Christmas in Wine Country

by Addison Westlake

  Or a YouTube video.

  Padding out of bed, she opened the screen door a crack in hopes that the crashing surf outside the ocean-facing room would serve as soothing white noise. Instead, back in bed, she alternated between deciding it sounded like a tsunami—could those happen in Northern California?—to realizing it was the soundtrack to the endless, relentless march of time that must overtake us all.

  Why in the name of all things holy had she gone to Phillip for comfort after getting laid off? Broken up with by being told there was nothing to break up. That was a new low, Lila reflected, tossing in her bed. Also, how could over a dozen down pillows feel so uncomfortable?

  Frustrated by the constant mental replay of a movie she hadn’t much liked the first go-round, Lila turned to a shelf of books in the room. Rejecting the romance novels—she knew she’d just stay up until she got to the end—she chose a local history. Despite its melodramatic title, “CIVIL WAR: Napa vs. Sonoma,” Lila trusted it to be suitably dull to put her to sleep.

  She was wrong. Five am and filled with facts—did you know Sonoma was five times as large as Napa but only had about 300 wineries compared to Napa’s 500? How about that Sonoma was known for being more casual and laid back with more boutique wineries, whereas Napa was typically more expensive, offering a visitor more glitz and glam?—she finally had to put the book aside. As the morning light crept in, Lila was visited by the ironic Insomnia Fairy who liked to play evil, twisted games and bring sleep only just before the alarm clock rang for work. She drifted off around 5:30am. This Monday, December 28, the silver lining on Lila’s jobless cloud was the fact that she could keep on sleeping.

  Later that day, settled in a massive, overstuffed armchair, wrapped in a down comforter and looking out at the crashing ocean surf, she found herself crying once again. Yet even as the tears stream down her cheeks, she had to acknowledge it was a far better setting for a breakdown. Tucked in amidst soothing creams and taupes, the room had been decorated to the height of good taste. Together with the fireplace, it provided the perfect backdrop to the stunning oceanfront.

  There was a reason the views along route 1 were world-famous. The day’s driving rainstorm only served to add to the stark and bleak drama as Lila surveyed the cliffs dropping 40 feet down into the ocean below. Waves boiled, churned and crashed against jagged black rocks. Walled as it was, the surf looked as it was trying to escape as it tirelessly pounded its way into crevices and caverns. Two rock spires had what looked like an arch between them, carved over the years by waves. When the water hit just right it sprayed out like a fountain. Even she, accustomed to oceanic beauty as one who’d grown up surrounded by it, found this coastline breathtaking.

  Gazing out over the waves, she decided there was more here to the scene of the romantic heroine, wronged yet not downtrodden. Easing the sliding glass door open another foot, she took a sip of the hot chocolate she’d made from the in-room coffee machine and settled in for a good brood.

  She didn’t have anywhere to be until five o’clock that night. She was heading over to her college roommate Annie’s house in downtown Redwood Cove for dinner. A wash of guilt overtook her, blending in nicely with the despair, as she realized that Annie’s daughter Charlotte had to be over a year old by now and Lila had only visited her once. It had been a quick visit, too, filled with obsessive pecks at her iPhone.

  It hadn’t been that way in college, of course. Matched together as Freshman roommates at Colgate, they’d instantly hit it off, sharing the same dry sense of humor and love of late night pizza deliveries. That first year Annie had been on the varsity swim team and Lila had been in the library, either working for her campus job or working on her studies. Sophomore year, however, a shoulder injury curbed Annie’s competitive swim career and the two had become inseparable. Wry, observant and willing to say the things others might just think, Lila loved the confidence she felt with fearless Annie.

  Annie had been at the center of her move to San Francisco after graduation. Never having left the East Coast, it was a big deal to move out; less so since Annie would still be her roommate and her parents lived just forty five minutes away in the suburb of Danville. Six months into the adventure, Annie had announced that she was leaving for Redwood Cove so she could move in with her boyfriend, Pete. The distance between them had widened as Annie got engaged, married and settled into a cute little cottage in a cute little town. Lila stayed in the city to climb the corporate ladder, party with her chic and sophisticated roommates and date a highly successful executive in the firm. At least, that’s how Lila had portrayed it, feeling defensive and lonely. The few times she’d tried greater honesty Annie had asked pesky questions like, “Why are you into this Phillip again?” or a “Remind me why you’re suddenly so interested in advertising?”

  Once Annie embarked on pregnancy and motherhood, they might as well have moved to different planets. Where Lila was consumed with deciphering Phillip’s latest text and planning the new fasting cleanse diet promised to make you lose those last five pounds of bloat, Annie was obsessed with her infant’s sleep schedule, or lack thereof. It seemed every time Lila called Annie’s daughter was crying in the background. “Now’s not a good time” had ended most conversations before they began.

  What was Annie going to have to say tonight when Lila washed up on her doorstep battered, bruised and thrown overboard by her supposedly sublime life? Shifting her legs so they were slung over the arm of the chair, Lila gazed out at a seagull perched defiantly on a jagged rock. He had no answers. But something about the independent and spirited gleam in his eye made her think of her Gram. What was she up to just then? Probably cooking some soup. She always liked to have soup on hand and in the freezer in Tupperware containers. “You never know when you’re going to need some,” she’d tell Lila, stirring a pot.

  A hot bowl of soup would be pretty good right now, Lila reflected, wiping a tear from her cheek. She knew she was taking pathetic to new heights, or rather lows, but since there was no one there to see, she went with it.

  She supposed she could always just hop on a plane and fly back to Gram in Hyannis. Southwest had good deals, even at the last minute. She knew she could show up on her doorstep with a duffle bag and a sniffle and Gram would take her in, no questions asked.

  The same couldn’t be said of her mother’s one-bedroom condo in Braintree, just outside Boston. First, there was only one bedroom—barely enough for her mother, Richard the boyfriend of seven years, and Richard’s gigantic Tom Selleck-style mustache. Then, there would also be the problem of questions, pressure and, even, resentment. What happened, exactly? That student loan isn’t going to pay itself! How could you throw away what I never got the chance to have?

  The aforementioned ‘what’ that Lila had thrown away could have multiple meanings given the context. It could refer to Lila’s four-year degree from what her family called ‘that fancy private college’, instead of the associate’s degree her mother had painstakingly earned at night over a decade once Lila had started elementary school. It could refer to the opportunity to live footloose and fancy-free as a young twentysomething in the big city, instead of never leaving the house you grew up in and raising a baby as a single mother with Gram’s help. Or it could refer to starting off in the fast lane of a promising career path, instead of patching together a resume from a hodgepodge of low-skilled service sector jobs to finally work your way into a decent job in office supply sales in your mid-forties.

  Lila understood it all: the questions, the pressure, even the resentment. But she couldn’t turn back the clock and make her mother not get pregnant at 19 with some summer fling tourist who didn’t want the romance to carry through into the fall, never mind suddenly become a father. And she couldn’t see a way to an instant fix of her current life. So moving in with Mom was out of the question.

  Her Gram’s however…Lila took another sip of her hot chocolate, rapidly becoming cold chocolate, and swished the idea around for a minute. She could see her
self back in her tiny old bedroom. She could dust off the academic decathlon trophies and that Leonardo DiCaprio poster circa Titanic. It would be like she never left.

  A shiver ran down her spine and she knew she’d give herself two, three months, tops, before landing firmly inside The Bell Jar. She loved her Gram, rotating wolfpack of stray dogs notwithstanding, but moving back into the attic wasn’t what 27-year-olds were supposed to do. They were supposed to be off on a juggernaut of career-building networking cocktail parties, weekends away with friends from college and trendy art openings with hot dates. Mary Tyler Moore. Jennifer Anniston in Friends. Lauren Conrad in The Hills. There were plenty of examples, but Lila had somehow missed the playbook that explained all the rules and strategies of the game.

  Instead, she had a student loan, a VISA bill, and an apartment that, even with two roommates, she could only afford rent on for about another month. Clearly, she was going to have to start wearing a sandwich board and handing out fliers on the sidewalk. Or holding a big arrow pointing to New Condos. Some of those guys got pretty impressive with the flipping and twirling of the sign. She didn’t think she had that kind of coordination.

  Over again at the shelf of books, Lila selected a romance to stop her endlessly racing parade of anxiety. Drawn in as she’d hoped, tucked in under the down comforter, the rest of the afternoon hours slipped away relatively free of pain, suffering and self-doubt.

  * * *

  “You doing all right?” Annie called from the kitchen. She’d ducked in there a few minutes ago promising something fabulous called sipping chocolate and insisting Lila relax instead of help.

  “Yup,” Lila answered from the living room where she realized, amazingly, she was. For the moment, at least. Dinner had been chaotic and fun, with Annie’s husband Pete insisting on grilling up fat steaks and Lila put to work chopping a big salad. Their 15-month-old daughter, Charlotte, had provided the entertainment by relentlessly pressing a refrigerator magnet that played a variety of favorites such as “This Old Man” and “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain”. Lila didn’t tend to spend a lot of time with 2 ½ foot tall people prone to spontaneous and unselfconscious dancing. She found herself laughing more than just a bit.

  There simply hadn’t been any room for awkwardness and Lila was grateful. She hadn’t wanted to monopolize dinner conversation with news of her depressing life. And, more than that, she didn’t want stretched out silences reminding them both how out of touch they’d fallen in recent years.

  Tucking her feet up under her, she curled herself into a ball in a corner of Annie’s overstuffed pink couch. It was a hand-me-down, Lila felt almost sure. Annie was more of a no-nonsense type. Together with the matching valance on the window and a pink accent vase on top of the mantle, Lila bet it was the work of Annie’s mother-in-law who lived down the street.

  Pete was putting Charlotte to bed, but even in her absence the bungalow was filled with her presence: a doll in her stroller under a blanket, a Curious George with a bonnet seated on a chair, a copy of Goodnight Moon on the coffee table.

  “Lila Clark,” Annie said with a grin, setting down two mugs and settling into the opposite side of the couch. “Have some of my sipping chocolate.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “Glad to see you still allow yourself a treat every now and then.” Just the hint of an edge sharpened Annie’s comment.

  “Oh, of course,” Lila agreed, though in honestly she’d pretty much cut sweets out entirely. Plus she hit the gym six days a week. The seventh she took off, but she still did a half-hour of stretching at home.

  Wow, that sipping chocolate was good.

  “Slowly, now,” Annie cautioned with a laugh. “It must be savored.”

  “Oh my God.” Lila closed her eyes to fully enjoy the rich, dreamy liquid chocolate. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Yes, it is,” Annie agreed. Over dinner, she’d explained that she was now working at a chocolatier. She planned to own her own shop some day. “A few more sips and you won’t even care that you lost your job.”

  “Oh my God.” Lila closed her eyes again, this time reeling from nausea.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sick over it. Listen, maybe it’s not that bad. Why were you still working at that advertising agency anyway? Wasn’t it just a copy editing job while you figured out what you really wanted to do?”

  Lila sighed, remembering that was indeed how she’d felt when she’d first taken the job.

  “And why were you in charge of that party?” Annie continued. “I have to say, I don’t see you as an event planner.”

  “It made me a total wreck,” Lila admitted.

  “What a drag you got fired from that.” Annie nodded, deadpan.

  “Still, I feel like such a failure.”

  “Listen, you’ve got to get over your never-satisfied-mother-absent-father syndrome.”

  Smacked by a cold whack of truth, Lila took a moment to assemble something witty in response. She wasn’t used to spending time with someone who knew her so well. “I love how you sugarcoat everything, Annie. Such a kid glove approach.”

  “Hey, then get yourself a new best friend.”

  So she still was? Lila wondered, turning once again to her sipping chocolate.

  After a pause, Annie asked, “And Phillip? He’s not in the picture anymore?”

  Somewhere in the chaos of dinner—sharing the meal with a 1-year-old didn’t leave much time for in-depth conversation—Annie had asked if she and Phillip were still seeing each other. Lila had found herself tearing up and simply nodded ‘no’ as she focused intently on her fork. She and Annie hadn’t discussed Phillip in about a year. The last time they had had been a phone call during which Lila had been chatting incessantly about his hair, his Porsche, the little quirks that made him so… Phillip. How he said “zed” instead of “z”, or “pro-cess” with the o pronounced like the letter o instead of the boring way everyone else said it. Doing graduate school in England had really left its mark on him. Less enchanted, Annie had informed Lila she didn’t want to hear any more about such a pretentious jerk.

  “It ended a couple weeks—well, right when I got fired, actually,” Lila explained. Annie arched an eyebrow and invited more detail. Losing her self-consciousness—it didn’t seem to make sense when talking to one’s best friend, now did it?—Lila dove in, giving her all the grizzly detail about Axelle in her red dress and Phillip’s cold dismissal. “The worst of it is I can’t even say my boyfriend dumped me because he denied that we ever were dating. We were just ‘having fun.’”

  “Rat bastard. And he’s dating someone now named Excel?”

  “Ax-cell,” Lila corrected. “Or something like that, I can never pronounce it right.”

  “That’s because she’s named after a spreadsheet,” Annie declared. Lila heartily appreciated her indignation.

  Thankfully, as the evening progressed Annie never asked Lila ‘So, what next?’ Nor did she point out how lame it was that Lila was more than willing to drive the hour and a half out to Redwood Cove for a romantic getaway with her so-called boyfriend but had done it less than could be counted on one hand to visit Annie in the past five years. Instead, recognizing Lila was in pain, Annie practiced the ancient art of cutting a friend some slack.

  “So what’s up?” Pete joined them, settling in on the armchair and cracking open a beer.

  Struck with familiarity so strong it verged on déjà-vu, Lila remarked, “I think that might be exactly what you said and did the first time I met you.”

  “What, in our dorm room?” Annie asked with a laugh. Pete had come to visit during the spring of their Sophomore year. They’d had a great view of the main quad and Pete had devised what he called “the rich kid drinking game.” You took a sip every time you spotted a guy wearing pink. Nantucket red was the correct term, Annie had insisted, drawing upon her upper middle class roots in contrast to Lila and Pete’s lower middle origins. Of course, as a nat
ive Cape Codder, Lila was well acquainted with all shades of the faded, preppy spectrum. Whatever you called it, the fact remained that it hadn’t taken long for all of them to get pretty buzzed.

  “I think so,” Lila nodded. In a baseball cap, t-shirt and jeans, Pete maybe had a bit more around the middle but otherwise didn’t look all that different even though now he had to be about thirty. “So Annie tells me you’re a licensed contractor? Congrats.” For the guy who had taught Lila the term ‘chillax’, she had to admit, she was both impressed and surprised that he’d achieved his goal.

  “Thank you.” Pete nodded and took a sip of his beer.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah.” He gave a casual shrug.

  “He runs into some real gems though sometimes,” Annie said. Pete told Lila about a job he’d just finished up at one of the local vineyards. A vanity project owned by a retired real estate mogul and used largely as a vehicle to appease his thirty-years-younger trophy wife, the vineyard was never expected to turn a profit. Instead, the owner poured money into things like a deluxe dog run and spa area instead of anything as mundane as the cultivation of grapes.

  “I read about that!” Lila exclaimed.

  “What, the dog run and spa?” Annie asked. “Because I guess the lady was trying to get someone to come do a story on it, but I didn’t know she’d done it.”

  “No, I mean vineyards and how some are vanity projects and some are businesses. I just finished this book.” Lila adopted the requisite movie trailer drama voice “CIVIL WAR: Napa vs. Sonoma.”

  “That seems a bit much,” said Annie.

  “It was.” If a book could have used a slow-motion camera and a melodramatic soundtrack, this would have. After rattling off some facts about varietals and the lifecycle of the average vine, Lila noted their blank expressions and brought herself to a stop.