A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  No, she won’t, I thought, but he was right. I couldn’t just let her stand out there. The water might short out her electronics or rust her gears or something. And if anyone happened to see her standing there, begging to be let in, I’d look like a monster.

  And even if I told them she was a robot, they’d never believe it, seeing her standing there with her red nose and blue lips. And now her teeth were chattering, for God’s sake. “Get in the car,” I said.

  Jorge hurried around to open the door for Emily, and she scrambled in, getting water everywhere. “Thank you so much, Miss Havilland,” she said, grabbing my hand, and her sensors were even better than I’d thought they were. Her hands felt exactly as icy as a fan’s would have, standing out in that sleety rain.

  “Turn on the heat,” I ordered Jorge. “Emily, where were you when you sneaked away from Dr. Oakes? At Radio City Music Hall?”

  “Yes. I told him I needed to go to the ladies’ room off the Grand Lounge.”

  The ladies’ room? Just how authentic was she?

  “To see the murals,” she said. “They were done by Witold Gordon, and they show the history of cosmetics through the ages—Cleopatra and the Greeks and Marie Antoinette and—”

  “And something happened to you in the ladies’ room?”

  “No,” she said, frowning. “I told him I was going to the ladies’ room so I could sneak out the side door.”

  Definitely able to lie, I thought. “How long ago was this?” I asked her.

  “Eighteen minutes. I ran all the way.”

  Less than twenty minutes, which hopefully meant Dr. Oakes hadn’t panicked yet and filed a “Missing Robot” report. “Jorge, give me your phone,” I said.

  He did.

  “Emily, what’s Dr. Oakes’s cell phone number?”

  “Oh, don’t send me back!”

  “I won’t,” I promised. “Tell me his number.”

  She did.

  “This is Claire Havilland,” I told him when he answered. “I called to tell you not to worry—Emily’s with me. I’m giving her a tour of the theater and then we’re going out for some authentic New York cheesecake.”

  “She can’t eat cheesecake. She’s an artifi—”

  “Yes, I know, but I can eat it, and I thought she’d enjoy seeing a genuine theater-district deli. I’ll bring her home afterwards. Are you at your hotel?”

  He wasn’t; he was still at Radio City Music Hall. “The staff and I have been looking for her everywhere. I was about to call the police. Why didn’t she tell me you were giving her a tour?”

  “It was a simple case of miscommunication,” I said. “She thought I’d told you, and I thought you were there when we discussed it,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t remember we hadn’t had any opportunity to talk alone, that he’d been there the entire time. “I am so sorry about the mixup, Dr. Oakes.”

  “She still should have told me she was leaving,” he said. “She should have known I’d be worried.”

  “How could she?” I said. “As you said, she doesn’t have human emotions.”

  “But I specifically programmed her to—”

  He wasn’t going to let go of it. “You sound hoarse,” I said to distract him. “Are you catching a cold?”

  “I probably am. I got drenched standing out front waiting for her. If I catch pneumonia because of this—”

  “You poor thing,” I said, summoning every bit of acting ability I’d acquired over the last twenty-five years in order to sound sympathetic. “Go straight home and get into bed. And have room service send you up a hot toddy. I’ll take care of Emily and see she gets home safely,” and after a few more disgruntled-parent sounds, he hung up.

  “There,” I said. “That’s taken care of—”

  “Are we really going to a deli?” Emily asked unhappily.

  “No, not unless you want to. I just told him that to keep him from coming here to the theater. Where would you like to go? Back into the theater? I think Benny’s still here. He could let us in.”

  “Could we just stay here in the car?”

  “Certainly,” I said, and told Jorge to pull in closer to the curb.

  He did, and then got a plaid blanket out of the trunk and put it over Emily’s knees. “Oh, but I don’t—” she began.

  I shook my head at her.

  She nodded and let him cover her knees with the blanket and drape his jacket around her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said, smiling enchantingly up at him.

  “Would you like something hot to drink?” he asked her as if he’d forgotten I was even in the car. “Coffee or—?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  “She’ll have cocoa,” I interrupted, thinking how much I would give to be able to look as young and helplessly appealing as she did, “and bring me a coffee with a shot of rum in it. Not that mud they make at Dark Brew,” I added. “Go to Finelli’s.” Which was six blocks away.

  He trotted off obediently. “Good,” I said. “Now we can talk. Tell me what’s happened. You went to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall….”

  “Yes, and it’s beautiful. It’s huge, with gold curtains and chandeliers and statues and this enormous stage—”

  “I know. I’ve been there. You said something happened?”

  “Yes, the show started and there was all this singing and dancing, and then the Rockettes came out. They’re this group of eighty dancers, though only forty dance in each performance. There were originally sixteen of them, called the Roxyettes, who danced at the Roxy Theater, but when Radio City Music Hall opened in 1932, they were a big hit because of the way they looked on the stage—it’s 144 feet wide—and they added twenty more dancers, and then four more, and they’ve been there ever since. They’re all the same height, and they’re all dressed alike—”

  “I know what the Rockettes do,” I said, but there was no stopping her. She was in full spate.

  “They’ve done over a hundred thousand shows, and in the 1970s they rescued Radio City Music Hall! It was going to be torn down, and they went out in their Rockette costumes and stood all around the building, asking people to sign petitions to save the building. All eighty of them stood out there. In the middle of winter, when it was snowing and everything—”

  I waited for her to pause for breath and then realized that wasn’t going to happen. I was going to have to break in and stop her. “The Rockettes came out, and then what happened?” I asked.

  “They formed this long, perfectly straight line. They were wearing these red leotards with white fur trim and hats and gold tap shoes. That’s one of their traditional Christmas show costumes. They’ve been doing a Christmas show since 1933—”

  At this rate, we could be here all night. I broke in again. “They formed a straight line, and then what?”

  “They linked arms and kicked their legs in the air at the same time,” she said, her eyes bright with excitement as she described it, “as high as their heads. And all the kicks were to exactly the same height.”

  I nodded. “That’s what the Rockettes are known for. Their precision eye-high kicks.”

  “And then these skaters came out and skated on a pond—right on the stage—to the song ‘A Simple Little Weekend’—”

  From Bumpy Night.

  “And then the Rockettes came out again in pale blue leotards with sequins on the top and silver tap shoes and kicked some more and then—”

  Was I going to have to listen to a blow-by-blow of the entire show? “Emily,” I said. “What exactly hap—?”

  “And then they opened the curtain, and there was a toyshop, and the Rockettes came out dressed as toy soldiers, and they all fell down—”

  The Rockettes were famous for that, too, the long line of ramrod-stiff soldiers collapsing like dominoes, one against the other, till they were all in a carefully lined-up pile on the stage.

  “And then,” Emily said, “they came out dressed all in silver with these square boxes on their
heads and flashing lights—”

  Robots, I thought. Of course. In keeping with the theme of the Macy’s parade and the department stores’ Christmas windows.

  “And they all tap-danced,” she said breathlessly, “and turned and kicked, all exactly alike. And that was when I realized…when you asked me the other night what I wanted to be, I didn’t know what you meant. By wanting to be something, I mean. But now I do.” She looked up at me with shining eyes. “I want to be a Rockette!”

  My first thought was, Thank God it’s the Rockettes and not musical comedy! I wouldn’t have to compete with that youthful innocence, that disarming enthusiasm.

  My second thought was, How ironic! Dr. Oakes had brought her here specifically to convince people artificials weren’t after their jobs, and now here she was announcing she wanted one of the most sought-after jobs in New York. She was now a threat to thousands of aspiring Rockettes, and tens of thousands of little girls in dance classes all over America.

  It’s his own fault, I thought. He should have known better than to have let her see them. Even when they weren’t dressed up like robots, they looked like them, with their identical costumes and long legs and smiling faces. And performed like them, their synchronized tap steps, their uniformly executed turns and time steps and kicks. Dr. Oakes should have known it was bound to dazzle her.

  Add to that her youth (and I wasn’t talking about her sixteen-year-old packaging, I was talking about her lack of experience—and who has less knowledge of the world than a robot?) and the fact that every little girl who’d ever gone to see them had come out of the show wanting to be a Rockette, and what had happened was inevitable.

  And impossible. In the first place, she was designed to do photo ops and interviews with unsuspecting dupes, not dance. And in the second place, Dr. Oakes would never let her.

  “You can’t be a Rockette,” I said. “You told me yourself artificials aren’t allowed to take humans’ jobs.”

  “But it’s not a job!” she said passionately. “It’s…jobs are tasks humans have to do to keep society functioning and to earn money to pay their living expenses. Being a Rockette is something totally different! It doesn’t have anything to do with money. It’s like a…a dream or a…a quest or…it’s—”

  “What I did for love.”

  “Yes,” she said, and now I knew for certain she was stagestruck: she hadn’t even noticed that was a line from a Broadway musical.

  “But it’s still a job,” I said. “The Rockettes are paid—”

  “They wouldn’t have to pay me. I’d do it for nothing!”

  “And even if artificials were allowed to take humans’ jobs, there’s still the problem of your height.”

  “My height?”

  “Yes, you’re too short. The Rockettes have a height restriction.”

  “I know. They’re all the same height. What is it?”

  “They’re not actually all one height,” I said. “That’s an optical illusion. They put the tallest girls in the middle and then go downward to either end.”

  “Well, then, I could be one of the ends.”

  I shook my head. “No, you couldn’t. You have to be between five foot six and five foot ten, or at any rate that’s what it was when I auditioned to be a Rockette. It may have gone up since th—”

  “You were a Rockette?” she squealed, and it was clear I’d just gone up several notches in her estimation. “Why didn’t…? It didn’t say that in your bio.”

  “That’s because I wasn’t one. While the auditions were still going on, I got offered a part in the chorus of The Drowsy Chaperone, and I took it. It turned out to be my big break.”

  “But how could you give up being a Rockette? I wouldn’t ever want to be anything else!”

  It didn’t seem like a good idea to tell her I hadn’t actually wanted to be a Rockette, that I’d only auditioned because I’d hoped it might get me noticed, or to tell her that when I’d heard I’d made the chorus of Chaperone, I’d walked out of the Radio City rehearsal hall without a backward glance.

  “You have to tell me what I need to do to become a Rockette,” she said, clutching my arm. “I know you have to learn tap dancing—”

  “And jazz dancing and ballet. En pointe.”

  She nodded as if she’d expected that. “I can have those programs installed.”

  “A program of dance steps isn’t the same as actually learning the steps,” I said. “It takes years of training and hard work to become a dancer.”

  She nodded. “Like in A Chorus Line.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I said. “But even if you had that experience, it wouldn’t matter. You’re only—what? Five foot two, at the most?”

  “One.”

  “And the height requirement’s five foot six,” I said, hoping the appeal to logic would convince her what she wanted wasn’t a good idea, as had happened when she’d wanted to be named Eileen. “You’re simply too short.”

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s disappointing, but it’s all part of being in the theater. I didn’t get the part of Fantine in the revival of Les Mis because I was too tall. And Bernadette Peters lost the part of—”

  She wasn’t listening. “What about bingo-bongos?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Bingo-bongos. Should I have them done?” and when I still looked blank, “In A Chorus Line. The ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ number. Val said she had the bingo-bongos done.”

  Indeed, she had. She’d been talking about having her breasts enlarged and her derriere lifted, or as she referred to it, having her “tits and ass” done, which I refused to explain to a dewy-eyed innocent. Or a robot.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” I told her. “As I said, you’re not tall enough to meet the height requirement.”

  “What did you do in the audition?”

  She was too stagestruck to hear a word I was saying. “I’m trying to explain, you won’t make the first cut for the aud—”

  “What did you have to do?”

  “They taught us a series of combinations, which we did in groups of three. And then if we made callbacks, we had to learn a full routine, with time steps and kicks, and do a tap solo.”

  “What did you do for your solo?”

  “ ‘Anything Goes.’ But you won’t get to do a solo. You won’t even make the initial cut. You’re too short. And even if you met all the requirements, you’d only have a miniscule chance of getting in. Hundreds of dancers audition every year, and only one or two make it. I’m not trying to discourage you, Emily,” I said, even though that was exactly what I was trying to do. “I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  She nodded and was silent for a moment. “Thank you for all the advice, Miss Havilland. You’ve been most awfully kind,” she said, and was out of the car and splashing down the street through the rain, which was coming down harder than ever.

  “Emily!” I shouted, “Wait!” but by the time I got the window down, she was half a block away.

  “Come back!” I called after her. “I know you’re disappointed, but you can’t walk home in this. Jorge will be back in a few minutes. He’ll drive you home. It’s late, and your hotel is miles from here.”

  She shook her head, flinging raindrops everywhere. “It’s only forty-five blocks,” she said cheerfully, and vanished around the corner.

  Jorge, arriving moments later with two cardboard cups, was furious. “You let her walk home in the rain?” he said disapprovingly. “She’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “She can’t,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me, either.

  “Poor kid,” he muttered, pulling away from the curb with a jerk that spilled coffee all over me. “Poor little thing!”

  “Poor little thing” was right. Because even if she could charm the choreographer into waiving the height requirement (which wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, given her programmed-in charm), there was no chance at all of Dr. Oakes’s allowing
her to be a Rockette. It would undermine the image he and AIS were trying to convince the public of. Even her raising the possibility of being a Rockette would be too dangerous. He’ll cut short their tour, and they’ll be out of here on the next plane, I thought. If they haven’t left already.

  But the next morning, there she was on TV, smiling and waving from the foot of the Statue of Liberty and later from a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, and on Monday night there was coverage of her charming the pants off reporters and the TSA as she and Dr. Oakes went through security at LaGuardia on their way home, with no sign that she’d had her hopes dashed.

  “Will you be coming back to the Big Apple soon, Emily?” one of the dozens of reporters asked her.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” she said, and there wasn’t even a hint of regret in her voice. “I had a wonderful time here in New York! The Empire State Building and everything! I especially loved seeing Only Human.”

  Well, at least Torrance will be happy about her mentioning the play, I thought, waiting to hear what she’d say about the Rockettes.

  “What did you think of the Radio City Christmas show?” the reporter asked.

  She smiled winsomely. “I loved the Nativity scene. They had real camels and everything!”

  “Where do you go next, Emily?” another reporter asked. “Back to San Jose?”

  “Yes, and then we’ll be in Williamsburg for Christmas.”

  “And then L.A. for the Rose Bowl parade,” Dr. Oakes said. “You’re really looking forward to that, aren’t you, Emily?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, dimpling. “I love flowers! And football!”

  “One last question,” the reporter said. “What was your favorite part of your visit?”

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “Meeting Claire Havilland. She’s such an amazing actress!”

  I suppose I should have been grateful to her, especially when Torrance called the next day to tell me Only Human was sold out through Easter and three days later to say Austerman wanted to have lunch with me to talk about Desk Set.

  But I wasn’t. I was suspicious. That touching little scene in my car had obviously been just that—a scene, performed by a very skilled actress—and she hadn’t fallen in love with the Rockettes at all. But then what had its purpose been? To soften me up like Eve Harrington’s made-up story about seeing Margo Channing in a play and falling in love with the theater, so that she could worm her way into my life?