plugs in the toaster, and turns it on.

  “Mice, then. How did you know we had mice?”

  “I heard them, the first night I was here, rolling up and down the walls.”

  Rolling? “Like marbles?” I say. “Mice make a sound like marbles? Or bowling balls?”

  Grandma nods. Bill and Bernie come upstairs. They’re disappointed. I can tell without having to hear them say it that the traps are empty.

  I don’t know how I feel about that. I don’t want mice in the house, but I don’t want them caught in the traps, either. In my heart I like the cute little picture book mice – as long as they stay in the books.

  “What did you use for bait?” asks Bill. “I didn’t see any cheese.”

  “Cheese gets stale. Better to use peanut butter.”

  “Mice eat peanut butter?” asks Bernie, yawning hugely. “Like me?”

  The toaster is working. The heating coils are glowing red. Grandma bends down to light her cigarette off one. “Little dastards’ll eat anything.” She notices me staring at her. So that’s what she was doing, inches away from the toaster.

  “Out of matches,” she says.

  *

  “Mother! Mother, look at this!” Mom runs into the kitchen, holding the thermometer. Her face is shining. She’s so beautiful. “Alex is sweating!”

  “So what? I’m sweating myself. All that running around.”

  “Don’t you see? It means the fever’s broken. He’s asleep now, but I took his temperature before he dropped off. It’s lower than it was. See?”

  She notices us then. “Why aren’t you children in bed?”

  “Is Daddy getting better?” I ask.

  “Yes.” She relaxes, smiles at me. “Yes, he is.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes. Now go to bed.”

  She kisses us all good night and walks us upstairs. I fall asleep right away. I don’t dream at all. Not about fire, or bowling, or anything. When I wake up in the morning, the sun is streaming through my window. My pajamas smell of burnt toast.

  “Here’s the one,” says Grandma. Our corner fruit store sells Christmas trees around the back. Every year Dad takes us to pick one out. Not this year, of course. Dad had breakfast this morning, for the first time in a while, but he’s not going outside yet. He’s upstairs sleeping now, and Grandma is taking us tree shopping. A typical winter weekend in Toronto, warm enough to melt the snow, but freeze you. Copernicus, the big market street, is crowded with people. Parkas are open at the throat, breath steams, slush collects at the side of the roads.

  Grandma’s choice is a scrawny spruce. It’s lying down on the ground. It looks tired.

  “That’s the tree. Let’s go home.”

  We all stare at her.

  “It’s not the biggest!” says Bernie. “That one is bigger!” He stands up in his stroller to point to one of the standing trees. A pine. I like pine myself. The long needles make it look fuller.

  “Or how about this one?” I say. “See Grandma, it’s bushier than yours.”

  “So what? This is the one. Let’s go. You wanted me to take you to look for a Christmas tree, and I found you one.”

  “But –”

  “Nope” She picks up the tree. It’s not very big at all. Grandma is an old lady, and she can lift it with one hand.

  “Are we done already, Jane?” asks Bernie, twisting in his stroller.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  “But I like to pick,” says Bernie.

  Dad’s Christmas tree shopping expeditions always take a long time. We check out every tree. There’s a lot of comparing and arguing; we usually end up standing the trees next to each other to see which one is the tallest. Sometimes we have to toss a coin. Then, when we’ve made our choice, we have to get the tree home. If there’s snow, we drag it home on a toboggan. If
there isn’t enough snow for a toboggan, we put the tree on Bernie’s stroller. Bill and I push. Dad and Bernie steer. By the time we get home with the tree, we feel that we’ve earned our hot chocolate.

  “So what?” says Grandma. She walks away. We hurry after her. I’m pushing Bernie in his stroller. When Grandma gets to the slushy sidewalk, I grab her arm.

  “You have to pay Tom,” I say. Tom runs the fruit store. He’s not giving the trees away.

  “I paid him before we went out back,” she says. “Come on, now.” She carries the tree to the corner.

  “The tree should be bigger,” I say. “And bushier. Shouldn’t it, Bill?”

  He shrugs. “I guess so,” he says.

  What’s wrong with Bill? He’s usually as keen as the rest of us.

  “It’s only a tree,” he says.

  “A Christmas tree,” I remind him. “A tree with presents under it.”

  “You don’t need a tree to get presents,” he says. “David gets presents without a tree.”

  “David’s Jewish,” I say. “He doesn’t get presents without a whatchamacallit candleholder.”

  “Menorah.” He smiles at me condescendingly. I hate it when he knows something I don’t. He sounds the word out slowly, like I’m an idiot. “And it’s not for presents. It’s just a symbol of the miracle.”

  “Yeah, well, so’s a Christmas tree a symbol. Isn’t it?” I ask Grandma.

  “Christmas tree? It’s a nuisance,” says Grandma. “It falls over. It dries out. It’s messy. The needles get everywhere. I can’t stand the ham things.”

  “The tree should be in my stroller. That’s how Daddy does it,” says Bernie. “You’re not doing it right, Grandma.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Grandma. She drags the tree down the street to the corner with a crosswalk. We follow. She sticks out her pointing finger. A car moving up the street doesn’t stop at the crosswalk; doesn’t even slow down. Neither does the car after it.

  “Dastards!” She changes fingers.

  The next car is slowing down. So is the one coming from the opposite direction.

  “Come on!” Grandma looks back at us, and strides out into the crosswalk.