In the years after Cameron Gordon died of a brain tumor, his sister Addie retreated to California, where she was in graduate school in comparative literature at Berkeley. She rarely came back to New York, usually only at the Christmas holidays. She had always been evasive and elusive. After Cameron’s death, she became more so.

At Berkeley, she got involved with a man who dominated her and alienated her from her friends. He was built like a fireplug with a muscled upper body. He had a German name, and our group of college friends referred to him among ourselves as “the Nazi.” I wondered if he were abusive to Addie, but I had no way of knowing, since we were barely in touch.

Eventually Addie broke up with him. Her next boyfriend was the opposite. Marcus was tall and slender, with dark eyes and hair. A graduate student in the English department, he was Jewish and four years younger than Addie. The times I saw them together, he deferred to her. 

Addie and Marcus got married in a civil ceremony at Berkeley City Hall, with two colleagues as witnesses. I found out about it afterwards, like our other college friends. Perhaps Larissa knew; her friendship with Addie dated back to high school.

I got the feeling that Marcus did not get along with Cyrus and Janine. No one could compensate them for the loss of Cameron. Perhaps any male addition to the family would be a painful reminder, especially a son-in-law like Marcus, who never knew Cameron.

Marcus accepted an assistant professorship at UC Santa Barbara, and Addie dropped out of graduate school. She got a job teaching French and Latin at a secondary school in Santa Barbara. They had a son, Jay, a year younger than Corinne.

Addie and I kept in touch by sending each other art postcards. Addie was a clever correspondent. Her communications were full of witty allusions and inside jokes. She could be infuriating because she was elliptical, but she could also be amusing and charming. She possessed a wide-ranging, esoteric knowledge. She was good at languages. We both loved art so much that neither of us wanted to make it a career. I didn’t know anyone else quite like Addie, which is why I put up with what was annoying about her.

In 1999, before the last Christmas of the millennium, Addie wrote me about her intention to spend the holiday in New York with her parents. The Modern Language Association’s annual conference, a must for Marcus, was being held between Christmas and New Year’s at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, and Addie, Marcus, and Jay planned to stay the entire week. Before the holiday, Addie and I communicated our wishes to get our children together.

On Friday, Christmas eve, Corinne came with me grocery shopping. It had rained that afternoon, and grimy puddles collected at the street curbs. We were bundled against the cold. The pavements were wet, and we wore waterproof boots.

Vendors had set up temporary booths to sell Christmas trees next to the street in front of West Side Market at Broadway and West 110 Street. They came from as far away as Quebec, and sometimes they lived in their trucks while they sold their trees. The trees were wrapped with wire and twine, forming neat cylinders, stacked in rows, and the wooden booths were strung with little lights. The heady fragrance of the Christmas trees transformed the city street into a forest.

As I was leaving the grocery store with two heavy bags of groceries, accompanied by Corinne, I saw Addie and Jay outside the store. It was five-thirty and already dark, but Addie, being tall, was easy to spot. I glimpsed her in profile under the streetlights; her upturned Irish nose, pale skin, and bushy brown hair stood out against the backdrop of Christmas trees facing Broadway. I recognized her red wool coat with its sleeves that were too short for her. I called her by name, but she didn’t hear me over the street noise from the busy intersection. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and pedestrians, and the streets were clogged with traffic.

I called Addie again. This time she heard me. A wide smile spread across her face, and she waved at us in a stilted Queen Elizabeth way, raising both arms and rotating her forearms from the elbows. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, and neither was Jay. As we approached, I saw Addie was wearing her old red canvas sneakers, with a hole in the right little toe.

In college, Addie liked to boast that she was impervious to the weather. Coming from Alabama, I was always cold until I learned how to dress for the New England winter. Addie apparently hadn’t changed, even after all her years in California. Jay wasn’t dressed much more warmly than she was. He was wearing a fleece jacket, canvas trousers, and high-topped leather sneakers. No hat or gloves. At six, he was a head taller than Corinne, aged seven.

Jay didn’t look much like Addie, more like his father, if his father had ever been a handsome boy. He had large brown eyes, clear olive skin, wavy chestnut hair, and full pouty red lips, like a fashion model. When he saw us, he jumped up and down with excitement, or maybe it was the cold.

As we approached, Addie started talking about how they’d arrived on the red eye from California that morning to learn that Cyrus and Janine had made no preparations for Christmas. After Addie woke from a nap, she was sent to buy a Christmas tree.

“I think I’ll pick out a tree and come back with Marcus to carry it home,” Addie said. “Which one do you think I should get? I want a small one we can handle.”

. Addie was behaving as if it were just the two of us, and we weren’t standing in the dark on a crowded sidewalk with our children on a busy evening before a major holiday. Her arms floated in the air as she talked to me. She was more animated than I’d seen her in a long time.

I noticed Addie was oblivious the same way I noticed the tree vendors, ready with clippers and pliers, and the noises of street traffic and the subway, the crowds on the narrowed sidewalk between the grocery store and the tree booths, and the reflections of store lights and street lights and traffic lights on the wet pavement. I felt as if I were inside a dark kaleidoscope, my attention pulled in different directions.

A few feet away, Corinne and Jay were in a communication of their own. Corinne stood apart, small and contained. The hood of her coat was pushed back, revealing her high curving forehead and silky blonde hair held in place with a barrette. I realized she was watching Jay warily, the way she often did with active boys. Jay drew closer and closer to her, shouting something incoherent. He came so close he pushed her toward the curb. I glanced at Addie. She was paying no attention. The next thing I realized, Jay had pushed Corinne off the sidewalk and out onto Broadway, just as the M4 bus was making the turn from West 110 Street. I don’t remember dropping the groceries I was carrying or running out in the street. All I remember is scooping up Corinne and carrying her back to safety before the bus completed its turn.

When I looked up, I saw Jay had retreated from the curb and was enfolded in his mother’s arms. They looked back at us and said nothing. I had expended all the energy I had to rescue my daughter, and I couldn’t confront Addie. When I saw that no apology was forthcoming, I said we had to get home. I took Corinne by the hand, gathered my groceries, and left.

Later that evening and the next morning, I was plagued by thoughts of what I should have said to Addie. I had prevented myself from speaking my mind, but the more I thought about it, I felt I couldn’t remain silent, even though I knew there was a risk in speaking to Addie, because she could be unpredictable and quick to take offense.

I waited until after Christmas to call her. When I said that Jay had been physically aggressive with Corinne and pushed her onto Broadway, she hung up on me. At first I thought it was a lost connection, but when I tried to call her back, she wouldn’t take my calls.

I never got the opportunity to say what I planned to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I realized that Jay was not accustomed to New York and didn’t know how to behave on the street. That I knew he had not pushed Corinne onto Broadway out of malice, but from an exuberance he couldn’t control. In the gentlest way possible, I wanted to ask Addie to watch Jay more closely when our children were together.

Instead, I wrote Addie a note in which I apologized. I said I loved her, and I wasn’t angry at her, but I was hurt when she hung up on me.

According to Larissa, Addie didn’t like the letter, and so she didn’t respond. I tried calling again. I left messages with Janine. Addie never called me back. During one of my attempts to reach her, I reached her husband. Marcus talked to me about Addie. He gave me a sense of how badly she coped in her daily life. There seemed so little she could manage.

I didn’t see Addie or speak to her again before she left. I had to accept that she was willing to throw away twenty-seven years of friendship without attempting to discuss differences, presumably because she didn’t like what I said about her son.

Four years passed before I saw Addie again. Again, it was on an early evening at Christmas time, and Corinne was with me. We were in the Ivy League Stationers on Broadway at West 115 Street, looking for an accordion letter file folder for Corinne’s middle-school papers. They didn’t have one, and we were in the process of ordering it, when I saw Addie walk in the store with Jay and Larissa’s daughter Chiara. I later learned that Marcus was waiting outside with Cameron’s friend Murray.

Once Addie saw us, she talked nonstop to Corinne for twenty minutes, pointedly ignoring me even when I spoke to her. First I said, “I didn’t know you were here.” Then I said, “Do you want to get together?” Eventually, she said, “Call me,” and I knew that meant no. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Nice talking to you, Corinne.” Nothing to me. Only Chiara was friendly.

After we left the stationery store, Corinne told me that Addie’s behavior made her uncomfortable, but she hadn’t known what to do. I told her she didn’t need to do anything.

The more I thought about it, I realized that what made the encounter especially painful was that Addie behaved like my mother. I remembered a visit to Birmingham in my twenties, when Mimi was living with our parents. I sat down with my mother and Mimi in the den while they carried on a conversation for nearly half an hour as if I weren’t there, ignoring my attempts to join them, until I got up and walked away.

Why is Addie’s enmity towards me so great? I wondered. Because four years ago, I told her I was upset when her son pushed my daughter into the street? It didn’t make sense. I considered how, whenever there was a feud or conflict involving members of my family, there was always the shadow reason and the real reason. The shadow reason was the literal reason. It was what people said was the reason so they wouldn’t have to admit the real reason. The real reason was the buried reason that was too dangerous or threatening to acknowledge. If it were suggested, it would be denied. All the same, it was the cause.

For someone like Addie, even the shadow reason couldn’t be acknowledged. She couldn’t accept my objections to her son’s behavior and her lack of oversight that put my daughter in harm’s way.

It upset me because it was irresponsible, but I didn’t think it was enough to explain Addie’s lasting antipathy. I thought about how among our group of five college friends who shared the same hallway freshman year, only Addie and I still worried about money by the time we were in our mid-thirties. We had put our energies into creative endeavors that were not lucrative, and our husbands had spent years in graduate school, in contrast to our other friends. 

When Corinne was born, Keith and I were at last able to buy a Manhattan apartment, while Addie and Marcus still lived in a rental in Santa Barbara. Perhaps Addie felt abandoned by my relative affluence, even after she and Marcus bought a house in Santa Barbara, and Marcus ascended the ranks of academia, eventually becoming a full professor.

Whatever the real reason, I thought, Addie is a person so full of lies and evasions that she will never admit to it. She is the only person I’ve ever been friendly with who will willingly lie rather than tell the truth, even when telling the truth is easier, and there is no reason to lie.

The morning after the encounter with Addie in the stationery store, I was sitting in my living room mulling over these thoughts when the telephone rang, and I answered it. A muffled boy’s voice sounding vaguely familiar asked for Corinne.

“Whom may I say is calling?”

There came silence, then muffled laughter.

I asked once more.

The indistinct reply sounded like “Gaby Ray. From pre-school.”

My voice grew sharper, “Who are you?”

I could hear a whisper, not to me, “What should I say?”

There was someone else, not speaking into the phone. I could barely hear, but I thought I recognized Addie.

The boy said, not to me, “I can’t do this.” Then I was sure who he was, and who’d put him up to it. Quietly, I hung up the phone.

Because Harris was the friend with whom I could discuss everything, I called to tell him about it. “Addie put her son up to a crank call,” I said. “She’s forty-five years old and acting like a child. I can’t believe she did that. She’s seriously disturbed.”

“Let it go, Adrienne,” Harris counseled me. “The friendship is over.”

I thought of all Harris had been through in his life. There was the AIDS epidemic, when he’d lost friends and lovers. He’d seen friendships break up, too, out of jealousy or envy or expectations that went unfulfilled. Somehow he’d managed never to get AIDS, but he did get cancer and survive it. Harris was a good example for me, because he didn’t waste time regretting what might have been. He cherished what he had.

– Adrienne Pine

Author’s Note: “A Christmas Story” is an excerpt from a full-length prose memoir, Stacy and Her Sisters, which is still in process.