Just North of Whoville (18 page)

“
What? She locked me out. What did you tell her?”

“
Me? I didn’t say anything. What did you do?”

“
Nothing. It’s just… Tanya kept calling my cell. And then Celia started accusing me of things.”

“
Maybe because you’re cheating on her.”

“
Whatever, okay----it’s fucking freezing out here.”

“
You’re planning on staying here?”

“
It’s my apartment.”

“
You can’t get a hotel room?”

“
Celia has my wallet with all my money and credit cards.”

“
Why did you give her your wallet?”

“
It…creates an unsightly bulge in the line of my pants.”

“
That’s pathetic,” I couldn’t help but say. “If you’re cheating on your girlfriend, it’s probably not a good idea to let her hold your purse.”

“
Hey---this is my apartment,” was his counter-thrust.

Touché.

As we climbed the stairs, I had a thought; one that I expressed as soon as we got inside the apartment.

“
Wait a minute. What about your little twit downstairs? Tanya? Why don’t you stay with her?”

“
She broke up with me. I don’t know where she is. I think she’s out downtown drinking with her friends or something. She was pretty messed-up.”

As I resigned myself to spending my birthday night with The Doubtful Guest, I pulled out the spare pillows and a blanket and started to make up the couch.

“
I can’t believe they both broke up with me on the same day. It’s like you can’t depend on anything nowadays” he said pitifully as he polished off the flask.

“
You’ll excuse me if I don’t have a whole lot of empathy for you right now.”

“
Whatever,” he picked up the remote and flipped on the TV. “You got any liquor around here?”

While Alex scoured my kitchen cabinets for the half bottle of cooking sherry, I put on the least revealing pair of pajamas I owned and did a quick search for the cat, who was nowhere to be found. With Alex there, she wouldn’t come out all night.

This was no way for my cat to live.

12

The next morning, Alex sobered up and pointed out the obvious.

“
You know your coffeemaker’s broken?”

“
Yeah,” I replied as I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink.

“
Hey, this rent check for December,” he said as he handed me the check I’d given him the night before, “you think you could give me cash?”

Just then, the morning mariachi session began on the roof and a hunk of plaster hit the floor.

“
They really need to fix that,” Obvious Man commented as he grabbed his coat and looked at the bedding he’d left on the couch.

“
Oh---don’t worry about making my bed. I’ll be back tonight. These the spares?” he said as he grabbed a set of keys off a nail. “Yup. I can tell. Okay, got my keys, got my phone, got my game face… Oh----can I get like twenty bucks? I need a toothbrush and lunch. Oh, and coffee. Can you make it twenty-five?”

I gave him my withering stare, which is extra withering before I’ve had my morning coffee.

“
What? If you had a working coffeemaker, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

Over the next few days, I tried several times to call Celia, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I left a message that Alex was staying with me, but tried not to make it sound as horrible as it was. She had her own problems. The fact that one of them was sleeping on my couch was minor, in comparison.

“
He’s still there?” Dr. Prince practically jumped off her folding chair. Thank god, I finally wasn’t boring my therapist.

“
Yes! I’m exhausted. He snores so loud I can’t sleep. Then he wakes up before the sun comes up and turns on the early morning stock report or something. I’m so tired.”

“
If she has his wallet, where is he getting his money?”

“
I gave him the rent in cash. And then he comes home and spreads his work stuff out on the sofa and turns on the TV. I haven’t seen my cat in days. She must eat and pee while we’re at work. And then there’s the guys repairing the roof… It’s awful. I mean, I know it’s not suicide or divorce or the firm belief that I’m a 1970s pop star, but…”

“
No, it’s bad. Trust me, I’ve had houseguests before. I feel your pain.”

“
So, what do I do?”

“
What would you like to do?”

“
I don’t know. I was waiting to talk to you.”

Somewhere along the way, fishnets had reeled me in.

“
Well, this is a new development in our relationship,” she sat back in her folding chair with a satisfied look on her face. “Look, he’s got to leave sometime. What is he doing for clothes?”

“
He had a few extra suits at the office. But he’s using my toothpaste. My shampoo. He even took one of my razors. I gave him cash! Why can’t he buy a plastic razor?”

“
Ay
tacaño!”

“
Yes! He is cheap!” I happily recognized a Spanish word. “
He doesn’t seem in too much of a hurry to leave, either.”

“
Meera, he feels comfortable there. It’s his old place. And, frankly, he’s just waiting for her to take him back. He figures that if he lays low for a few days, she’ll cool off and forgive him. And she probably will, so watch what you say about him. He might seem like a loser to you, but this was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Those feelings don’t just die overnight. But I have a big question to ask you---who’s the cutie-pie I saw you leaving with?”

“
Oh---that’s the building manager.”

“
No! That’s him! Oh, he seems nice, mami. Are you working it? I mean, don’t be a slut, but you need to work that shit.”

“
There’s no way it’s going to work out. It never works out for me.”

With twenty minutes left to go in our session, I started to tell her the story of Jeff.

Jeff Michaels was my ex-boyfriend back in Milwaukee. We’d broken up about a year before I left for New York. In fact, he was one of the reasons I finally made the decision to move to The Big Apple.

We’d dated for six and a half years. He’d been in grad school seemingly forever. Botany. Why I put all my hopes and dreams into a man who was perpetually working on his botanical dissertation, or whatever it was he was doing was beyond me. But he was fun. And he made me happy in that great relaxed sort of way.

By the end, we’d reached a point where we either had to do something or call it a day. Or, as my father so succinctly put it after seeing Jeff four Christmases in a row, “So, Jeff,” he said looking up from his third glass of scotch. ”Are you going to shit or get off the pot?”

Apparently, we were constipated. A few months later, we finally closed the lid and turned off the bathroom light. He wasn’t ready to get married. I’m not sure I was, either.

Oddly enough, he got married a year later. Around the same time I moved to New York. Another botanist. He also finally got his Masters and was currently heading up the Cacti and Succulent Wing at the Milwaukee Botanical Gardens. His wife just gave birth to their first child. A bouncing baby boy. I know all of this information because of a sick and twisted flaw in my character---niceness.

I’d made sure to establish a very public friendship with Jeff after the breakup. Not that we kept in touch all that much. An occasional email was about the gist of it. But I just happened to be a very nice person who went out with another very nice person and we’d always been very nice to each other so somehow it made sense to just continue being very nice. And this niceness, in the end, got me exactly what I deserved---a birth announcement with a picture of the bouncing baby boy.

A few months ago, as I sat down to write the note of congratulations, I felt like the biggest sap of them all. I even sent a gift. Sap. Huge major sap.

But I had no regrets. Dr. Prince agreed.

“
So, what is it about this Nate guy?”

“
I don’t know. I just like who I am when I’m with him. It’s like I’m having one of those dreams where I’m flying. You ever have those?”

“
No. But I used to have this reoccurring dream that I stabbed my orthodontist like nineteen times and pushed him off the GW Bridge.”

“
Good to know.”

As a child, I had flying dreams on a weekly basis. In my dreams, my special gift was being able to jump up and down really high and then suddenly, I’d catch the wind underneath my feet and become airborne. The ability to fly was such an incredible feeling that I would inevitably wake up disappointed when my superpowers didn’t extend beyond my dreams.

Not for want of trying, though. I spent hours jumping on my bed trying to recreate that high. Until the day my mother walked by my room and saw me jumping on my bed and shouting like Peter Pan, “I can fly! Look Mommy! I can fly!”

At which point I missed the bed and landed smack on the floor.

After we got back from the emergency room, she decided to try to contain my excess energy with skating lessons. “It’s the closest thing to flying,” she told me. And after one lesson, I believed her. Every Saturday afternoon, I took skating lessons in the park from an old Romanian woman. In fact, after the crushing disappointment of Patron Saint of Animals already being taken, I decided I would become a professional skater.

If I did well (and I always did) she would take me out after my lesson for ice cream. At some point in my life there had been a fairly decent work-to-reward ratio.

When spring rolled around, the lessons stopped. For years, I thought I’d done something wrong. It was only in my twenties that I got the courage to ask why I hadn’t been allowed to continue.

“
Oh she died, honey,” my mom explained. “Well, first it was spring and there was no more ice. And then that fall, she passed away. She taught Sonja Henie back in 1924, you know. She was old. We didn’t want to tell you because you were such an emotional little girl. And by then, you’d stopped jumping on the bed and decided you wanted to be an archaeologist. So we bought you a shovel and let you dig up the backyard to look for dinosaurs. You didn’t find any, but you had fun.

“
They got another teacher at the park the next winter, but I didn’t have time to be one of those skating moms. You were good, but it wasn’t like you were Olympic material or anything. Trust me, I asked Mrs. Tedescu. And she taught Sonja Henie, so she would know.”

“
So, wha’cha doin’ tonight?” Timmy asked that day when he came to pick out his photos.

“
Um…why?”

“
One of my elf friends is a skating instructor at Rockefeller Center. He offered to get me on the ice for the tree lighting tonight! Wanna come with me?”

“
Are you crazy? It’s going to be a madhouse down there.”

“
I have passes to get us thru. And you could use some Christmas Spirit, Dorrie.”

And another car pulls up with the door wide open. Damn. Though if you look inside, this one seemed to have a creepy old man offering me candy.

Most New Yorkers avoid the tourist hot spots during the holidays---in particular, Rockefeller Center. The people you see on TV are all tourists braving the freezing cold, the pushing and shoving, and getting sneezed on by viral little children---or worse, by adults. At least children sneezed near your knee caps.

What kind of crazy parent would want to bring a child into that lion’s den? For what purpose? For what soul-fulfilling dream did they brave this inhumanity? But I knew Dr. Prince would be grilling me next week, so I decided to dive into the belly of the beast.

I was going to Rockefeller Center to see the lighting of The Big Damn Tree.

A few hours later, we were in the middle of a mob. Unfortunately, our passes didn’t include a police escort and a helicopter to drop us into the combat zone. People had been holding their spots since the crack of dawn for this thing. An entire day of your life spent waiting for someone to plug in some lights. Unbelievable. Even stranger, most of them seemed perfectly content just standing there. They’d obviously been standing there for hours, and yet they seemed not only completely comfortable, but appeared to feel special in some way for simply being there. These were the die-hard Christmas fans. Possibly the same people who had camped out for concert tickets years ago. Now they were camping out for a pine tree. Instead of band t-shirts, they were bundled up in Christmas sweatshirts and Santa hats. They were Christmas groupies. Somehow hoping that their proximity to their object of worship would reinvigorate their lives.