Page 1. Unlikely Objects–A Christmas Story

1. iron skillet

Sarah and I aren’t buying presents for each other this Christmas. We don’t have the money. I am working part-time delivering furniture for my father’s store and trying to save enough money for law school. Sarah, who works two part-time jobs, claims she doesn’t mind eating pasta five nights a week, or never having enough cash to go to the movies. This is what we get for marrying right after college. We knew things would be tight. But we do spend an awful lot of time these days talking about when I will graduate from law school and start making some real money.

“Even then,” I whisper into Sarah’s long, brown hair. “Even then it will probably be years before I make a decent salary.” Translated: Before we can start a family or buy a house or take a vacation to the Bahamas. Translated: We don’t have much to look forward to the next ten years or so.

“I don’t care about that,” Sarah says. “I don’t regret marrying you. What would we be doing separately that we can’t do together?” She grips my face between her rough, sculptor’s hands and stares cross-eyed at me. She gets close to my nose as if I were malleable as clay and she could make me perfect if she only tried hard enough. That’s Sarah. A sculptor of broken things.

Since I think of myself as a realist, and since we’ve only been married six months, I’m beginning to suspect we didn’t know quite what we were getting into. I’m thinking, worrying, that in a few years my gorgeous, smart, artsy wife will figure out she’s strapped herself to a going-nowhere-lawyer-wanna-be, and that will be the end of my life.

So, anyway, I’m sitting in the living room of our apartment, and an old Miami Vice episode comes on TV. The apartment is old, one of three units carved from a large ballroom in what used to be a Masonic Hall right on Main St. here in East Mercy.

The ceilings are high, made of tin pressed into intricate patterns, and there are hardwood floors and tall, tall windows overlooking the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant behind our building. The wall-paper is outdated. The handles on the kitchen faucets have been replaced by the garden-hose variety–the metal ones that look like cute, little flowers but dig into your palm whenever you have to turn them. The plumbing itself chokes and coughs like an old man with bad lungs.

Our landlord promises to fix this, but he doesn’t.