Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

Anson laughed. “To tell you the truth, Miss Odau, that’s where I got part of my original idea. I rummage old mail-order catalogues and the ads in old magazines. Of course, Liquid Sheers also derive a little from the body-painting fad of the sixties — but in our advertising we plan to lay heavy stress on their affinity to the World War era.”

  “Why?”

  “Nostalgia sells. Girls who don’t know World War II from the Peloponnesian War — girls who’ve worn seamless stockings all their lives, if they’ve worn stockings at all — are painting on Liquid Sheers and setting grease-pencil seams because they’ve seen Lauren Bacall and Ann Sheridan in Bogart film revivals and it makes them feel vaguely heroic. It’s amazing, Miss Odau. In the last few years we’ve had sales and entertainment booms featuring nostalgia for the twenties, the thirties, the fifties, and the sixties. The forties — if you except Bogart — have been pretty much bypassed, and Liquid Sheers purposely play to that era while recalling some of the art-deco creations of the Beatles period too.”

  Marilyn met Anson’s gaze and refused to fall back from it. “Maybe the forties have been ‘pretty much bypassed’ because it’s hard to recall World War II with unfettered joy.”

  “I don’t really buy that,” Anson replied, earnest and undismayed. “The twenties gave us Harding and Coolidge, the thirties the Great Depression, the fifties the Cold War, and the sixties Vietnam. There’s no accounting what people are going to remember with fondness — but I can assure you that Liquid Sheers are doing well in California.”

  Marilyn pushed her chair back on its coasters and stood up. “I sold bottled stockings, Mr. Anson. I painted them on my legs. You couldn’t pay me to use a product like that again — even with colored pencils and butterflies thrown in gratis.”

  Seemingly out of deference to her Anson also stood. “Oh, no, Miss Odau — I wouldn’t expect you to. This is a product aimed at adolescent girls and post adolescent young women. We fully realize it’s a fad product. We expect booming sales for a year and then a rapid tapering off. But it won’t matter — our overhead on Liquid Sheers is low and when sales have bottomed out we’ll drop ’em and move on to something else. You understand the transience of items like this.”

  “Mr. Anson, do you know why bottled stockings existed at all during the Second World War?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There was a nylon shortage.”

  “The nylon went into the war effort — parachutes, I don’t know what else.” She shook her head, trying to remember. “All I know is that you didn’t see them as often as you’d been used to. They were an important commodity on the domestic black market, just like alcohol and gasoline and shoes.”

  Anson’s smile was sympathetic, but he seemed to know he was defeated. “I guess you’re not interested in Liquid Sheers?”

  “I don’t see how I could have them on my shelves, Mr. Anson.” He reached across her desk, picked up the kit he had given her, and dropped it in his samples case. When he snapped its lid down, the reports of the catches were like distant gunshots. “Maybe you’ll let me try you with something else, another time.”

  “You don’t have anything else with you?”

  “To tell you the truth, I was so certain you’d like these I didn’t bring another product along. I’ve placed Liquid Sheers with another boutique on the first level, though, and sold a few things to gift and novelty stores. Not a complete loss, this trip.” He paused at the curtain. “Nice doing business with you, Miss Odau.”

  “I’ll walk you to the front.”

  Together they strolled through an aisle way of clothes racks and toiletry shelves over a mulberry carpet. Jane and Terri were busy with customers. . . . Why am I being so solicitous? Marilyn asked herself. Anson didn’t look a bit broken by her refusal, and Liquid Sheers were definitely offensive to her — she wanted nothing to do with them. Still, any rejection was an intimation of failure, and Marilyn knew how this young man must feel. It was a shame her visitor would have to plunge himself back into the mall’s motivelessly surging bodies on a note, however small, of defeat. He would be lost to her, borne to oblivion on the tide. . . .

  “I’m sorry, Jordan,” she said. “Please do try us again with something else.”

  The man beside her flinched and cocked his head. “You called me Jordan, Miss Odau.”

  Marilyn covered the lower portion of her face with her hand. She spread her fingers and spoke through them. “Forgive me.” She dropped her hand. “Actually, I’m surprised it didn’t happen before now. You look very much like someone I once knew. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “You did say Jordan, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess I did — that was his name.”

  “Ah.” Anson seemed on the verge of some further comment, but all he came out with was, “Goodbye, Miss Odau. Hope you have a good Christmas season,” after which he set himself adrift and disappeared in the crowd.

  The tinfoil decorations in the mail’s central shaft were like columns of a strange scarlet coral, and Marilyn studied them intently until Terri Bready spoke her name and returned her to the present. She didn’t leave the boutique until ten that evening.

  * * *

  Tuesday, ten minutes before noon.

  He wore the same navy-blue leisure jacket, with an open collar shirt of gentle beige and bold indigo. He carried no samples case, and speaking with Cissy Campbell and then Terri, he seemed from the vantage of Marilyn’s office, her curtain partially drawn back, less certain of his ground. Marilyn knew a similar uncertainty — Anson’s presence seemed ominous, a challenge. She put a hand to her hair, then rose and went through the shop to meet him.

  “You didn’t bring me something else to look at, did you?”

  “No, no, I didn’t.” He revealed his empty hands. “I didn’t come on business at all . . . unless . . .” He let his voice trail away. “You haven’t changed your mind about Liquid Sheers, have you?”

  This surprised her. Marilyn could hear the stiffness in her voice. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  Anson waved a hand. “Please forget that. I shouldn’t have brought it up — because I didn’t come on business.” He raised his palm, like a Boy Scout pledging his honor. “I was hoping you’d have lunch with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem simpatico — that’s the Spanish word for the quality you have. And it would be nice to sit down and talk with someone congenial about something other than Latter-Day Novelties. I’ve been on the road a week.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Terri Bready straining to interpret her response to this proposal. Cissy Campbell, Marilyn’s black clerk, had stopped racking a new supply of puff-sleeved blouses, and Marilyn had a glimpse of orange eyeliner and iridescent lipstick — the girl’s face was that of an alert and self-confident panther.

  “I don't usually eat lunch, Mr. Anson.”

  “Make an exception today. Not a word about business, I promise you.”

  “Go with him,” Terri urged from the cash computer. “Cissy and I can take care of things here, Ms. Odau.” Then she chuckled.

  “Excellent advice,” Anson said. “If I were you, I’d take it.”

  “Okay,” Marilyn agreed. “So long as we don’t leave Summerstone and don’t stay gone too long. Let me get my bag.”

  Inevitably, they ended up at the McDonald’s downstairs — yellow-and-orange wall paneling, trash bins covered with wood- grained contact paper, rows of people six and seven deep at the shiny metal counters. Marilyn found a two-person table and eased herself into one of the attached, scoop-shaped plastic chairs. It took Anson almost fifteen minutes to return with two cheeseburgers and a couple of softdrinks, which he nearly spilled squeezing his way out of the crowd to their tiny table.

  “Thank God for plastic tops. Is it always like this?”

  “Worse at Christmas. Aren’t there any McDonald’s in Los Angeles?”

  “Nothing but. But it’s three whole weeks till Christmas. Have these people no piety?”
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  “None.”

  “It’s the same in Los Angeles.”

  They ate. While they were eating, Anson asked that she use his first name and she in turn felt obligated to tell him hers. Now they were Marilyn and Nicholas, mother and son on an outing to McDonald’s. Except that his attention to her wasn’t filial — it was warm and direct, with a wooer’s deliberately restrained urgency. His manner reminded her again of Jordan Burk, and at one point she realized that she had heard nothing at all he’d said for the last several minutes. Listen to this man, she cautioned herself. Come back to the here and now. After that, she managed better.

  He told her that he’d been born in the East, raised singlehandedly by his mother until her remarriage in the late forties, and, after his new family’s removal to Encino, educated entirely on the West Coast. He told her of his abortive career as a rock drummer, his early resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, and his difficulties with the United States military.

  “I had no direction at all until my thirty-second birthday, Marilyn. Then I discovered where my talent lay and I haven’t looked back since. I tell you, if I had the sixties to do over again — well, I’d gladly do them. I’d finagle myself a place in an Army reserve unit, be a weekend soldier, and get right down to products-consulting on a full-time basis. If I’d done that in ’65 I’d probably be retired by now.”

  “You have plenty of time. You’re still young.”

  “I’ve just turned thirty-six.”

  “You look less.”

  “But not much. Thanks anyway, though — it’s nice to hear.” “Did you fight in Vietnam?” Marilyn asked on impulse.

  “I went there in ’68. I don’t think you could say I fought. I was one of the oldest enlisted men in my unit, with a history of antiwar activity and draft-card burning. I’m going to tell you something, though — once I got home and turned myself around, I wept when Saigon fell. That’s the truth — I wept. Saigon was some city, if you looked at it right.”

  Mentally counting back, Marilyn realized that Nicholas was the right age to be her and Jordan’s child. Exactly. In early December, 1942, she and Jordan had made their last farewells in the little house on Greenbriar Street. . . . She attached no shame to this memory, had no regrets about it. The shame had come twenty-six years later — the same year, strangely enough, that Nicholas Anson was reluctantly pulling a tour of duty in Vietnam. The white wicker bassinet in her upstairs shrine was a perpetual reminder of this shame, of her secret monstrousness, and yet she could not dispose of the evidence branding her a freak, if only to herself, for the simple reason that she loved it. She loved it because she had once loved Jordan Burk. . . . Marilyn put her cheeseburger down. There was no way — no way at all — that she was going to be able to finish eating.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I need to get back to the boutique.”

  “Let me take you out to dinner this evening. You can hardly call this a relaxed and unhurried get-together. I’d like to take you somewhere nice. I’d like to buy you a snifter of brandy and a nice rare cut of prime rib.”

  “Why?”

  “You use that word like a stiletto, Marilyn. Why not?” “Because I don’t go out. My work keeps me busy. And there’s a discrepancy in our ages that embarrasses me. I don’t know whether your motives are commercial, innocently social, or. . . . Go ahead, then — laugh.” She was wadding up the wrapper from her cheeseburger, squeezing the paper tighter and tighter, and she could tell that her face was crimsoning.

  “I’m not laughing,” Nicholas said. “I don’t either — know what my motives are, I mean. Except that they’re not blameworthy or unnatural.”

  “I’d better go.” She eased herself out of the underslung plastic chair and draped her bag over her shoulder.

  “When can I see you?” His eyes were full of remonstrance and appeal. “The company wants me here another week or so — problems with a delivery. I don’t know anyone in this city. I’m living out of a suitcase. And I’ve never in my life been married, if that’s worrying you.”

  “Maybe I should worry because you haven’t.”

  Nicholas smiled at her, a self-effacing charmer’s smile. “When?” “Wednesdays and Sundays are the only nights I don’t work. And tomorrow’s Wednesday.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know,” she said distractedly. “Call me. Or come by the boutique. Or don’t. Whatever you want.”

  She stepped into the aisle beside their table and quickly worked her way through the crowd to the capsule-lift outside McDonald’s. Her thoughts were jumbled, and she hoped feebly — willing the hope — that Nicholas Anson would simply disappear from her life.

  * * *

  The next morning, before any customers had been admitted to the mall, Marilyn Odau went down to Summerstone’s first level and walked past the boutique whose owner had elected to sell Nicholas’s Liquid Sheers. The kits were on display in two colorful pyramids just inside the shop’s entrance.

  That afternoon a leggy, dark-haired girl came into Creighton’s Corner to browse, and when she let her fur-trimmed coat fall open Marilyn saw a small magenta rose above her right knee. The girl’s winter tan had been rubbed or brushed on, and there were magenta seams going up the backs of her legs. Marilyn didn’t like the effect, but she understood that others might not find it unattractive.

  At six o’clock Nicholas Anson showed up in sports clothes and an expensive deerskin coat. Jane Sidney and Cissy Campbell left, and Marilyn had a mall attendant draw the shop’s movable grating across its entrance. Despite the early Wednesday closing time, people were still milling about as shopkeepers transacted last-minute business or sought to shoo away their final heel-dragging customers. This was the last Wednesday evening before Christmas that Summerstone would be closed.

  Marilyn began walking, and Nicholas fell in beside her like an assigned escort at a military ball. “Did you think I wasn’t coming?” “I didn’t know. What now?”

  “Dinner.”

  “I’d like to go home first. To freshen up.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “I have a car.”

  “Lock it and let it sit. This place is about as well guarded as Fort Knox. I’ve rented a car from the service at the airport.”

  Marilyn didn’t want to see Nicholas Anson’s rental car. “Let yours sit. You can drive me home in mine.” He started to protest. “It’s either that or an early goodbye. I worry about my car.”

  So he drove her to Brookmist in her ’68 Nova. The perimeter highway was yellow-grey under its ghostly lamps, and the traffic was bewilderingly swift. Twilight had already edged over into the evening — a drear winter evening. The Nova’s gears rattled even when Nicholas wasn’t touching the stick on the steering column.

  “I’m surprised you don’t have a newer car. Surely you can afford one.”

  “I could, I suppose, but I like this one. It’s easy on gas, and during the oil embargo I felt quite smart. . . . What’s the matter with it?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that I’d imagined you in a bigger or a sportier one. I shouldn’t have said anything.” He banged his temple with the heel of his right hand. “I’m sorry, Marilyn.”

  “Don’t apologize. Jane Sidney asked me the same thing one day. I told her that my parents were dirt-poor during the Depression and that as soon as I was able to sock any money away for them, that’s what I did. It’s a habit I haven’t been able to break — even today, with my family dead and no real financial worries.”

  They rode in silence beneath the haloed lamps on the overpass and the looming grey shadow of Satterwhite’s.

  “A girl came into the boutique this afternoon wearing Liquid Sheers,” Marilyn said. “It does seem your product’s selling.” “Hooo,” Nicholas replied, laughing mirthlessly. “Just remember that I didn’t bring that up, okay?”

  They left the expressway and drove down several elm-lined residential streets. The Brookmist complex of townhouses came into
the Nova’s headlights like a photographic image emerging from a wash of chemicals, everything gauzy and indistinct at first. Marilyn directed Nicholas to the community carport against a brick wall behind one of the rows of houses, and he parked the car. They walked hunch-shouldered in the cold to a tall redwood fence enclosing a concrete patio not much bigger than a phone booth. Marilyn pushed the gate aside, let the latch fall behind them, and put her key into the lock on the kitchen door. Two or three flower pots with drooping, unrecognizable plants in them sat on a peeling windowsill beside the door.

  “I suppose you think I could afford a nicer place to live, too.” “No, but you do give yourself a long drive to work.”

  “This place is paid for, Nicholas. It’s mine.”

  She left him sitting under a table lamp with several old copies of McCall’s and Cosmopolitan in front of him on her stonework coffee table and went upstairs to change clothes. She came back down wearing a long-sleeved black jumpsuit with a peach-colored sweater and a single polished-stone pendant at her throat. The heat had kicked on, and the downstairs was cozily warm.

  Nicholas stood up. “You’ve set things up so that I’m going to have to drive your car and you’re going to have to navigate. I hope you’ll let me buy the gas.”

  “Why couldn’t I drive and you just sit back and enjoy the ride?” Her voice was tight again, with uneasiness and mild disdain. For a products consultant Nicholas didn’t seem quite as imaginative as he ought. Liquid Sheers were a rip-off of an idea born out of necessity during World War II, and the “novelties” he’d mentioned in his spiel on Monday were for the most part variations on the standard fare of gift shops and bookstores. He wasn’t even able to envision her doing the driving while he relaxed and played the role of a passenger. And he was the one who’d come to maturity during the sixties, that fabled decade of egalitarian upheaval and heightened social awareness. . . .

  “The real point, Marilyn, is that I wanted to do something for you. But you’ve taken the evening out of my hands.”