Rudolf the red-nosed

Christmas tree?

I didn't feel like celebrating Christmas this year. I still don't.

Yesterday, I sighed that I supposed that I was heading over to Florosny to look at the trees. Audouin roused himself from in front of the television, where he was fighting a headache and falling asleep after a terrible night on duty at the hospital.

"Tu veux que je viens avec toi?" I was hoping for more of a "Wait! Let me change my shoes, and I'll be right with you. I love picking out Christmas trees!" This is the first time in, oh let me count the Christmasses (2002, 2003, 2004... 2008 = 7 Christmasses), 7 years that he has participated in getting the sapin de Noël. Usually, Sam comes with me. Sam is, however, growing up and was having a writing tutoring session with Asmaa at the hospital. It was sort of a now or never get a Christmas tree this year, which disappointed Audouin more in what it said about me than the fact of not having one of my pretty Christmas trees this year.

"Non, non. C'est bien."

"Tu n'as pas besoin de moi pour le charger?"

"Ils ont les gens pour m'assister." I headed out the door, very much wishing I had said something more like, "I'd love to have your company. That would mean so much to me. Thank you." It was gray and chilly as a trod across the worn grass, covered with bits of stone and chaux. I opened the gate, turned the Voyager around in the street, and there was Audouin, closing the gate behind him. I opened the passenger door.

"Je pensais que tu restais."

"J'ai préferé être avec toi." Merci. I threw the V6 into drive and drove off up the road out of the village, toward my favorite, my one and only garden store.

I am nearly as picky as was my mother (and still is, if her returns to LL Bean's tree department are keeping up apace) when I was little and learning how one shops for a Christmas tree. This involved a first trip to Brang's Garden Center up on Genesee Street, at the corner of Maple Drive. It was usually snowing, and my little sister and I were bundled up in ski jackets with red knit mittens with strings up our sleeves and across our backs, which didn't prevent us from losing two mittens each instead of one. The young man would dutifully pull out one tree after another from the others, leaning against the wood rails of the racks of trees, and then, holding the tree on display for my mother's decision firmly by the trunk, he would bang it down on the ground a couple of times to make its snow-covered branches, scrunched tight to it from being pressed together with all the others, drop just like they would at home, pulled farther down by the weight of our accumulated glass balls and strings of colored bulbs (we were transitioning from the tuna noodle casserole -- my favorite pre-ski supper -- and Jell-O mold Christmas tree, but hadn't evolved all the way to tiny white blinking lights yet).

Mom would shake her head, while we nodded in support of her judgement, and looked more than a little longingly at the lights inside the warm store with the cash register for those who had decided they had found the right tree, and off we went in the car, feeling our mittens gradually soften and sodden in the heat, to criss-cross the town until we found the right tree.
Dad drove and never (that we heard) complained. Maybe he appreciated perfection in his Christmas trees as much as Mom did, and as we were learning to do, but what I suppose I really learned was to never go to more than two stores. That's my limit. Find the store with the best trees and become a faithful client, up until last year when I realized that Florosny sells them, too. Naturally.

Audouin followed me to the next to last greenhouse in the series, sensing that I was a seasoned veteran and knew where I was going, and doing his level best to be supportive and agreeable (we have been a little tense lately, ever since he brought up twice in one week that his youngest son would like to come live with us every other week, which he would also like very much, and to which I would prefer another difficult wisdom tooth extraction). Alright, I was appreciating it very much, but I didn't tell him. I suspect the truth is that as soon as I let up my guard, he'll spring the request on me again.

We gazed at the enormously fat and squat trees leaning in heaps, standing in their root bags, or stuck into the log bases that are actually quite a nice French addition to the Christmas tradition, even though you can't water the tree. I learned to appreciate these petits trees when I saw my sister-in-law's. I have even secretely pined for one ever since, but I don't dare tell Audouin or Sam, who are used to my majestic confections.

Besides, what would I do with all the ornaments I couldn't fit on it tastefully?

"Il y en a plus là-bas," dis-je, turning my head toward the last greenhouse. His followed.

"Oui, je les vois." We headed to the farthest corner of the store, but what I saw were the banana trees and a few decorative olive trees trained on "tiges". I looked farther into the corner, and there were the trees I expected to find, piled on two palettes. I pulled one Nordmann upright that looked promising. They don't smell Christmasy like the Epiceas, but they have softer green needles with bluish undersides, and hold them longer. I began to tear off the netting with my cold hands.

"Tu as le droit de faire ça? Tu es sure?" Always the worrier, my husband is constantly concerned that I am breaking some other unwritten rule.

"Yes, I have the right to take the netting off the tree. How else can we actually see it? Tu n'aurais pas un couteau dans ta poche," I asked, pretty sure that he had given up that practical and usually useless habit sometime when I wasn't paying attention.

"Non, mais tu es sure que tu as le droit de faire ça?"

"Oui, et aide-moi." We got the netting off, looked at the tree with its long branches pressed to its trunk. I asked him to grip it by the trunk and bang it down a couple of times, you know, like you supposed to do, but he wasn't quite as cooperative as those young men at Brang's and all over Syracuse, NY.

"Aie!" he looked at me, "Ca pique." I looked back somewhat accusingly and suggested he was a little over-sensitive. "Mais il y a des épines. Ca fait mal aux mains." He was injured in his pride. I thought of his surgeon's hands, not made for banging down Christmas trees bare-handed. Not that those guys at Brang's or anywhere else hadn't worn gloves to do that.

I pushed down the branches, and looked at the tree, which bulged out on one side and had only slightly more branches at the top than the others that had nearly three-feet of bare top. They've been blaming this on the heat wave of the summer of 2003 for some time now. We both turned and looked around us for the next likely candidate for our living room, when Victor came around the corner. Saved.

Only not.

He trumped my tree choice with his announcement that his work there was done. Audouin understood before I did. He had to explain what Victor was saying to me. It took a minute.

"Vous partez? C'est fini ici? Vous partez?" The next day would be his last. Today. Last week, Chloé died, and this week, Victor goes to a garden center in les Alluets le Roi in two more. "It's on the way to Ikea," I consoled myself, while I listened to him explain the situation to us again. I knew it by heart. I couldn't blame him: 500 euros more a month, after taxes. He has a wife, two kids and a Golden Retriever who need to eat and have a nice life. I can understand that.

What I cannot understand is why Florosny never understood how to run their business to make, rather than to lose, 300,000 euros a year and pay him every centime he's worth to accomplish it. You go to Delbard, Truffault and Jardiland and tell me if you find the same range of plants of the same quality. I defie you to tell me that you do.

You won't.

So, this is as far as I got with the ornaments this morning. I let Wisp cuddle with me for an extra hour, worrying about the ball (ah, the Grassroots Ball, another story and another sigh), before I got up to make coffee and start adding the ornaments to the lights I strung last night, while Audouin watched something on television. Oh, yeah, the end of the season race drivers' competition at Wembley. Joyeux Noël.

I opened the box of red and the box of gold balls, the "base balls", as I have come to think of them. The ones from Ikea. I hung one red one, and then another. Stepped back to stare at the tree. They were hung at the same height on either side of the tree and looked ridiculous. Eyes.

I went and got another, a red one, a nose, hung a few gold ones from the antlers, and reached for the camera.

Rudolf the red-nosed Christmas tree.

It took another hour to load the digital camera software onto the desktop computer, since my laptop has been non-functional for nearly two months now. Dell. Say no more, say no more.

That's the real reason, or one of them, for why you haven't heard much from Sisyphe of late.

Joyeuse préparations pour les fêtes de fin d'année, tout le monde.

Me? I am heading to Ikea for furniture for Sam's room. That will surely make the difference between motivation to succeed and disdain for everything school means, starting with the teachers and the work. His friends are getting into Princeton, Barnard, and Northwestern early decision, and to McGill and Oxford and King's. Let's hope that that, along with a more organized room and a bigger desk, will make a student of a quality brain going to academic waste.

But, if anyone can persevere in that task, Sam can. I have never met a more stubborn person in my life. Convinced is how he would probably prefer to characterize himself. Sam marches to his own tune. Let's hope life likes the music.
....

Chloé

Chloé in the last ray of afternoon sun
May 21, 2005

Chloé

February 21, 1999 to December 6, 2008
....

She's cold, wrapped in a pink towel on my lap. She chills my legs. It froze last night, where she lay dead under a car in the parking area across from the village's only business, a restaurant and bar, Le Petit Diablotin. Since Saturday morning, we had all walked through there, calling out to her, hoping to hear a thin meow from an even thinner cat. Some sign that we could still help her.

The owner of the bar called a little before noon to tell me that he had found our cat, "au moins, je pense que c'est elle, comme dans sa photo. Mais, il faut que je vous le dise," he paused, "elle est morte." I knew.

I had gone there Monday with a note from Chloé and a picture of her below it. It asked whoever might have found her and taken her home, thinking she had been abandoned, so miserable did she look, so thin and weak these last weeks, or who might find her dead to return her to us so that we could care for her, or know that she was dead and bury her. Cry finally.

She was one of three kittens from the same litter that we got when they were 8 weeks old. Sam and I had moved into our 2-bedroom railroad apartment in one of two post-war brick apartment buildings in the center of Greenwich, built by a family recently emigrated from Italy. They were still in the same family. Two stories, two up and two down. We had the lower floor apartment on the south side, full of sun if it had few other advantages. I could only be proud that we were no longer living in the attic of a house, turned into a studio apartment in an affluent neighborhood, even if you did have to walk through my room to get to the living room from the kitchen and Sam's room. It wasn't much, but it was a real apartment. It's what I could afford as a single mother and architect living where the work was.

We settled in some furniture from Ikea, put a couple of rugs too small for the bare wood floor in the living room down, stuff from the garage at my parents' house that wasn't good enough for their house anymore, and we thought that what we needed, what we could have now, what any family needs to be complete would be a pet. Sam wanted a cat. So did I. I'd always had cats, and like I'd teach Sam to ski, even if it wasn't really in my means, because my father taught me to ski, we'd have a cat. Actually, we decided we'd need two. One and another to keep that one company while we were at school and work.

I asked around, family, friends, for anyone who knew of someone looking to place kittens. It didn't take long before my sister called -- that was two years before I had email, a PC at home, imagine -- to say that one of her colleagues knew someone looking for homes for a couple of kittens. I said yes right away, and a couple of days later I received a note in the mail with a photo tucked inside. It was from the woman giving the kittens away. There were three in the photo, two black and white and one white with gray and marmalade marks. They played on a blue and pink flowered sofa, all three on one cushion with room to spare. She asked if we could possibly take the third, as well, for whatever reasons she gave. It didn't matter. We would, and we drove to Philly the next weekend to pick them up, at a meeting point in a hotel parking lot.

There they were, in a large hamster cage. Chloé, Shadow and Nuts. Nuts got off lucky. He was almost named Neil Armstrong by a 7 1/2 year old boy, who had visited the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian the summer before.

"Don't you think it might be a little hard to call him? 'Neil Armstrong, here Neil Armstrong, kitty, kitty, kitty'?" I asked Sam. He thought about it a moment and acknowledged the truth of this.

"What do you think we could name him that might be a little easier?" He thought a second longer and said,

"Nuts." He also had recently received another Beanie Baby from my other sister, the squirrel named Nuts. Naturally, my stepfather had the perfect réplique when we brought him home from the vet later, neutered.

"Okay, Nuts." I had wanted Chloé and Zoé, but Sam nixed that.

"Shadow, Mom. She's black, like a shadow." We had looked at the picture together. She was. Kids get to decide these things. Chloé, Shadow and Nuts.

It was better that way. When Sam started 6th grade in Paris, there were skinny twin girls in his class, Chloé and Zoé. Terribly unoriginal.

Nuts was the first to be sick. We didn't know which of the three of them was peeing everywhere but where they were supposed to, including on my bed from time to time, but mostly on the bath mat. We suspected Shadow, the one who had been the most timid, but the vet found nothing wrong and said that she is a very affectionate cat. Still, they gave us valium for her, in case she was peeing for psychological reasons. We drugged the poor thing for awhile, and gave up. She was out of it, and there was still cat pee on the bath mat.

We finally caught Nuts peeing there one afternoon. The tests showed kidney failure, but he made it from that afternoon in June or so of 2001 all the way to France, to be put down and buried in our garden on May 4, 2004, only a little more than 5 years old.

Then Chloé, just like Nuts.

Chloé was everywhere in my pictures. I spent most of most months of the year these last few years working in what was an abandoned terraced garden, and there was hardly a picture I took in which Chloé wasn't somewhere in it, luxuriating in the Nepata or sun, keeping me company in her own way. It was Shadow who followed me everywhere, like a dog, always just a few feet away.

She was a cat who couldn't live without our affection. She was always like that. The day Sam and I picked them up and drove back to Greenwich, while the two other kittens crouched together in the cage, Chloé stood up on her rear paws and reached to us. She wanted to be held. I am not sure if a cat ever spent more time pressed against her humans than Chloé did, especially these last few weeks at night.

Audouin always said that it's disgusting to have a cat in bed, but Wisp was the first to have the rare privilege when we found her and brought her home. She was so thin and weak, starved. She had spent so many cold, wet nights wherever she could to stay alive. She slept on a towel against me at the side of the bed until she was well. Then Chloé these past few weeks. Two? Three? I don't remember.

"This time you'll let her die, won't you? She's sad and sick. We can't keep taking her to the vet for IV treatments. Think of what it will cost, and she'll still die. Let her go this time."

I didn't answer. I'd do what I needed to do when the time came, and I knew he would let me. Meanwhile, he said nothing about her sleeping on my chest all night. She needed to be there, and for once, she wasn't making me miserable, trying to lick my face all night long. She just curled up and slept, her front paws tucked under her chest, and I barely felt her, that's how skinny she had become. Like Wisp when Audouin brought her home from the woods at the center of the boucle de la Seine, she sort of crouched when she walked, as though her hips and legs had already done all they could to carry her around and were exhausted from the effort.

I watched her eyes. That's where you could see when she was very dehydrated. That's when I knew she was sick like Nuts a year ago last September. A week of IV then, and she recovered enough to go on until July. Another week in July -- the vet cut the price of treatment, very kindly -- and she made it until Saturday.

Friday evening, I stopped at the vet to get more of her kidney diet food. I was overdue. She had been eating the same thing as the other two cats for a little while, and now I can feel horrible about that. Such an easy thing to go buy the special food, and I hadn't done it. I nearly said to the technician that I was going to bring her in for a blood test, almost made the appointment, and the next evening at the dinner table, Audouin looked at me and said, "Have you seen Chloé today?"

"No. Why? Haven't you?" He said his daughter had noticed that she hadn't been around like usual.

"She's gone to die," I said.

And she had. We searched for her, looking under ever bush and hedgerow, in the boat enclosure and where the workers store their tools, in the garage, and in the gardens around our own. We didn't look under the white delivery car across from Le Petit Diablotin, where she had gone to lie down, almost as though she were comfortable on a bit of warm pavement, although no pavement had been warm these last days in a very wet, cold early December, and died.

I can't keep her on my lap. We'll wait for Sam and Audouin to come home, and then we'll bury her where Audouin suggested. Where I changed the soil and planted the rhododendron and the dogwood these last two years, and like with Nuts some four and a half years ago, I will have to fight myself not to go and get her when it is cold and raining at night. Accept that the life is gone, even if it is hard to believe, and with her, another piece of those years when Sam was a child and I was working to make a life full of love for him and me.

Baccarat licked her, and Rapide and Wisp (with whom she fought protracted battles over territory), came to see. Shadow, who returned to the spot where she watched us bury Nuts and slept near it, sat on it, didn't care.

"She died peacefully," Audouin said over the phone, "It's only sad that she died alone, but she died peacefully. It makes me sad, too."

Chloé, like the smooth stone you throw into the still water, and watch the ripples stretch out in wide rings, the reminder of the stone you held in your hand, until they are no more, and all that remains is the memory of the stone.

I'll miss her markings, those curved V's that drew a line from the corner of her eyes to the corners of her mouth. Marmalade on the left, and gray on the right. The surprising purity of the whiteness of her fur, like snow that was always just fallen, and the flame up the middle of her forehead. The site of her in a vacant flower pot. Pressed up against our chests, driving us nuts.

Bye, Chloé. We've missed you already these last few days, and so we know how much we will. You and Nuts.

Good-bye.
....