Iris by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

course I didn’t know what the game was for either so it didn’t matter. I sat the tree on the kitchen table—everything that comes into the house lands on the kitchen table—and there it stayed, its bare circles of straight branches rising in dusty diminishing tiers.
    Meanwhile the next week was all about red and green and merry ho-ho here and merry ho-ho there. Daytimes if I went to the post office, it was Christmas stamps for sale and clerks in Santa Claus hats. Evenings weren’t any better. I’d try watching TV, but then I’d get disgusted and wander into the kitchen, sit at the table in the dim, flickering fluorescent light—damn things never did work right—and play with my toys until it was time to go to bed and not be able to sleep. I’d circle the jacks like covered wagons in an old western movie to protect the lavender butterfly and the toy bird. I’d make chains of the plastic clips biting each other like yellow, green, purple, blue alligators, and I’d spin the jacks, and I’d stack the bottle caps.
    And there stood the bottle-brush tree, with the twisted wires sticking out of the ends of its so-called branches.
    Bottle-brush tree, bottle caps, and one night I just stuck the bottle caps onto those branches to cover the wire ends.
    White, cream, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, bright green, and all I had to do was just shove them on and they stayed, and I had plenty to fix up the whole tree.
    Then I stood back and looked, and that ugly tree was not so ugly any more.
    Well, one thing led to another as it always does with me. Next I draped shiny Mardi Gras beads all over the tree, and what the heck, I clipped on a few red clothespins and threw on a few sparkly jacks, but then I decided the jacks would be prettier if they dangled and twirled, so I took some paper clips and bent them into hangers to hang all the jacks from the branches. I put hangers on the pale blue cap gun doohickies too. Lacy plastic things, they looked kind of like snowflakes, and the jacks catching the light looked kind of like stars—
    And then I realized what I was doing.
    Also, that it was Christmas Eve.
    Which I’d been trying not to acknowledge. For days and days, strangers and radios and horse-faced TV announcers had been telling me Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas until it had gotten easy to ignore—
    Yet here I found myself decorating a Christmas tree.
    Caught myself in the act, so to speak.
    Huh. It wasn’t really a Christmas tree, I argued to the arresting officer: me. Not without any lights.
    And no real ornaments, just junk.
    And no angel or anything on top. See? Look, this was just a joke of a tree. Kind of making fun of myself, I took five of those clips like miniature clothespins, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and I fastened them to the top of the tree in the shape of a star.
    Yeah, right. Some star.
    It was not enough for me to be scared, solitary, old and shriveled; I had to be sarcastic too.
    But at that moment I seemed to hear a little girl laughing—and the tree lit up.
    Like somebody had flicked a switch, it stood all alight with color.
    At the risk of repeating myself: there were no strings of electric twinkle-bulbs on that bottle-brush tree, none. Yet it shone all over, branches aglow, like a pot of junk at the end of a rainbow.
    Make that the beginning of a rainbow.
    And the rainbow was Iris. I knew it. I could feel her there in the dim kitchen with me.
    I sat down because I had to. No strength in my knees.
    “Come on, Mommy!” she sang to me right inside my head. “You forgot the baby things!”
    And so I had. I’d been forgetting them for a long time. But I managed to stand up again without falling over, and my hands trembled only a little as I hung the teething rings on the tree. And the yellow whistle, and the white toy bird, and the tiny doll. I mean, Christmas is about a baby, and I’m not the only person who ever lost mine.
    Then I tried to think what else might please her. “Let me