The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [70]
“We made her,” Camille said.
“Ill-conceived,” Caleb thought, and then he said, “Handcrafted by the finest artisans.”
For Caleb, Annie was Camille’s project. He changed diapers, bathed her, attended to the grunt work of upkeep, but Camille understood the innate needs of the baby and addressed them with little wasted effort. The baby was crying and then, somehow, it wasn’t. The baby was glassy-eyed and unfocused and then, suddenly, Camille would coax a smile to the surface of Annie’s face. “How did you do that?” Caleb would ask, and Camille would pull on her earlobe and wink at him. “Magic,” she would say. The baby was a hummingbird inside of his cupped hands, and Caleb could not hold on tightly enough to believe that she was real. It was a form of art for which he had no innate talent.
“Let’s get out of here,” Camille said.
“Where?” Caleb asked, still worried about the police officer.
“Let’s go to the mall.”
“Why?”
“It’s free,” Camille said.
At the mall, Christmas season in full swing, shoppers on all sides of them, the Fangs were endlessly fascinated by their surroundings. Sunlight from the skylit ceilings mixed with the buzzing fluorescents and made everything seem clean and expensive. Tinsel and pine needles and cottony snow hung in places that you could see but could not touch. Piped-in Muzak, Christmas standards, found you even in the restrooms. The mall was labyrinthine, exquisitely constructed and impossible to leave.
The Fangs rode the escalator up and then down, over and over, the baby overjoyed at rising and apprehensive about descending. A receipt, two feet long when unfurled, sat on top of a trash can and Caleb and Camille read through the items as though they were directions to a wonderful, previously unheard-of location. They watched a woman, loaded down with packages as if she was a store unto herself, purchase an Orange Julius and then immediately set it down on a bench in order to readjust her belongings. Properly aligned, she then walked away without retrieving her drink. Caleb picked it up, took a few tentative sips, and then passed it over to Camille. “Mmm,” she said, smiling, “orangey.” An item in their hands, they now felt a part of the community, no longer sightseers but active participants in the goings-on. They strolled through the mall without their initial naïveté and, long after the drink was finished, they continued to hold on to the cup, passing it back and forth like a torch.
They found a line that stretched out from a snowy village in the middle of the mall, its own brand of Christmas music, more digital, higher-pitched, emanating from the area. “What’s this?” Camille asked the last person in line, a burly, scowling man in custody of two small children. “Santa Claus,” he said and then turned his back on them. Caleb looked at the line, kinked and unmoving, and then whistled. “All this to see Santa Claus?” he asked. One of the man’s children turned to them and said, “You tell him what you want and then he’ll give it to you.” Camille and Caleb nodded. They understood how it worked. “And then you get a picture with him,” the other child said.
“Is it free?” Camille asked.
“What do you think?” the man snorted.
“I guess it’s not free,” Caleb said.
“No harm in meeting Santa Claus,” Camille replied. In her family’s house, there was a reproduction of a Thomas Nast illustration of Santa Claus, corpulent and red-faced and awkwardly gripping a doll that Camille had mistaken for a real child. Despite her parents’ explanations, she could never see Santa Claus as anything other than a drunk man who kidnapped children. Later, she began to think of Santa Claus as a true artist, crafting elegant toys in his remote studio, fucking elves when he got bored, uninterested in making a profit. “We’ll let Annie meet her first folkloric character. She can ask him for some nice things.”
“She can’t talk,” Caleb said, wary of tradition.
“I know what she wants,” Camille said. “I’ll translate