Charming Christmas (11 page)

“Still . . .” Woody shook his head, letting out a long breath. “When I saw the show, I never thought it was you, Olivia. Not for a minute.”

“I love this man!” I said, throwing myself against his chest for a big hug. He smelled surprisingly sweet, sort of like baby powder. No lingering traces of the seventh-grade grass-stain-and-sweat smells.

Well, of course not
, I thought, stepping back to smile up at him and wipe a smudge of cheesecake from the lapel of his suit. Why did I keep trying to plunk this man back in the seventh grade?

As most of the people moved off and Doris and her friends began to speculate where the show might go in the second episode, I realized I had to get back to work.

“Time to hit the showers,” I told Woody, glad that he'd had the foresight to install a few showers in the employee locker rooms. “It may take some deep cleansing to remove the cheesecake masque.”

“Thanks for sharing your dessert with me,” he teased, looking down at his suit. “A ribbon cutting and a flying cheesecake all in the same day. Way too much excitement for a nerdy architect.”

“Nerdy? You're going to be on the front page of the
Baltimore Sun
tomorrow. Me? I may go down in infamy as the craziest woman in city history.”

He frowned. “Actually, you don't compare with Sewer Sadie.”

I rubbed my chin with one of the soggy towels. “I'm afraid to ask.”

“In 1909, when the city was just completing a brand spanking-new sewer system, a photojournalist named Sadie Miller decided to check it out firsthand. She climbed into an old jalopy with her husband and some friends, and they cruised through miles of sewer pipe. When they hit the end of the line, they realized their car was too wide to turn around.”

My jaw dropped. “Yuck! What happened to them?”

“They had to back out—six miles of curving pipe. Plus a flat tire.”

I could imagine the choice words that passed between Sadie and her husband that day. “So you're saying I should be reassured that I'm not stuck in a poop chute like Sewer Sadie?”

“It's all relative.”

I headed off, then pivoted and stepped back to him. “Why don't you stop by and see how Santaland is working firsthand?” I thought of his suggestion of coffee the other day, how I'd brushed him off so quickly. Nice move, dummy-head.

“I hear it's pretty busy down there.”

“I've got an in with the big guy. I could get your name on the ‘Nice' list.”

“You'd do that for me?” He laughed. “Why don't we meet outside the store, away from our mutual clients. But wait, aren't you working, like, ninety-hour days right now?”

“I don't start till noon. How about breakfast?” Maybe I sounded way too eager, but when you've been pied in the face in front of a guy, it breaks down certain barriers of etiquette in my book.

“That might work.” He plunked my cell number into his cell and promised to call me and set it up.

“Don't forget,” I said, lifting a stiff lock of hair away from my face. “You wouldn't want to cheese off Mrs. Claus.”

“Been there, seen that.”

I smiled as I headed toward the elevator. The Wood Man and I still had something. Definitely something.

11

A
fter opening week, the number of children visiting Santaland tapered off. Gone were the overwhelming crowds, though there were enough children in line to keep me on my toes.

“It will be slow now through Thanksgiving,” ZZ predicted. “Then, soon as December starts . . .” He clapped his hands together. “Whammo!”

True to his word, he had joined me last week on a trip to my mother's house, where he had swirled cabernet and discussed the hidden mythology of the film
The Wizard of Oz
, which had been Mom's theme that night. ZZ had stayed well into the evening, then asked my mother if she wouldn't mind another visit, next time in the morning, before Santaland opened for the day. Mom seemed to enjoy his company, and I decided this was one situation I could back away from for the time being.

Back at Rossman's I used the lull to refine my “Mrs. Claus” style with the younger kids, the ones who ducked behind Daddy's legs or clung to Mom's coat. Not having much experience with children, I initially fell into the habit of raising my voice to a giddy, baby-talk mode and leaning in toward the little cuties.

Not a particularly effective approach.

The goo-goo face usually sent them burrowing for cover. Sometimes it provoked tears.

I called Kate at the aquarium and asked if I could borrow her nieces and nephews for a workshop. When I explained my predicament, she told me I was focusing too much on the age difference, not enough on methods of communication.

“Many animals are intimidated by direct confrontation. That in-your-face thing is the approach used by the alpha male in the wild. It's the challenge to do battle, and with you being so much bigger than the kids, you can imagine how intimidated they feel.”

Hmm. “Okay, so what can I do? Always keep back fifteen feet like I'm following a fire truck?”

“It might help to get down on their level. The dolphins seem to relate best when we're in the water with them. Try to get down on their level, not hover over them. And don't try to talk them out of feeling shy or intimidated. There's nothing worse than having an adult tell you not to feel something you're feeling. Instead, let them know their feeling is valid and okay. You could say, ‘I know how it feels to be scared,' or ‘Sometimes I still feel shy.'”

“How is it that we went to the same college and you are a freakin' wealth of information and I'm a big boob?”

“Too much television, Liv. It rots the brain. Hey, have you heard from the Wood Man yet?”

“He called. Right now we're still playing phone tag.” I tried to appear casual, though I'd been wondering why Woody didn't just drop by Santaland. He knew where to find me. “How's Turtle? What's the latest?”

“I can't talk about it now.”

“Uh-oh. Are you okay?”

“Not great, but I'll fill you in when I see you tomorrow. We're still going out, right? Boycotting the next episode of
The Nutcracker
. Isn't that the plan?”

“Absolutely. I could use a night out, and I refuse to contribute to the viewership of that show. Do you know that the guy in the coffee shop next door still refuses to sell me a bagel? And people pick me out as the Nutcracker every day.”

“You're a celebrity!”

“Then why do they treat me as if I'm from
America's Most Wanted
?” I sighed. “At least customers don't recognize me when I'm in the Mrs. Claus costume.”

“You're a Christmas Jekyll and Hyde.”

“Kate, if you don't stop being so perky I'll have to kill you.”

“Sorry. I'm overcompensating for my bad mood. Let me go jump in with the dolphins before I start spout off Hallmark phrases.”

 

 

Thanksgiving came and went with typically heightened family stresses all around. Kate regretted agreeing to spend the day with Turtle's family. They didn't serve turkey, the men sat in the den watching games while the women scoured pots in the kitchen, and for dessert—frozen pies. Lanessa felt pressure from her married sisters to “spawn wildlife,” as she puts it, and before she left her mother's house there was an argument because Nessa's sister let the nieces play with their dolls in the back of her BMW and consequently they spilled their juice boxes on the leather upholstery. Bonnie enjoyed spending the day with Jonah but felt guilty about neglecting her family.

With the long hours I was putting in at Rossman's, Thanksgiving Day had sprung itself on me with surprising swiftness. The night before I had called my mother with some degree of panic since I hadn't done any grocery shopping at all, but she'd assured me not to worry, that she and “Hank” had it under control.

Hank. It was still hard for me to think of ZZ that way, but apparently that was the name he went by outside Rossman's, where he would always be “Head Santa.”

Thursday afternoon I got off the bus on Lombard Street expecting a quiet dinner, but a dressed-up couple was ahead of me, passing through Mom's double doors. From the front vestibule I could see that the leaves had been added to the dining-room table, which was set for more than a dozen with the good china. Classical music and laughter spilled out from the parlor, where I recognized friends, neighbors, and Mom's colleagues from the university. A couple from the university squeezed into the vestibule, admiring one of Mom's statues, and the two men from Mom's bridge club in Patterson Park wanted to know where to put the cranberry relish. In the kitchen, the head of the Butchers Hill Neighborhood Association was cracking walnuts with her grown son, and she winked at me, wryly asking, “I suspect you've had it with nut cracking, eh, Olivia?” One of the profs was handing out mimosas in tall crystal glasses, and I gratefully took a sip, using the moment to regain my composure and balance.

Of course Mom had a houseful of guests! Just because she couldn't cope with venturing out didn't mean she wanted to be cut off from the world. Subconsciously I had thought that Mom was so bad off, trapped in this house; I had forgotten that she possessed the charm to transform it into an intellectual haven.

“I can't bear to think of anyone alone on Thanksgiving,” she was saying to one of the neighbors, Carol Sawiki. “When my husband was alive we began the custom of inviting strays and loners, our own lonely hearts club, and over the years it's extended to neighbors and friends.”

“It's a great tradition,” ZZ said as he set a plate of crudités on the kitchen counter. “Sometimes the most cohesive families are the ones who come together by choice.”

That night, after the guests left and I was sipping wine with my mother and ZZ, I couldn't help but ask Mom about Darcy, her new therapist. To my surprise, she was willing to talk about it.

“There's actually an interesting therapy being used. In theory, they break the huge panic monster into a bunch of small but pesky dwarves. The notion being that the panic is too overwhelming to fight, but each smaller component of it is somewhat manageable.”

ZZ was nodding as if it was familiar ground.

“Dwarves and a monster?” I tucked my legs under me. “Sounds like a Grimm's fairy tale.”

“Darcy is taking me though a cognitive-behavior therapy called MAP.” Mom's pale gray eyes held a glimmer of fear, something I was not used to seeing. “That stands for Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic. The therapy teaches you to slow down the panic response, to break it into different elements so that they can be addressed one at a time. As opposed to the huge, overwhelming panic monster that no one can fight.”

“I'm so glad you're doing this,” I said quietly.

“Darcy was a find.” She turned to ZZ. “Thanks to you, Hank.”

“I'm glad she's working out for you, Claire.” Stroking his beard thoughtfully, he seemed so different from the first day I'd met him. Civilized and even intellectual.
Note to self: try not to make snap judgments
. “Darcy and I did our clinical work together in Miami. We're friends from way back. Like family.”

“Do you have any family, Hank?” Mom asked.

“Blood relatives, no. But I have family all over the country. The ever-extended family of friends.”

 

 

His observation resonated for me over the next few days as I continued to fight off the Olivia haters each morning, then settled into my large, magnanimous role as Mrs. Claus, the nurturing goddess to parents and children. The first days after Thanksgiving are some of the busiest for retailers, and as I wove through crowds of children, sending them to craft stations or helping them board the train, I thought of how family had been redefined for me over the last few years. In the years since my father had died we'd lost touch with his family, two brothers, lobstermen in Maine. My mother occasionally talked to her sister in Ohio, but I hadn't seen my cousins for years, and if I had to summon someone in a crisis, I knew it would be one of my three friends, the three phone numbers I knew by heart.

I felt fortunate to have my urban family here. Even when the rest of Baltimore's population had turned against me, my friends were there for me.

Would I miss them when I headed back to New York?

Although I hadn't mentioned it, I had moved up my appointment with the orthopedic surgeon to the week before Christmas. Once he gave me his blessing I would go back to full-scale workouts to get ready for the New York stage again. And one morning before work I gathered my nerve and called the Rockettes director, Mrs. Atwater, on the phone. I'd been doing my physical-therapy exercises in my apartment, and I looked down at the leg warmers, thinking of the old days when I'd worn them in the New York rehearsal studios. Mrs. Atwater seemed happy to hear from me and hinted that my audition would be a cinch.

A cinch.

A mixture of excitement and dread swept through me as I hung up the phone. This was what I'd been waiting for, what I'd been working for, and somehow the prospect of going back to New York made me feel a little queasy.

My parents used to call it Olivia's lament—this devastating indecisiveness that started to peak when I was in junior high. I would struggle with a decision, make my choice, and then began the tears and lamentations and regrets over the choice I had made. It happened with clothes and prom dates, trips and classes. Spring ski trip or Ocean City? Whatever I decided, I spent a day or two crying over the fact that the beach was so pretty in spring. Or that this would be my last chance to ski this year, how did I blow that?

Olivia's lament.

One year, when Bonnie and Lanessa and I were caught up in Easter dresses—and does that tell you we did not have a lot going on?—my mother took me shopping and I narrowed the field down to two dresses, one lace-covered loose shift in my favorite shade of lavender, the other a pink, pinstriped cream puff of a dress with a drop waist and puffy sleeves. I must have tried those two dresses on six times in the Hecht's dressing room. With my mother's patience wearing thin, I finally chose the lavender shift, sure that it was the dress for me because it was my favorite color. But even as I walked to the parking lot with the bag clutched in my hand, misgivings attacked. The dress was so formless, so unshaped, it took away the few subtle curves I'd developed. It made me look like an elephant; it made me look like a baby.

My mother endured two hours of my sobbing that night, determined not to buckle to “Olivia's lament.” The next day, we went back to Hecht's and exchanged the dress.

And now, at least ten years later, I felt that same sense of indecisiveness over the future. Not that there was any question about going back to New York, but I did have a growing sense of the things I would miss once I left Baltimore.

Then again, I could walk the streets of New York without being sprayed by shaving cream. If I'd ever had a choice, Bobby had made it for me when he named that character after me.

Just point me north . . .