Just North of Whoville

by Turiskylie, Joyce

  “Oh---that’s the building manager.”

  “No! That’s him! Oh, he seems nice, mami. Are you working it? I mean, don’t be a slut, but you need to work that shit.”

  “There’s no way it’s going to work out. It never works out for me.”

  With twenty minutes left to go in our session, I started to tell her the story of Jeff.

  Jeff Michaels was my ex-boyfriend back in Milwaukee. We’d broken up about a year before I left for New York. In fact, he was one of the reasons I finally made the decision to move to The Big Apple.

  We’d dated for six and a half years. He’d been in grad school seemingly forever. Botany. Why I put all my hopes and dreams into a man who was perpetually working on his botanical dissertation, or whatever it was he was doing was beyond me. But he was fun. And he made me happy in that great relaxed sort of way.

  By the end, we’d reached a point where we either had to do something or call it a day. Or, as my father so succinctly put it after seeing Jeff four Christmases in a row, “So, Jeff,” he said looking up from his third glass of scotch. ”Are you going to shit or get off the pot?”

  Apparently, we were constipated. A few months later, we finally closed the lid and turned off the bathroom light. He wasn’t ready to get married. I’m not sure I was, either.

  Oddly enough, he got married a year later. Around the same time I moved to New York. Another botanist. He also finally got his Masters and was currently heading up the Cacti and Succulent Wing at the Milwaukee Botanical Gardens. His wife just gave birth to their first child. A bouncing baby boy. I know all of this information because of a sick and twisted flaw in my character---niceness.

  I’d made sure to establish a very public friendship with Jeff after the breakup. Not that we kept in touch all that much. An occasional email was about the gist of it. But I just happened to be a very nice person who went out with another very nice person and we’d always been very nice to each other so somehow it made sense to just continue being very nice. And this niceness, in the end, got me exactly what I deserved---a birth announcement with a picture of the bouncing baby boy.

  A few months ago, as I sat down to write the note of congratulations, I felt like the biggest sap of them all. I even sent a gift. Sap. Huge major sap.

  But I had no regrets. Dr. Prince agreed.

  “So, what is it about this Nate guy?”

  “I don’t know. I just like who I am when I’m with him. It’s like I’m having one of those dreams where I’m flying. You ever have those?”

  “No. But I used to have this reoccurring dream that I stabbed my orthodontist like nineteen times and pushed him off the GW Bridge.”

  “Good to know.”

  As a child, I had flying dreams on a weekly basis. In my dreams, my special gift was being able to jump up and down really high and then suddenly, I’d catch the wind underneath my feet and become airborne. The ability to fly was such an incredible feeling that I would inevitably wake up disappointed when my superpowers didn’t extend beyond my dreams.

  Not for want of trying, though. I spent hours jumping on my bed trying to recreate that high. Until the day my mother walked by my room and saw me jumping on my bed and shouting like Peter Pan, “I can fly! Look Mommy! I can fly!”

  At which point I missed the bed and landed smack on the floor.

  After we got back from the emergency room, she decided to try to contain my excess energy with skating lessons. “It’s the closest thing to flying,” she told me. And after one lesson, I believed her. Every Saturday afternoon, I took skating lessons in the park from an old Romanian woman. In fact, after the crushing disappointment of Patron Saint of Animals already being taken, I decided I would become a professional skater.

  If I did well (and I always did) she would take me out after my lesson for ice cream. At some point in my life there had been a fairly decent work-to-reward ratio.

  When spring rolled around, the lessons stopped. For years, I thought I’d done something wrong. It was only in my twenties that I got the courage to ask why I hadn’t been allowed to continue.

  “Oh she died, honey,” my mom explained. “Well, first it was spring and there was no more ice. And then that fall, she passed away. She taught Sonja Henie back in 1924, you know. She was old. We didn’t want to tell you because you were such an emotional little girl. And by then, you’d stopped jumping on the bed and decided you wanted to be an archaeologist. So we bought you a shovel and let you dig up the backyard to look for dinosaurs. You didn’t find any, but you had fun.

  “They got another teacher at the park the next winter, but I didn’t have time to be one of those skating moms. You were good, but it wasn’t like you were Olympic material or anything. Trust me, I asked Mrs. Tedescu. And she taught Sonja Henie, so she would know.”

  “So, wha’cha doin’ tonight?” Timmy asked that day when he came to pick out his photos.

  “Um…why?”

  “One of my elf friends is a skating instructor at Rockefeller Center. He offered to get me on the ice for the tree lighting tonight! Wanna come with me?”

  “Are you crazy? It’s going to be a madhouse down there.”

  “I have passes to get us thru. And you could use some Christmas Spirit, Dorrie.”

  And another car pulls up with the door wide open. Damn. Though if you look inside, this one seemed to have a creepy old man offering me candy.

  Most New Yorkers avoid the tourist hot spots during the holidays---in particular, Rockefeller Center. The people you see on TV are all tourists braving the freezing cold, the pushing and shoving, and getting sneezed on by viral little children---or worse, by adults. At least children sneezed near your knee caps.

  What kind of crazy parent would want to bring a child into that lion’s den? For what purpose? For what soul-fulfilling dream did they brave this inhumanity? But I knew Dr. Prince would be grilling me next week, so I decided to dive into the belly of the beast.

  I was going to Rockefeller Center to see the lighting of The Big Damn Tree.

  A few hours later, we were in the middle of a mob. Unfortunately, our passes didn’t include a police escort and a helicopter to drop us into the combat zone. People had been holding their spots since the crack of dawn for this thing. An entire day of your life spent waiting for someone to plug in some lights. Unbelievable. Even stranger, most of them seemed perfectly content just standing there. They’d obviously been standing there for hours, and yet they seemed not only completely comfortable, but appeared to feel special in some way for simply being there. These were the die-hard Christmas fans. Possibly the same people who had camped out for concert tickets years ago. Now they were camping out for a pine tree. Instead of band t-shirts, they were bundled up in Christmas sweatshirts and Santa hats. They were Christmas groupies. Somehow hoping that their proximity to their object of worship would reinvigorate their lives.

  “Hey Barb, we’re here!” I overheard a Southern woman yell into her cell phone. “Can you believe it? We’re right here in Rockefeller Center! We’re about a hundred yards away from the tree. I can smell it from here. I can just smell it!”

  All I could smell was the recently-filled diaper of the child next to me. Apparently, the mother, who held the doo-doo baby in her arms, had completely lost her olfactory sense. It was terrible. What could that child have been eating? Diarrhea?

  “Timmy, we’ve got to move,” I said quietly as I looked for a way out of the chaos.

  “Timmy Tinsel!” I heard a voice cry out from the crowd.

  “Ohmygod! Prancer!” Timmy yelled back and waved frantically to a young man carrying skates. Within minutes, someone named Prancer managed to get us thru the crowd and onto the ice.

  Sure there was Christmas music playing everywhere. But here, it actually seemed appropriate. If you couldn’t play it here, then where could you? I felt like I’d finally made some peace with the Christmas gods. Timmy’s long, spindly legs looked even more toothpick-like with the giant ice skates. He hesita
ted at the edge of the ice.

  “Do you know how to ice skate?” I asked.

  He paused a moment and he looked down at his feet. “No,” he said with the saddest look I’ve ever seen; as if he were embarrassed that he hadn’t mastered such a vital Christmas component.

  “Look, it’s easy,” I explained. “You just step onto the ice and then you push one foot forward at a time like this. See?” I said as I went around in a small circle. Not that there was room to do much else. The rink was so packed with people that if one person went down, it would be like a bunch of dominoes hitting the ice. Prancer stepped in to help. The two of us got on either side and held him up on the ice as he took his first baby steps.

  “Trust me, Tinsel,” Prancer explained, “In a few minutes, you’ll be skating around the rink like a natural.”

  If nothing else, Timmy took to positive reinforcement and within minutes, lost his fear. He still insisted on sticking close to the rail, but was quickly moving along at a no-hands pace.

  “Well, he seems to be doing pretty good,” Prancer said as he shot a smile at Timmy. “Think you can take over from here?” he asked me.

  “Yeah. I think I can handle him. Thanks… I’m sorry. I feel silly calling you Prancer. What’s your real name?”

  “Not going to tell you. It’s my elf name and I love it!” he said as he quickly skated off.

  “What’s his real name?” I asked Timmy.

  “You know, I don’t even remember. We just use elf names around the office.” And off he went. Feeling his icy oats as he wrested himself from the rail and skated off into the crowd.

  The two of us took turns passing each other on the ice, and occasionally met up near the rail to point out someone doing something stupid or something daring or fancy on the ice. As I spun around a bit, I wondered what special magic Mrs. Tedescu hadn’t seen in me? What kind of woman sets up a Reality Booth for a ten year-old girl? I mean, I don’t doubt I wasn’t Olympic material----but we’ll never know now, will we?

  “It’s time! It’s time!” Timmy squeaked as he skated up to me. Everyone on the rink suddenly stopped and looked up at the tree. Then suddenly, there was light. It cast a rainbow glow over the rink as everyone cheered and applauded. I almost felt a part of what they were feeling as Timmy, like a little boy, held my hand. Then, he looked into my eyes, leaned in and kissed me full on the lips.

  “What are you doing?” I practically yelled.

  “I love you!”

  “But you’re…” I looked at him carefully trying to figure this out. “…too young,” I finally decided to say.

  “I don’t care about your age,” Timmy scoffed. “I love you, Dorrie!”

  “Oh no. No you don’t,” I quickly squashed that idea.

  “But I do!”

  “Timmy,” I decided to try a different tactic. “I just don’t think this would work out.”

  “Why not?” he looked at me with those big elf eyes that took up half his big elf head.

  “Because…you’re confused.”

  “Confused? About what?”

  I couldn’t say it. I just skated away.

  “Confused about what?”

  When I got home that night and shut the door, I finally yelled out the words I’d been dying to scream.

  “Because you’re gay!”

  Heidi immediately darted into the closet.

  13

  “Dorrie, good news,” Alex said when he called me at work the next day. “She took me back.”

  “Celia?”

  “No. Tanya. Big favor---I’m working late tonight so can you pack up my stuff and take it down to her place? She’s in 3A.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  As I walked in my apartment the evening, I saw Heidi’s tail slide under the bed. Poor thing, between Alex and the roof repair she had to be a nervous wreck. She’d become Sasquatch Kitty----the only evidence of her existence being a foot print, a tuft of hair, and a blurry black and white photo.

  But if nothing else, I was finally getting rid of an unwanted houseguest. I packed up a box and an old suitcase full of Alex’s things and began hauling them down to 3A. Just then, the door to 3C opened and out stepped Nate.

  “Dorrie!” he said as he eyed the box and suitcase. “You’re moving out?”

  “Well,” I said uncertainly as I looked down at Alex’s things, “sure looks that way.”

  “Let me give you a hand with that,” he said as he grabbed the box. “I’ve got my car here, if you need a ride.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.” For once I was happy I had a habit of first refusal. It was about the only honest thing I had going.

  “You’re not taking a taxi, are you?”

  “No. I’ve got a friend coming to get me. Me and my stuff.”

  “Well, I think it’s going to be the beginning of a great new journey for you,” he smiled. “If you need something, let me know. I’ll be here for a bit. Some business…” he seemed to wonder whether to go any further. “Do you know the guy in 3C?”

  “No. I don’t know anyone in the building.” Truer words had never been spoken. I had been extremely careful not to cultivate any sort of relationship with my fellow tenants. You never knew who was going to rat you out for a dishwasher or the permission to have a dog.

  “Well, it turns out he was an illegal sublet. Three years. I’m in big trouble at work.”

  “Wow. That stinks,” I said, as I saw the lids on the box of Alex’s things start to mysteriously pop open revealing his Facial Cream For Men.

  “Yeah. Really stinks. My boss said I should have been paying more attention to the units. But it’s so hard. They’re hiding from you. What are you going to do? My uncle used to own the company. It was different then. It was a great job while I was writing. But last year, my uncle retired and sold the company to Herb---that’s my boss. The whole housing situation is different now. They’re serious about getting the old tenants out so they can go in there and gut these places and then quadruple the rent. I might lose my job over this.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that won’t happen.”

  “Well, according to Herb, I cost him forty thousand dollars. Plus the money he had to spend hiring a private detective.”

  “They hired a detective?”

  “Oh yeah. Pretty standard in Manhattan once you suspect something’s up.”

  I immediately began to wonder what my dossier looked like.

  11:06 a.m. Suspect enters building with a large bag of what appears to be cat litter. Unusual, as no cat appears to be on the premises.

  My plan was to just sit on the front stoop “waiting for my friend” till Nate left, then I’d drag the stuff upstairs to Tanya in 3A, and then sneak back into my apartment---the “my” looking more and more precarious every minute.

  As I sat outside shivering in the cold, my cell phone rang.

  “Dorrie? It’s Timmy,” he said in a shaky voice like a four year-old who’d been crying. “I tried to call you and work, but you already left and…and…and…” he sniffled. “I’m sorry,” he started to bawl. “I feel so bad. That was a violation of your person!”