Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman

Author:Stephanie Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unnamed Press

Three years ago, Saturnalia gave way to morning. After Amparo came home from the emergency room, she packed an overnight bag and took a car to her parents’ house in the northeastern arm of the city. Amparo would stay there through Christmas, let her father wait on her and her mother cook for her. I knew all this without her telling me; I knew it from the rhythm of her limping steps and the slammed door’s echo.

I didn’t want to be in the apartment, either, but where could I go? Not home. I couldn’t play with my brothers’ kids, or wipe the kitchen counter, or make small talk with my mother, or watch my father endlessly work his remaining fingers against his remaining palm, like he was smothering a small but persistent memory. I couldn’t go to the Saturn Club, where the younger members were still drinking, eating leftovers, and gossiping—who danced with whom, who revealed a secret, who needed to be carried home, who went home together. I was jittery, exhausted; my whole body ached. I might tell everyone what I really thought of them or confess what I thought of myself. I might shriek or laugh manically or weep. But I was also afraid to be alone with my unendurable thoughts.

Then I remembered Max’s Blue Christmas party, the only thing he hosted all year. The solstice is also St. Thomas’s day—St. Thomas, who doubted. If the second half of December is all celebration, a fight against darkness, then Blue Christmas is a few hours to honor night itself, a reception for the mournful and struggling. Max’s party is always the day after the solstice. People need a place to come down, he said. It was kind of him, providing a fellowship for the lonely. Clever, too. Collecting the vulnerable, listening to their sorrows, and earning their gratitude.

I dressed up even more than I had for Saturnalia: a tight skirt, mascara, glitter in my hair. I decided not to ask myself why—not to ask myself any questions at all. For instance, why I put a boot heel on the bloody mirror shard Amparo had left in the hall. I ground it to sand, a puddle of shining dust, blind and futureless.

A tube of Amparo’s Luxe Ruby lipstick was on the kitchen counter. I couldn’t bear to put it to my mouth. Instead, I stopped at a drugstore, opened a new tube, and applied it there in the cosmetics aisle before a grimy mirror. Under the fluorescent lights, I was ghastly—eyes black with makeup and blue with exhaustion; scarlet paint on my lips and rosy blotches on my cheeks. I smiled. That made it worse, but I took a kind of pleasure in it, how ugly I looked. I dropped the lipstick and kicked it across the linoleum.

It was bitterly cold outside, and my fingers were numb by the time I turned onto Delancey Street. The houses were lean shadows punctured by butter-yellow windows. The darkness made the lights burn brighter; the lights sharpened the darkness.

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