White Christmas Pansies - Linda Hall © writerhall.com (First Place - GUI Awards, 2002)

“I’ve decided to leave you after Christmas,” I said to my husband on a Saturday morning while I carefully spread newspapers on the card table in the guest bedroom. The words sounded so casual, so spur of the moment, as if I had just thought of them. But this was something I had been thinking about, praying about for quite a while. I had practiced over and over in my head, even: Nothing’s working. Just look at us. You’re never home. We barely speak, and when we do, we fight. I can’t live like this. Think of what we’re doing to the girls.

I wanted to say all of these things, I wanted for him to finally understand how it was with me, but all I said was, “I’ve decided to leave you after Christmas.”

He had come in to look for his fishing gloves, and was rooting through the drawers in the bureau we keep there. When he found them he pulled at the leather fingers, and his response to me sounded as equally unpracticed, “Maybe we should get the Christmas tree up, then.”

I was getting out my paints, unscrewing the containers, arranging my brushes. I’d stenciled and painted the nativity scene on some glass milk bottles, the old fashioned kind, and today I planned to finish them up in time for the Ladies Aid Christmas Silent Auction to raise money for missionaries. I do something crafty every Christmas for them. Tole painting, decoupage, you name it, I’m into it.
My husband and I hadn’t spoken to each other for a week, really spoken, I mean. We weren’t particularly mad at each other, It wasn’t that. It was just that we seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Even in church we never touched the way other couples did. He didn’t lean over to me with a smile or a whisper. Only occasionally did we even share a hymnal.

Is this how a marriage ends, I wondered? With the smell of paint on newspapers and with no one saying anything? He walked out of the room, and I called after him. “Don’t forget to pick up Kristi at one. I’ve got to get these finished today.”
The door closed. He was gone. I was alone.

Had he heard me? Not the part about Kristi, but the other part? And then I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t really said it at all, but only thought it.

I turned to my paints. I wasn’t pleased with the faces of my nativity people. I couldn’t seem to get their eyes right. Mary continued to have this astonished look, baby Jesus resembled a wrinkled old man and Joseph looked detached, like he’d rather be fishing. I laughed at that one. My husband loves to fish. Every family vacation has had fishing attached to it for as long as I can remember. I don’t like to fish much. When we were first married he bought me a fishing rod. I used it a few times, but now I’m not sure I know where it is.
Last year, he and a few friends, guys from church, bought an ice fishing shack. I went with him once. It was dreadfully, unbearably, inhumanly cold. Also, there was no decent bathroom anywhere, and then I kept worrying about the girls. My mother came over for the day, but I don’t like to leave them. I told my mother to make sure they did their homework, and to have Melissa practice the piano for at least half an hour. She had a piano recital coming up and needed all the practice she could get.
“You could at least try,” my husband had said to me on the way home.

“What.”

“Try. Pretend to have a good time. The other wives didn’t think it was so terrible. You didn’t even try to enter in.”

Enter in. I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t finished.

“You don’t even try to be interested in the things I like. You don’t even make the effort.”

I could tell him about how he’s not interested in the things I like either; that when I try to talk to him about my painting classes, or the children’s art workshops I help out with, he just rolls his eyes in that way of his, like this is some very peculiar thing that is totally beyond his imagining. I could have told him that, but what good would it do? We would only end up fighting again. That was a year ago. He’s never asked me to go with him again. I do my crafts here in the spare bedroom and never show him any of them.
I had moved from the nativity faces and was working on white flowers that I was painting freehand on the rest of the bottle. They didn’t belong here, not really I supposed, but the white was so innocent, the petals so delicate, so fitting for the Christ Child. Like starting over, a new beginning, I thought. Sort of like the incarnation, when the old ways didn’t work anymore, God came up with a new way.
A sudden gust of wind blew against the house and I got up and made sure the window was shut tight. It was beginning to snow and I thought about Kristi. When she gets out of swim team practice sometimes she doesn’t dry her hair properly and if she waits outside she could catch cold. I hoped my husband remembered to pick her up. I should have gone myself. I shouldn’t have counted on him.
“I will leave my husband after Christmas.” This time I made sure I said it out loud. “I don’t love my husband. I’m going to leave him. It’s obvious that I have married the wrong person. I need someone more in tune spiritually with my needs. I have known this for a while.” I was admitting it now. Out loud.

“Mom?” Melissa was in the doorway.

I snapped around, put a hand to my mouth. “I thought you were at Beth’s,” I said, breathless.

“Mom, don’t have a cow. I came home. Beth had to go somewhere.”

I stared at her. Had she heard? Did I dare ask her that?

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Can Beth come over after youth group to watch videos?”

I was still reeling. “Sure. If it’s all right with Beth’s mom, it’s all right with me. Maybe we could all decorate the tree tonight? How would that be?”

“Boo-ring.”

Behind the closed door of her bedroom, she turned on her stereo. She was into her own little world now. And I thought about the four of us, when had decorating the tree become a chore, like housecleaning?

I was still at the window. A light dusting had covered the ground. I always like the first snow of the year, when the ground reflects the light and sends a white cleanness into the house. As I stared at the colorless sky, I wondered if it was too late for new beginnings in our house, too late for the innocent first snow.

Snow, like icing sugar was sprinkled on our birdhouses. We have dozens of them in our backyard. When he’s not fishing, my husband builds what he calls his “special recipe squirrel and pigeon proof bird feeders.” They were everywhere in our back yard; on metal posts, strung up trees on wires, coat hangered from high branches—all inventions of my husband.

I went back to the table and a picture of my husband came to me: He and three friends scrunched into a booth down at Tim Hortons, still in their fishing vests, their brown paper cups of coffee on the table in front of them. They were laughing, guffawing, the way men do, outdoing each other with their stories. He didn’t see me as I stood at the doorway looking over at this Tim Hortons television commercial of happiness. I had walked out quickly without buying anything.

I was aware then, that I was crying. I was trying to get the blossoms right. And I couldn’t. The shape of them eluded me. The color. All wrong. I had smeared a few of them, ruined them. Maybe the whole bottle would be ruined. My husband found me like this a few hours later; weeping over my work.

“I can’t do it right,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this.”

He stood beside me, smelling of snow and cold, and when I looked up at him, his eyes were so blue. I had forgotten how blue they were.

“I have something for you,” he told me, “Kristi helped me find it. Let me go get it.”

A few minutes later when he placed the red foil wrapped plant on the table, his hands shook. I had never seen the strong hands of my husband tremble. Steady hands, in-control hands, they have baited fishhooks, hammered nails, strung up birdfeeders, straightened crooked Christmas trees, held our baby daughters; and once long ago, held me. But now they were trembling. He pressed his palms against the sides of his jeans to still them.

“Remember?” It was all he said.

I did remember. The third year we were married, I had seen a picture of this somewhat difficult to find flowering Christmas rose and had declared rather casually that I wanted to paint it. On Christmas eve he had presented me with a plant, much like this one, telling me rather theatrically that he had had to drive from nursery to nursery to nursery all over the city find it. I laughed and said, “Oh, poor you.” Part of the problem was that he kept asking the nurseries for Christmas pansies. No one knew what this non-horticultural husband of mine was talking about.

I was fingering the pale white blossoms, the color of clean snow. Some of the white came off in my fingers and I rubbed my thumb and finger together.

“I’ve been looking at your bottles.” He was talking fast, nervous, so unlike him. “The ones you’re painting. I saw that you were doing Christmas pansies again. Roses, I mean.”

I looked up from the plant, startled. I hadn’t realized that this year, the year I was going to leave I had been unconsciously putting them everywhere, intertwined in the manger, around the outer edges of the nativity picture, in wreaths on the stable door, as laurels around the angels.

“I thought you might want to remember what the real flower is like.” He paused. He didn’t look at me when he said, “I know you’re not happy. And I’m not happy. And the girls aren’t either. I thought it was all over. Because we’d just plain quit trying. Both of us. And then I came in here.” He looked around him. “I know you won’t believe this, but I came in here to pray, actually. About what we should do. And then I saw all this.”

Drying on the shelf were tole painted coasters, the white Christmas rose on every one. I had also painted them on Christmas cards, and the cloth calendars I do. I looked around me. Everywhere. Everywhere.

I ran a nervous hand through my hair. “I guess I wanted to remember,” I said. “I guess there was a part of me that didn’t want to forget.”

We looked at each other for a long moment. Then he held out one arm, and then the other, until, silently, I went into them.