The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus

by Carly Alexander

  I quickly rubbed it dry with my fingertips, then leaned back against the locker and tried to calm myself. It was just a costume. Just a role I’d played. Temporary.

  Well, maybe for me, but someone else would probably use this costume next year. I fished a pen and tiny notepad out of my purse, deciding to leave the next Mrs. Claus a message. After some thought, I wrote:

  This suit brings luck. Go with it.

  —Mrs. C.

  Maybe it was corny, but if I found a note like this, I’d get a kick out of it. Like finding a poignant prediction in a fortune cookie. And at least writing the note gave me enough of a boost to pull on my jeans and sweater and get the hell out of there before they closed the store around me.

  When I finally swung out of the locker room, my coat flying behind my heels, only ZZ and Charley remained.

  “There she is!” Charley beamed his ever-present smile.

  “Before I forget—” ZZ pointed a finger at me, “Regis said to tell you he had to run, something about picking up his parents at the airport. But he’s going to call you on your cell after the holidays.”

  “Okay.” I lifted the silver box and pressed my lips together tightly as I handed it over to Charley. “Merry Christmas, Charley.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Claus,” he said. “And best of luck to you back in New York with the Rockettes. Or should I say, break a leg?”

  I thought about telling him that a broken leg was just the first crack in the huge tectonic-plate shift of my life, but then it was such a long story that I just smiled and wished him happy holidays.

  22

  Dinner at Mom’s was lovely, with the lights dimmed, candles lit throughout the main floor, an orchestra playing Handel’s Messiah, and the strong scent of pine in the front parlor.

  “We just picked up the tree this morning,” Mom said, recalling how she and ZZ had bartered with the tree man at the market. As I studied the ancient ornaments from my childhood, Mom rushed off to open the door for one of our neighbors, Fritz, who’d brought a very smooth oyster chowder he’d made from a recipe on the cooking channel. Mom tried to keep things simple with a main course of shrimp scampi, but other friends contributed cheese blintzes and mandarin almond salad, pumpkin pie and mince tarts.

  Although I helped Mom serve and clean up, changed CDs of Christmas music, and pulled door duty, I kept returning to the tree, the ornaments that had taken me through my childhood. A plain red ball with my name in glitter, decorated when I was in Girl Scouts. My replica of the Bromo Seltzer Tower, an architectural atrocity that I’d never seen but adored. A sparkling red dancing shoe given to me by Bobby during our last year of college, a time when so many good things seemed possible, just down the road for us. It struck me that I wasn’t always unhappy here; the Baltimore of my childhood had been a wonderful place to dream and plan and fall in love for the first time.

  Tucking my legs under me on the sofa, I gave my old Christmas snow globe a shake and relaxed with the crowd, part of the ebb and flow of the party. So easy to lose myself in my mother’s house, in her circle of friends and music and cultural projects and committees. How easy it had been to become a Rockette. To portray Mrs. Claus. To play the role of Claire Todd’s daughter. Had I become a talented assimilator, a sponge ready to suck up alternate worlds?

  Any world but my own.

  Soon after dessert people began to head out, and while ZZ rinsed more plates in the kitchen, Mom pulled a chair closer to the sofa and handed me a rectangular box wrapped in burnished gold foil. “Merry Christmas, sweetie.”

  “Mom…” I sat up straighter. “Your gifts are upstairs. I wasn’t planning to exchange until tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine. I just wanted you to open this tonight.” She tapped her lips as if trying to hold back a grin. “I think I nailed it this year. One of the best gifts I’ve ever given you.”

  I pulled off the foil wrap and found a manuscript bound in a red ribbon. “The Moron’s Guide to Baltimore Architecture?” I read the title.

  “Dedicated to you, my dear. I started writing it as a simple guide for you, then… The project sort of took off.”

  “You were writing for me?” I shook my head. “But I know my way around town.”

  “When Carol showed me a tape of that Nutcracker show, it forced me to think about my own daughter and her attitude toward the city I love.”

  “Mom, that character is not me—”

  She held up a hand to cut my objection. “I’m not saying that it is, Livvy. But you must admit, history and architecture have always been your most hated subjects. Perhaps I forced too much on you when you were little. Those Latrobe tours and such. I accepted your rebellion, your choice to pursue a different area of the arts, but I also think you have come to the age where you’ll begin to appreciate history and art.”

  “Uh-oh.” I bent down one corner of the manuscript, trying to steal a peek at some of the text. “I guess this is chock full of lessons to be learned from history. All that stuff I learned then forgot in high school?”

  “There comes a time in your life when you realize the relevance of history. It’s more than learning from the mistakes of others. Fine architecture demonstrates the marriage between function and beauty. It is only after we appreciate the past incarnation of a city that we can become a useful part of its daily function, eventually melding into its history.”

  I had untied the ribbon and was looking at the contents page. “Ghosts in These Walls?” It was the title of an early chapter.

  She nodded. “I like to think of the people who used this house before us, and the people who will live here in a hundred years. We can be a part of that timeline, Livvy, and not just in this house, but in the library, our church, Fells Point, Mount Vernon Place…”

  My fingers moved through the manuscript hungrily. So she really had been working during her seclusion. “And this is going to be published?”

  “Not with a scholarly press, but with a trade house.” She smiled. “It’s really going to be a Moron’s Guide. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but when I learned of the number of people this market reaches, it seems far more effective than pouring my efforts into a rarified textbook that a few hundred students will be forced to buy and will never crack the spine on.”

  “I’m shocked, and surprised. Very surprised. But thanks, Mom.” I stood up to give her a hug and suddenly ZZ appeared with our coats.

  “We’d better get going if we’re going to make midnight Mass.”

  As they bundled into gloves and hats, I turned down the house lights and headed out. One of the grand double doors pushed open into a shower of fuzzy snow.

  “How beautiful!” Mom clapped her gloved hands together as she emerged from the house. It struck me that this was the first time I’d seen her outside for weeks, with a new calm about her, even a festive air. She descended the stairs, her face lifted to the night sky. “There is something magical about a having snow on Christmas.”

  “Olivia, you’d better be careful on these steps,” ZZ said, reaching back to give me a hand.

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, though I leaned on him till I reached bottom. Healed, yes, but I could be cautious too.

  As the three of us walked down the hill at Chester Street, the city was quickly beginning to resemble my snow globe ornament on the mantel, its streets and stoops and cars blanketed with a new-fallen snow and a hush that hinted of peace—the sort of calm that can only inhabit the pure of heart.

  Not for me tonight.

  Twisted and tortured, I followed my mother and friend through the snow, wishing desperately that this were my city, my place in time to enjoy as Mom had said. She’d written a whole manuscript to help me understand this city, and somehow I couldn’t find a place in the elaborate, historic timeline for myself. Electric orange candles lit every other window, some of them half caked with snow, and one illuminated tree seemed to quiver slightly, its lights peeking through the white powder. We passed other delighted walkers, a handful of older kids ou
t to scoop up what they could, an occasional stoop sitter in cap and coat gathering white stuff like a lawn ornament.

  Such a festive moment, a magical Christmas, except for me, Olivia the Nutcracker, able to wreck the perfect holiday with untold anxiety.

  In a daze I followed into St. Stannie’s, genuflected, took my seat, and stared ahead at the ornate carvings over the altar. Although more than half of the masses here were in Polish, my mother always chose St. Stannie’s for its classical architecture—the rose window, towering nave arcade, flying buttresses. A mini-Gothic cathedral in the neighborhood. When my father died five years ago of a sudden heart attack, his funeral was held here in St. Stannie’s, the first and only time I had sat in the front row, an uncomfortable spot for the lapsed Catholic in me. For a while I had thought that the funeral would make me feel a sadness each time I passed this church, but the opposite had happened; St. Stannie’s was a peaceful connection with my dad, the scene of our final good-bye.

  The church organist was playing “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and the end of every other row was decked with a sprig of pine tied off in a red bow. We were sitting at the end of an aisle, right beside the panels of stained-glass windows that were oddly illuminated from the whiteness of the snow outside. St. Stannie’s was known for its stained glass, stacks of square windows in jewel tones with sacred images like doves and chalices, mangers and crowns, and embedded words like gloria, ave Maria, INRI and pax. I craned my neck to take in the windows on the other side, such pleasing, reassuring designs, the symbols universal. The window nearest me honored the Assumption, though I couldn’t decipher the symbols in gold at its center—sort of a twisted SR. The letters were surrounded by a ring of stars and a simple mosaic patchwork of glass in various hues of blue, from Caribbean turquoise to a deep indigo. It gave me a sense of timelessness, of the Christmases that had been celebrated in this church, of the baptisms and the funerals that had passed here and those that would transpire in the next hundred years. I shivered, oddly connected to the mystical beauty of these windows.

  As the Mass began in Polish and I heard my mother reciting, “Glory be to the Father…” in English beside me, I realized what an achievement this was for her to be outside the house in a very crowded public place. She was making real progress, and all along she hadn’t been wasting her time at home. To think that my mother would be publishing a Moron’s Guide to Architecture. And I was her inspiration… scary. So Mom’s hermitage had been fruitful, and now she had a therapist and ZZ and a good prospect of returning to teaching next fall.

  Whatever Mom’s relationship with ZZ, she didn’t need me here. She was capable, and my ankle was healed, and Mrs. Atwater wanted me back, and I had a twenty-thousand-dollar check handy, good for a year’s rent in New York, two if I got in with a roommate.

  I was one lucky girl. Lucky, yet still in turmoil.

  My fingers closed over the dance-shoe charm in the crook of my neck, and I wanted to cry. My do-over, my wish come true. How could I be so ungrateful?

  Suddenly the air inside the church felt hot and stuffy and I needed out. Quickly, I squeezed out of the pew, hating the sound of my heels tapping down the aisle to the back of the church.

  The vestibule was much cooler than the crowded church, with winter air seeping in through the ornate double doors, beautifully crafted but not well insulated. I touched my fingers to the cold stained glass and breathed deep. Behind me, the priest’s voice carried on, patient yet firm, in the rhythmic language that had once enveloped this community, wafting through its markets and bakeries, rising over dining-room tables, punctuating the air as neighbors passed each other on streets lined with marble slab porches. I was not Polish but there was something comforting about this language of my neighborhood, the solidarity of this culture, now living side by side with Chinese shop owners and African American families and Johns Hopkins residents from Chile and India and Canada and France.

  This was the neighborhood I had fled for the sophistication and excitement of New York, where I lived in a tall glass building surrounded by neighbors I didn’t know. I’d been convinced that I was trading up, leaving Baltimore for the thrill of Manhattan. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  The door creaked back a few inches and a woman squeezed in, her narrow, slumped shoulders fitting easily through the small space. She said something in Polish, blinking as she untied the scarf at her chin. “They have started!” she whispered.

  I nodded, then moved to open the inner door for her. As she passed inside with a distant smile, my eyes met ZZ’s. He’d been standing by the door.

  “I came to check on you. Everything okay?”

  “Not really. And I don’t know how to fix it, but I realize now that I asked for the wrong thing when I put that wish in the stocking. I thought I wanted a do-over with Bobby, a chance to go back and make our relationship work, but I was so wrong. Being with him was toxic for me; I see that now.” I raked a bunch of damp curls off my forehead. “Anyway, you asked and I’m giving you the sound-byte version. Not your average church chatter, but that’s it. I’m kicking myself for making that stupid wish.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with examining our pasts, Olivia. We can savor the moments when we felt happy and try to get there again.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I won’t ever be so blindly happy again.”

  “You’re right.” ZZ took one of my hands between his and held it tight. “Next time, you’ll be an informed, wiser person. No more dumb luck for you, Olivia. From now on, you’re going to make your choices instead of following the path of least resistance.”

  As he said it, I saw it so clearly—how my relationship with Bobby had been about following him, basking in his confidence and talent. Although I had been the one paying the rent and buying groceries, I had deferred to Bobby on life choices, on artistic decisions. He was the one who pushed me to audition for the Rockettes, the one who’d told me about the dance troupe at Towson State, who’d made sure that I kept up with ballet, jazz, and tap lessons. Bobby was my stage mother, and now that I had really and truly separated my life from his, I wasn’t sure who owned my career goals. Who really wanted Olivia to be a dancer?

  Was that a part of my life that needed a do-over, too? “I’ve botched up so many things.”

  “Have you really?” ZZ folded his arms over his belly. “Were the last few months a mistake? Dancing in New York? Do you regret the people you met in the last six weeks?”

  “No, of course not,” I answered quickly. “They’re not the problem. It’s my own choices, that’s what I regret. Bad choices.”

  “Honey, it’s all grist for the mill. Haven’t you ever heard the old pearl about learning from mistakes?”

  “Maybe that’s my problem. All these mistakes and I still don’t have a clear path. I just wish I had a chance to start over.”

  “Well, then, this is your lucky day.” He reached out and touched the heavy door, pointing to the street. “Olivia, on the other side of the door waits a new start. A chance to begin again.”

  I frowned at the door.

  “Every day is a do-over, Red. Every new morning holds infinite possibilities. Whether you choose to take a train to New York or join a circus in Kalamazoo, you are in control. You are seizing the moment. We only go through once, Red, far as anyone can guarantee, and already you’ve accomplished some pretty cool things. Keep at it, but don’t think you have to follow any certain track.”

  The old church door loomed before me, beckoning, intimidating.

  “Go on,” he said. “Go for it.”

  Did he think I was going out there in the cold, right now? “You mean out in the snow?”

  “A little snow never hurt anyone.” He stepped back from the doorway, giving me full access. “Don’t worry, I’ll see that Claire gets home.”

  “Okay, then…” I put my hands against the door and shoved, and a hundred tiny crystal flakes skittered around me. Feeling a little silly, I stepped out, let the door close beh
ind me, and descended the church steps, the first steps in my symbolic do-over.

  One car passed by, then another. A man walked his dog down the side street, moving slowly, the dog trying to sniff footprints in the snow.

  I wondered what it would be like to live here again, to stake my future in this city, set down roots and start a business. The money I’d gotten from Mario’s wouldn’t go too far in New York, but here it could be a down payment for a house or condo, seed money for a business.

  What had ZZ said? Infinite possibilities.

  I took a few steps away from the church, glancing at the Christmas trees in the windows of homes I passed. Heading west, toward the hub of Fells Point as if I actually had somewhere to go this dark Christmas morning.

  I turned down Wolfe, passing the house Woody had pointed out, 927 Wolfe, which was once occupied by an ice company. In old Baltimore the company sent crews to the Susquehanna River each winter to cut ice and haul it into storage. It was shipped to Baltimore by boat each spring, used in iceboxes to preserve food.

  I had always been surrounded by this city’s history, but somehow, I’d never felt as if I were a part of it until Bobby’s show had pushed my name into infamy. Here was my chance to reverse that, my chance to make my own mark, do something positive, make some waves instead of just dodging the ones that came my way.

  And suddenly I was running down the street, my boots skidding slightly in the slush, snowflakes battering my eyes. I ignored it all, forging ahead as if I were running straight into the frame of a Frank Capra film. A right on Thames Street, past the water, another right on East Broadway.

  The storm door of Jimmy’s rattled slightly as I tugged it open and burst inside, my nose frozen and my eyelashes wet with snow. The waitress looked up from the counter, unfazed as I swiped at my eyes and looked in the corner…And there he was, at his table under the clock, reading glasses balanced on his nose as he sketched in a notebook. His shoes were kicked off under the table, his gray-socked feet rubbing against each other for warmth.