“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…
12
“If you don’t like Jimmy’s Grill, just don’t say anything,” Woody said as we walked down Broadway, the wide main street of Fells Point, one December morning. “I love this place. It’s open all night, and I come here when I’m stuck on a project. Helen, the woman who runs the place, doesn’t care if I sit for hours over a cup.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, noticing the way the sun cast pasty light over the cobblestone lane as we headed toward the water. “Besides, I’m not picky.”
“Not what I’ve heard.”
“You must be talking about that show, which I have no affiliation with.”
“Actually, I was thinking of something your mother told me—how you can never make up your mind.”
Olivia’s lament!
“That’s so not true.”
“Come on, Liv, you never could. Remember when you could only try out for one team—basketball or softball? How you kept changing your mind? You drove Sister Catherine Charles crazy. Right here.” He reached for a weathered screen door with a Plexiglas plate tucked in, and I realized he’d been talking about this downtrodden coffee shop on the corner. All this time, I never knew it had a name.
“Ach! This Jimmy’s? It’s the worst.”
His eyebrows shot up as he held the door open for me.
“Kidding. I’ve never been in here.”
“Well, be nice and we might be able to avoid another cheesecake facial.” There was an old luncheonette counter on the left; the rest of the spare room was filled with plastic-covered tables and wooden chairs. The most upscale item in the entire diner, with its scarred wood floor and dark three-quarter paneling, was probably the old Coca-Cola clock on one wall. He leaned close to the counter to call something to the waitress reaching into the refrigerated pie case, then waved me on toward the back of the room. “Let me show you my favorite table.”
The place was more than half empty, so we could have had our choice, but Woody put his worn leather softsider on a table in the corner and took a seat under a clock made from a kitchen plate and fork. “I make it a point not to look at the clock. It just pressurizes things when I’m trying to think. Some of the other patrons, in the middle of the night, they’ve got to get back to Johns Hopkins or on the city desk at the Sun. They need the clock.”
“This is fun.” I sat down opposite him, better off watching the clock since I had to be at work by noon. “I like seeing you in your niche, with your Woody idiosyncracies.”
“Oh, do I amuse you?” he said archly, a poor mafioso imitation. “I don’t come here in the morning so often, but I know the former mayor and his cronies used to favor that round table in the corner.” He handed me a menu. “And I’m a sucker for bacon and eggs, but the oatmeal is pretty good, too.”
“When did you become such a creature of habit?”
“Honestly? After my divorce.” I must have looked shocked, because he added, “You didn’t know about that, huh? Yep, I guess a lot’s happened since seventh grade.”
The waitress, Joanne, came over and took our orders without writing anything down, then moved off casually.
“So what’s been keeping you so busy these past few weeks?” I asked him.
“Besides R
ossman’s? The city has a project in Sandtown—a community center—and I’ve been trying to get a better feel for that area so I can draft a design sample. I’m working on a few renovations for private homes, but no one wants to talk about ripping their house apart until after the holidays. And there’s a property for sale here in Fells Point, over near the old wharf. I thought we might want to walk over and take a look after we eat.”
“Sure. I’m still exploring the waterfront here. Some of my favorite shops and pubs closed down when the hurricane flooded these streets.”
“So you were the smart one,” Woody said, balancing a spoon between his fingers. “You and Bobby never got married.”
“Stuck on the serious stuff? No, thank God, we didn’t. How long were you married?”
“Three years. Liz and I were still finishing college while she planned the wedding.”
“Wow.” I curled the corner of the plastic menu. “Was it rough? Did you stay friends?”
“The relationship stuff…” He shrugged. “You get over it. But the heartbreak of it is that I rarely get to see my daughter. Chloe is four now. She lives with her mother in Rhode Island.”
“You’re a daddy? Woody, I didn’t know…” I pretended to look at the menu so that he wouldn’t read the jealousy in my eyes. Married and a parent? If you were keeping score, Woody would be way ahead in the life-experience category. Of course, he’d probably lose points for being divorced, but I couldn’t get over how he’d lived so much while I was perfecting my eye-high kicks.
We talked about Chloe for a while—her interests, her fears, her two-week visit the previous summer. I thought of the kids I’d been working with at Rossman’s, Lexie, whose mother was feeling the strain of single parenting, of a little girl who’d told me that her daddy moved out and maybe someday he would decide to come home again. It was heartrending, that tug and shift of relationships, a difficult dance in which no one was sure of all the right steps. Watching the light in his eyes as he talked about Chloe, I sensed Woody’s care for his daughter, along with his loss of control.
“But you struggle with the guilt?” I asked.
“Long-distance parenting…” He shrugged. “It sucks. And I still have a lot of anger toward her mother. Liz grew up in Rhode Island, and once she got pregnant she wouldn’t hear of living anywhere else. She wanted me to leave Baltimore, but…”
“You stayed.”
“This city is so wrapped up in my identity, my whole life is here.”
“But—and I’m playing devil’s advocate here—did you consider moving? Trying someplace different? It could be better.”
“I moved to Providence for six months, but it didn’t work for me.”
I loved his honesty, the fact that he’d learned this painful fact about himself, though it struck me as odd that I wasn’t repulsed. This was a man who was stuck in Baltimore—a most unappealing quality in my mind, but Woody wore it well.
He squinted at me, as if framing my face in his mind. “Olivia Todd. I can’t unglue myself from this place and you couldn’t wait to tear off. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“It’s temporary. I’m heading back after the holidays, but I needed a place to hole up and recuperate. I broke my ankle on the ice last spring.”
He winced. “And you had to give up dancing?”
“Temporarily. But the physical therapy’s been going well. I thought it would be easiest to come back, stay with Mom. But Mom has her own issues, and the day I moved back I found out that Bobby and his wife are here from L.A. filming all over the city. And suddenly, my life is a sitcom and I’m the starring villainess. Thank God for my friends, and for Rossman’s. The Mrs. Claus gig saved my sanity.”
He bit into a crispy strip of bacon. “It’s a wonderful life.”
“And changing every day,” I said, thinking of my upcoming doctor’s appointment, of the green light I was waiting for. My happiness hinged on it.
“At least your ankle is healing, right? You’ll dance again?”
“Definitely. But look at you, Woody, big-shot architect. The nuns at St. Rose of Lima would be proud.”
“Nah. Just eking out a mouselike existence, mostly work. I’ll probably end up like Godefroy, a shunned municipal architect, up to my knees in mud laying sewer pipe.”
“Godefroy? Refresh my memory.”
“After Latrobe, Maximilian Godefroy was Baltimore’s most prolific architect in the nineteenth century. He sought exile here from France after opposing Napoleon. He and Latrobe were good friends until they argued over whose designs would be used for the Merchants’ Exchange. He designed quite a few churches here, the Washington Monument, the Battle Monument. But his differences with Benjamin Latrobe seemed to define his downfall. Embittered and vindictive, he blamed Latrobe for his inability to find more work in America. He packed up his family and sailed back to Europe, but his daughter died of yellow fever on the journey, and when he arrived in England he was treated like a criminal, his drawings seized by customs officials. It’s not clear how he died, but he ended up working in the trenches, a municipal architect in France.” Woody shook his head. “It’s a wonderful life, huh?”
“You architects do lead glamourous lives,” I teased. Through my mother’s passion for Benjamin Latrobe, often considered to be America’s Leonardo, a botanist and designer and artist, I had learned that he also felt undervalued and underpaid for much of his life. He’d commented that both the working class and the wealthy shunned him.
“Sometimes I think about Godefroy, how the breach with Latrobe defined his life, how one event can define a person’s life.”
“Yes, but it could have been different, the outcome would have changed if Godefroy let it go,” I said. “If he refused to let it define his life…”
“Exactly! We can’t control the events in our lives, but we can control our response to them, whether we learn from them, whether we let them set us back, change the course of our lives.”
I sat back in the wooden chair as the underlying truth hit me. “You’re right. I get it.” And I could see it in my own life, in Bobby’s show, in the negative attention and nasty attacks that rattled me… because I let them unnerve me.
“This was very good oatmeal,” I said, resting my spoon on the table. “They should add a little slogan on the menu: Enlightenment in every bowl.”
13
For days after that breakfast with Woody I was walking on air.
Something about the unconventional meeting—breakfast and a walking tour—had intrigued me after more than a handful of noisy club dates in New York, during which the ritualistic process of drinks, light conversation, and noncommittal sex were supposed to play out. And there was something else about Woody—the substance, the spirituality. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the depth of our conversation had left me feeling liberated as I walked down the street in my own skin and able to relax as I played Mrs. Claus, nursing scraped knees, soothing lost children, entertaining the bored.
When I met my friends that Tuesday night at Peter’s, a funky neighborhood bar/restaurant in Fells Point, I couldn’t help but bubble over with talk of Woody. “We left Jimmy’s and we walked to this property he wanted to check out, and all along the way he pointed out architectural features unique to early Baltimore.” We were waiting for a table at the bar, an aged wooden slab with stools that resembled seats pulled right off old Harleys. “Like Shakespeare Street, with its local red brick and marble slab porches. The mansard roofs and the different types of brickwork, Flemish and Dutch cross bond. I used to ignore it all when Mom was lecturing, but somehow, now it interests me.”
“Because Woody was talking,” Bonnie said dreamily.
Lanessa rolled her eyes. “Two people find each other through architecture? Very touching, hon, but when I’m on a date you won’t catch me talking gargoyles and mansard roofs.”
“Are you seeing him again?” Bonnie asked.
I nodded. “Sure. Though it’s sort of hard to f
ind a time. A lot of his evenings are committed to community meetings. He’s making a bid on a building for the city, and he feels obliged to engage the people it will involve.”
“This boy may have political aspirations,” Lanessa said.
“Why don’t you meet in the morning again?” Bonnie suggested.
“I thought of that.” I shrugged. “We could do it. But…” I lowered my voice. “It’s not the most romantic lead-in. Sort of awkward.”
“Oh, please.” Lanessa lifted the olive skewer from her martini. “No need to act so coy. Just tell him to meet at your place. You make the coffee, he can bring bagels and a box of condoms.”
We laughed. “Sure. Mrs. Scholinsky would love that.”
“She’ll never hear you over the racket she makes,” Bonnie added.
I turned to Kate. “You’re awfully quiet today. Everything okay?”
Her lips pressed into a fine line, she nodded. “I’ve got news, sort of a bomb, and I don’t know how to say it.”
The three of us stared at her. “Well?” I prodded.
“I might be moving to San Diego with Turtle,” she said. “They’ve offered him a job, and I’ve applied to work with their marine mammals. I’m flying out for an interview in January, but Turtle’s new boss seems to think I’ve got the job.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m moving to the West Coast.”
We shrieked and cheered and hugged wildly. Behind the bar, the tattooed waiter folded his arms and grinned in amusement. “Chick love,” he muttered to some guy at the bar.
As we moved to a table, we prodded Kate for details, details. “I’m excited about the possibilities. Nervous and worried. Feeling a little guilty about being excited and about leaving you guys. Worried about living so far from my family. And since it’s still not definite, I can barely talk about it.”
“I’ll bet Turtle is thrilled,” Bonnie said.
She nodded. “He sees this as an adventure, while I see all the things that could go wrong. I guess he’s just more of a risk taker.”
The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus Page 11