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  “The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”

  –W. H. AUDEN

  NEW YEAR’S EVE (CHILD)

  Witchy Woman

  I believed, for a good many years, that my mother was a witch because she levitated my bed on a New Year’s Eve in the early 1970s after my parents had returned from a fancy party.

  Before they left, I remember my mother sashaying from her bathroom smelling like Jean Naté. She had never looked more enchanting. She was wearing a plunging black blouse and shimmering pendant, black palazzo pants with legs so wide they ballooned whenever she walked, and very high cork platforms, all of which gave her the look of a sexy Endora.

  My grandma had come over to babysit me and my brother, Todd, and—like any good grandmother—she had given us anything we wanted, including lethal doses of sugar. I had ingested, at least, two or three Nehi grape sodas, a quart of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup, a dozen or so chocolate-chip cookies, and a quarter of a homemade cherry-chip cake with sour-cream icing that my grandma had made.

  I was more wired than a trapeze artist that New Year’s, and could not sleep when my grandma tried to put me to bed. More than anything, though, I just wanted to see my mom when she arrived home from her party.

  Glamorous nights were a rarity in our tiny Ozarks town, which made me sad for my mother, whom I believed had an otherworldly beauty. Maybe because she was a nurse who wore white uniforms all day, my mother tended to embrace a more sophisticated, darker look during her off-hours. She wore her black hair cropped short and her makeup thick, lips bright red and eyes catlike. She loved to dress in the latest fashions, and the early-seventies style, with its flowy fabrics, seemed to suit her personality well. Even as a kid I saw the joy it brought her when she got the chance to dress up, let loose, and be a different person than a mother or nurse.

  My parents had just given me a Polaroid camera that Christmas, and I had instantly fallen in love with it. Holding that Polaroid was like holding Wonder Woman’s lariat: It gave me a magical power to capture the truth in those around me, a chance to make sense of a world that captivated and scared me by looking at it from a different perspective.

  I had already become obsessed with recording my life—writing simple stories and poems—and now with my Polaroid I could obsessively record other people’s lives, too.

  I loved that camera, with its aluminum-and-faux-leather body.

  I slept with that camera the week following Christmas, clutching it tightly to my body like a teddy bear.

  And I used that camera on New Year’s to capture the resounding dullness of my life.

  So while my grandma snored on the couch, I clicked a photo of her.

  And while my brother slept—drooling like a rabid dog, a huge string of saliva concreting his mouth to the pillowcase—I snapped a Polaroid.

  I remember lying in bed, waiting, watching the clock in my bedroom that New Year’s night as it turned from eleven fifty-nine to midnight.

  I took a Polaroid of the clock, of the new year.

  And then I heard laughter, uproarious and ear-shattering—the kind of out-of-body laughter that I only heard on Hee Haw or Laugh-In. I jumped out of bed in my footed pj’s and ran to the living room, where my mother was blowing not one but two New Year’s noisemakers, the horns extending and then bending at grotesque angles from her mouth like devil tongues, one curling straight up into her nostrils, the other diving into her bosom.

  “Mom?” I asked nervously, as if I didn’t know this woman.

  She bent down and looked at me. Her makeup was smudged and out of focus, like some of the Polaroids I would take that didn’t develop correctly, and she smelled like all the old men who came out of the local liquor store. I had never seen my mother like this.

  I snapped a Polaroid.

  “Mom?” I asked again. “Is that you?”

  “Why aren’t you in bed, sweetie?”

  I knew this voice.

  “I missed you!” I screamed, hugging her leg. “I want to have fun, too! I want to go to a party!”

  So my mom found two birthday hats, plopped them on our heads, poured me some apple cider, and then lifted me onto her feet and we danced as she sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

  “Take our picture!” I yelled at my dad, handing him my Polaroid.

  “Ready for bed now?” my mom asked when the song and picture were over.

  “No! One more! ‘Candy Man!’ ”

  So my mother sang a little Sammy Davis Jr., and we shimmied around our tiny rental house.

  I was giggling by then, spinning like a tiny top, when I looked up to see that my mom had turned the exact shade of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Mommy?” I asked.

  She was groaning now instead of singing, and she sprinted to the bathroom and slammed the door.

  “Mommy? Are you okay?”

  And then my mother coughed up her spleen.

  She emerged from our lone bathroom a different woman, not laughing and singing but cursing and moaning.

  “Champagne,” she moaned. “I can’t drink champagne.”

  “Let’s dance, Mommy!” I said, trying to cheer her up.

  She looked at me in a troubled sort of way, the way I look today at people who rave about the food at Applebee’s or the Olive Garden.

  And then I screamed like only a kid who is still jacked up on sugar and wants to play can scream.

  My mother covered her ears and then rubbed her face, and when she dropped her hands she looked like a Picasso painting: Everything was distorted, a bit off.

  She grabbed me by the arm and tugged me toward the bedroom, my footed pj’s sliding along the wood floors.

  “Stop screaming!” she begged. “Please, Wade. Stop screaming.”

  Which made me scream even more.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!” my mom yelled.

  Now, my brother could sleep through a tornado. Had, in fact, actually slept through a tornado, and he was still glued to his pillow by that thick layer of spit.

  My mom forced me into bed while I continued to rage.

  Then I started to cry, uncontrollably and loudly.

  My mom sat on the edge of the bed and began to cry, turning green once again.

  “Wade, please be quiet.”

  I screamed.

  “Wade,” she cried, rubbing her head and her face, “if you don’t be quiet this very second, I will levitate your bed.”

  I didn’t know what “levitate” meant.

  My mother stood up and waved her hands over my bed. She shut her eyes and lifted her arms toward the heavens. She began to hum.

  “I will lift your bed off the ground and into the air, and rattle it until you stop,” she told me in a trancelike state. “And if you don’t, you will sleep suspended in midair, and you won’t be able to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because you will simply fall to the ground.”

  And then, with her eyes half shut, looking possessed, my mom started to chant the following:

  Hmmmm, spirits, lift Wade’s bed off the ground …

  And when it’s up, spin it around.

  Well, this was about the scariest thing a six-year-old boy, who loved both his mother and Mother Earth more than anything, could imagine.

  I shut my mouth, my teeth chattering, and then I shut my eyes, and I could swear my bed was lifting off the floor, and then spinning like a merry-go-round.

  Hmmmm, spirits, keep Wade’s bed in midair,

  Until morning comes, and I release my stare.

  I popped open an eye and saw my mother, as green and wickedly magical as the wicked witch, her arms outstretched, humming and chanting. She was, I now knew, levitating my bed.

  So I did the only thing I could: I grabbed my Polaroid and snapped a photo.

  Of my mother, the witch, her twinkling pendant releas
ing an evil spell.

  I knew I would need proof to show the authorities what had occurred this night.

  I knew I would need evidence to show my dad and brother that their wife and mother was really from Salem.

  I shook my Polaroid, defiantly, in front on my mother.

  “I have proof!” I screamed.

  Shut your eyes, shut them NOW!

  And do not look or you’ll be turned to a cow!

  Now, I certainly didn’t want to be a cow, so I clamped my eyes shut again, and they remained that way until the next morning, when I awoke to find my mom sitting on the edge of my bed, shaking me, hugging me, apologizing, asking if I was okay, if I had slept.

  “Is my bed back on the floor, Mommy?” I asked.

  She hugged me and said she had to go take some aspirin.

  As soon as she left, I retrieved the Polaroid picture that I had stashed under my pillow. Here was my evidence to the world.

  The Polaroid was black.

  So I shook it.

  It was as if a picture had never been taken.

  I shook it again. Harder.

  Nothing.

  Her powers had destroyed it!

  That New Year’s morning, my dad made Belgian waffles for breakfast and my brother and I blew my parents’ leftover noisemakers all day long while my mother moaned through clenched teeth, shutting all the curtains in the house to keep out the bright light, just like any witch would, I knew.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE (ADULT)

  Caramel Corn, Comas, Coupled

  I woke with a start last New Year’s Eve after my head had fallen into the giant red enamelware popcorn bowl I was holding in my lap.

  Homemade caramel corn was stuck to my chin.

  I jerked upright and looked over at my partner, Gary, whose head was painfully tilted sideways—like a broken jack-in-the-box. He was drooling the remnants of his ice-cream sundae.

  “Get up!” I shouted, staring at the clock in our basement. “Just look at ourselves! We’re pathetic.”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” Gary said sleepily. “It’s what we do on New Year’s Eve. It’s called relaxing.”

  “It’s eight P.M.!” I said. “We’re not relaxing. We’re comatose.”

  It seemed shocking to me that we had managed to become our parents some time between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

  Of course, we’d attended our share of New Year’s Eve parties over the years; we’d even tossed a few of our own.

  But the hoopla, the pressure, the resolutions seemed meaningless when compared to one simple fact: Gary quit drinking on New Year’s Eve.

  In 1995 Gary walked out, very drunk, on a nightmarish relationship. He was sporting a new Armani jacket that his wealthy, older boyfriend had bought for him to wear to dinner at a very tony restaurant, but after being told repeatedly to “shut up and look pretty,” Gary bolted from the restaurant bawling, before dramatically hailing a cab, crab-walking his way up the stairs and into his tiny apartment, and promptly puking on his new Armani.

  The next day he managed to crawl his very hungover body to his first-ever AA meeting. He has been sober fifteen years, and for an emotional man who cries when he sees Suzanne Somers on QVC, I consider this an accomplishment more extraordinary than men walking on the moon.

  But it is not always easy.

  Since I have been in a relationship with Gary, we have not been able to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a stupid wild night like most of our friends, who tend to wake up naked the following morning next to someone with recessed gums and more body hair than a Yeti.

  “But he was wearing a ball cap,” they always say the next day. “He looked cute at the time.”

  Technically, I could drink on New Year’s, considering I am not an alcoholic, but that would make me the bad guy, like those husbands who continue to bring their eight-hundred-pound wives honey buns and two-liter jugs of Mountain Dew before the authorities are called and their spouses are airlifted out of the trailer park.

  Our New Year’s Eves are, therefore, purposely boring. Gary and I spend them eating and then promptly lapsing into a coma.

  We no longer, out of respect for Gary’s sobriety, even make resolutions.

  In fact, the older we’ve grown, Gary and I have become more life-lessons guys than new-year’s-resolution people. We truly believe that important decisions shouldn’t be saved and announced one night every year, but that they should evolve naturally, no matter the day or month. Otherwise, we believe, life becomes stalled with inertia, and when resolutions are made they seem forced, false, and, as a result, doomed to be ignored or to fail.

  “Life should be conquered every day,” Gary believes, “not one night a year. Life is too short.”

  It’s a great theory, I always believed, but honestly I had never really been tested. In fact, my last New Year’s resolution—to watch bowl games all day without moving from the couch, changing out of my pajamas, or eating anything that didn’t contain Velveeta—had exceeded my wildest expectations.

  And then our phone rang.

  “Happy New Year!”

  It was Elise, one of our best friends from the city, who is all tornadic energy. She loves parties. I mean, she throws parties for every holiday, from Earth Day to Cinco de Mayo.

  She adores New Year’s Eve.

  “I just made my New Year’s resolutions!” she announced with great pride, shouting over a raucous crowd in the background. “I’m losing twenty pounds by March, doing hot yoga three times a week, and only investing my money in green companies. Oh, and I might move to Costa Rica. Just thought you’d like to know! What are you two up to?”

  She caught herself before I could say a word.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she yelled. “Go back to sleep! Ciao!”

  She hung up, a dial tone replacing the party raging in the background.

  I looked over at Gary.

  He was asleep again.

  In fact, it looked like his head had been rubber-cemented onto his body by a three-year-old.

  When did our lives become so boring and calculated?

  I wanted to be respectful, but didn’t we need to shake things up a bit?

  Shouldn’t we at least resolve to stay awake until midnight?

  “Get up!” I said, shaking Gary. “We’re making New Year’s resolutions.”

  “No! No, that’s a mistake,” Gary said, wiping his mouth. “First of all, we don’t believe in them. And second, if you utter them, you have to mean them. Otherwise it’s bad luck. You might as well just go shatter a mirror in front of me.”

  “I just want to have some fun,” I said, a bit testily.

  “Fine,” he remarked.

  “I’ll go first, then,” I said, adjusting my sweats, whose mustard color made me look like I had jaundice. “Here’s one: I resolve to look nicer for you when you get home at night. Instead of wearing old, comfy clothes all the time, I’ll dress like I’m in Ocean’s Eleven.”

  Gary eyed me suspiciously. “You don’t get dressed during the day as it is. You write until noon in a ball cap and pajamas with pine trees on them, and then you change into sweats. You’re very Johnny Depp in Secret Window.”

  “That changes now,” I said.

  I ran upstairs and threw on a pair of dark Banana Republic jeans, a choker, and a black Lycra top that made me feel as if I’d been encased in plastic wrap.

  When I returned, I spun around like a fashion model and said, “Your turn!”

  Gary scrunched his face and smoothed his hair down. It looked like he had gotten electroshock therapy. He stared into our Christmas tree, bedecked with hundreds of ornaments and lights, and then inhaled deeply, the whiff of our seven burning sugar-cookie-scented candles making his mouth water. “Okay, I resolve to spend less money on unnecessary items, like holiday ornaments and pretty candles. Your turn.”

  I looked at the TV. I had been watching reruns all day of Project Runway and House Hunters International.

  “I vow to watch less realit
y TV.”

  I sounded less than convincing, but continued. “I’m smarter than those shows, right? So, from now on, I’ll watch more Discovery and rent important documentaries.”

  Gary nodded enthusiastically. “And I’ll read more!”

  I glanced down at the stack of Better Homes and Gardens, Coastal and Midwest Livings, Peoples and InStyles Gary kept by the couch.

  “I’ll read more books,” he clarified, standing up and heading toward our bookshelves. “Like Moby-Dick. I’ve never read Moby-Dick. I mean, what a great title, right?”

  He yanked the classic off the shelves, the heft making him go, “Ooofff!”

  We both sat back down on the couch.

  “Happy New Year’s!” Gary and I sang to each other.

  Then I flipped on the History Channel and began watching a documentary about a pale queen with a lot of hair who desperately needed a tan and a run-in with some thinning shears. Gary put on his glasses—the ones he wore to make him “look smart”—and began to read Moby-Dick.

  His mouth was moving.

  I sat awkwardly, upright, rigid, in my tight clothes, like Kelly Ripa.

  “This is fascinating,” I said, nodding at the television.

  “So is this,” Gary said, nodding at the book.

  After fifteen minutes, we both started fidgeting. I pulled off my choker and spun it round and round like a lasso, wondering what this queen would have looked like if Tyra Banks had gotten hold of her and given her a makeover on America’s Next Top Model. Gary’s eyes were drawn to a picture of Reese Witherspoon in a magazine.

  “I can’t take it!” I said.

  “Ishmael is such a stupid name!” Gary said. “And Moby-Dick isn’t about a giant wiener at all!”

  I ran upstairs and changed back into my sweats, flipped the TV to House Hunters, and began screaming, “Pick the second condo, you idiots! You can always gut the kitchen!”

  Gary yanked open our cabinet doors—exposing the uncomfortable fact that he’d obviously invested our Roth IRA in Yankee Candles—and said, “We’re getting low on sugar cookie and pumpkin spice.”

  I began to laugh, which incited Gary, and when we both could finally breathe again, he looked over at me and asked, very seriously, “Are you compromising your life by being with me?”