The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus (12 page)

“I
f you don’t like Jimmy’s Grill, just don’t say anything,” Woody said as we walked down Broadway, the wide main street of Fells Point, one December morning. “I love this place. It’s open all night, and I come here when I’m stuck on a project. Helen, the woman who runs the place, doesn’t care if I sit for hours over a cup.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, noticing the way the sun cast pasty light over the cobblestone lane as we headed toward the water. “Besides, I’m not picky.”

“Not what I’ve heard.”

“You must be talking about that show, which I have no affiliation with.”

“Actually, I was thinking of something your mother told me—how you can never make up your mind.”

Olivia’s lament!

“That’s so not true.”

“Come on, Liv, you never could. Remember when you could only try out for one team—basketball or softball? How you kept changing your mind? You drove Sister Catherine Charles crazy. Right here.” He reached for a weathered screen door with a Plexiglas plate tucked in, and I realized he’d been talking about this downtrodden coffee shop on the corner. All this time, I never knew it had a name.

“Ach!
This
Jimmy’s? It’s the worst.”

His eyebrows shot up as he held the door open for me.

“Kidding. I’ve never been in here.”

“Well, be nice and we might be able to avoid another cheesecake facial.” There was an old luncheonette counter on the left; the rest of the spare room was filled with plastic-covered tables and wooden chairs. The most upscale item in the entire diner, with its scarred wood floor and dark three-quarter paneling, was probably the old Coca-Cola clock on one wall. He leaned close to the counter to call something to the waitress reaching into the refrigerated pie case, then waved me on toward the back of the room. “Let me show you my favorite table.”

The place was more than half empty, so we could have had our choice, but Woody put his worn leather softsider on a table in the corner and took a seat under a clock made from a kitchen plate and fork. “I make it a point not to look at the clock. It just pressurizes things when I’m trying to think. Some of the other patrons, in the middle of the night, they’ve got to get back to Johns Hopkins or on the city desk at the
Sun
. They need the clock.”

“This is fun.” I sat down opposite him, better off watching the clock since I had to be at work by noon. “I like seeing you in your niche, with your Woody idiosyncracies.”

“Oh, do I amuse you?” he said archly, a poor mafioso imitation. “I don’t come here in the morning so often, but I know the former mayor and his cronies used to favor that round table in the corner.” He handed me a menu. “And I’m a sucker for bacon and eggs, but the oatmeal is pretty good, too.”

“When did you become such a creature of habit?”

“Honestly? After my divorce.” I must have looked shocked, because he added, “You didn’t know about that, huh? Yep, I guess a lot’s happened since seventh grade.”

The waitress, Joanne, came over and took our orders without writing anything down, then moved off casually.

“So what’s been keeping you so busy these past few weeks?” I asked him.

“Besides Rossman’s? The city has a project in Sandtown—a community center—and I’ve been trying to get a better feel for that area so I can draft a design sample. I’m working on a few renovations for private homes, but no one wants to talk about ripping their house apart until after the holidays. And there’s a property for sale here in Fells Point, over near the old wharf. I thought we might want to walk over and take a look after we eat.”

“Sure. I’m still exploring the waterfront here. Some of my favorite shops and pubs closed down when the hurricane flooded these streets.”

“So you were the smart one,” Woody said, balancing a spoon between his fingers. “You and Bobby never got married.”

“Stuck on the serious stuff? No, thank God, we didn’t. How long were you married?”

“Three years. Liz and I were still finishing college while she planned the wedding.”

“Wow.” I curled the corner of the plastic menu. “Was it rough? Did you stay friends?”

“The relationship stuff…” He shrugged. “You get over it. But the heartbreak of it is that I rarely get to see my daughter. Chloe is four now. She lives with her mother in Rhode Island.”

“You’re a daddy? Woody, I didn’t know…” I pretended to look at the menu so that he wouldn’t read the jealousy in my eyes. Married and a parent? If you were keeping score, Woody would be way ahead in the life-experience category. Of course, he’d probably lose points for being divorced, but I couldn’t get over how he’d lived so much while I was perfecting my eye-high kicks.

We talked about Chloe for a while—her interests, her fears, her two-week visit the previous summer. I thought of the kids I’d been working with at Rossman’s, Lexie, whose mother was feeling the strain of single parenting, of a little girl who’d told me that her daddy moved out and maybe someday he would decide to come home again. It was heartrending, that tug and shift of relationships, a difficult dance in which no one was sure of all the right steps. Watching the light in his eyes as he talked about Chloe, I sensed Woody’s care for his daughter, along with his loss of control.

“But you struggle with the guilt?” I asked.

“Long-distance parenting…” He shrugged. “It sucks. And I still have a lot of anger toward her mother. Liz grew up in Rhode Island, and once she got pregnant she wouldn’t hear of living anywhere else. She wanted me to leave Baltimore, but…”

“You stayed.”

“This city is so wrapped up in my identity, my whole life is here.”

“But—and I’m playing devil’s advocate here—did you consider moving? Trying someplace different? It could be better.”

“I moved to Providence for six months, but it didn’t work for me.”

I loved his honesty, the fact that he’d learned this painful fact about himself, though it struck me as odd that I wasn’t repulsed. This was a man who was stuck in Baltimore—a most unappealing quality in my mind, but Woody wore it well.

He squinted at me, as if framing my face in his mind. “Olivia Todd. I can’t unglue myself from this place and you couldn’t wait to tear off. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

“It’s temporary. I’m heading back after the holidays, but I needed a place to hole up and recuperate. I broke my ankle on the ice last spring.”

He winced. “And you had to give up dancing?”

“Temporarily. But the physical therapy’s been going well. I thought it would be easiest to come back, stay with Mom. But Mom has her own issues, and the day I moved back I found out that Bobby and his wife are here from L.A. filming all over the city. And suddenly, my life is a sitcom and I’m the starring villainess. Thank God for my friends, and for Rossman’s. The Mrs. Claus gig saved my sanity.”

He bit into a crispy strip of bacon. “It’s a wonderful life.”

“And changing every day,” I said, thinking of my upcoming doctor’s appointment, of the green light I was waiting for. My happiness hinged on it.

“At least your ankle is healing, right? You’ll dance again?”

“Definitely. But look at you, Woody, big-shot architect. The nuns at St. Rose of Lima would be proud.”

“Nah. Just eking out a mouselike existence, mostly work. I’ll probably end up like Godefroy, a shunned municipal architect, up to my knees in mud laying sewer pipe.”

“Godefroy? Refresh my memory.”

“After Latrobe, Maximilian Godefroy was Baltimore’s most prolific architect in the nineteenth century. He sought exile here from France after opposing Napoleon. He and Latrobe were good friends until they argued over whose designs would be used for the Merchants’ Exchange. He designed quite a few churches here, the Washington Monument, the Battle Monument. But his differences with Benjamin Latrobe seemed to define his downfall. Embittered and vindictive, he blamed Latrobe for his inability to find more work in America. He packed up his family and sailed back to Europe, but his daughter died of yellow fever on the journey, and when he arrived in England he was treated like a criminal, his drawings seized by customs officials. It’s not clear how he died, but he ended up working in the trenches, a municipal architect in France.” Woody shook his head. “It’s a wonderful life, huh?”

“You architects do lead glamourous lives,” I teased. Through my mother’s passion for Benjamin Latrobe, often considered to be America’s Leonardo, a botanist and designer and artist, I had learned that he also felt undervalued and underpaid for much of his life. He’d commented that both the working class and the wealthy shunned him.

“Sometimes I think about Godefroy, how the breach with Latrobe defined his life, how one event can define a person’s life.”

“Yes, but it could have been different, the outcome would have changed if Godefroy let it go,” I said. “If he
refused
to let it define his life…”

“Exactly! We can’t control the events in our lives, but we can control our response to them, whether we learn from them, whether we let them set us back, change the course of our lives.”

I sat back in the wooden chair as the underlying truth hit me. “You’re right. I get it.” And I could see it in my own life, in Bobby’s show, in the negative attention and nasty attacks that rattled me… because
I
let them unnerve me.

“This was very good oatmeal,” I said, resting my spoon on the table. “They should add a little slogan on the menu: Enlightenment in every bowl.”

F
or days after that breakfast with Woody I was walking on air.

Something about the unconventional meeting—breakfast and a walking tour—had intrigued me after more than a handful of noisy club dates in New York, during which the ritualistic process of drinks, light conversation, and noncommittal sex were supposed to play out. And there was something else about Woody—the substance, the spirituality. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the depth of our conversation had left me feeling liberated as I walked down the street in my own skin and able to relax as I played Mrs. Claus, nursing scraped knees, soothing lost children, entertaining the bored.

When I met my friends that Tuesday night at Peter’s, a funky neighborhood bar/restaurant in Fells Point, I couldn’t help but bubble over with talk of Woody. “We left Jimmy’s and we walked to this property he wanted to check out, and all along the way he pointed out architectural features unique to early Baltimore.” We were waiting for a table at the bar, an aged wooden slab with stools that resembled seats pulled right off old Harleys. “Like Shakespeare Street, with its local red brick and marble slab porches. The mansard roofs and the different types of brickwork, Flemish and Dutch cross bond. I used to ignore it all when Mom was lecturing, but somehow, now it interests me.”

“Because Woody was talking,” Bonnie said dreamily.

Lanessa rolled her eyes. “Two people find each other through architecture? Very touching, hon, but when I’m on a date you won’t catch me talking gargoyles and mansard roofs.”

“Are you seeing him again?” Bonnie asked.

I nodded. “Sure. Though it’s sort of hard to find a time. A lot of his evenings are committed to community meetings. He’s making a bid on a building for the city, and he feels obliged to engage the people it will involve.”

“This boy may have political aspirations,” Lanessa said.

“Why don’t you meet in the morning again?” Bonnie suggested.

“I thought of that.” I shrugged. “We could do it. But…” I lowered my voice. “It’s not the most romantic lead-in. Sort of awkward.”

“Oh, please.” Lanessa lifted the olive skewer from her martini. “No need to act so coy. Just tell him to meet at your place. You make the coffee, he can bring bagels and a box of condoms.”

We laughed. “Sure. Mrs. Scholinsky would love that.”

“She’ll never hear you over the racket she makes,” Bonnie added.

I turned to Kate. “You’re awfully quiet today. Everything okay?”

Her lips pressed into a fine line, she nodded. “I’ve got news, sort of a bomb, and I don’t know how to say it.”

The three of us stared at her. “Well?” I prodded.

“I might be moving to San Diego with Turtle,” she said. “They’ve offered him a job, and I’ve applied to work with their marine mammals. I’m flying out for an interview in January, but Turtle’s new boss seems to think I’ve got the job.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m moving to the West Coast.”

We shrieked and cheered and hugged wildly. Behind the bar, the tattooed waiter folded his arms and grinned in amusement. “Chick love,” he muttered to some guy at the bar.

As we moved to a table, we prodded Kate for details, details. “I’m excited about the possibilities. Nervous and worried. Feeling a little guilty about being excited and about leaving you guys. Worried about living so far from my family. And since it’s still not definite, I can barely talk about it.”

“I’ll bet Turtle is thrilled,” Bonnie said.

She nodded. “He sees this as an adventure, while I see all the things that could go wrong. I guess he’s just more of a risk taker.”

“You’ll be fine,” I told her. “Look at me. I made the leap and I never wanted to come back.”

“Oh, no. Don’t start chanting the ‘Baltimore sucks’ mantra again,” Lanessa told me.

“I’m not complaining,” I said. “Just want Kate to know that there are so many exciting adventures ahead for her, and we’ll all come visit.”

We were comparing notes on San Diego when one of the patrons at the bar came over to our table and stood staring at me. I took a deep breath, having enough experience to anticipate his comment.

“I heard you talking about Baltimore. You’re that Olivia from TV, aren’t you?”

I folded my arms. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cheesecake behind your back, would you?” When he seemed confused, I went on, “Cocktail fork? Olive skewers? Any sharp objects at all?”

He lifted his hands innocently. “You know, you’re downright nasty on that show. You treat people like dirt.”

“Am I? First, let me tell you that it’s not my show, and it’s fiction. And I didn’t see last week’s episode, but I read the synopsis in
TV Guide
and I heard some people discuss it.”

Apparently, in last week’s
Nutcracker
Olivia had fired one of her dancers after he’d missed a rehearsal to attend his father’s funeral. She had told a little ballerina that she’d never have a career and suggested that the kid try some other venue, like cooking or nursing or cleaning hotel rooms. Olivia had stormed into the mayor’s office—with a cameo from Hizzoner, the mayor—and complained that the mayor should not have a personal parking spot right outside her studio, telling him that his car ruined her view of the Charles Center.

“And you know what I decided? Although the TV Olivia and I don’t have a lot in common, I’m beginning to find her amusing. Hurray for a woman who stands up to a man. Three cheers for someone who tells people what she’s really thinking. I find that shocking but refreshing, don’t you agree?”

Beside me, Lanessa made a growling sound. “From the ashes, a Phoenix rising.”

The man shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “I guess.” As he moved back to the bar to brag to his friends of how he’d braved the wrath of Olivia, I felt myself grinning.

Bonnie nudged my shoulder. “You really turned that one around.”

“How’d that happen?” Kate asked.

I thought of my conversation with Woody, about letting events shape our lives. “Something I learned over a bowl of oatmeal,” I said. “That show isn’t going to get to me anymore. From now on, I own it.”

Once the month of December began, time seemed suspended, as if I were a tiny Mrs. Claus figurine inside a snow globe hanging on the tree. Although I worked long hours—sometimes ten to ten, seven days a week in Santaland—those hours were a whirlwind of giggles and carols and wide, waiflike eyes. Not that we didn’t have our share of nervous tears and whining children flinging themselves down to pound the floor, but somehow we managed to dry the tears and circumvent the tantrums and keep the children moving on to their meeting with Santa.

Every morning when I slipped on the deep red velvet jacket of the Mrs. Claus costume, a feeling of contentment fell over me… one big smile. Although I was getting more and more accustomed to the role of Mrs. Claus, my enthusiasm wasn’t fading with time. Silly, I know, but I’d gotten more attached to this role than any part I’d ever danced with the Rockettes.

Through portraying Mrs. Claus, I had found some surprising qualities within myself. I could be nurturing, soothing, whimsical, or lovingly firm. Not that I’d been thinking of having kids any time soon, but if I decided to go there, at least now I could hold my own with the little rug rats I’d once found so mysterious.

A few times Woody popped into the store and I managed to have a quick bite with him at the restaurant in Rossman’s. I sensed that he wasn’t ready for more than that, which bugged me a little. What did it all mean—that he wanted to be with me, but only for brief spurts, in public places? Sometimes, at night in bed in the minute before I fell asleep, I wondered if he was holding back for some strange reason… like, he was secretly married or engaged. Or maybe his one bad marriage had pushed him over to the other side. Or maybe he just felt sorry for me because my ex had dumped me with a broken ankle and launched a show that pinned a scarlet letter
O
to my chest—and we are not talking about the Baltimore O’s.

I would have been overcome with self-doubt, but I was so crazy busy that the only time I had to worry about Woody was in that last second before I fell asleep.

One rainy night when Santaland was fairly quiet, Woody appeared around dinnertime. ZZ graciously told me to take a long break, and Woody and I made the short walk to Little Italy, where the scent of garlic hung heavy in the wet air, making me long for the whole night off, time to take off my damp boots and slip on warm, fuzzy socks. Time to stretch out on a blanket beside Woody and really talk, along with a few more horizontal activities. We settled at a small table near the window in Caesar’s Den, where a small cistern candle drew us both toward the center of the table. Woody joked that I was a cheap date when I ordered spaghetti marinara, but I tried to stay focused, not wanting to get derailed from my question.

I waited until we were sipping red wine, breaking apart crusts of garlic bread. “I have to ask, are you avoiding me?”

“What do you mean? We see each other a few times a week. I’m always dropping in on Santaland.”

“But it’s always on your terms, always brief conversations in very public places.” I leaned closer to the flickering flame. “Are you embarrassed to be with me?”

“Of course not. How could I be?”

“I was thinking maybe the red suit and suggestion that I’m married to a man with flying reindeer who sends toys sailing down the chimneys of anonymous homes.”

He grinned, and tiny laugh lines emerged beside his eyes. “Actually, Mrs. C., that’s one of the things I find strangely attractive about you. I dig the costume, and you wear it well.”

Okay, I could strike “team defection” from the list. “So what is the problem, then?”

“I’m moving too slow for you?”

I glanced away thoughtfully, then faced him. “Well, yeah.”

“And you have no sense of what’s been going through my mind.”

I shrugged. “I have a million theories, most of them ludicrous.”

“It’s because I can’t afford to get trounced again. You might have forgotten the details, but you split with me before, and I spent a year serenading you on the phone, trying to win you back.”

“When we were in seventh grade. We weren’t really dating, Woody. We were like, twelve, and all ecstatic that someone had invented cookie-dough ice cream. The vice president was freaking out over Murphy Brown’s baby. What the hell did we know?”

“It mattered to me. It was an important part of my life.”

I covered his hand with mine. “I don’t mean to minimize it, really. But I was totally dumb back then. Indecisive and insecure. I had no idea what I wanted, which is obvious from the fact that I followed Bobby Tharp around for ten years.”

“So here we are, all these years later, and honestly? It’s not the kind of thing you rush.”

“A pacing thing, Woody. You’re running into the tide in slow motion. Which is actually more difficult than just leaping in.”

“So what are you saying?” He glanced down at his plate. “That you want more involvement? More time together? A deeper involvement?”

“Two from column A. Twenty zillion from column B.”

He laughed. “Aw, Liv. You’re going to make me blush.”

I slurped long noodles in and wiped my mouth not too seductively. “That is exactly what I had in mind.”