karaoke machine
short story
“I’m not buying gifts for those kids,” I told Frank. I scolded him all the time for rolling his eyes, so over the years he’d developed a way to transmute his eye-rolling energies into a more subtle and unobtrusive mannerism, which was to flatten his lips into an un-curved, glib smile, a reaction which he performed for me then as he wrapped gifts we’d already bought for others beneath the tree.
“Oh c’mon, why not? They’re sweet kids!” he said of his own niece and nephew, his words reeking of bias.
Aurelien and Paisley (their names, perhaps, indicative of their ilk) were not sweet kids, not to me anyway. They were the product of modern ‘never say no’ parents who in turn acted in ways you would expect.
Aurelien (they called him Aurie, which I found slightly more charming) was a ten-year-old boy who lived his life in various modes of either punching things or jumping off of them, and when I was around I was frequently the one getting punched or jumped off of, which I was apparently supposed to bear and be glad for. The only salve for his omnidirectional focus and necessity for physical altercation was the soft glow of a screen upon his face.
Paisley, though more subdued, had inherited Frank’s sister’s mental gavel for superficial judgement and wielded it without discretion in a manner that wasn’t uncommon for kids eight-year-olds of any generation, but somehow her adjudications seemed particularly transgressive when directed toward me: Why is your face like that? Did you comb your own hair? You should wear different shoes.
And the two of them, when together, seemed locked in a perpetual battle for the upper hand that was unbecoming and visceral; for affection, gifts, snacks or anything else that might be bestowed upon one and not the other, so that in due course everything was bestowed upon both of them for reasons of preventing confrontation.
“They’re not sweet kids. And they don’t deserve presents,” I told Frank, and I was only slightly lacking in seriousness.
“All kids deserve presents on Christmas,” Frank told me, in his upstanding moral tone. I smiled and puffed air through my nose as though my insistence on not buying presents for them was not borne from sincerity.
Was this true? I wondered about the kids of the world and their deservingness of presents. I thought about the time as a kid I came closest to a Christmas without them.
“I DON’T WANT TO GO!” I said to my father, at a volume that constituted yelling.
“Don’t yell at me,” my father said.
“I’M NOT YELLING,” I yelled.
“Look, I understand why you don’t want to go. I never wanted to go to my Aunt Sally’s house when I was a kid either. But when I look back at it now, I realize they were some of the best times of my life...” he told me.
“No, you don’t understand dad. I hate it there. And I hate our family. I don’t even understand how I’m related to them,” I said.
“Don’t say things you can’t take back,” he said. “Family is all we have, and Christmas is the time to be grateful for it.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because I’m not grateful for them. They’re mean and stupid,” I retorted in an unsweet manner. My father put his fingers to his eyes in the way that meant he was about to say something difficult.
“I swear to God, Ash, if you don’t come with us today, you’re not getting anything for Christmas. Zilch. Nada,” he said, pointing his finger at me.
“You won’t do that. I bet you already bought my gifts anyway,” I said, perceiving a bluff that wasn’t there. I should have known he was for real; my father often performed this sort of transactional disciplining. B+ on a report card? Get your PlayStation taken away.
“Oh, is that so?” he said, leaning toward me, putting his face in mine. “Wanna bet? I’ll bet ya, no problem. You know, you think you just deserve everything. Take it for granted. There’s a lot of kids who would like the gifts we got you. If you don’t want to come be grateful for family, I’m sure they’d appreciate your gifts as a donation.”
I huffed and pouted, arms folded, saying nothing. I was surprised at my own resilience in the face of this threat.
“Fine. Your choice. Let’s go, Cheryl,” my father said to my mother, throwing his scarf around his neck.
Why didn’t I want to go visit my cousins at my aunt and uncle’s house? I tried to make eye contact with my mom as she put on her gloves and hat by the door, but her avoidance was calculated, as neither of us wanted to confront the answer to that question.
The last time I’d seen my cousins was at my house, a month before at Thanksgiving. My dad had gotten new microphone headphones for playing online games with, and I discovered that using them in conjunction with the voice memo app available on Windows OS, I could record and playback my own voice, a discovery that came with a host of implications for a young person hearing their own voice for the first time and one that I shared with my cousins in our quest to entertain ourselves within the strictures of holiday decorum and boredom. Me and my three cousins, all within a year’s age of myself, gathered around the computer cabinet in my den, away from the adults talking politics in the other room.
“Krsh roger, roger, this is agent dumbshit to colonel fuckwad, come in, over,” my cousin Ethan said into the headphones as the memo recorded. We played it back and myself and my other three cousins fell over laughing, if only because of his daring to use bad words like dumbshit and especially fuckwad, which was a new one to me. “This is lame,” he concluded.
“I think it’s cool to hear your own voice,” I said, eager to prove the activity I selected was not, in fact, lame.
“Whatever,” he said, in his typical older boy manner. “What do you even use it for, anyway?”
“Singing stuff,” I lied, since it sounded less lame. I hadn’t yet been brave enough to hear myself sing, even as I was enthralled by delivering fictional radio news reports and reading books aloud to myself.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” he said, putting the headphones on me. “Let’s make a record. I got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell!”
I didn’t understand his reference but I steadied the headphones on my head and swallowed the huge lump in my throat as Ethan hit the little red circle record button.
“I’M IN THE BUSINESS OF MISERY—LET’S TAKE IT FROM THE TOP—SHE’S GOT A BODY LIKE AN HOURGLASS IT’S—”
I didn’t make it any further as my three cousins had all fell to the ground laughing, rolling around and clutching their stomachs.
“That—that was so—that was so BAD!” breathed Ethan between laughs. I threw my father’s headphones off my head to the ground and stormed into the hallway, to my room, slammed the door, and cried into the pillow.
No one bothered to come find me until my mother softly knocked twenty minutes later, letting herself in.
“Hon, what’s wrong,” she asked when I turned up to face her as she sat at the edge of the bed, my eyes scarred red by tears.
“We were playing hide-and-seek and Ethan shoved me,” I lied.
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “I think you’re upset because your cousins laughed at your singing. Is that right?”
I was silent and did a disassociated stare out the window. I don’t know for sure how she knew about the incident, but I think she must have found the recording when pulling up some pictures on the desktop to show our relatives. She sighed and got up.
“Please come out to say goodbye to everyone before they go, at least,” she said. “It’s rude not to.”
Later I logged onto my dad’s computer to try to find the recording, but it had already been deleted.
When my parents left me home that Sunday before Christmas to go to my aunt and uncle’s holiday gathering, it was the longest time my twelve year old self had ever been allowed solitude and I took the opportunity to check my parent’s gift stash to see what presents I would supposedly be missing out on. After my discovery of Santa’s falsified existence a few years prior, I quickly ascertained that they hid all the gifts in their bedroom closet, an insultingly obvious place that didn’t have the aura of impenetrability they clearly thought it did.
There was the usual host of far too many gifts my comfortably middle class parents could at least pretend to afford, but in the middle of them all—a shining, cardboard cube of joy—was the ultimate gift I had yearned for so badly: the full RockBand game kit for PlayStation 3, the one with the drums, the guitar, and most deliciously of all, the USB microphone for the singer to sing along into. I got on my knees and leaned my forehead against it and cried and cried.
I did get a few ‘gifts’ that Christmas, but they were all of the mundane and necessary variety: socks, underwear, a toothbrush, soap, school supplies. I could tell my father was monitoring my eyes for signs of disappointment and regret amongst the wrapping paper and stockings, but I made sure to betray neither.
The RockBand game never showed. I wondered if my parents were withholding it for my birthday a few months later, but it never turned up then either, and it was gone the next time I checked the closet. I had to wonder if my dad had returned it for a refund or, as he had claimed, donated it somewhere. I prefer to believe the latter.
We did, of course, end up buying Christmas presents for young Aurelien and Paisley, whose foibles were perhaps no more extreme than any other children, despite my misgivings about them.
We got Paisley a puzzle set which was supposed to introduce kids to coding concepts, which she opened and put aside with the enthusiasm of someone reaching into their jeans pocket and discovering an old receipt. We got Aurelien a ‘young journalist’ kit with notebook and pens and pretend investigative equipment, which he promptly set aside and would likely never investigate again.
These were gifts that said, yes! You can be who you want to be. Yes, you can be an engineer! Yes, you can be a journalist!
“You know, not once did they thank us for the presents,” I pointed out to Frank on the way home. He laughed and shrugged. I couldn’t help thinking we should have donated the gifts instead.
When we got back, we exchanged gifts of our own. Frank got me a karaoke machine, and I felt like he was telling me, yes!
thanks for reading this story about being grateful. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:
Do you think the narrator’s parents were right in withholding the RockBand game?
Do you think the narrator has become a better singer over time?
thanks for reading PNP, where we love buying gifts for our nieces and nephews. if you liked this story, you might also like my novel, the big T, posted here on Substack:
Bookclub answers:
1) I think the parents could have found a more thoughtful way to utilize the moment, but it was definitely believable
2) I doubt she’s any better
Now I’m wondering if my grandkids are going to set my gifts aside and never look at them again. Haha!
I have a friend that went one step further. The threat to withhold the gift from the badly behaved boy turned into nightmare reality - upping the ante by publicly re gifting to another family member. Lesson burned into the memory, no doubt.