A Missy Christmas

A Missy Christmas
by Michael K. Smith







[This one got written because (1) I was feeling a bit guilty about not having submitted a Christmas story to the contest, (2) I’ve been thinking about doing a “rich kids” story, and (3) I was reminiscing about a semi-similar incident from college, involving an attic and a dormer window. Enjoy!]



Holiday get-togethers are a pretty big deal in my family, especially for July Fourth and Christmas. Smaller subgroups within the family celebrate Thanksgiving and whatnot together, but twice a year everybody makes a major effort to convocate.

For instance, Aunt Marie made advance plans for her whole family to go to Europe last July for some big special art museum thing, but Uncle Grant refused to hear of it because it would have meant missing the Fourth. So everyone troops off to Great-Uncle Edwin’s twenty-room “summer cottage” in the Berkshires for a week every Independence Day, and every Christmas we all foregather at Grandfather Travis McIver’s big old Victorian house in Dutchess County.

When I say “everyone,” I’m talking about a contingent of adults, adolescents, and toddlers sufficient to occupy a small nation. I go to school with a couple of my cousins at St. Osbert’s, of course, and we see some of these people more or less regularly at one country club or sports day or another, but putting all of them together at one time in one place, even a large, sprawling place, is always an interesting experiment in the chemistry of genetics and the physics of personality. And I’ve been going to these things twice a year for as long as I can remember.

My cousins are mostly an okay bunch, if you discount the usual adolescent neuroses. My first cousin George — who, like me, is a McIver and a senior at St. Ozzie’s — is actually a few months younger than I am, but rather more daring. I learned how to smoke from him the summer we were both fourteen. His older sister, Cecily, caught us and ratted us out to both her mother and mine, and we caught all kinds of hell about it because, of course, my mother believed her over our protests of innocence.

See, Cecily’s named after *my* mother because her mother and mine are sisters, in addition to her father and mine being brothers. Plus, Aunt Christine, who is father’s sister — one of them, anyway — married Uncle Gerald, who is my mother’s first cousin. It gets complicated. (At least no one is named after my father, which is probably just as well; “Randolph” is a pretty dorky name.) I think the idea is to keep all the money circulating tightly within the tribe forever.

As you can imagine, we’ve had a lot of advantages — especially my generation — but you shouldn’t get the idea we’re all a bunch of rich snobs and ne’er-do-wells. My great-grandfather, Grandfather Travis’s father, who built the place in Dutchess County, was originally a gentleman farmer who did very well in the market back in the ’20s and then somehow managed to get completely out of Wall Street shortly before The Crash. Then he invested in all the right technology companies just before World War II. Grandfather Travis, when he got his turn, knew what “semiconductor” meant about forty-eight hours after it was invented, and the family fortunes just kept growing.

But Grandfather and his father were/are strong Presbyterian types and they wanted the next generation to have to work for what they would, in time, inherit. My father and his siblings all received good educations but they were expected to labor for their bread afterward, and they did. Earlier last year, on my eighteenth birthday, my grandfather and my father sat me down and told me there was a trust fund waiting for me, but that I wouldn’t get my hands on it until I was thirty. And even then, it had various restrictions to keep me from excessive frittering.

I started drawing a generous monthly allowance that very day, however, which was entirely mine to do with as I pleased. I could bury it in a hole in the ground, or invest it and learn how to manage it, or blow it all on candy — it was all up to me. (My grandfather loves that parable about the talents of silver.)

I knew this milestone was coming, of course, having learned the details long ago from my older cousins. At first I was thrilled, but by Christmas I was beginning to be aware of the responsibilities it involved. Nobody was going to tell me how to spend my income, but nobody would rescue me if I screwed up, either.




So, anyway: Last month, I was spending the first evening of my first financially sort-of-independent Christmas leaning against my great-grandmother’s piano in the third floor drawing room, trying to look suave in my new cashmere jacket and sipping a cup of my grandfather’s really excellent hot cider. I was listening to George’s sister, Astrid, and another cousin, Tommy Schroeder, politely but earnestly trying to pressure me into declaring for Princeton or Brown, respectively (where they each were serving their sophomore years, respectively). I had arrived with my family that afternoon wearing a Stanford sweatshirt — trying, I confess, to get a rise out of my stolidly Ivy League kin — and both of them apparently were horrified that I was seriously considering college on the West Coast.

The thing was, what we called “the other side” — our second cousins who were the grandchildren of Great-Uncle Edwin — had recently taken to hanging out at weird places like the University of Michigan, and Tommy especially was worried that the blight might creep over to our side of the family tree.

“But, Daniel, you need to go to a really good business school *here*,” he was saying.

“I’m planning on electronics engineering,” I replied. “Anyway, Stanford has a first-rate B-school. So does Berkeley.”

Tommy sighed. “But it’s not the same–” he began. Then he paused when George slipped up close behind him and whispered in his ear. Astrid was taking a slug of her own cider and didn’t hear what was said . . . but I did, just barely: “She’s here.”

Tommy got a strange look in his eye. He straightened up a little taller and licked his lips (unconsciously, I suspected). I opened my mouth to ask who “she” was, but George shot me a stern warning look and flicked a quick glance at his sister.

“We’ll talk again later,” Tommy said to me. He seemed distracted. And then he and George were gone, trying to hurry casually.

Astrid raised a carefully shaped eyebrow and shrugged. “Boys,” she decided, displaying the natural superiority of a twenty-year-old woman toward a nineteen-year-old male child. Then Carolyn, an “other side” cousin, came to plead Astrid’s advice about the music for the customary dancing later , and I found myself all alone.




Not for more than thirty second, however. Gwen Schroeder, Tommy’s little sister, had been lurking in the background, awaiting her chance. She seemed to have filled out just since July and she sidled over and pushed my arm with one of her new tits.

“Hi, Danny,” she purred.

“Dan,” I automatically corrected her, and tried to think of a polite way to escape.

Now, Gwen’s not a bad kid, don’t get me wrong. She’s pretty enough, I suppose, especially since the braces came off, and she’s bright and all that, but she’s just not my type.