A Christmas Sonata Read Free Page A

the stove and Mother helped her. They put cinnamon in the oatmeal and the smell was somehow part of Christmas the way the store was part of Christmas and the train ride was part of Christmas.
    Matthew was still not awake because they gave him medicine to sleep, so after we ate the oatmeal Mother sat talking with Marilyn over coffee and Ben went to open the store and I followed him out from the back.
    I had only been to the store once before, in the summer, when I was very small. I caught a fish with a yellow stomach andblue eyes off the dock, but I couldn’t remember much of the store.
    Now that I was older I could see things I hadn’t seen when I was small and I thought how full everything looked. Full and more full.
    I walked along the glass case and looked at the candy and thought how it would be fun to be in the case, just be in the case with all that candy. I wouldn’t even have to eat any of it, I thought, just be with it.
    Mother had told me not to ask Ben for things because of the war and how everything was hard to get, but Ben saw me looking at the candy and opened the back of the counter.
    There was a bowl of white candy made to look like ribbons with green and red stripes in it, and he handed me one. It was colored so that the colors went all through the candy and I almost hated to eat it, but Iput it in my mouth and sucked on it and would take it out and look to make sure the colors were still there.

    The candy lasted a long time because I kept taking it out and looking at it, long enough for me to go around the store and see all the things I had missed the night before and in the summer when I was so small.
    I thought Ben and Marilyn must be very rich to have so many things in their store. There were boxes and boxes of food and blankets and snowshoes on the shelves, and guns hung shiny and new in racks. The head of an animal stuck so far out from the wall I could get under it.
    “What is that?” I asked Ben, pointing up at the head.
    “It’s a moose head.”
    “Is it live?”
    Ben was putting wood in the stove, split chunks that smelled like paint thinner,and he stopped to look at me. He smiled and shook his head. “No. They stuff them like that after they shoot them. It’s full of cotton.”
    “Who does that?”
    “The people who shoot them.”
    “Why do they do that?”
    “So they can keep seeing it after they kill it,” Ben said.
    I thought, if they wanted to keep seeing it why do they kill the moose in the first place, but I didn’t say it. I went the rest of the way around the store, seeing the things to see and smelling the smells that made me think of spices Mother had in our apartment in Minneapolis, and finally I came to the tree.
    Standing by the tree made it seem bigger.
    It went up and up to the ceiling, and the pictures in the squares on the ceiling were puffy and painted white, so theylooked like clouds, and it made the tree look like it went up into the sky.
    There were so many decorations. We had a tree in Minneapolis, but it was not like this tree—nothing was like this tree. There were silver balls and red balls, with dented-in sides so that they made all the light in the room seem to come out of them; and tinsel hung, each strand separate and straight, but so many that they were like water falling; and there were lights, lights that went around and around and up. While I was watching Ben plugged them in.
    “Oh.…”
    Each light had a little star around it, so when the lights came on the stars made them seem bigger and glow out in streaks of light that mixed with the streaks from the other lights.
    Red and blue and yellow and green and white, all shining in the tinsel and the colored balls, so no matter where youlooked there was some new light and color to see and if you lived to be forever you could not see them all. And on top, on the very top, was an angel with long white hair and a pink face and she was so beautiful, smiling down from the top of the tree, so