The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus

by Carly Alexander

  “You know, Shayna, I think that’s a good idea. We don’t want the little ones to have visions of Mrs. Claus fainting in their heads.”

  She laughed. “Whoo, no. That would not be one for the Rossman’s memory book.”

  In the employee lounge I exchanged my Mrs. Claus top for a black button-down fleece and headed up to the store restaurant for a quick bite. The mayor’s jazz band was just packing up its gear, and there was a cluster of activity near the sound equipment as customers vied for a few words with the popular man. I ducked into the self-serve line for a Caesar salad with chicken, emerging into the quieter section of the dining room lined with poinsettias and white holiday lights. As I moved past a table of business suits, someone called my name.

  “Olivia?”

  Bracing myself for a barrage of insults based on the show, I turned and realized it was Woody. Sherwood Cruise, architect of the month.

  “Oh, I didn’t notice you. I mean, I didn’t notice you were dining with friends.”

  “We were just having coffee, waiting for the mayor.” He gestured toward the empty chair. “Have a seat. It’s good to see you.”

  I moved to the empty chair, trying not to gape at the beautiful people flanking my seventh-grade sweetie. The man on his left looked like he might have just stepped out of GQ, and the woman on Woody’s right could have been Business Suit Barbie. Short blond hair in a fashionable cut, chiseled cheekbones, the dignified look that I envied. At the moment she was laughing over some exchange between the mayor and a young boy in a baseball cap.

  Funny how you run into an old boyfriend and immediately sense that the thrill is gone… until you see them with someone else.

  “Are you finished for the day?” Woody asked me.

  “Just on break.” I nodded toward the others, but he didn’t seem to get it. Giving up, I extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Woody’s friend Olivia Todd.”

  The woman shook my hand, her eyes opening wide. “Oh, don’t let us interrupt.” She gave a quick shake, then smoothly rose from the table.

  The man in the suit also got up. “You have a good evening,” he said warmly as he started across the dining room and paused a few feet behind the mayor.

  “They’re the mayor’s security team,” Woody explained. “Bodyguards. I was waiting for the mayor to finish up so that we could go over a few projects.”

  “Oh.” The sound came out more like the native “Oow…” but I didn’t want to think about it too much. “Aren’t you the entrepreneur. But taking a meeting on a Saturday night?”

  He shrugged. “Nine to five is boring. You know me, I never did well inside the box.”

  “None of us did well inside the box, but most adolescents grow out of that.”

  “What happened to us? Why didn’t we grow up and begin conforming? Neither of us got real jobs.”

  “Woody, I may be pursuing the life of the tap-dance kid, but look at you. Architecture school, which has got to be more math than most people can tolerate in one lifetime. And now dinner with the mayor? Hardly the work of a rebel.”

  He twirled the pepper shaker on the table. “So, you’ve been on the job here a few days now. By the way, I’m digging the Mrs. Claus suit.”

  I crunched on a mouthful of lettuce, nodding happily.

  “So what do you think of my work? I mean, how is the whole Santaland thing working out with the design of the third floor?”

  “It’s a great space. The maze for the waiting area works well, and the train is a real crowd pleaser.”

  He grinned. “Great, glad to hear it. I wrote a proposal to keep the train running after the holidays. That whole area was designed for baby-sitting while parents are shopping, but Rossman’s is still looking into it. Liability issues, I think.”

  We talked about possible design changes, the need for more bathrooms on that floor, the need to move the dressing rooms for the Santa Squad a little closer to Santaland. “Can’t have a little kid running into five Santas on the escalator,” I explained.

  He nodded, his dark eyes squinting as he took it all in. I imagined he might have the same look as he shared this information with the Rossmans and pitched some minor design changes. I didn’t know what Woody’s contract with Rossman’s entailed, but it seemed to me he was sticking on the project longer than most architects, with care toward function more than structure. This was a man who cared about the building and his vision for the people who used it.

  I wanted to fall back in love with him right there and then, but a very rude woman was suddenly leaning between us, in my face.

  “If you like New York so much, Olivia,” she said, “how ’bout a slice of New York cheesecake?”

  I turned and only got half a glimpse of her when a plate of cheesecake filled my line of vision and wonked my face with its sweet, cheesy, moist mass.

  There were cries and gasps of “Oh my gosh!” “Did you see that?”

  I dug two wads of cheese paste from my eyes and blinked at my attacker, a woman with a blond beehive do and too much blue eye shadow. “Do I know you?” I asked her.

  “You know my type,” she said. “Don’t you remember what you called us in the show? Balti-morons.”

  The show. Of course. The wicked Olivia.

  I was about to defend myself, to recuse myself from Bobby’s skewering spoof of this city, but suddenly it seemed like such a lost cause that I just scraped off some cheesecake with my fingertips and took a taste.

  “Are you okay, Liv?” Woody asked.

  “I could be worse,” I said. “I could’ve moved to Boston. Then I’d be wearing Boston cream pie, and brown is not my color.”

  In the aftermath of the attack I came to think of as the Cheesecake Toss, a dozen things happened at once. A few people called the police on their cells, while the mayor’s plainclothes security guards moved in and handcuffed the tosser.

  The mayor was whisked out of sight, off to a secure location, lest there be a second deranged doughnut flinger or pie pelter lurking in the kitchen.

  The attacker’s friends sat down beside me and tried to rationalize their girl Doris’s behavior, explaining she was “pretty darned serious about her TV shows,” how she’d been having a bad run with her husband getting transferred up to Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, “And him ’specting her to leave her family and all and move up to that godforsaken backwoods and all.”

  Many of the diners pushed in to surround our table, some curious, some sympathetic. The guy bussing tables eyed me with suspicion, as if I were a ketchup graffiti artist, but Woody sent him for a few hot towels, which he brought promptly. Through it all, Woody remained beside me, the calm voice of reason in a sea of hysterical, shrill voices.

  By the time the police arrived I didn’t want to press charges, and I convinced them to release Doris, who promptly burst into tears and told me I wasn’t at all like my character on the show. “You’re a real decent human being,” she sobbed.

  We hugged and everyone applauded.

  “And that’s what this is all about?” Woody said aloud. “Bobby’s show?”

  I had forgotten that Woody knew Bobby. They had both gone to Mt. St. Joe’s, and even though Bobby was two years older, Woody would have witnessed the bohemian artist period, the leather-jacketed bad boy of Baltimore phase, the quick cleanup and tutorials to land a college scholarship at the end of junior year. What a relief! Woody was totally wise to Bobby’s act.

  “I don’t understand that at all,” Woody went on, looking Doris in the eye. “If you don’t like the show, why don’t you speak to the man who created it?”

  “We don’t care about a bunch of writers,” one of Doris’s friends said. “Everybody knows that the bad girl herself is here in town. Why waste your time on a bunch of writerly types when you can have the Nutcracker herself?”

  “Still…” Woody shook his head, letting out a long breath. “When I saw the show, I never thought it was you, Olivia. Not for a minute.”

  “I love this man!” I said, throwi
ng myself against his chest for a big hug. He smelled surprisingly sweet, sort of like baby powder. No lingering traces of the seventh-grade grass-stain-and-sweat smells.

  Well, of course not, I thought, stepping back to smile up at him and wipe a smudge of cheesecake from the lapel of his suit. Why did I keep trying to plunk this man back in the seventh grade?

  As most of the people moved off and Doris and her friends began to speculate where the show might go in the second episode, I realized I had to get back to work.

  “Time to hit the showers,” I told Woody, glad that he’d had the foresight to install a few showers in the employee locker rooms. “It may take some deep cleansing to remove the cheesecake masque.”

  “Thanks for sharing your dessert with me,” he teased, looking down at his suit. “A ribbon cutting and a flying cheesecake all in the same day. Way too much excitement for a nerdy architect.”

  “Nerdy? You’re going to be on the front page of the Baltimore Sun tomorrow. Me? I may go down in infamy as the craziest woman in city history.”

  He frowned. “Actually, you don’t compare with Sewer Sadie.”

  I rubbed my chin with one of the soggy towels. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “In 1909, when the city was just completing a brand spanking-new sewer system, a photojournalist named Sadie Miller decided to check it out firsthand. She climbed into an old jalopy with her husband and some friends, and they cruised through miles of sewer pipe. When they hit the end of the line, they realized their car was too wide to turn around.”

  My jaw dropped. “Yuck! What happened to them?”

  “They had to back out—six miles of curving pipe. Plus a flat tire.”

  I could imagine the choice words that passed between Sadie and her husband that day. “So you’re saying I should be reassured that I’m not stuck in a poop chute like Sewer Sadie?”

  “It’s all relative.”

  I headed off, then pivoted and stepped back to him. “Why don’t you stop by and see how Santaland is working firsthand?” I thought of his suggestion of coffee the other day, how I’d brushed him off so quickly. Nice move, dummy-head.

  “I hear it’s pretty busy down there.”

  “I’ve got an in with the big guy. I could get your name on the ‘Nice’ list.”

  “You’d do that for me?” He laughed. “Why don’t we meet outside the store, away from our mutual clients. But wait, aren’t you working, like, ninety-hour days right now?”

  “I don’t start till noon. How about breakfast?” Maybe I sounded way too eager, but when you’ve been pied in the face in front of a guy, it breaks down certain barriers of etiquette in my book.

  “That might work.” He plunked my cell number into his cell and promised to call me and set it up.

  “Don’t forget,” I said, lifting a stiff lock of hair away from my face. “You wouldn’t want to cheese off Mrs. Claus.”

  “Been there, seen that.”

  I smiled as I headed toward the elevator. The Wood Man and I still had something. Definitely something.

  11

  After opening week, the number of children visiting Santaland tapered off. Gone were the overwhelming crowds, though there were enough children in line to keep me on my toes.

  “It will be slow now through Thanksgiving,” ZZ predicted. “Then, soon as December starts…” He clapped his hands together. “Whammo!”

  True to his word, he had joined me last week on a trip to my mother’s house, where he had swirled cabernet and discussed the hidden mythology of the film The Wizard of Oz, which had been Mom’s theme that night. ZZ had stayed well into the evening, then asked my mother if she wouldn’t mind another visit, next time in the morning, before Santaland opened for the day. Mom seemed to enjoy his company, and I decided this was one situation I could back away from for the time being.

  Back at Rossman’s I used the lull to refine my “Mrs. Claus” style with the younger kids, the ones who ducked behind Daddy’s legs or clung to Mom’s coat. Not having much experience with children, I initially fell into the habit of raising my voice to a giddy, baby-talk mode and leaning in toward the little cuties.

  Not a particularly effective approach.

  The goo-goo face usually sent them burrowing for cover. Sometimes it provoked tears.

  I called Kate at the aquarium and asked if I could borrow her nieces and nephews for a workshop. When I explained my predicament, she told me I was focusing too much on the age difference, not enough on methods of communication.

  “Many animals are intimidated by direct confrontation. That in-your-face thing is the approach used by the alpha male in the wild. It’s the challenge to do battle, and with you being so much bigger than the kids, you can imagine how intimidated they feel.”

  Hmm. “Okay, so what can I do? Always keep back fifteen feet like I’m following a fire truck?”

  “It might help to get down on their level. The dolphins seem to relate best when we’re in the water with them. Try to get down on their level, not hover over them. And don’t try to talk them out of feeling shy or intimidated. There’s nothing worse than having an adult tell you not to feel something you’re feeling. Instead, let them know their feeling is valid and okay. You could say, ‘I know how it feels to be scared,’ or ‘Sometimes I still feel shy.’”

  “How is it that we went to the same college and you are a freakin’ wealth of information and I’m a big boob?”

  “Too much television, Liv. It rots the brain. Hey, have you heard from the Wood Man yet?”

  “He called. Right now we’re still playing phone tag.” I tried to appear casual, though I’d been wondering why Woody didn’t just drop by Santaland. He knew where to find me. “How’s Turtle? What’s the latest?”

  “I can’t talk about it now.”

  “Uh-oh. Are you okay?”

  “Not great, but I’ll fill you in when I see you tomorrow. We’re still going out, right? Boycotting the next episode of The Nutcracker. Isn’t that the plan?”

  “Absolutely. I could use a night out, and I refuse to contribute to the viewership of that show. Do you know that the guy in the coffee shop next door still refuses to sell me a bagel? And people pick me out as the Nutcracker every day.”

  “You’re a celebrity!”

  “Then why do they treat me as if I’m from America’s Most Wanted?” I sighed. “At least customers don’t recognize me when I’m in the Mrs. Claus costume.”

  “You’re a Christmas Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “Kate, if you don’t stop being so perky I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Sorry. I’m overcompensating for my bad mood. Let me go jump in with the dolphins before I start spout off Hallmark phrases.”

  Thanksgiving came and went with typically heightened family stresses all around. Kate regretted agreeing to spend the day with Turtle’s family. They didn’t serve turkey, the men sat in the den watching games while the women scoured pots in the kitchen, and for dessert—frozen pies. Lanessa felt pressure from her married sisters to “spawn wildlife,” as she puts it, and before she left her mother’s house there was an argument because Nessa’s sister let the nieces play with their dolls in the back of her BMW and consequently they spilled their juice boxes on the leather upholstery. Bonnie enjoyed spending the day with Jonah but felt guilty about neglecting her family.

  With the long hours I was putting in at Rossman’s, Thanksgiving Day had sprung itself on me with surprising swiftness. The night before I had called my mother with some degree of panic since I hadn’t done any grocery shopping at all, but she’d assured me not to worry, that she and “Hank” had it under control.

  Hank. It was still hard for me to think of ZZ that way, but apparently that was the name he went by outside Rossman’s, where he would always be “Head Santa.”

  Thursday afternoon I got off the bus on Lombard Street expecting a quiet dinner, but a dressed-up couple was ahead of me, passing through Mom’s double doors. From the front vestibule I could see th
at the leaves had been added to the dining-room table, which was set for more than a dozen with the good china. Classical music and laughter spilled out from the parlor, where I recognized friends, neighbors, and Mom’s colleagues from the university. A couple from the university squeezed into the vestibule, admiring one of Mom’s statues, and the two men from Mom’s bridge club in Patterson Park wanted to know where to put the cranberry relish. In the kitchen, the head of the Butchers Hill Neighborhood Association was cracking walnuts with her grown son, and she winked at me, wryly asking, “I suspect you’ve had it with nut cracking, eh, Olivia?” One of the profs was handing out mimosas in tall crystal glasses, and I gratefully took a sip, using the moment to regain my composure and balance.

  Of course Mom had a houseful of guests! Just because she couldn’t cope with venturing out didn’t mean she wanted to be cut off from the world. Subconsciously I had thought that Mom was so bad off, trapped in this house; I had forgotten that she possessed the charm to transform it into an intellectual haven.

  “I can’t bear to think of anyone alone on Thanksgiving,” she was saying to one of the neighbors, Carol Sawiki. “When my husband was alive we began the custom of inviting strays and loners, our own lonely hearts club, and over the years it’s extended to neighbors and friends.”

  “It’s a great tradition,” ZZ said as he set a plate of crudités on the kitchen counter. “Sometimes the most cohesive families are the ones who come together by choice.”

  That night, after the guests left and I was sipping wine with my mother and ZZ, I couldn’t help but ask Mom about Darcy, her new therapist. To my surprise, she was willing to talk about it.

  “There’s actually an interesting therapy being used. In theory, they break the huge panic monster into a bunch of small but pesky dwarves. The notion being that the panic is too overwhelming to fight, but each smaller component of it is somewhat manageable.”

  ZZ was nodding as if it was familiar ground.