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plans.” He says he is sending something; he has spoken with Ellen about what would be a good gift and he’s putting it in the mail—insured, overnight express, to be sure it gets there in time.
    I spend the official day in hiding. I turn off the phone, I don’t answer the buzzer.
    Later I go downstairs and find that people have left me flowers and gifts, similar to the way strangers leave offerings at scenes of tragic accidents. My friends have created a veritable altar to the birthday girl: an FTD Pick Me Up bouquet, a get-well card, and so on.
    Norman sent a small heart-shaped gold locket, the kind that snaps open and you put two pictures in, the kind that you’d give a little girl. It is such a strange gift for a thirty-two-year-old. Is this jewelry? It is more like pre-jewelry, like a training bra. (For Christmas he will send me a thin cashmere sweater—which will make me wonder, is this the kind of “cashmere sweater” Ellen was referring to?)
    Ellen sends a birthday card meant for a small child—shaped like a teddy bear, signed, “Love, Mommy Ellen.” She sends a kiddie card, a silky nightgown negligee like something Mrs. Robinson would wear, and a box of homemade candy from her favorite Atlantic City candy store. The chocolate is thick, heavy, rolled, filled—it looks like it could bend your mind. I can’t keep the things she sends me and I can’t throw them out either. I give the chocolate away. That evening I make each of my friends take a piece, like communion wafers, bits of the mother. “Here,” I say pushing the box forward, refusing to try one myself. “Take one,” and I watch to see how it goes down.
    Â 
    Christmas Eve—it’s a year since this started unfolding. I’m on the train to Washington—it’s packed, the mood is festive, the luggage racks are bursting with ornately wrapped packages. I’m bringing presents even though my mother has told me we don’t celebrate Christmas. The fact is we don’t celebrate Hanukkah either.
    We handle the holidays by pretending they aren’t happening, by ignoring them. We hold our breath—it’ll pass. An invisible cloud hangs over the house, a depressed charcoal gray, like the set for a Eugene O’Neill play.
    Some part of me thinks it’s not hard to have a decent holiday; you choose what holiday you like and you celebrate. Every year I become all the more determined that I will do it for myself, I will make my own holiday.
    The winter I turned nine, I was fixated on having a Christmas tree. It made no sense to me that all up and down the block every house except ours had a tree.
    â€œWe’re Jewish,” my mother said. “Jews don’t have trees.”
    â€œWe weren’t always Jewish, were we?” Until then we’d always celebrated Christmas, a treeless Christmas, but Christmas nonetheless. I remembered leaving a plate of cookies for Santa, waking to find it empty, replaced by a long red stocking hanging from the fireplace, an orange bulging in the toe, walnuts spilling out the top, presents on the hearth. It wasn’t my imagination. Until then we’d been like everyone else, and then suddenly we were different.
    â€œI was wrong,” my mother said. “It was my error. Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, we have Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.”
    â€œBut the Solomons next door are Jewish too, and they have a tree.”
    â€œThat’s their problem,” she said.
    It wasn’t as though we were especially religious. On Yom Kippur, the highest of the holy days, the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting, we paused only momentarily for God to count us in and then ate a late breakfast. But now, without warning, Christmas had changed its name to Hanukkah. It came early and lasted for eight days, like a plague.
    We gathered around a menorah and lit the candles—no one knew the prayer; instead we said