As I turned off the hair dryer, I heard Heidi circling around the laundry basket, trying to make a comfy spot. There was something peaceful about cats. Even ones you rarely saw.
Suddenly, there was a knock on my door.
I crept slowly to the kitchen and replied to the wooden door.
“Who is it?”
“Building manager.”
My brain seemed to actually freeze.
“Um…I just got out of the shower. Just a minute.”
Why did I say that? I just dried my hair. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I quickly opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of cold water, leaned into the shower and poured it over my head.
Then I raced to the “Alex Box”, pulled out the shaving cream, tie, and the Ted’s Ribs and Chicken shirt, spritzed the men’s cologne around the place, threw a towel over my head and opened the door.
“Hi. You must be Alex’s girlfriend,” he said as I rubbed my wet hair with the towel. “Sorry I caught you at a bad time.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said peering out from under the towel.
“I’m Nate, the building manager.”
Oh god. It was him. The cute playwright.
“Hey---I know you! You’re the ice cream girl. Dorrie, right?”
Wait---was I Dorrie? Or Celia? What did Alex say? What did I say? What was my story? I know Alex had important Wall Street business, but we really should have had a meeting about this.
“Oh yeah. I remember. Hi,” I simply replied.
I guess I was going with Dorrie.
“You’re Alex’s girlfriend? Wow. I mean….I’m sorry. I meant that as a compliment. You caught me at my day job,” he said holding his hands in the “Stick ‘em Up” position.
“Well, we all have to do it. That’s theatre,” I said nervously making conversation.
“So you have one, too. What do you do?”
“I work at a modeling agency.”
“Really?”
There it was again. The incredulous reply that I could somehow be involved in the modeling profession.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized again. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“It’s okay. Get it all the time. I’m not a model. Just work in the office.”
“Oh…sure. I mean…” he stumbled. “What I was trying to say…is that you seemed too intelligent to be involved in…the modeling industry.”
“Well, thank you. It’s a living.”
“Oh yeah. Me, too. So---Alex said there’s leak?”
“Oh, it’s way beyond a leak, at this point,” I said as I led him to the main room.
“Wow. This is bad,” he said as he looked up into the rafters. “Sorry about this. Maybe you guys could go over to your place for a bit. He said your apartment is being painted right now?”
Painted? That only takes a few days. We really should have had a meeting about this.
“Well…it’s painting….and plumbing…and electrical work…it’s a whole thing they’re doing.” I tried to keep it short and sweet. I’m not good at lies. And the thing is---When you start telling them, you have to make sure you remember them.
“That sounds like a mess,” he said with such genuine compassion and sympathy that I began to worry if I told one more lie, my nose would start to grow.
“Oh----I got the script,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“Well…it’s just an adaptation,” he said self-consciously. “Spoiler Alert: Bell rings…”
“…angel gets his wings.”
“Yeah. I really am a writer, though. I swear!” he laughed. “I have actual plays to prove it.”
“I’d love to read them sometime.”
“Ah!---now that’s a dangerous thing to say to a writer. Next thing you know you’ll have a stack of manuscripts on your doorstep.”
“Or maybe just bring them to rehearsal,” I suggested, not sure having the Building Manager hovering around my doorstep would be such a good thing.
And then I had a horrible thought. Steve. He knows Steve.
A few minutes later, I looked out my window and saw Nate drive away.
“Steve…” I whispered into the phone, “you know about my whole illegal sublease thing, right? Well, it just got a little more complicated…”
The next day, I sat on a futon wearing an ugly Christmas sweater and Timmy’s holiday pin.
“I think we’re getting somewhere,” Dr. Price said as she surveyed my festive ensemble. “Didn’t I tell you? The Christmas Spirit makes all the difference.”
“Oh, absolutely!” I beamed as brightly as my cubic zirconia pin. “I think so, too. So I was wondering, maybe you could take a look at my resume,” I said as I reached into my bag.
After all, isn’t that why I started coming here to begin with?
“Oh yeah, yeah,” she said as she jumped out of her seat. “But let me just show you this. Oh, you’re going to love it!”
She ran across the room to retrieve some sort of mechanism with a reindeer and the flailing arms of a nylon-faced, puppet grandma that moved around wildly as the song, “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” came gushing out of a mini-speaker.
“What do you think?”
“Oh…it’s…cute. It’s really cute,” I did my best to squeeze out.
“You like it?”
“Oh yeah. It’s got the song…and the reindeer…and the grandma. Just…ties the whole thing together with a big red bow!”
“It’s my gift to you.”
“Oh---I…I couldn’t.”
“No. You keep it.”
“Really. I...”
“You hate it.”
“No! No. It’s…cute.”
“Dorrie----it’s irritating. Even I know that.”
“Then why are you trying to give it to me?”
“I’ve noticed that week number three is generally when patients lie about their progress.”
“A patient is in the nuthouse. I’m on a futon. Completely different.”
‘When you sit your ass down on my futon, you’re my patient. Why is this so hard for you?”
“I just don’t see it making a difference in my life. I’m sorry. I tried the Christmas Blend. But it just tasted like regular coffee. They just put it in a holiday cup. And everywhere I go they’re playing Christmas music. It’s not even December yet!”
“Okay. Just take a breath,” she said like yoga instructor in a mental ward. “Let’s start with one thing. Christmas music. Why does it bug the shit out of you?”
“It’s just the same music. Every year. The same Top 40 I’ve heard for thirty-four years.”
“I thought you were thirty-five.”
“Not yet. And why is everyone harping on my age?”
“Dorrie,” she said clicking her fingers and waving them in front of my face. “Snap out of it. What are you doing for Thanksgiving on Thursday?”
“Nothing. My family’s back home….”
“If you’re going to have The Best Christmas Ever, you need to have a good Thanksgiving. Go to a friend’s house. Have a nice dinner.”
“No one invited me.”
She began mumbling things in Spanish to herself like Ricky Ricardo and ended with, “If you were a dog, they would drag you to a metal table and stick a needle in your ass. Dorrie… Are you a glass half-full person, or a glass half-empty one?”
“I don’t know. What’s in the glass?”
The next day at work, I got on the phone with Steve. “I was thinking I could make dinner and we could go over the play.”
He seemed a little distracted. Like he was busy on one of his hook-up sites----or worse.
“Um…well…this uh…. This isn’t like a date or anything?”
“NO! It’s not. It’s really, really not.”
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to ask.”
“Good god. What is wrong with you? No. Not a date. I know your type is twenty year-old actresses with low self-esteem.”
“I wasn’t say
ing you were old…”
“Why is everyone fixated on my age? My psychiatrist says I’m supposed to do this and I thought it would be a nice gesture. So do you want to come over for stupid Thanksgiving dinner or not?”
“Well….okay.”
“Fine. Was that so hard?”
9
Thanksgiving is my kind of holiday. You cook a big meal and you eat. No gifts to buy, no songs to sing, no irritating decorations everywhere you go. In grammar school, we would simply trace our hand and make a turkey. Here you go, Mom. Happy Thanksgiving. What’s for dinner? Turkey? What a surprise!
In fact, it would likely be my favorite holiday if it weren’t for its close proximity to Christmas. If we could move it to say April, when there’s not a whole lot going on…. I think it would really get the full attention it deserves. I wouldn’t even mind a few more Thanksgiving specials on TV. Or a really classic Thanksgiving film. It’s never been done. But I guess there’s not a lot of conflict in eating and sleeping.
Thanksgiving morning, I woke up early and watched footage of the President pardoning the turkey on TV. As much as I enjoy eating turkey, I’m always happy to see one little guy get away. I could never kill a turkey, or any animal for that matter. But if they’re already dead and in the supermarket…
I know that’s no justification for my moral conundrum. But turkey is delicious, and I’m not sure how safe it would be to eat an old turkey that died of natural causes. Even then, after all those years together, I’d have grown too attached to eat him.
Despite my love for animals, the closest I came to a pet as a child was a hamster. Cuddles. I had just turned four when Santa left a rodent cage under the tree.
An empty rodent cage.
“Dear Dorrie,” my mother read the note taped to the cage. “I brought you a very sweet hamster for Christmas because you were such a good girl this year. Unfortunately, your hamster jumped out of my sack while I was putting presents under the tree. Go with your Mommy and Daddy to the basement where you will surely find him. Love, Santa Claus.”
It wasn’t exactly a horse. But I looked at it as a good omen for next Christmas. After all, he had noticed that I’d been good. This was likely a test. I just had to show Santa that I had the right stuff to take care of this little guy.
While Mom was busy with breakfast, Dad and I went down to the basement to look for him. We moved boxes and bags and practically mountains in our search party of two. As Mom called down to us that the eggs were getting cold, we were hot on his trail of hamster droppings. I saw something brown and white scurry behind a suitcase and started squealing. Within seconds, my father scooped him up in a cardboard box.
I was the happiest child in the world as I peered into the box and saw the new little man in my life---Cuddles.
We took him upstairs to his brand new home and let him settle into his wood chips and toilet paper tube.
The next day, Cuddles died.
Possibly from something he ate in the basement, my father surmised. I was a mess. My beloved hamster. Cuddles, we hardly knew ye.
Santa was going to be so disappointed in me.
“Cuddles was a good hamster,” my father eulogized at the backyard funeral that afternoon. “He uh…liked to run on his wheel. And uh…”
“He liked peanuts,” I reminded him thru my tears.
“Yes, he did,” my mother added. “He liked carrots, too. Didn’t he, Dorrie?”
“Yeah,” I said all blubbery.
But when my father picked up the shovel, I completely lost it. I fell to the ground sobbing and clutching the fancy perfume box that was Cuddles’ coffin. Chanel No. 5. Never had a dead hamster smelled so good. I kissed the box and cried and hugged it while my mom kept saying, “Oh honey, don’t open the box. Please. Just leave him in the box, honey.”
As Cuddles was lowered into the one foot-deep hole, I threw myself to the ground, ripping out bits of dried grass and sobbing till I could barely breathe. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The next day, it started to snow. I began sobbing as snow fell onto his grave, worried he would be cold. I was allowed to take a blanket out to cover his grave and stay with him till I was told I would “catch my death”. I cried for almost two weeks for a hamster I’d barely known for twenty-four hours.
I devoted the entire next year of my life to animals. I begged to go to the zoo constantly, watched documentaries on TV about penguins and lions, played “Farm” with my miniature toy farmhouse, and colored pictures of almost every animal on the planet and stuck them to the refrigerator with letter-shaped magnets.
One of the nuns at my school noticed my love of animals, and told me about St. Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Animals. To be honest, I was a little peeved because I had already decided to be a saint when I grew up----and that I waould be the Patron Saint of Animals. But that darn St. Francis beat me to it.
My first career disappointment.
Nevertheless, I decided that I could do better than a saint. The following year for Thanksgiving, I stood up at the dinner table and announced that I would NOT be eating turkey, because a turkey was an animal and eating animals was wrong. I would not judge them on their choice to eat the bird, but I refused to participate.
“Well, okay sweetheart,” my Mom agreed. “You don’t have to eat the turkey if you don’t want to. What would you like me to make you for dinner then?”
I sat down righteously and declared, “I’ll just have a hot dog”.
I think I made my point.
I don’t mind Black Friday. Hard workers don’t always have a lot of time for Christmas shopping. So for those of you who enjoy taking that extra day you may get off work to get a jumpstart on the madness that is Christmas---more power to you.
But Black Thursday is another thing. Forcing poorly paid retail workers to end their “holiday” in the afternoon so they can get a few hours of sleep, and then up in time to be at work for the midnight sale…
Even during the Industrial Revolution they let the factory workers take a holiday off. Geez.
St. Dorrie of Milwaukee. Patron Saint of Retail Workers. It could happen.
Strangely, while the new American tradition seems to be opening retail stores on Thanksgiving, this doesn’t extend to grocery stores. Maybe because they have unions. Must be pretty strong unions if they can close on the one day when people need food the most.
I found this out the hard way.
“Closed for Thanksgiving”, the sign read.
I knew my even going there was a moral conundrum in my bid for sainthood, but it wasn’t like I wanted a sale price on the latest electronic gadget. I just wanted some food.
Just North of Whoville Page 10
