I went outside. They were just waking up.
“Happy Christmas Eve!” I chirped. “Did you two sleep out here last night? I didn’t hear you come in. You must have been freezing! Let’s make a big breakfast this morning, what do you say? Eggs and toast and pancakes and …”
“Orange juice,” Langston coughed. “Please, Lily. Go to the corner store and get us some fresh orange juice.”
Benny, too, coughed. “And some echinacea!”
“Sleeping outside in the dead of winter not such a smart idea, huh?” I said.
“Seemed romantic under the stars last night,” Langston sighed. Then sneezed. Again. And again, this time with a full-on hacking cough. “Make us some soup, please please please, Lily Bear?”
It seemed to me that, in allowing himself to get sick, my brother had finally, and totally, ruined Christmas. All hope for any semblance of a decent Christmas was now gone. It further seemed to me, since he made the choice to sleep outside with his boyfriend last night instead of play Boggle with his Lily Bear as she specifically asked him to do and which she specifically used to do for him during his time of need, that Langston sicko would have to deal with this crisis on his own.
“Make your own soup,” I told the boys. “And get your own OJ. I have an errand to run in Midtown.” I turned to go back inside and leave the boys to their nasty new colds. Suckahs. That ought to teach them not to go out clubbing when they could stay home and Boggle with me.
“You’ll be sorry next year when you’re living in Fiji and I’m still in Manhattan where I can order food and juice from the bodega at the corner and have it delivered to me anytime I want!” Langston exclaimed.
I swiveled back around. “Excuse me? What did you just say?”
Langston pulled the comforter over his head. “Nothing. Never mind,” he said from underneath.
Which meant it was seriously something.
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, LANGSTON?” I said, feeling a Shrilly panic moment coming on.
Benny popped his head under the covers, too. I heard him say to Langston, “You have to tell her now. You can’t leave her hanging like that once you slipped.”
“SLIPPED ON WHAT, LANGSTON?” I almost was ready to cry. But I’d decided to try to be less Shrilly for New Year’s, and even though that was still a week away, I felt like I had to get started sometime. Now was as good a time as any. I stood strong, shaking—but not crying.
Langston’s head re-emerged from underneath the comforter. “Mom and Dad are in Fiji for their second honeymoon, but also to spend time visiting a boarding school there. A place that’s offered Dad a headmaster’s job for the next two years.”
“Mom and Dad would never want to live in Fiji!” I fumed. “Vacation paradise, maybe. But people don’t live there.”
“Lots of people live there, Lily. And this school caters to kids like Dad was, who have parents in the diplomatic service, like in Indonesia and Micronesia—”
“Stop it with all these -esias!” I said. “Why would the diplomatic parents send their kids to a stupid school in Fiji?”
“It’s a pretty amazing school, from what I’ve heard. It’s for parents who don’t want to send their kids to schools in the places where they’re posted, but also want to not send them so far away as to the States or the UK. For them, it’s a good alternative.”
“I’m not going,” I announced.
Langston said, “It would be a good opportunity for Mom, too. She could take a sabbatical and work on her research and her book.”
“I’m not going,” I repeated. “I like living here in Manhattan. I’ll live with Grandpa.”
Langston threw the comforter over his head again.
Which could only mean there was more to the story.
“WHAT?!?!?” I demanded, now feeling truly scared.
“Grandpa is proposing to Glamma. In Florida.”
Glamma, as she likes to be known, is Grandpa’s Florida girlfriend—and the reason he had abandoned us at Christmas. I said, “Her name is Mabel! I will never call her Glamma!”
“Call her whatever you want. But she’s probably soon going to be Mrs. Grandpa. When that happens, my guess is he will move down there permanently.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Langston sat up so I could see his face. Even sick, he was pathetically sincere. “Believe me.”
“How come no one told me?”
“They were trying to protect you. Not cause you concern until they knew for sure these things would happen.”
This was how Shrilly was born, from people trying so hard to “protect” me.
“PROTECT THIS!” I shouted, lifting my middle finger to Langston.
“Shrilly!” he admonished. “That’s so unlike you.”
“What is like me?” I asked.
I stormed away from the garden rooftop, snarled at poor ol’ Grunt, who was licking his paws after breakfast, and continued my storming, to downstairs, to my apartment, to my room, in my city, Manhattan. “No one’s moving me to Fiji,” I muttered as I got dressed to go out.
I couldn’t think about this Christmas catastrophe. I just couldn’t. It was too much.
I felt especially grateful now having the red Moleskine to confide in. Just knowing a Snarl was on the other side to read it—to possibly care—inspired my pen to move quickly in answer to his question. As I waited for the subway en route to Snarl’s Midtown destination, I had plenty of free time on the bench at the Astor Place station, since the notoriously slow 6 train seemed to take its usual forever to arrive.
I wrote:
What I want for Christmas is to believe.
I want to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is reason to hope. I write this while a homeless man is sleeping on the ground under a dirty blanket a few feet away from the bench where I’m sitting at the Astor Place subway stop, on the uptown side, where I can see across the tracks to the Kmart entrance on the downtown side. Is this relevant? Not really, except that when I started to write this to you, I noticed him, then stopped writing long enough to dash over to the Kmart to buy the man a bag of “fun size” Snickers bars, which I slipped underneath his blanket, and that made me extra sad because his shoes are all worn out and he’s dirty and smelly and I don’t think that bag of Snickers is going to make much difference to this guy, ultimately. His problems are way bigger than a bag of Snickers can resolve. I don’t understand how to process this stuff sometimes. Like, here in New York, we see so much grandeur and glitz, especially this time of year, and yet we see so much suffering, too. Everyone else on the platform here is just ignoring this guy, like he doesn’t exist, and I don’t know how that’s possible. I want to believe it’s not crazy of me to hope he will wake up and a social worker will take him to a shelter for a warm shower, meal, and bed, and the social worker will then help him find a job and an apartment and … See? It’s just too much to process. All this hoping for something—or someone—that’s maybe hopeless.
I’m having a hard time processing what I am supposed to believe, or if I’m even supposed to. There is too much information, and I don’t like a lot of it.
And yet, for some reason that all scientific evidence really should make impossible, I feel like I really do hope. I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won’t be homeless. I hope that suffering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain.
I want to believe that even though I hope for things that are so magnanimous (good OED word, huh?), I am not a bad person because what I really want to believe in is purely selfish.
I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.
Remember in Franny and Zooey (which I assume you’ve read and loved, considering the location where you found the Moleskine in the Strand) how Franny was this girl from the 1950s who freaked out over what’s the meaning of life because she thought it was embedded in a prayer someone told her about? And even though neither her brother Zooey nor her mom understood what Franny was going through, I think I really did. Because I would like the meaning of life explained to me in a prayer, and I would probably flip out, too, if I thought the possibility of attaining this prayer existed, but was out of my reach of understanding. (Especially if being Franny meant I’d also get to wear lovely vintage clothes, although I’m dubious on whether I’d want the Yale boyfriend named Lane who’s possibly a bit of a prick but people admire me for going out with him; I think I’d rather be with someone more … er … arcane.) At the end of the book, when Zooey calls Franny pretending to be their brother Buddy, trying to cheer her up, there’s a line where he talks about Franny going to the phone and becoming “younger with each step” as she walked, because she’s making it to the other side. She’s going to be okay. At least that’s what I took it to mean.
I want that. The getting younger with each step, because of anticipation, in hope and belief.
Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just take a nice silly walk in Central Park with. Somebody who wouldn’t judge another for the prepositions they dangle, or their run-on sentences, and who in turn wouldn’t be judged for the snobbery of their language etymology inclinations. (Gotcha with the word choices, right? I know, sometimes I surprise even myself.)
Belief. That’s what I want for Christmas. Look it up. Maybe there’s more meaning there than I understand. Maybe you could explain it to me?
I had continued writing in the notebook when the train came, and finished my entry just as it arrived at Fifty-ninth and Lex. As the zillions of people, along with me, poured out of the train and up into Bloomingdale’s or the street, I concentrated hard on not thinking about what I was determined not to think about.
Moving. Change.
Except I wasn’t thinking about that.
*
I dodged Bloomingdale’s, walking straight toward FAO Schwarz, where I realized what Snarl had meant by “payback.” A line down the street outside the store greeted me—a line just to get into the store! I had to wait twenty minutes just to reach the door.
But no matter what, I love Christmas, really really really I do, don’t care if I am sardined in between two million panicky Christmas shoppers, nope, don’t care at all, I loved every moment of the experience once I got inside—the jingle bells playing from the speakers, the heart-racing excitement at seeing all the colorful toys and games in such a larger-than-life setting. Aisle after aisle and floor after floor of dense funfun experience. I mean, Snarl must know me well already, perhaps on some psychic level, if he’d sent me to FAO Schwarz, only the mecca of everything that was Great and Beautiful about the holidays. Snarl must love Christmas as much as me, I decided.
I went to the information counter. “Where will I find the Make Your Own Muppet Workshop?” I asked.
“Sorry,” the counter person said. “The Muppet Workshop is closed for the holidays. We needed the space for the Collation action figure displays.”
“There are action figures for paper and staplers?” I asked. How had I not known to include these on my list to Santa?
“Yup. Just a hint: You might have better luck finding the Fredericos and the Dantes at Office Max on Third Ave. They sold out here the first day they went on sale. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“But please,” I said. “There has to be a Muppet workshop here today. The Moleskine said so.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind,” I sighed.