Read You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas for Free Online

high: I had built a gingerbread public housing tenement, a little gingerbread slum.
    And I could populate my small-scale confectionary representation of urban blight with the deformed gingerbread men that I had baked alongside the cake. Men with misshapen arms and legs, heads that had expanded into great amoebalike structures. I had baked an entire population of pitiful, armless and legless subjects, each with a physical deformity worthy of the most corrupt circus.
    I didn’t even bother to frost my gingerbread misfits. Why shame them with frivolous frosting hats and raisin eyes? Let them be plain and blind. I could give them
that
much dignity.
    I would think of them as a large family who had, unfortunately, farmed too near a leaking nuclear power plant. And now they only wanted to live the remainder of their sad lives in the solitude of the cookie jar and not displayed on a platter near my public housing unit.
    It was almost like I had baked a scene from the
CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite.
     

     
    My mother made a bold and insincere fuss. “Oh, it’s just precious,” she said.
Precious
being the word southern women have always used to describe the indescribable, the unsavory. It’s also what my grandmother had said after peering at the harelip on the baby of a friend’s daughter.
Precious
meant
So positively hideous, I could produce vomit this instant and without the aid of my index finger.
    She was reduced to bland compliments. “It’s so
original.
I like it very much more than the picture in the magazine.”
    When I asked her, “But doesn’t it look like one of the slums on the news? Like something out of Springfield?” she replied, “No, honey, not at all.” But I could see in her eyes the distinct flicker of recognition and then agreement. Her eyes said,
Exactly!
    I knew that what I had constructed was an insult to the picture in the magazine, to the entire magazine itself and to baking in general. If the people at
Woman’s Day
ever saw my gingerbread horror they would cancel my mother’s subscription.
    Why hadn’t I followed the directions
exactly
? Why had I thrown the measuring cups to the wind and decided to spread my architectural wings?
    Worse, though, than the visual presentation was the sensation of the gingerbread house inside the mouth.
    First, the teeth made hard, damaging contact with the bathroom tilelike cake. Next, the tongue was burned by the cheap, hardened vanilla frosting. A single bite was enough to onset juvenile diabetes.
    Still, the front door and a tiny portion of roof were politely sampled. A number of gumdrops had been removed, then placed back. The dog refused a chunk of window even though it was caked with frosting “snow.” This very same dog did not hesitate to eat the wadded-up ball of aluminum foil she found on the floor next to the trash can.
    And so my fiasco sat in ruin on a platter in the center of the dining table. Now no longer a food item but a stand-in for a decoration.
    And then my brother appeared. He had briefly left his bedroom and all the electronic equipment in there to forage for food.
    With one swift and decisive motion of the hand, he cracked a third of the roof away from the structure and got as much of it into his mouth as possible before I could scream at him and tell him to stop. But I wasn’t going to scream at him. My mouth was open in amazement, not anger. I was just waiting for him to snarl in disgust and spit the partially chewed roof right out onto the floor.
    “You like it?” I asked, amazed.
    He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. Why, did you put something funny in it?” he said suspiciously, holding the last corner of roof out away from him.
    “No, it’s edible,” I said. “There’s no tricks.”
    He nodded. Then he devoured the fragment in his hand and returned to the cake for more, breaking away nearly one entire wall of my holiday housing unit.
    “Well, since nobody else is gonna eat it,” he said, carrying the wall away