Charming Christmas Page 2

  Evelyn looked at her nephew as if he were speaking an incomprehensible language. “You know, Daniel, marketing is not your forte.”

  “But who will be Mrs. Claus?” Karl asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be Mer-Mer.” Lenny shrugged. “So we hire an actress.”

  “I was just thinking we should send it to the new store in Baltimore,” Meredith suggested. “They’re opening next week and it might be fun to advertise a special visitor in their Santaland.” In addition, she suspected it wouldn’t hurt to have that suit thousands of miles away—remove it from sight and take away the family pressure to follow so closely in her mother’s footsteps.

  “Of course! Excellent idea,” Lenny agreed, flipping open his cell phone. “I’ll notify the store manager. They’ll be thrilled, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure,” Daniel added sardonically.

  Evelyn shook out the garment, then refolded it with expert precision. “I’m so glad you found it, Rahiella,” she said, tucking the lid on gently.

  Karl checked his watch. “We need to get this wrapped quickly if we want to overnight it to Baltimore.”

  “Overnight?” Lenny barked, lowering his cell phone. “That’ll cost a fortune. Make sure it goes by two-day express. Such a savings.”

  Inside the silver cardboard box, the fabric glowed, rich dark red, ready to warm the heart of its next occupant . . .

  The Nutcracker

  Olivia

  Baltimore, November 2003

  1

  After my involvement with Bobby, I understood why certain species of females devoured the males after the nuptials.

  As a kid, I’d found that practice disgusting, barbaric . . . “Gross!” Bonnie and I had said at the same time, our freckled noses scrunched up in horror at the detailed lives of arachnids unfolding on the TV screen. As a teenybopper and dedicated reader of Tiger Beat magazine, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have sex, let alone kill their mate.

  But after Bobby, it became clear that the female spider wasn’t just killing the male; she was putting an end to the madness, chewing him up before he had a chance to go off and mock her personal foibles with his spider buddies, before he could mate with her friends and suddenly find success and fortune to spend on someone else, before he landed a ten-minute interview on prime-time TV, during which he looked fabulous in the cashmere sweater she’d given him to wear at their engagement party.

  Not that spiders wear cashmere or watch television, but the female spider’s motivation is now clear to me: eat the sucker before he betrays you big-time.

  “I don’t know why you’re taking this all so personally,” my friend Lanessa had told me one night when she and I narrowly missed running into Bobby and his crew after they’d just finished taping a segment at the Wharf Rat, a smoky, dark saloon in Fells Point. “The guy is writing and producing a show. It’s what he does. He was a producer when you were together, right?”

  “An unemployed producer,” I said, gripping the shiny wood lip of the hundred-year-old bar. Talk of Bobby did that to me—sent me clenching surfaces with my fingertips or gritting my teeth. “Always out of work, chasing down deals, sticking me with the check.”

  “So be glad that’s over and let him do his job. You moved on, can’t he go where opportunity takes him, even if that’s Baltimore?”

  “I moved back home to Baltimore to save some money and regroup.” It seemed like an appropriate distance away from Bobby, who was into the L.A. scene back then. But I wasn’t back three weeks when I flipped through the trades and read that he was back in Baltimore, filming a show. “It’s bad enough that he came back at the same time, but he’s filming here, right in my own backyard. And by the way, why are you defending him?”

  “Man’s got a right to earn a wage,” Lanessa said, in that judicious inside-the-Capital-Beltway voice. “It’s the town he grew up in, too. And you’ve got to admit, the idea of another show being shot in Baltimore is damned exciting. I’m kind of sorry we missed the shoot here tonight, because you know I’d be right in their faces, asking them questions. I wonder how they filmed in here, with this place so dark. I mean, what do you think it looks like in the light? Scary. And what’s the show about? Do you know the story line? Last time I read about it in the trades, they were thinking of calling it The Nutcracker or She-Devil, which leads me to believe that it’s about a demon ballet dancer. Sort of a female Taz on ice.”

  “I don’t have a clue, and I don’t really care.” Part of that was a lie, as I couldn’t help but wonder how Bobby had come up with a concept strong enough to land a production deal—even if it was to air on the BigTime cable network. When I thought back over all the “small” concepts he’d nurtured over the years, all the pitches I’d had to hear over and over again about following the trail of a penny as it passed from hand to cash register to pocket to sewer grate, about the first Polish man ever to become a cardinal in the Vatican, about the short, sad life of the tallest man in the world (or would that be the long, sad life of the shortest man in the world? I should know; I heard those pitches countless times . . . ).

  And despite the fact that most of his ideas made my eyes glaze over, instinctively I knew Bobby would make it. With an ego that inflated and the ability to keep a conversation going with just about anyone, Bobby had the tools for success in Hollywood. The killer was, I thought he needed me for that success. I thought we’d be hitting it big together, that I’d be dancing in Broadway shows while he wrote movie scripts or directed television. We were going to be one of those couples you see on Entertainment Tonight—the next Brad and Jennifer or J.Lo and Ben, except, of course, Bobby and I would stay together.

  When we moved to different cities, there was a plan for our careers to converge in the future, as soon as I established myself as a dancer in New York, as soon as Bobby snagged a deal in Los Angeles.

  But Bobby went west and hit a real gold mine, snagging a woman and the chance to shoot a midseason replacement for a cable network. Before I even realized he was auditioning new girls, I was replaced. After six years of paying my dues.

  “Six years,” I said. “I spent six years with the guy, and wouldn’t you know it, the minute we break up, he dreams up a marketable pitch. Where’s the justice in this universe?”

  Lanessa’s amber eyes glimmered over her pint glass. “Kills you, doesn’t it?”

  “Not that I care or anything.”

  “Oh, come off it, you big liar. You totally care. And don’t think that I’m really defending him, ’cause I’m not. Bobby’s a slime mold, but having a show here totally jazzes me.”

  I took a sip of my beer, a cranberry lambic that suddenly seemed sour. “Does this taste right to you? I should never order these seasonal brews.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. And admit it, it’s cool to have a camera crew in Baltimore.”

  “The city without pity? Sorry, but Baltimore never did much for me.”

  “Just because you’re biding your time before you can hightail it back to New York, don’t be putting my city down, girl. This town is coming around, just as soon as we can undo some of the stereotypes we got saddled with in Hairspray.” Lanessa Jones is the most image conscious of all my friends, which probably serves her well in the political arena thirty miles down I-95, where she works as a lobbyist for dairy farmers. “Aren’t you happy your ex is bringing new jobs to Baltimore, along with good PR?”

  “Please don’t call him my ex.” Bobby and I had only been engaged when we broke up. “And don’t pin the PR of an entire city on me.” Feeling shades of the novel You Can’t Go Home Again, I felt a certain revulsion at having landed in the city of my youth after an injury curtailed my dancing career in New York last March. As far as I was concerned, Baltimore was just a pit stop, a transitional home, a place to hole up while my leg healed and my bank account recovered from a few months of unemployment. Not to mention that I’d thought it best to be close to Mom for a while.

  The best laid pl
ans . . .

  My leg was healing, the scars from the surgery almost invisible and my gait getting more and more even. Physical therapy had helped, and I’d done my special exercises religiously, two, sometimes three times a day. I figured that right now, my job was to whip this leg back into shape and get back to that March afternoon when my life had abruptly been interrupted. If you could see my life as a timeline, imagine mine dropping off sharply on an icy March day, where you’d see a huge dip, rising again in January when I would get back on track.

  My plan was to restart my life in the new year, after the surgeon gave me the green light. In the meantime, I had seen an unusual job listed in the Sun, the chance to play a department-store elf, and since the timing worked for me and the role could pump up my résumé a little, I was going to give it a shot.

  Heading down the stairs, I was hit by a draft leaking through the hole in the plaster wall. Baltimore Novembers can bring anything from humid tropics to snow, and as I stepped out onto the porch that morning I noticed frost on the leaves of the petunias in Mrs. Scholinsky’s planter. The steps were iced with frost and framed by an elaborate network of green and orange electrical cords crisscrossing their way down the marble slab steps.

  My landlady had put out her Christmas decorations during the night—a sleigh of toys fashioned out of colored rope lights, an array of cellophane-wrapped lollipops, a skeletal white sparkle-light reindeer with a mechanical nodding head, and a molded plastic Mr. and Mrs. Claus who smiled at each other with knowing grins. A ghoulish ode to Christmas, still glowing in the rising light of morning.

  Above me, a window slid open. “Watch your step now, sweetheart. Jack Frost came through last night.”

  Carefully I maneuvered my way down the stoop, then glanced up to face Mrs. Scholinsky’s crooked-tooth grin. Her hair was pinned in tight curls, a scarf covering the top. I suspected she slept that way, an image that brought to mind blunt-needled acupuncture to the head. No wonder she suffered from insomnia.

  “Looks like a Christmas elf came through, too,” I said, sounding more cheerful than I felt, having to catch a bus on this cold morning. “You’re the first one on the block, Mrs. S.”

  “The sooner the better, I always say. Got me that new reindeer at Costco and I was dying to set it up.”

  Olivia the New Yorker would have commented crisply on the fact that her landlady had time and money for Christmas decorations while so many house repairs went untended, but that was the old me. Olivia the Baltimorean just picked her way carefully over the cables and cracks in the sidewalk.

  “I like my Christmas, Olivia,” she went on. “You’ll see. One year I left the Clauses out till Memorial Day.”

  Something to look forward to, I thought as I wobbled slightly on my new shoes. Maybe Dolce & Gabbana heels weren’t the best choice when you were auditioning to be an elf, but the shoes were a recent purchase, a gift to myself when the physical therapist deemed my leg healed enough to move beyond my collection of rubber-soled Nikes and Pumas. Although when she made that call, I don’t think she was picturing three-inch stiletto heels.

  “Where’re you off to so early?” Mrs. Scholinsky asked. “Did you get a job?”

  “I have an audition,” I called proudly, then waved to end our conversation. Although most of the neighbors weren’t above shouting down the street at any hour of the day or night, I wasn’t quite up to broadcasting all my business to all of Camden Street, a narrow lane among many tiny streets tucked behind the Orioles’ stadium in a neighborhood known as Pigtown. How I’d ended up here, in this unfamiliar part of Baltimore, was a comedy of errors, but the rent was cheap, my friend Bonnie owned a row house on the next block, and it was a short ride on the bus or light rail to almost anything worth doing.

  “I’d tell you to break a leg,” the landlady’s voice shrieked down the block, “but don’t take it too personal or anything!”

  Oh, hardy-har-har. I waved again, not bothering to look back this time. Up ahead I saw two of the neighborhood regulars at the bus stop, a man in a plaid flannel jacket with a watch cap and a young woman with meticulous baby dreads and a warm, puffy down jacket. Once I saw her ID badge from Johns Hopkins and suspected that she worked as a nurse or aide, but then maybe that was wrong of me. What if she was a resident or the head of personnel? Just because she lived in Pigtown didn’t mean that she couldn’t be the chief of cardiac surgery.

  Then again, this was Pigtown.

  In historic Baltimore, these streets were home to stockyards and slaughterhouses, Irish and German immigrants. Later, the neighborhood got a big lift when people realized that Babe Ruth was born in a Pigtown home and raised here until he was ten.

  These days, the neighborhood’s big claim to fame was the stadium built at the old Camden Yards. When the Orioles had a night game, the stadium lights glowed in the sky and vendors set up their plywood sheets of orange and black shirts, caps, megaphones, and foam hands on corners, and traffic streamed into the streets, jamming intersections and parking lots. And the locals loved it, the frenzy surrounding their beloved “O’s,” pronounced “Ows.”

  Chalk on a board for me. But at least I was spared embarrassment in the mailing address, which was simply Baltimore, Maryland.

  I’d worked hard to lose my accent, and coming back to all this felt like a demotion—bumped from high school to third grade.

  This is temporary, I told myself. Temporary, temporary . . . my mantra. After the holidays I’d be feeling better, dancing again, taking the train to auditions for Broadway shows in New York instead of the bus to audition for the role of elf at Rossman’s new downtown department store.

  Cold wind swept down the street, and I pulled my coat closer.

  “Got cold last night,” the man with the watch cap said.

  “Really,” I agreed, while the woman in the puffy down coat stared hard down the street, as if willing the bus to come immediately and remove her from this inane conversation.

  A strong-willed woman, that one, summoning a bus like that. I blinked in wonder as the frame of the Pratt Street bus lumbered toward us.

  The three of us shuffled on the sidewalk, jockeying for position as the bus pulled up to the curb. I teetered carefully in my heels as the side of the bus cruised close, its colorful billboard rolling past.

  What was all that red? A cartoon drawing of a wild-eyed redhead, a vixen glowering over the copy:

  She’s got him in a squeeze. Torture or terror?

  WATCH OLIVIA, THE NUTCRACKER

  Premieres Tuesday at 9 on BigTime Cable

  I reeled back, stumbling in my heels. Olivia?

  This was Bobby’s show?

  The impact of seeing a caricature of myself along with my own name on the side of a bus was too much. I went down, my left shoe slipping off as my bottom landed on the cold pavement.

  “You okay?” Mr. Watch Cap asked, pausing by the bus door.

  I sat there staring at the poster, knowing that I wasn’t okay at all. Not with Bobby stealing my name and making me into a caricature soon to be frequenting buses and print ads. “This is not okay,” I said sternly as I pressed my shoe to my chest in horror. Not okay for the lying ex to take my name and my red hair and exploit me as some villainous shrew.

  “C’mon, hon. You’ll be okay.” The watch-cap man extended a hand, and I let him help me up, my eyes fixed on the horror.

  I wobbled to my feet and staked out the billboard as if it were my opponent in a wrestling match.

  Did the boy have a creative bone in his body? Could he at least have taken some creative license and changed a few details of my life?

  “Not o-kay.” With each syllable, I banged the heel of my shoe against the poster. Surely the stiletto would cut through the poster like a knife, then I could rip it up, shred it off with my fingernails.

  “Hey, there. You don’t want to be doing that.” The man stepped away from me, toward the safety of the bus steps. “You coming?”

  With as much dignity as I could mu
ster I put the ad behind me and waddled onto the bus. Click-thomp, click-thomp.

  All the grace and finesse of a professional dancer.

  With the demeanor of a man accustomed to the shoeless, the toothless, the homeless, the bus driver slanted his eyes at me in annoyance but didn’t bother to turn his head. The watch-cap man scrambled into a seat near the driver, giving me a suspicious look as I passed.

  “It’s my ex-fiancé,” I said, trying to explain the unexplainable. “He’s the producer of that show, and he’s a total asshole.”

  “That’s not what I saw, hon.” He spoke like a chastising father. “You can’t go pounding on a bus like that.”

  Passengers’ heads lifted, their curiosity piqued at the stylish woman clomping down the aisle like a matinee monster. I wanted to lift my hands and deliver a sermon on the evils of Bobby Tharp, the betrayal of a Judas who sucks your soul, then spins the details of your life into a prime-time TV show.

  But they wouldn’t get it. Of course they wouldn’t.

  I sat down alone, pondering the downward spiral. Just when I thought my life had sunk to rock bottom, my marker sent back ten spaces without passing go, Bobby had made it worse by twisting and exploiting it.

  He had some nerve, calling me a nutcracker. He was the king of rats, a seven-headed creature deserving a sturdy, well-placed kick.

  And I had the perfect pair of pointy-toed shoes . . .

  2

  Here’s the great thing about cell phones: you can reach out to friends when you need them.

  Here’s the bad thing about cell phones: sometimes, when you’re in the heat of a crisis, you call all your friends and no one has time to deal with you, which leaves you feeling small and extraneous, like a royal pain in the ass. That was the case as I rode the bus to Harborplace, having checked in with Lanessa on her cell, crazed with traffic in D.C., with Bonnie’s voice mail, with Kate’s associate at the aquarium who told me she was “with the dolphins.”