Mom and I hung the Christmas lights around the living room twice a year: once for Jesus and once for Michael Phelps. Remember '08, Phelps the American hero winning and winning, even if by a touch? That was the year Mom said we wouldn't have the money to celebrate holidays the way we wanted to. She proposed an activity to soften the news: we'd calculate the midway date between our birthdays and find a celebrity birthday to celebrate as proxy. Mom's birthday is four days after mine, but we took the long way around the calendar and landed on Michael Phelps Day.

For my birthday, I secretly wanted a DJ and a disco ball, a cake with those little snails of blue Cool-Whip icing along the edges, a big rented room and friends enough to fill it. Instead, we ate 2-for-20 coupon pizza from Domenico's six months later and exchanged homespun gifts in the name of Michael Phelps. In that first year, we must have made all our usual jokes for the first time. Oh, who's this from, Michael Phelps? He has such great taste! Mom froze what we didn't eat, a pizza and a half in aluminum foil like it had won the silver.

For Christmas, we saw a movie. We went to the theater sparkling with the notion that we'd have the whole place to ourselves. Ever since Mom came here, that's been her American Dream. She wanted miles of empty seatbacks, the place so quiet she could hear the projector clicking, the quiet proprietorship of being alone in a public space designed for many. But as soon as we saw the parking lot, we realized moviegoing must be an American Christmas tradition. The movie was about a man who aged backwards, who was born a wise old man and spent the years swallowing his tongue until he died without words.

If we couldn't be the only people in the theater, we were always the last. I liked to stand beneath the screen and watch the big names recede above me, like I was in a glass elevator lowering into the ground. The big screen made our TV at home look like a joke, the same way Michael Phelps' blue-skies Olympic pool made the one in our complex look like a postage stamp. But our little pool had its own sky. There, Mom and I played a game where I swam under her legs without touching them. I tried to imitate Michael Phelps' streamlined kick, the way he let the water billow through him like a flag in the wind. I called the game Spider, and Mom called it a word that always sounded adopted in my mouth.

On Super Bowl Sunday, we finally did it — all alone at the movies. I realized I'd never really understood Mom's dream until it happened; I'd had a child's pride just to be invited to the chase. The whole dark lung of the theater, swelling with conspiratorial privacy, lit a giddiness in me. I danced along the stairs, climbed over seats, somersaulted over the rows in front of me down to the front aisle and stood beneath the screen. When I turned back, I saw Mom's small face bathed in light against the sea of empty chairs.

All these years later, this is still how I picture her face when we're apart: like a votive icon candle flickering in the dark.



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