HAVE YOU EVER GIVEN YOUR SISTER A SNOWMAN? by Christopher Citro
Holler, say
Help, help, help. Hello, they will say,
Come back here for some potato salad.
– Josephine Miles, “Family”
Try this: read the following list of Peanuts book titles but without including the Charlie Browns. Leave that part out. And remember that Peanuts was a comic strip. Made for kids. And meant to be funny.
Who Do You Think You Are, Charlie Brown?
Let’s Face It, Charlie Brown
You Need Help, Charlie Brown
You’re Out of Your Mind, Charlie Brown!
You Can’t Win, Charlie Brown
You’re Hopeless, Charlie Brown
You Asked for It, Charlie Brown
* * *
Day one: Morning light. I open the closet door, carefully start unpeeling some upper layers, telling myself, Don’t look at everything too closely, you haven’t got the time. Just decide if it’s a keeper or not.
Day two: Late afternoon light. I pull open the closet door, grab a stack of stuff, sit on the empty bedroom floor and begin looking at everything too closely. Toy cars, stuffed animals, workbooks from elementary school inscribed with large penciled alphabets, pale blue report cards, yearbooks, crayon boxes.
Day three: I ignore the closet, move to the living room, start reading a memoir I’ve brought, You Can’t Catch Death. Richard Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe describes a private investigator finding his body in front of his picture window weeks after his suicide by shotgun. Sitting with my back to our brick fireplace, evening light coming in through the picture window, no furniture to sit on, only the old brown carpet, my parents having been moved down to my brother’s farm weeks ago. My brother’s email from Ohio to me out in Kansas: If you want anything from the house before we sell it, now’s the time.
Day four: I head out for groceries with an ex-girlfriend. “I’m so glad I’ll never have to go shopping with you ever again,” she says as I toss toilet paper over an aisle to her in an attempt to cheer us both up.
Day five: Having gotten through only the top foot of a waist-high sedimentary pile of my childhood, I yank open the door, grab armfuls of what’s left, and throw it all into a box big enough to hold a body. Screech of duct tape. Heft the stiff cardboard against my chest out to my rental car, and drive myself the hell out of that place, never to step foot in my childhood home again. Let the realtors sort it out. Let the new owners peel the fingerprints from the walls.
* * *
In the house where I grew up, the top of the old basement stairway formed a walk-in closet for my bedroom. I thought of this space as my museum, a venue to house my many collections. I had the usual stamp album and foreign money – Magyar forints strange and heavy in the hand, Egyptian bills holding watermarked pharaohs, a twothousand-lire note with the face of Galileo. When I turned eleven, as part of my private investigator training, I taped fingerprint sheets like wanted posters across the walls, names of my friends and family in ballpoint above ink-smeared grids.
When I left for college I moved completely out of that house, mostly to get away from my mother, but I left that closet’s contents 154 intact, the floor piled high with broken toys, old picture books, and within this the small caves where during high school I’d hidden film canisters of ditch weed and half-filled crockery bottles of Lancers imported Vin Rosé. It all stayed that way, undisturbed, for another decade.
* * *
DUSTIN: I had wheat pennies and baseball cards. Neither of which I decided to collect on my own. They were given to me by my dad, to start collecting something. He bought me baseball cards. I’d throw them in a box and he’d keep buying them for me. For my birthday he got me a jar of wheat pennies and this booklet where you stick them in by year. Stuff like that. I had no desire to really do it myself.
ME: How long did you have those collections?
DUSTIN: I don’t know. They’re probably still in a box somewhere.
* * *
What holds an atom together? No one knows, obviously, so they gave it a name so they could feel like they understand. They call it the strong force because it’s slightly more powerful than the weak force, which is the one that tears atoms apart. Without the strong force there’d be no atoms, no perceivable matter. Without the strong force the sun wouldn’t work. It couldn’t fuse hydrogen into helium, releasing the energy that reaches us to make sweet peas grow and your carpet warm for your cat to sleep on. No one knows why this force exists, or any of the others. As if we needed another thing to worry about in the middle of the night. They try – they come up with acronyms like GUT and TOE: Grand Unified Theory and Theory of Everything. This is where physics starts sounding like philosophy or religion with numbers. Except for our toes and guts. If we ever get things figured out it’ll apparently come down to a matter of toes and guts. Thanks, science. That’s a big help.
* * *
September 30, 1953
Outdoors. Night.
CHARLIE BROWN: Just look at all the stars.
LUCY: (Looks at the ground.)
CHARLIE BROWN: Did you ever see so many? They’re all over . . .
The sky is covered with stars . . .
LUCY: (Looks straight ahead.)
CHARLIE BROWN: Stars, stars, stars. As far as you can see . . . I wonder how many there are?
LUCY: (Looks up finally.)
CHARLIE BROWN: (Looks at Lucy.)
LUCY: Ten?
* * *
My parents were World War II generation, the age of my friends’ grandparents, and I arrived at the end of a run of five kids spread out over decades. Evelyn and Angelo loved visiting flea markets on weekends. When I was little it was fairly normal: antique butter churns, beef smokies, and Depression glass fruit bowls. As they got older it got weirder. To the point that they’d just bring home brown paper bags of junk to lug directly down to the basement: winter coats in odd sizes, broken coffee makers, ersatz antique end tables with teeth marks, photographs of strange girls in Buster Brown collars. This was something else left for the realtor to deal with, the mountain of other families’ trash piled next to our oil furnace.
In their final days of being able to live on their own, my father selected screwdrivers and wrenches from his tool box and hung them, suspended by bread bag twist ties, from nails he hammered in above his work bench. Then he hung up washers and rusty screws. Individually. And my mom put the Chevy through the back wall of the garage one morning too many.
* * *
ME: What holds your family together?
DUSTIN: Guilt.
ME: That’s a one-word answer.
DUSTIN: What would be another answer? Um, an uncomfortable – uncomfortable expectations.
* * *
As a kid I had a lot of books but only a few felt like a collection: my Choose Your Own Adventure books, for example. How unsettlingly dark and twisted those were. More often than not I’d make the wrong choice, in the face of some sleazeball leering out at me from the page, and end up at the bottom of a pit awaiting a swift and imminent death. It’s quite a feeling to be confronted with the words The End when you’re only on page 12 of a 200-page book.
Before that there were my Peanuts books, dozens and dozens of 156 tattered flea market paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s, glossy new ones from the ’80s. I constructed a special shelf just for these along the side of my dresser so they’d be the first thing you’d see coming into my room, beneath the embroidered Winnie the Pooh hanging mid-air from a rising balloon, a few bees circling him as he nervously repeats, “Tut-tut! Looks like rain!”
One afternoon, when I’m not looking, my mother hands the bulk of them away to my visiting nieces and nephews. I guess Mom felt they were hers to give, that I might have been too old for them, that any request from a grandchild must be obeyed without question, that the way I’d carefully gathered and presented them on a shelf of their own meant I didn’t care about them in any special way and probably wouldn’t even notice if they were taken away. Actually, thanks, Mom. I needed those 160 square inches of carpet for something more important. Like a garbage can.
* * *
ME: Does anybody in your family collect anything?
DUSTIN: My sister collects snowmen for Xmas. She has many, many snowmen.
ME: You mean figurines, not actual snow men.
DUSTIN: Yeah, porcelain. Whatever you buy in gift shops. She’s like (high-pitched gleeful voice), “Oh, it’s snowmen.” And she buys them.
ME: What do you think they do for her?
DUSTIN: I don’t know. But she has a lot of them. And I said, “You have a lot of snowmen.” And she goes, “Yeah, I collected them for a long time.”
ME: What do you do when you’re around them? Do you interact with them?
DUSTIN: No. I don’t.
ME: You don’t play with them liquored up at 3 in the morning under the Christmas tree? Have battles?
DUSTIN: No. I mean, they’re everywhere, man. There’s just like snowmen everywhere.
ME: Sounds scary.
DUSTIN: Yeah, of course. They all got the faces and stuff. Different sizes . . . I don’t know. Why does anyone – I don’t know. Something to do. Something to normalize yourself.
ME: To normalize yourself?
DUSTIN: Something to identify yourself.
ME: When she meets people do you think she says, “Hi, my name’s Jocelyn and I collect snowmen”?
DUSTIN: (Laughs.) I doubt it. I doubt it. But you know it’s like that aunt each year that only gets sweaters with cats on them. “She likes cats. Let’s get her a cat.”
ME: Makes gift giving easy.
DUSTIN: Yeah maybe that’s –
ME: Have you ever given your sister a snowman?
DUSTIN: No. She has plenty.
* * *
The strong force appears to become stronger with distance, unlike the other forces. As the distance between two quarks increases, the force between them increases rather as the tension does in a piece of elastic as its two ends are pulled apart. Eventually the elastic will break, yielding two pieces. Something similar happens with quarks, for with sufficient energy it is not one quark but a quark-antiquark pair that is “pulled” from a cluster. Thus, quarks appear always to be locked inside the observable mesons and baryons, a phenomenon known as confinement. At smaller distances the strong force between quarks becomes weaker, and the quarks begin to behave like independent particles, an effect known as asymptotic freedom.
Hands up how many of you understood that? Okay. You can leave the room. And thank you.
Now for the rest of us, the strong force gets stronger the further apart the particles get. Pretty weird, ain’t it? Reminds me of a joke I heard somewhere about a mother’s love being like apron strings: You might be able to get a certain distance away from her but eventually they’ll yank you right back. And this is known as confinement.
The closer the particles get the weaker the strong force gets, and the scientific name for this is freedom.
* * *
With my childhood in a box in the back of my rental, I motor down to my brother’s farm in southern Ohio. My parents are living in his basement until a plot is cleared on a corner acre and their new prefab house is delivered. My mother fights with everyone, threatens suicide, sits calmly across the dining table explaining how she’ll kill herself, then adds “Be ready at six for spaghetti.”
Upon arriving, I carry the box up to a storage space above my brother’s garage, and I do not touch it again for twelve years.
One bright spring I travel back to Ohio to visit my brother and his family, and when I leave I’ll bring the box back home, finally. My father years dead. My mother recently dead. Their prefab house 158 rented out to frackers who stack cases of beer against the picture window where my mom had carefully arranged her ceramic rabbit collection each spring. “Your father and I eloped in April. I never had a real marriage, with family and friends. These rabbits are for that.”
Wooden carved carrots strewn around them for a touch of realism.
With the box now with me up in Syracuse, one January night years – yes, years – later, I carry my highball into the garage – without a coat – and finally make a clumsy attempt to explore the contents. Shivering on the concrete, I finger through yellowed Reading Skills workbooks from second grade, a hunk of fool’s gold, a 1977 C-3PO action figure, 45 singles of “I’ll Be Getting Nuttin’ for Christmas” and “Word Up” by Cameo. My old coin collection is in here. My stamps long gone. A stack of Polaroids from a Wild West adventure park. Kmart photo envelopes from middle school when I’d gotten a camera of my own, faces of kids I’ve not thought of in years, shiny and sneering, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, before the drugs hit (mostly). There’s a remote control robot in here.
* * *
DUSTIN: There’s this woman at my work that collects teeth.
ME: Teeth?
DUSTIN: Yeah. I don’t know where she gets them.
ME: How do you know that she collects teeth?
DUSTIN: She told me that she paints, and I asked her questions because I’m trying to learn. I asked her if she made anything else, and she goes, “I make jewelry out of teeth, and I collect teeth.”
ME: Human teeth?
DUSTIN: Yeah. Human teeth.
ME: Where does she get them?
DUSTIN: A lot of them have been from friends. When they get a tooth pulled. But I was like, “That doesn’t sound like you’d have a lot of teeth, unless you have a lot of friends with really bad teeth that are thinking of you and knowing that you like teeth.”
ME: (Laughs.)
DUSTIN: I don’t even know if she actually collects teeth or if she just said she did. Or maybe she has like four teeth, you know, and calls it a collection.
* * *
I tried collecting most of the things kids my age did. Comic books for a few years, until I found out about girls. I had a cake tin full of bubble gum cards. Could care less about sports, but I loved my Star Wars cards, my Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mork and Mindy. The KISS card where Gene Simmons pukes out six-foot flames and the one where he’s dangling a long, blood-drenched tongue.
My dearest childhood collection became my stickers. I filled half a dozen photo albums, with individual ones placed carefully in grids. As the years rolled on, I’d slide whole sheets beneath the clear plastic photo covers, pages after pages of them. It all started with scratch ‘n’ sniffs – a long green pickle, a skunk shouting “Scent-sational!”, a splat of bubble gum smelling of chemical grape, brown goo on a slice of bread that stunk like peanuts, dot matrix pin-fed printer paper chirping “Data Pro!”, a skeleton dancing next to the word “eek” and reeking of mint for some reason. I’d get high as a kite standing in gift stores before rolls of these, revolving wire stands of packages I could shift through, decide how to dole out the dollars I’d saved. Later, exchanging them with kids at school, visiting nieces and nephews. On difficult afternoons, my mother off somewhere in the house yelling, I’d press my nose to the paper and inhale cherries from a bowl with the words “Good Job!” printed above it.
* * *
ME: Explain what holds an atom together.
J: A combination of the gravitation pull of the nucleus and . . . it’s like an electro-gravitational pull.
ME: What holds a nucleus together?
J: Dark matter? I don’t know. I assume it’s the same thing. That it’s like the electromagnetic bonds where you have the elements of the atom that sort of cling together. But if you ask me how to explain it, that’s the best I could do. ME: What holds your family together?
J: (Emphatically.) That’d be me.
ME: (Laughs.)
J: That would be me. There’s no hesitation in answering. I’m the one who holds them together. If they have clean underwear, socks, food to eat, it’s because I get that stuff for them. Not just that I pay for it, cuz I have a job, but if I didn’t wash clothes they would all be wandering around wearing smelly t-shirts, and nobody would go to bed on time, and they’d all be brushing their teeth with toothbrushes that are all busted up, with no toothpaste, cuz who goes to the store to buy this stuff if not me.
* * *
November 9, 1954
Outdoors. A few leafless trees.
CHARLIE BROWN: (Looks at Lucy.)
LUCY: I’ve been counting the suns, Charlie Brown . . . Every day I count a new one . . .
CHARLIE BROWN: (Looks directly at the reader.)
LUCY: I’ve got twelve so far . . . It’s very interesting work . . . They all look so different . . .
CHARLIE BROWN: (Looks at Lucy.) What would you say if I told you there was only ONE sun?
LUCY: (Waves her arms.) I’d say you were CRAZY!
CHARLIE BROWN: (Walks away.) That’s what I thought.
LUCY: (Looks at the sky.) I’m anxious to see what the one tomorrow looks like.
* * *
The sun is a huge ball of hydrogen, so enormous that the mass of all that gas crushes it into the fourth state of matter. As plasma, the hydrogen atoms break apart into their component electrons, protons, and neutrons. And thanks to the strong nuclear force, some of these recombine to form new, heavier particles. Every second the sun fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium. The difference between those two numbers is the amount of leftover matter in each particle that gets turned into pure energy, á la Einstein’s E=MC². This energy output comes in the form of photons, packets of light, that yellow stuff that’s warming your cat curled under a window.
* * *
Created in an instant in the heart of the sun, fresh photons move to the next outer layer, a slightly cooler radiative zone, where they spend the next one hundred thousand years bouncing around in the plasma, holding one another only a short while, losing a little energy each time, in an aimless perambulation known as random walking.
After years of this random walking, a photon enters the sun’s next outer layer, which takes about a month to get through. Then the photon escapes the sun, enjoying an eight-minute journey through space to enter our atmosphere, to shoot through the kitchen window and land smack onto one of the collection of ’20s sheet music hanging on my wall. Beneath the words Turn Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday, a forlorn flapper, hand under chin, stares off into the distance. The photon bounces off her yellow headband and runs right into my eyeballs. Where it is welcome. Where it can rest now. Its journey complete.
* * *
J: The annoying thing about the oldest child’s collecting of things is – Wreck-It Ralph comes out with little dolls associated with the movie, she had to have all of the dolls that were in the set. Then the moment she got the last doll, she’d lose all interest in playing with the set. Until she had that last one, she’d play with them all the time. But when she got that last one, and she had the set complete, she was completely done – a week later you couldn’t pay her to play with them.
ME: Huh.
J: And it happened over and over again. So we’d get to a point where we would – you know when she was into a certain kind of set of things – we would never buy the last one. In stores we would try to keep our eye out in case there was, like, the last one that was needed. If we saw it, we’d hide it somewhere, throw it into another aisle and (innocent voice, to his child), “Oh, I guess they don’t have it!”
ME: So your parenting used the technique of the pusher man –
J: Yeah.
ME: – to keep her strung along?
J: (Innocent voice again, to his child.) “Oh well, I guess they don’t have any more of those.”
ME: (Laughs.) And then, when she lost interest, then what? Would you sell them or throw them away or –
J: No, she was very possessive. She couldn’t get rid of them. At some point she had this idea that she was going to have the Guinness Book of World Records collection of – the biggest stuffed animal collection of all time. Even being told that was never going to happen – we weren’t going to financially support that, and we weren’t going to make enough space in our house for it – she insisted on believing that was in her future.
ME: How close did she get?
J: I have no idea what the largest number of stuffed animals might be, but I’m sure it would be our entire house filled on every level.
* * *
In 2018, Jackie Miley of Rapid City, South Dakota, holds the World Record for largest collection of teddy bears. On the Guinness website, a mind-bending vortex of fuzzy faces and tummies leads the viewer’s eye toward the center where the smiling 68-year-old stands holding 162 her very first. “I never had a teddy bear as a child – didn’t even know what one was until I was eight years old and saw one at the Minnesota State Fair,” says Jackie.
Of all 8,026 bears, Jackie explains that though she doesn’t have a favorite, there is one in particular that holds a lot of sentimental value as someone bought it for her from her school. “They took the time to find my school picture (age 7) and pinned it to the bear. I was raised in foster homes and when I moved from one place to another, all my photos got lost so that picture is the only school picture I have.”
During an online tour inside her plush world, packed on every level with bears, ranged along every surface, stacked several deep on endless shelves, suspended from the ceiling, she adds, “It’s a house of memories and I’m just the keeper of those memories.”
* * *
November 15, 1954
Outdoors.
LUCY: I’m counting the suns, Charlie Brown.
CHARLIE BROWN: That’s really the same sun you see, Lucy . . . It just goes behind the clouds.
LUCY: I suppose that same sun stays lit ALL day long? (Stomps off, muttering.) Boy, Charlie Brown . . . I think you must be getting more stupid every day.
CHARLIE BROWN: (Clutches at himself.) My stomach.
* * *
Because I was named after Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh stuff filled my bedroom. My favorite stuffed animal was a Pooh doll I’d had since infancy, from when it was bigger than me in the crib. I’d carry it dangling by one ear, which my mom would sew back on whenever it tore lose. I remember giving Pooh a hair cut one day and from then on his fur had these horizontal gouges above his eyes. It never grew back. Mom couldn’t fix that.
In late childhood, these teddy bears turned into an official collection. I didn’t play with them, but arranged them carefully at the foot of my bed. I’d ask my mom to buy them for me from the same cinnamon-scented gift shops I’d once gotten my stickers. Swanky European dolls with rough fur, stiff bears with articulated limbs and hard black noses, ceramic teddys with music boxes in their belly.
If you go down in the woods today,
You’d better go in disguise . . .
One day during sixth grade, my mother stops me on my way through the kitchen with a cheese sandwich. “You father thinks it’s time for you to get rid of your teddy bears.”
“Why?”
“He thinks you’re getting too old for them.”
“Um, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
To which I reply, “He can have my teddy bears when he tears them from my cold dead hands, is what I mean, Mom.”
At least, that’s what I wish I’d said. What I probably muttered was something like, “I mean, no. My teddy bears are going no place, Mom.”
* * *
It’s cold here in my Syracuse garage. My girlfriend asleep above me. My highball resting on a stack of tires. What I most want to see is my oldest sticker collection, a photo album with a grid on the front for showcasing a family’s special memories. The blue cardboard torn in places one afternoon when I was eight. Sitting cross-legged at the foot of a beechnut tree in the backyard, my pet pygmy goat Billy came up, curled in my lap and proceeds to try to eat my sticker album. He tears a few strips from the cover before I pull it away. I watch him chew them up and swallow. He looks up at me with those horizontal, non-predator pupils, and I pet him between his little horns.
Years later I come home from school one spring day to both my parents standing in the dark living room, looking at me. They say, “We’ve given your goat away.”
Dad adds, “He kept trying to headbutt your mother whenever she fed him.”
I look from Dad to Mom.
“Your father gave him to an Amish family out in Brimfield. He’ll live on their farm.”
I look from Mom to Dad. I had absolutely no idea they were going to do this. I never got to say goodbye to Billy.
I remember running out of the house and collapsing in a pile beneath a beechnut tree. I remember crying harder than I’d ever cried. The whole yard went wavy through the water in my eyes and stayed that way.
* * *
ME: What’s the most interesting stuffed animal she ever had?
J: It’s not a stuffed animal, but she sort of treats it in the same way as a stuffed animal. For Christmas this year we got her a skeletal goat, that when you press a button its eyes light up red and it does this sort of goat-of-the-damned cry. She’s napped with it and held it while she’s napping.
* * *
May 1, 1954
LUCY: (Approaches.) How about trading a few comic books, Charlie Brown?
CHARLIE BROWN: I’ve only got three . . . (Reads titles aloud.) ‘Mangle Comics,’ ‘Disease Comics,’ and ‘Gory Comics’
LUCY: (Grabs Charlie Brown’s comics and hands him some of hers.) That’s fine . . . Here . . . Take three of mine.
CHARLIE BROWN: (Holds the comics Lucy hands him. Reads their titles aloud as each appears in the air before him in a cutesy font.) ‘The Little Bunnies,’ ‘Billy Bluebird,’ ‘The Funny Foxes.’
LUCY: (Has left.)
CHARLIE BROWN: (Runs after Lucy.) Hey!
* * *
And that’s where things remain today. A box, with some of its contents stacked around it, propped up on an old office chair on one side of the garage next to the radon reduction tube. Last week I forgot and left the garage door open while snow-blowing the drive, and icy sleet landed on the open box, covering scratched 45s of Ted E. Bear & Friends singing “The First Bear in Space” and “The Summer It Snowed in Bearbank,” Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” a dusty Space Shuttle Challenger patch, young me smiling out of the pouch of a six foot fiberglass kangaroo, looking stern beside a Wild West reenactor brandishing iron straight at the camera, and the only photo I ever had of Billy. He’s reaching to eat something from my hand. His head is blurry, but you can see the little tuft of white hair between his horns.
When I parked the blower and saw what I’d done, I quickly wiped away as much of the snow and ice as I could with my mittens. Then I went inside to get undressed next to the washing machine. I walked upstairs and hugged my girlfriend.
* * *
My brother’s kids have all grown up and moved away. My nieces and nephews have families of their own now. Like most people, they took their belongings with them. Some things they left behind. One winter night back in Ohio visiting the farm, I browse for something to read after my brother and his wife have gone to bed. The living room quiet, logs sigh in the fireplace, a pool of warm orange light at the end of a lumpy leather couch. At eye level on the shelf, I pass over old Leo Buscaglia hardbacks, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, Stephen King’s The Stand, and I come upon . . .
You Can’t Win Them All, Charlie Brown
Don’t Give Up, Charlie Brown
You’re a Brave Man, Charlie Brown
You’re Not Alone, Charlie Brown
My index finger pauses upon these papery spines. Then I pull my finger back and continue on down the shelf.
Christopher Citro is the author of the poetry collections The Maintenance of the Shimmy Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015) and If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021). His creative nonfiction appears in American Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Boulevard, and Quarterly West.